First I read that the AP has suspended the use of photos from the Department of Defense, and then later in the weekend my roommate sends me an article saying that Victoria’s Secret model Karolina Kurkova doesn’t have a belly button, and that they insert it digitally in any midriff-baring pictues of her.

Why is one use of a doctored photo acceptable, while the other results in outrage from a news agency?

Unlike the Iranian missile situation from this summer, neither photo was edited in an attempt to change the news or what it was reporting.

The line at which is acceptable to edit photos has been blurring for a long time. At what point will we stop caring?

-Parker

I recently wrote a post on this blog introducing you to Jan Chipchase’s Future Perfect blog in an attempt to introduce people to some blogs that might be outside their usual reading scope. Continuing with this series is a post about SEOMoz and why you should be reading it.

A concept that has been around for a long time in the web industry but only recently seems to be gaining steam amongst communications professionals is that of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). According to Wikipedia, this is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site via natural or “organic” search results. Basically, the more optimized your website is, the better traffic you’ll get to it.

For some reason, many of the people that I have spoken to in the past few months seem to think that there is some sort of alchemical magic or technological wizardry that optimizes a site for search engines.

Put aside those thoughts and start reading the SEOMoz blog, written by some of the world’s leading SEO experts. Some of their posts are directed at newcomers to the world of SEO and can offer a great introduction. Others are a little more complicated and technical, and the balance of the two types of posts lets you pick up anywhere and start learning or applying what you already know.

If you’re more of a visual learner, they also have a series of posts called Whiteboard Fridays where one of their team members will create a short, casual video explaining some SEO concepts.

One of my favorite posts on SEOMoz is about the Three Cornerstones of SEO. Even though it was published back in mid-September, I’m constantly referring to the great diagram they have that makes it easy to explain the basic concepts of Search Engine Optimization.

So head on over to SEOMoz and find out why can proudly say they’ve got more than 30,000 subscribers to their RSS feed.

-Parker

PS: Related is a great post from Ed Lee about why your site sucks in search engine rankings. As I commented there:

“I also think that too many people complicate SEO, particularly in our industry. They think that it is some kind of alchemical magic, when it really comes down to the three simple “pillars” that you mention. I’ve always heard that if you design a site that is easy to navigate by humans, the search engine bots/spiders will also be able to crawl it easily and find your content. If you’re creating relevant content and writing naturally using words that people are likely to search for rather than jargon, people will be able to find your site and are more likely to get something out of it, and subsequently link to it.”

Over the past few months, I’ve given a lot of thought to Social Media Releases. They are a great tool, but only if used correctly. In the few years that they’ve been out, there have been a lot of different types and styles, successes and failures, but no real agreed-upon strategy for how to use them.

I think it is time we should start thinking about how exactly to use them, and less about the actual form they should take. My recommended strategy for a course of action when including a Social Media Release in a communications campaign includes four points: Monitoring, Message, Media, and Media Relations.
1.) Monitoring: Paying attention to what is being said about your brand or organization has always been recommended as a first step. As has been said before, social media is a conversation. Just as you would wait until your turn to speak in a real-world conversation, and then say something relevant, you should do the same in an online conversation. Monitoring will help you ensure the timing, nature and relevancy of your message.

2.) Message: This is what the core of the release is. It is why you are making an announcement. It is what you are hoping your audience of bloggers and the online community will care about enough to engage with. As April Dunford recently wrote in the blog post entitled “A Skeptic’s Guide TO Social Media Press Releases“:

“You need to answer the question “Why is this interesting right now?”  What is it about your announcement that makes it important information to share right now?  If you can make your news relevant to a broader audience than experts in your space, you are well on your way to spectacularness.”

If you can’t think of a reason why your announcement would be interesting to anyone, you’re probably not going to get a lot of media attention.

3.) Media: One of the coolest things about a Social Media Release is that you can include photos, audio and video to accompany the text of the release. However, this doesn’t mean that  a JPEG of the CEO’s head and a television commerical uploaded to YouTube constitute great multimedia content. Instead, you should think about your target audience and what might appeal to them. If it is a product launch, including images of the product in use and with a plain, white background would probably be beneficial to bloggers that might use them. Similarly, including a short video of the product in use might do wonders (but keep it short).

My thought is that a Social Media Release should provide value to the intended audience. The text portion should provide value in that it is informing them about something new. The accompanying media should either reinforce this value, or provide value on their own. One of the reasons I believe that the video CNW Group produced with Mark McKay got picked up online (here and here, for starters) is because it provided educational value by teaching people what a Social Media Release was. Similarly, April Dunford mentions in her post that she also provided a white-paper that showed other companies how they could start a green program in their organization.

