Friday, December 22, 2006

Happy Holidays- fake tree and all

1 comment :
Portugal this year has the claim of having the tallest Christmas tree in Europe- i went to check it out during the day and in the evening when it was lit and as reported it is indeed fake but a massive tree indeed!

I found this funny transcript from CNN:

KELLY WALLACE, CNN ANCHOR:
........Just in time to wish everyone a nice holiday season comes my special treat to see the tallest Christmas tree in Europe
And the tallest Christmas tree in Europe is brightening the spirits of folks in Lisbon, Portugal. City officials flipped the switch to illuminate the tree that's said to be as tall as a 23-story building. Get this, it is taller than the national Christmas tree and the Rockefeller Center tree combined, but it is artificial.

O'BRIEN: Well, fake.

WALLACE: It is fake, Soledad. So, you know, it's hard to compare the real thing.

O'BRIEN: Well, I mean, it's not hard to be really, really tall if they just plunk another story on top of it.

WALLACE: That is true.

O'BRIEN: I was going to say, wow, the tallest tree, that's going to be amazing to see how tall this tree grew in the forest in Europe somewhere.

WALLACE: The folks in Lisbon are saying it's still amazing, Soledad.

SANCHEZ: But at least it's not silver.

WALLACE: I think it has something like, though, more than two million light bulbs. So...

O'BRIEN: Oh, man. It's fake. It's not a feat to be tall if you're fake.

WALLACE: Jacqui, help us.

O'BRIEN: Anyway...

WALLACE: The poor folks in Lisbon, Portugal, are hoping to get a lot of attention for their tree, but it is fake. We must -- we must reveal that to our viewers.

JACQUI JERAS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yes. It's pretty, though. I thought it looked pretty nice.

WALLACE: It sure is.
-------------------------
It is pretty nice- see for yourself as the tree goes through a light cycle and Happy Holidays to everyone!

Personal and work related news consumption- not exclusive of each other but different

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Jeremiah's post pointed me to this post by Tris Hussey at Podtech discussing a recent WSJ article.(BTW: maybe because i have been in the content display business for years, but it made me crazy that there was no attributed author on the link he posted which is the full post view and i had to dig for Tris's author attribution)

It wasn't the comments on the WSJ article that interested me but some of the points that Tris made about main stream print media and the shift in coverage of news as their print, then online presence expanded in order to meet the needs and consumption choices of their audiences. I agree and continue to see their online presence changing in order to retain and grow readership- many mainstream media online sites now embed video, blog content, slide shows and audio.

Tish also states that he reads the newspaper for the "here is what we think it means type of stuff" that is part of the editorial aspect of journalism and he makes a good point on how magazines like Time- were at one point vehicles of 'current' news and then turned more to analysis because a weekly magazine could no longer cut being a news only distribution channel.

I agree with Tish's point and believe that when we go to the newsstand (virtual or physical) we select the papers that we feel reflect our own beliefs (although i work for Dow Jones of Wall Street Journal fame and get a free copy at work which i read, i by habit read the New York Times first to see what is happening in the world). The same choices affect which television news casts we tune into or radio stations we listen- so of course it is no different with the blogs we choose to read. (and by the way i am not talking about news junkies but the regular news consumer). I however do not think that we are ready for print newspapers to only provide analysis.

If you have been reading my blog you know i have worked for Factiva (now fully a Dow Jones company) for the last 8 yrs. Our part of the business is content aggregation and distribution and i am part of the consulting services group that works with companies to integrate content (ours, other 3rd party or internal) into enterprise work flows. Aside from the technical implementation, i spend a lot of time on the user requirements from filtered topics to content source selections, to point of delivery and post 'processing' requirements.

If we are talking about news consumption from a personal perspective ( e.g. i want to personally know what is happening in politics, in global issues, with health and climate issues etc.) i think our consumption habits are a bit different then when we consume news on behalf of the work we do for our employers and clients and therefore the tools we need to consume that content is going to be different. They are not exclusive of each other but different. When information workers consume content as part of their work flow they need validated content from trusted sources on demand (and i do not exclude web content in the trusted sources category but that is an entirely different post). I have seen enterprises slash their print budget by millions over the years as they move to electronic versions while applying those savings to distribution models that ensure that the right information is delivered to the right person at the right time.

i still like the idea of a print version being the record of news- i might be a bit old fashion but i know if i want to find a 'newsworthy' story from the early 1900's to present time i can go to an online full text database or to my local library to find it.

