If you plan on selling to everyone you contact, pretty soon you’ll have no contacts to interact with.

On some of my blogs, some are for dialog others are blatent promotion sites. Individuals that arrive at either type of site via articles signature links or search engine keyword searches, know immediate if they are going to be sold to or be able to carry on a decent conversation.

It’s there choice to stay or leave.

It’s about facilitating their interactions, not yours. It’s not about shiny new toys, or 80 million different channels to push your message out.

I liken it to a cocktail party conversation. Traditional PR walks up to a group of people talking and begins to talk about itself loudly and interruptively. Social-media PR eases into the conversation and contributes only when there’s something useful to say.

I’ll be back to read more…

Last Year at This Time Andrey was trying to impress TD Canada Trust by applying for a job with a social media plan Michael Garrity was emerging Julie Cole answered 5 Questions David Dougherty optimized his PPC quality score Thanks…

Web 2.0, social media, whatever you want to call it, is best served by an integrated approach and well-planned online PR strategies consist of much more than blogger relations.

Has there been too much of an emphasis on blogger relations? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is a lot of blogger relations is awful. Compounding the problem, less savvy PR consultants are targeting social media influencers when they should be targeting bloggers in specific niches instead. Several high-profile social media influencers are becoming increasingly frustrated and blogging about their disdain for the PR profession as a whole as a result.

I’m fine being contacted by knowledgeable PR folks wanting to share information about their clients’ products or services, provided they don’t spam me. Unfortunately, most people contacting me aren’t interested in relationships. They just want me to write about their client’s product or service on my blog. Blogger outreach is not end in itself. It should be part of an overall strategy with a focus on long-term engagement. Why connect with me for one initiative if you (or your client) can’t help me at a later date because the campaign is over and the budget has run out?

Enough has been said about the value of SMPRs in the earlier comments. Actually, I wish more companies would use them. I find SMPRs far more helpful and efficient than most of the garbage currently making its way to my inbox.

“there are still many organisations who are just culturally, politically, or for policy reasons unable or unwilling to engage in social media (even though – in many cases – their marketers and PR people so badly want to join the conversation).”

This is the part of the “conversational marketing” and social media space that I find most strange. Why is it always about the tools and what We want to say, rather than what our audiences want to know? There are **so** many existing ways that customer-focused organizations could (and have been, look at Ducati or Four Seasons) directly engage with customers/stakeholders before the advent of social media.

This used to take a great deal of time, effort, commitment, and budget. Why else would so many organizations and co’s continue to have poor communications with customers? Because despite all the tools, it still does. it is not about the tools. It’s about a commitment to actually using feedback once it is gathered, and structuring programs to deliver information that is useful to the audience vs solely self-serving. You say that the SMPR is a useful tool for client organizations. But is it useful for the intended audience, journalists? Does it help THEIR audiences get better information, really? I’m not so sure. Prepackaged content may be very helpful in timestrapped newsrooms, but I’m not sure how much it contributes to either the quality of information the public gets compared to what they need, or the journalist’s ability to be objective.

The semantic search benefit is where much of this is likely headed, and the onus will then be even greater on companies not to just implement the latest tools, but the implement them meaningfully. Using the best, most useful content. All the SMPRs in the world will not change the fact that journalists and audiences alike will eventually go where they get the best information,(google’s biz model is built on this despite best efforts by many to game the system) which will start to erode the dominance engines of persuasion and spin that have given our industries such questionable reputations,and fundamentally change how corporate and stakeholder comms are done, by putting customer needs at the front of the comms priority list, instead of at the end.

For a long time I’ve disliked the use of the word “social” when it comes to press releases or applied to any other business-related software or activities. Yet I do recognize that there is a grey area when it comes to online communities such as Face…