4.) Media Relations: Contacting journalists has always been a part of traditional public relations, and it should continue to be a part of public relations in the blogging age.  Just because the audience you are trying to reach is online and you might never see them in real life does not mean that you can simply blast them with email. In fact, a huge part of the Social Media Release is the social aspect, and the fact that it is able to connect you and your news with so many people. Research and follow blogs that are relevant to your news - just as you might have different traditional media contacts for different types of news, you will probably want to reach out to different bloggers as well.

5.) Monitoring: As with any communications plan, monitoring success and following up where necessary are an important part. In the case of a campaign involving a  Social Media Release, monitoring should include not just checking to see where it got picked up and how it was used. I included Monitoring as both first and last on the list because it marks the beginning of a new communications cycle.
I hardly think that the Social Media Release is the only tool for communicators to reach an online audience, but I do think it is a good one. If you have any thoughts, suggestions or criticisms of my “4M Theory” I’d be happy to hear them.

-Parker

(As with all of my posts on BlogCampaigning, this reflects my own personal thoughts and opinions. These may not necessarily be the same as those held by my employer, CNW Group).

Well, I’ve been tagged by Sharon in a great little meme first thrown out there by Collin Douma.

The game is two come up with 5 great examples of social media use that our peers might not have noticed.

The rules are something like this:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List five Social Media projects that deserve better exposure.
3. Tag EIGHT {as many as you’d like} “Social Media / Digital Experts” at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.
5. Tag your post “Five Gems” so we can search for all of these great examples.

I’m also going to go ahead an tack on what I think should be a 6th, rule, and that is that we should all tag our posts (and examples) as 5gems on Delicious so that they are easy to find later.

1. The CNW Group Social Media release announcing the CNW Group Social Media Release - Although a bit self-referrential, I think that this is an excellent case study in how a Social Media Release can be effectively used. People left comments, bloggers embedded the video on their site (due to it being educational, rather than advertorial in nature) and one site even used the CNW logo provided with the release. (disclosure: I work for CNW, and worked directly on this).

2. Journalist Source -While they aren’t using social media directly besides having their homepage built on Wordpress and using a Twitter account, they are providing a great service to writers (I’m thinking bloggers here) that might not necessairly have the kind of resources needed to research a story on their own and source experts.

3. MySpace - Look, I know that a lot of people don’t care about MySpace anymore because it is just full of retina-burning designs and emo kids. But ever since I started a music blog a few months ago, I’ve been all over MySpace. It’s where the cool stuff happens: the creative kids are on MySpace, designinging their own pages, seeing what they can do within the constraints of the site and promoting themselves. The boring kids are on Facebook, installing applications and de-tagging drunken photos of themselves.

4. I Like Totally Love It -My Blogcampaigning co-author Jens told me about this site a little while ago, and it is definitely worth checking out. I don’t really know how to describe it, but they are kind of a social-voting site for products and things that you want, or I guess, things that you, like, totally love.

5. Movember - Growing moustaches for charity…what a great idea, and they’ve really used the online space to build traction for this. I participated last year, but I can already tell that it has grown alot since then. (if anyone is doing it this year, let me know and I’ll sponsor you!).

I’m tagging Chris Clarke, Martin Waxman, Jessica Ayers, Michael Allison and Alecia O’Brien.

-Parker

Magazines and newspapers are cutting staff. Ebook readers grow in popularity and functionality. Environmental concerns begin to outweigh the need to print out such disposable items like magazines and newspapers.

There isn’t really much of a future for the print industry, is there?

Actually, I think there is. And while I think that the discussion about what newspapers will evolve into is certainly worth having (I personally think that they will come to resemble blogs more and more just as the top blogs will come to resemble newspaper website, blurring the line), I’m not going to get into it now.

Instead I’m going to talk about magazines.

I love reading magazines and I buy them all the time. My preferred publications are normally surfing magazines, but I also buy RADAR if it looks like an interesting issue. Since my roommate subscribes to Toronto Life, I’ll often read that (along with Fashion, the magazine that accompanies it). When the mood strikes us, we’ll also sometimes pick up Vanity Fair. I’ve even seen a few copies of GQ lying around my other roommate’s room but he doesn’t seem to read them when I’m around.

The point is that there is still a market for these. People like the tangible feel of a magazine. “I love magazines,” writes Alana Taylor, lamenting the discontinuation of one of her favorite magazines. “I still would like to write for one and I still enjoy buying & reading them and I still love ripping out pictures to create collages on my bedroom wall.”

I’ve heard people remark before that the reason newspapers have failed to adapt to the internet era is similiar to the way the horse and buggy industry failed to adapt to the era of the motorcar and steam train. Rather than seeing themselves in the transportation business, the horse and buggy industry saw themselves as being what was an increasingly unfashionable horse and buggy business. Similarly, newspapers saw themselves as being in the newsaper business (rooted in paper publications), rather than in the news gathering and distribution business.