i am sitting in my grandparents living room in Portugal and my grandmother just sat down next to me and asked what i was doing, i had this post as a saved draft and was on the New York Times website, i told her 'i am reading the newspaper' she looked at the screen and said "oh yeah- how cute, remember when you used to make us go downtown to buy the American newspaper at that one newsstand that had American papers? guess you don't have to do that anymore'....exactly

Percebes (Barnacles)

2 comments :
If you just dropped in on my blog and are a new visitor, this week I am in Portugal visiting my grandparents and have made a couple of posts about being here, mostly about food like Pastéis de Nata and Castanhas assadas. I don't think i am unique in returning home and using food to reconnect with memories and when i am go back east i also eat a lot of pizza like most new yorkers that live on the west coast.

Although some of these foods are 'reproducible' back home - it just isn't the same so i try to eat all the things i love while visiting and i always come back with a couple extra pounds to prove it!

Fish and seafood are a staple of Portuguese cuisine (well at least the dishes i enjoy) so yesterday's special treat was Percebes (Barnacles). Perecebes are crustaceans that are considered a delicacy and they certainly were delicious.

As i was looking for a definition in English to link to from this post i came about the barnacle definition in Wikipedia and noticed on the bottom an image of barnacles from Moss Beach in California which is just down the road from where i live. I have never seen barnacles on restaurants menus back home- do i have to put on my clam diggers and head down to Moss Beach to check it out myself?


Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Get to know the person behind the blog and the company behind the products and services at HP

1 comment :
When i got tagged with the "Tag You're it- 5 thing you didn't know about me" meme that Jeff Pulver started i kinda curled up my nose because i have always hated those chain e-mails that follow the same format- but the folks that tagged me i have a lot of respect for so i digged in. As i started looking at others' tagged posts i concluded that it is indeed a good way to share something with blog readers if what i am producing is social media because blogs are a tool for creating media and it is the people indeed that makes it social. I tend to try to mix a bit of personal with my blogging to keep it real (and to not totally bore my family and friends)- but my blog is not corporate sponsered.

Last month i mentioned a new Blog from the HP executives on
'The New Face of Media' and mentioned 'The Marketing Excellence blog by Eric Kintz who is VP of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence at HP. Checking my feeds this morning i found two posts of interest on Eric Kintz's blog:

1. Kintz is participating in the "Tag You're it- 5 things you didn't know about me" meme and in his post "
Is a Blog-Tag Virtual Game Too Non Corporate?" he writes that although he rarely participates in these things he thought it would be appropriate because as a HP corporate blogger "knowing the person behind the blog would seem as critical (if not more) as for any non-corporate blog". You are right on Eric!

The best part however is that Kintz tagged forward the tag to HP competitor bloggers at Dell and Lenovo. (check out this post on a
Blogging War as well)Wish i had thought of that! Who might i have tagged? Perhaps Jonathan Carson of BuzzMetrics , Mitch Ratcliffe of BuzzLogic, Tom Glocer of Reuters (ok not a 'competitor' but since they just decided to sell their Factiva portion), and Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra (partner/competitor).

2. The second thing of interest was Kintz's post on the Web2.0 trends of 2006. The question posed by a group of bloggers was "What was (were) the most notable PR/marketing social media trend(s) or event(s) in 2006 and why?". Kintz chose to post on
Company Generated Media something that HP is certainly taking a lead on. He writes that these new trends "will imply that companies maintain an authentic, personal and direct dialogue with customers" and that it is a key trend to watch for in 2007. I agree and when we conducted our social media roundtable this month we discussed not only the monitoring of consumer generated media but the measuring of company generated media and we have a couple of follow-ups with a few clients in the new year to discuss just that.

As VP of Global Marketing Strategy, Eric Kintz is giving us a look into the marketing strategies that HP is using to stay ahead of the market. If you are interested in how companies will use the new media creation tools like
blogs, podcasts,and video, you should subscribe to his blog- it looks like it will be a good read in 2007.

Pastéis de Nata de Belém

1 comment :
As a little kid in Portugal i went to school at the Colégio do Bom Sucesso in Belém a parish of Lisbon. The school was located in an old convent called Bom Sucesso whose doors had opened in 1639 and it was the first female convent of Irish Domicians nuns in the world. In 1955 it became a private school and when i went there in the late seventies our teachers were all still Irish nuns and i dressed like this.(sorry all my pictures are at my parents house in florida or else i would share!)