I think it is interesting that a few people have used similiarly equine analogies to describe the magazine industry. Former Conde Nast editor James Truman likens magazines to horses in that they used to be something that everyone could afford and that were enjoyed and used by the masses and are now increasingly becoming a luxury item. Along the same lines,  Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZYVA apparently compared magazines to ponies in that they don’t serve any real purpose but people keep them around because they like to look at them.

Truman thinks that the direction the magazine industry will take is to offer even more luxurious, glossy and otherwise tactile objects of luxury such as those created by fashion icons like Karl Lagerfeld (”a ninja” as Truman refers to him).
As a firm believer in the idea that science-fiction often provides a prescient glimpse as to what our future might hold, I think it is worthwhile taking a look at the book Grey by Jon Armstrong. In it, the main character continues to buy magazines despite the fact that he lives in a futuristic, connected world extrapolated a few years down the road from our own.

This model doesn’t apply only to fashion magazines -
I recently bought a $15 magazine about Metal Gear Solid 4 because it offered such great art and compelling articles. When I lived in Australia, I used to buy a magazine called Monster Children. This skate and surf mag was printed in a unique format (length-wise, so that the spine was on the shorter side) on high-quality paper and always had amazing photos and graphic design. In fact, their team must have had high standards when it came to accepting advertisements because all of them were also beautiful from an art perspective.

The magazines’ websites then become promotional material for the actual publications. Pages and pages of advertising might become a thing of the past as companies either create their own publications or work more directly with the writers and editors to see their product or service featured, perhaps going as far as to sponsor certain sections. I’d see no problem with this, as magazines have always been a vehicle for delivering advertisements.

Do you still read magazines? Which direction do you think the industry will go in?

-Parker Mason

I had my friends Malte and Anthony over for the week: not only did the Web 2.0 Expo take place here in Berlin but their company, iliketotallyloveit, also had been selected as one of the top ten finalists in the Zanox Web Services Contest 2008 for 1 Million Euros. During the course of their stay I had the pleasure to attend several events with them which offered me a better grasp of the vibrant local start-up scene.

Vibrant for the most part as the impressions I gathered seem to support Matt Marshall’s view that a lack of capital keeps German entrepreneurs more conservative than they could be: Rarely are German start-ups working on a visionary, cutting-edge idea but more often than not fall into the copycat run. Many the conversations I had included the words “They already offer this/ a similar service in the US but we…”.

It’s not all bland and blatant though as the winners of the Zanox contest proved. Unfortunately iliketotallyloveit wasn’t one of them but it would be unfair to say that the three victorious companies didn’t deserve the attention:

Webtrakk – webcontrolling, helps to measure the performance, control and improve websites’ commercial success and online-marketing campaigns
Triboo – e-commerce and high definition marketing of some sorts… unfortunately I don’t speak Italian
Servtag – near field communication based mobile solutions which offers easy and quick access to independent product information; it also allows to share your shopping habits by feeding your shopping habits to social networks

In this Servtag is similar to another interesting start-up I came across after the announcement of the contest winners: Barcoo.com

It turns your mobile into a barcode scanner and shows the information you demand e.g. by comparing prices, user ratings, giving information about ingredients of foods and their effects on your health (from the amount of fat to allergies), the carbon footprint of a company etc.

I liked these services for several reasons:
– First of all it is an original idea which doesn’t blatantly rip off existing sites but on the opposite has the potential to be successful outside of Germany.
– I could immediately relate to it: Earlier this year I needed to buy a printer/scanner and was simply overwhelmed by the variety of options; here some orientation through easy to access on the spot information certainly would have been helpful. Another example: You’re an eco-conscious shopper doing grocery shopping; with Barcoo you can base your purchases on how sustainable the suppliers’ business is.
– The idealism in case of Barcoo: Of course financial success is a motivation behind this project but from what I gathered the founders are also personally invested in that they supply a platform which supports consumers in making conscious choices they can identify with.

Servtag and Barcoo also go to show how potential future collaborations between the scientific community and start-ups might work: While Technical University of Munich is involved in Servtag, the Berlin based Humboldt University is associated with Barcoo which received funding under a European Union R&D grant – the tragedy which Matt Marshall laments, namely that Germany has a tremendous basic science research and some of the best engineering in the world but lacks the ability to connect engineers with company builders might still be a real one but as this example shows is none that’s unresolvable.

One question remains though: Who would be willing to pay for such a service? While Servtag can monetize on affiliate programs and share valuable information about shopping habits with marketeers in case of Barcoo the industry might not be enthusiastic about too much transparency, consumers not about possible extra costs of a subscription model and an ad-based solution would cost a tremendous amount of credibility.

Whatever the answer may be, Berlin’s scene will stay exciting.