After school when my brother and i would get picked up we would sometimes go 'lanchar' (a light afternoon snack) and play in the neighborhood park. Even today, Belém is a great place to take an afternoon stroll and one of my favorite portuguese desserts "Pastéis de Nata" are served warm sprinkled with cinnamon and powdered sugar (they sell something like 30,000 per day my avo says) at the original place were they were invented and produced for the monasteries (1837) (picture on the left with the Jerónimos Monastery in the background). It is place i always make sure i go to (one or two or three times!) when i am in town.


Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Participatation in the buying cycle instead of shopping

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I have been reading Martin Hardee's blog Sun.com Design, Usability & Other Stuff for a while now and always like to read the behind the scenes at Sun.com that Hardee posts. He recently posted about Sun.com's website redesign. I was just about to leave him a comment but is seems that his posts are closed for comments so i will leave my comment here.

I really like what Sun is doing and if you have read my blog before you notice that i am a big Sun fan and what they are doing in the marketplace with social media (and that i have a huge crush on JS). But putting that aside, their recent redesign is one to be admired because they are trying to have visitors become more participants then 'shoppers'.

Hardee points us to the new "activity boxes" at the bottom of the page were they have added 4 panels down below that provide "windows into Sun", including a "Participate" box that showcases Jonathan Schwartz's recent blog postings and (if you click on the grey arrow on that box) views into recent blogs from the Sun blogroll community. I also like the addition of the 'Discover' feature because it takes a visitor who might not know what they are looking for to find something of potential interest. In his post he talks a bit about the design choices- leaving the existing page structure etc.. Hopefully there will be more posts with additional tidbits of information on their choices and decisions. I think that the use of specific words (Discovery,Participate, Find & Buy (instead of Shop for products), Stay Connected) is another indication that Sun wants its customers to participate and not just buy. Kudos well done.

Tag you're It- Five things you didn't know about me

2 comments :
Ok i have been double tagged for the "Tag you're it" five things you didn't know about me meme that started over on Jeff Pulver's Blog. I got tagged by Ian Kennedy who i have known for going on 8 years (can you believe it?) as well as Greg 'Fred Gregarious ' Narain who i have known for around 8 weeks but it feels like a lifetime.

Here it goes:

1. i have seen Bob Dylan hundreds of times all around the world and spent a small fortune which i would do over and over again
2. my first job out of college was driving a forklift in a warehouse and within a couple of weeks on the job i supervised a team of 5 guys-i did that for over a year and when i left i made sure another woman took my job
3. i have a 130lb great dane who likes popcorn
4. i received a double major in women and labor studies (with a full scholarship) before heading off to Library school for my Masters. i am a 21st century feminist
5. i always wanted to study computer science and be a full fledged geek, but was always made to feel that i was bad at math and that i wouldn't cut it (and honestly my freshman year calculus grade was sad). i turned geek anyway and one day will learn to program beyond the simple basics.

The rule is you pay the tag forward so 5 lucky bloggers here you go:

Jordan Alder
Chris Saad
Mary Smaragdis
Jeffrey McManus
Glenn Fannick

Monday, December 18, 2006

Companies using social media can't just be visitors

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Another blogging Factivite (should we now be referenced as Dowjonesites?) blogs over at Guerilla HR and recently posted about Employee Blogs from an HR prespective. He gave Glenn Fannick and myself kudos for blogging and for the recent Social Media Roundtable event that we had and he also wrote about 'bad' employee bloggers and the need for a blogging policy.

I left a comment on his post and i wrote:
"What we did with the social media roundtable that you reference was awesome but it is also pretty scary. So we have engaged in this community of social media enthusiasts one that i had been involved in for a while- mostly 'personal' due to my interest in this 'new' media. Because i haven't really engaged with the Insight product suite since consulting services hasn't been involved that much, i started bringing the product folks into the conversation and they engaged fully and whole heartily- so the whole thing got rolling...now we have some great information that we gathered and we have started a buzz around where we are going and now how do we continue to be engaged above and beyond my blog or glenn's? It takes a lot of work and passionate individuals to maintain what we have started but I think it is very worth while. An interesting conversation is going on per this post once you jump in you need to continue so you don't just act like visitors."


The post i referenced was Jeremiah's recent post on Do companies Cultivate, Harness, Build, Engage, Lead, Visit, Watch, or Join Communities? - before boarding the plane on saturday i opened a couple of browser windows (an offline trick i have been forced to do) including the post that he linked to about Shel Israel's lunch with the Citizen Agency folks. As i read through all their thoughts and comments it was addressing some of the things i have been thinking about post the social media roundtable event. I completely agree with Tara Hunt that if you are going to step into a community you must not play visitor- I of course wanted the out-put of the event to come out immediately- things change so much in a week let along a month. There are some great follow-up posts from the attendees but aside from Glenn's and my quick roundup posts (both of us have been on the road since the event) factiva has a lot of information that we need to share back but it will take some time because the video and audio is being put together back in corporate-the white paper is getting started and the DJ final announcement last week meant that everyone was 'on deck' for integration stuff.

So i won't fret because i know when i get back from vacation things will start to be produced and shared back but figured i would share this as an example of a company (factiva) using social media and how we are continuing with the monitoring social media community and are very conscious that we need to continue what we started. More to follow- of course!

Castanhas assadas (roasted chestnuts)

2 comments :
The city streets in the fall and winter in Lisbon would not be the same without the castanhas assadas (roasted chestnuts) that you see many vendors on the streets selling. They are easy to recognize by the scent and the smoke coming from the push carts. They are served in a cone made out of a newspaper/phone-book page and are awesome when warm and toasty brown.
Stopping to buy castanhas assadas with my avo (grandfather) also always brings the story of a little daniela, whose grandfather took her downtown one winter day and had been told not to let me eat anything. Passing the castanhas vendors- i promptly threw a fit going as far as to throw myself on the ground- which damaged my little bib dress- so to not further embarass himself he bought some chestnuts which i filled my little belly with. On returning home- he got busted when asked why i was all dirty. Today he bought me some castanhas-i didn't have to throw a fit but i did give him a big kiss for this time and that one as well!

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Safe Travels and potential good news for me

4 comments :
Moving out west from the east coast two years ago, one of biggest worries was that i wouldn't be able to travel to Europe and specifically to my home country as frequent as i used to because of the length of travel and the cost associated. As a last minute decision earlier this month i decided to come spend a couple of days with my grandparents this week who are on their way to becoming very elderly and are no longer up to traveling to the states to see us.

My travels to Portugal were safe arriving this morning to a beautiful Lisbon day- everyone is in good spirits and i look forward to spending the rest of the week eating, drinking and being merry with them. I always forget how much i love Portugal until i return and it is just great to speak Portuguese nonstop, although i find myself stumbling around some of the big words due to lack of practice.

Another piece of good news is that i convinced myself to bring my laptop (to combat my 4hr layover in Newark and to potentially find a WiFi cafe) and it just got better because there are a whole bunch of WiFi connections that i am getting from my grandparents living room! Hurray-

I will try to post pics at least over the next few days- above left is the tile work that surrounds the walls in the living room porch in which i am sitting in right now...not bad and dinner time is coming and Avo (grandmother) is making traditional soup that i love. I am smiling ;-)

Blog Commenting as a sales tool

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I have posted before about my use of blogs in my 'sales' cycle. Last winter i put together an internal communication call BlogitUP! for my coworkers with resources on utilizing blogs to understand our customer better and to engage with them outside of the traditional methods. I am pretty sure that most did not listen at the time and i honestly didn't expect them to but more and more i have also been getting pinged - can i leave a comment? how do i do that without sounding like a sales pitch, etc. Well my response is always to be sincere and build a relationship with the blogger, and by relationship i don't necessarily mean comment multiple times and act like you are courting them - just communicate with them on the topics that you and they are interested in and you can potentially assist them with in meeting their goals or yours.

I got a kick out of a comment that Pam Wood from Coldwell Banker Riveras Realtor in Cabos left on my last post. She was sincere and shows that she is listening to her marketplace perhaps through a blog alert? Too bad i am not in the market for Mexico real estate- but if you read this and you are please contact me ;-)- see how effective she was- right on!

Friday, December 15, 2006

Reuters sale of Factiva final and the Motley Fool thinks Dow Jones is something of a special case within the newspaper world.

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This afternoon it was posted on our internal portal and the press is starting to cover it. The Reuters sale of Factiva is now final. In my factiva alert this afternoon i also got a link to this article that the Motley Fool website thinks Dow Jones is something of a special case within the newspaper world. i agree

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Offline access- i can easily manage podcasts and video but why not blogs?

2 comments :
Back from a couple days of R&R in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The view to the left is pretty much the view from my pool side chair were the nice staff at the Villa De Arco kept bringing me fruity drinks to keep my mind off work and blogs (i went cold turkey with no laptop or blackberry for 5 days-except for the sneak gmail access to make sure a client project launched successfully-it did!).
At one point i said to dylan that i was going to walk around the pool with my video camera and ask people if they knew what a 'blog' was since last week's social media roundtable got me thinking about the influence of the blog outside of the day to day world the "bloggers" live in. After the evil stare down i went for a swim to cool down on that idea....

So i got back on Tuesday night, flew to Seattle for the day Wednesday then back to the office today and out to the East Bay for a client appointment this afternoon- catching up on work email (yes it needs an overhaul in how it is being used in the enterprise) and getting some things out before i leave for a much longer holiday on Saturday morning did not leave me much time to read through all my blog RSS and factiva feeds, email newsletters, and follow memes but got some stuff reviewed this evening- just catching up on Jeremiah's blog takes a while if you miss a couple days and before i got on the plane yesterday i loaded his blog as well as some others on my browser so i could read the posts offline. Of course that leads to issues- not being able to follow links- or leave comments.

Here is an idea-So i am headed to Europe for the holidays so i am jamming up my iPod with podcasts and videos to catch up on, would love to also be able to simply send some blog posts to an offline mode (with the follow through primary links) without much hassle and without losing the cached page if i close my browser window- anyone know of a tool that does that?

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Social Media Roundtable round-up

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It is a great feeling when something that you put a lot of effort and love into goes well. i can honestly say that i am extremely pleased with how the social media roundtable event that we hosted last night turned out. i have a lot of people to thank like my factiva colleagues Glenn Fannick, Matt Toll, Sally Hammond and Saurabh Goorha but the biggest shout out goes to Jeremiah Owyang who:

1.) inspired me to take this on and to use the social media tools and connections i have made to involve key members of the community

2.) volunteered with passion to be our master facilitator and came up with a great exercise to gather the attributes that are the most important to the attendees.

Glenn Fannick who is part of our product development group posted some of his initial thoughts on his blog and i agree that my head is also spinning from all the things we discussed. Today the factiva team spent some time debriefing from the event. Before leaving to go back to the east coast, i managed to convince Glenn to sit in front of the camera and share his thoughts on the outcome of the event and what we intend on doing as next steps. The great thing is that the conversation is already started (see links below).

We are committed to taking what we learned and incorporating these needs into our product strategy in order to meet the needs of our customers. Take a listen to the video- and please feel free to post a video response if you attended with your thoughts!




One of the things that i find to be the most fascinating is that we will have the opportunity to apply some of the metrics that we discussed during our session as to the affect of the social media being produced by this event- our internal PR group will hold us to that. The entire event- about social media-was driven by social media

So far the output has been the production of social media and attendees are posting on blogs, photo sites and video sites- so how will factiva measure the outcome of this event? We plan on sharing that information back into the community so watch this space.

Current Event Resources:

I am skipping town for the next few days heading south for some R&R- i have a lot to think about and chew on and i certainly look forward to reading even more thoughts and engaging questions and conversation on this topic when i get back!

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Content Business Scaling?

1 comment :
Ok one more piece of consumption before i turn off this computer (and now i am also watching today's rerun of 'Meet the Press' with Jimmy Carter on a real TV).

Went over to Techmeme before putting down the 'chalupa' (my husband's loving term for my laptop) to take a look at some of the top blogging topics. I have posted before about how i like Techmeme and it helps me keep on top of hot topics in the blogsphere.

There i found this meme on how content businesses don't scale anymore starting with a post by Scott Karp in his blog Publishing 2.0 with some interesting comments and then some additional pickups which i am sure will continue tomorrow. Since Karp defines original content businesses to be producers like Weblogs, Inc., Gawker, TechCrunch, Paid Content as part of his scaling i don't think he is talking about traditional media producers but rather what some call new media producers but of course it is an interesting conversation because everyone is competing for the same eyeballs.

I work for a premium enterprise content aggregator- aggregating content from over 10,000 unique publications from newspapers, newswires, pictures to transcripts for the Enterprise user to use to make business decisions. As an aggregator we have been owned by two media producers (Dow Jones and Reuters) since 1999. This October Dow Jones announced that they would buy out Reuters' 50% share of the business. Do i think this is one strategy for a traditional media producer (as i define media producer) to scale the traditional content business? yes.

Some of My Media Consumption Habits

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I have a lot of habits- some good ones and others not so good- hey no one is perfect. Over the weekend as i was trying to catch up (which is honestly just impossible) i gave some thought to my media consumption habits and how they are continuously changing because of multiple things such as:
  • changes in the production of the media itself
  • different needs in my consumption cycles and attention triggers
  • abundance in production (multiple media covering the same topics)
  • that i am a self professed information junkie
  • that i look at media consumption through the lense of multiple enterprise worker roles (sales, marketing, product etc.)
  • i constantly experiment with consuming different media types using different tools
Per the photo on the top right, this weekend (cause it was just so nice out) i sat on the deck with a stack of magazines and print outs that i have had on my desk for weeks that i wanted to get to. That is my great dane Townes he encourages me read print instead of digital by drooling on the paper instead of my laptop. I just posted about some of the highlights i read this weekend.
I ingest information in multiple ways here is a short clip of me talking about my media consumption:



While i was writing up this and the previous post, i was catching up on the Scoble show over at PodTech , i am sure it was my wireless connection but i just couldn't resist getting this on tape- 'duh- so who are you' make sure you turn up the volume for a good chuckle- sorry robert. yes obviously i need some rest from consuming media this weekend.


Some Observations from my print Reading

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My next post will be about my media consumption habits but here are some highlights that i would like to share from the print (and i mean actual print magazines although most of this content can be found in their online version) that i read this weekend. I enjoy reading print magazines and due to my professional work subscribe to quite a few.

I started off with the summer edition of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Summer 06 edition of the PR Strategists that had BLOGS on the cover. It had been sitting on my desk at work since the summer and although i had browsered it i figured with our upcoming Social Media round table i would give it a in-depth read. Some of the items across various articles in that edition about social media include:

  • Pointed to the fact that Fortune 500 companies- those with the deepest pockets are only now starting to advertise in Yahoo! and Google
  • Large companies 'fear' blogs because they are under control of a single person- they are used to editorial boards reviewing what is being said about them
  • after the first web bust the Internet stayed on as a tool for companies- regardless if social media busts it will continue as a tool
  • PR professionals won't necessarily be the spokespeople in the blog sphere. Instead, their role within the enterprise will focus on facilitating others in the organization to speak directly to consumers and become more educators on how to use the tools
  • other types of social media (not blogs but video, podcasts, pictures) will have a faster adoption as a PR tool because it is less-time consuming then maintaining a relevant and updated blog and less risky in some ways because it is more controlled
  • many journalists look at blogs for inspiration to write articles- this creates an indirect path to mainstream media that PR professionals can take advantage of or use as an early warning systems of what the mainstream press will pick up.

I then read through a handful of copies of CMP's InformationWeek which i have subscribed to for years and find very valuable.

  • One thing that i found interesting was that they have started to print comments from their blogs in their print version next to their letters to the editor-makes sense as a media company that using both online and print media to communicate with their audience.
  • I also learned about Movable Type's new Enterprise 1.5 blogging software that now provides more tools for enterprise blogging needs like access control integration (from who can comment to who can post)through enterprise directory services.

Reading through CMP's November edition of Intelligent Enterprise,

  • provided a stat that enterprise spam email tools block 20% of legitimate business critical emails- so it makes sense that enterprise are looking at tools like blogs and wikis to communicate with their clients and partners. I know i always check with my client after sending them a file attachment that i think might be blocked.
  • Pointed me to Edward Tufte's new book 'Evidence is Beautiful'

PRWeek gave me some good client information as usual and some interesting items:

  • Forget social media how about Smelly Media? - KRAFT's rub'sniff campaign (subscription required) includes an experimental campaign in People magazine that will send smelly product adds to magazine subscribers that fall within Kraft's targeted demographic which is women 25-54 with children. According to BrandSense- 75% of all emotions people generate are from smell and not sight. It reminded me of the story i saw in the elevator this week (YES! yet another media distribution method) about the new 'Got Milk' campaign that will put just out-of-the-oven cookie smells into San Francisco bus stops.
  • An article about a 'Measured Response' (subscription required) goes through how Sun Microsystems is doing media measurement including social media. An especially good read because of the upcoming Social Media round table . A good overview of Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is provided as well.

And the last that i will bore you with (i won't go into the paper articles i printed from the factiva database or other web content i have been bookmarking) comes from EWeek