-Jens

I wrote a post earlier today about Piracy and the Entertainment Industry without realizing that Microsoft had declared today Anti-Piracy day.

What a delightful coincedence!

And since you’re probably giving so much thought to piracy, why not check out an interview that Wired has with everyone’s favorite pro-piracy dude Matt Mason?

From the Wired article:

“I’m convinced that Steve Jobs is currently working on a double-sided touchscreen laptop, which has a great screen density so you can hold it on its side and you can touch it and turn pages. When something like that comes along, then the e-book’s going to be a real threat. And I think the publishing industry is going to collectively crap its pants.”

-Parker

Disclosure: Matt Mason’s got a great last name, but we aren’t related.

I’m a “pirate.” Everyday, I steal.

I steal music, by downloading it from music blogs.

I steal movies, by downloading them or streaming them from websites.

I steal information, by reading it online.

Except that stealing information isn’t exactly stealing it. Websites everywhere are giving it away. People set up blogs for the sole purpose of giving away what they write for free. News organizations do the same thing all the time: they post content on their website, and give it away freely.

And stealing music and movies isn’t stealing either. It’s piracy. Stealing removes the original, while piracy merely makes a copy (see this diagram by Danielle for help understanding this concept).

So what is the difference between the print publications (those, not including the Globe and Mail, that realize they can still have a profitable business by giving away content for free) and the entertainment industry that refuses to change its business model in the face of the internet?

Its not like there aren’t successful examples of entertainment organizations giving away their content for free and exploring different models.

Michael Moore recently allowed his film “Slacker Uprising” to be downloaded for free. Techdirt reports that Wayne Wang (director of the Joy Luck Club and Maid In Manhattan) is giving away his most recent film for free via YouTube.

As I’ve pointed out before, BMW gave away a number of short films they created with actor Clive Owen. There’s no reason that kind of model of corporate sponsorship (in exchange for product placement) can’t work in a future of legal, free downloads.

Similarly, both Radiohead and the Nine Inch Nails have seen a great deal of success in giving away albums or allowing fans to pay what they want for them. Rapper Lil Wayne is constantly giving away his music for free, and that hasn’t stopped him from near-record breaking sales.

At least one record label seems to understand this concept, even if their hosting company doesn’t. According to this story, Quote Unquote Records worked on a model that allowed fans to download albums and songs from the label’s catologue for free. Unfortunately, the company that owned the space they were hosting their content on didn’t understand this concept and took down their site for copyright infringement.

South Korean Jin-Young Park also seems to get the new economy. According to an article in Portfolio a few months ago, his entertainment company (I hesitate to call it a music label) is worth over $100 million US, and music sales only make up a small part of that fortune. That’s because Jin-Young Park recognizes that the music promotional, and can be used to sell other products and services that his company offers related to that music. This includes concert tickets, cell phones and more.

Oh, and to the American record labels that are lamenting the loss of revenue as a result of declining CD sales: Jin-Young Park created his company in a country where CD sales declined 80% from 2000 to 2006.

The world has changed, and the failure of organizations to realize that they will be unable to profit in ways that they were accustomed to will be their downfall. Those that are capable of adapting will prosper.

-Parker

(note: this is a belated followup to the post I wrote almost a month ago about Twitter)

A few weeks ago, I told my roommate about the magic of RSS feeds. I also told him about how he could go about subscribing to these feeds using an RSS reader like Google Reader.

Last week, I couldn’t help but feel pride when I walked into his room and saw him with Google Reader open, scrolling down through a number of posts.

“This is great, man,” he told me. “I’m getting all these updates from sites I like, but I don’t have to go back to them to check for new stuff.”

With that statement, I knew that he understood the value of RSS. Even though his reading list of Ultimate Fighting news sites probably isn’t the same as the list of sites that you check on a regular basis, what matters it that he is able to easily get the information he wants. As Seth Godin recently wrote about the topic of subscribing to information via RSS:

“If you subscribe to a blog, any blog, congratulations. Not only have you figured out how to keep up, for free, with huge amounts of information, you’ve done it in an elegant and efficient way. While it may be fun to try to remember which blogs you read and then go visit them in some sort of order, RSS and other subscription tools are way smarter.”

So right now you’re probably thinking that this sounds great, but wondering how it works. Well anywhere you see the RSS logo (normally in orange, but like shells in the Mario games, it can come in a variety of hues), or word ‘Subscribe’ or ‘RSS,’ you can sign up to start recieving RSS feeds. Nearly every these days allows you to subscribe via RSS, and those that don’t are missing out.

At Toronto’s recent WordCamp, I heard Joe Thornley compare subscribing to RSS Feeds to subscribing to magazines. Rather than having to drive all the way downtown to the store and look around to see if his new magazine had arrived, Joe noted that he simply took one of the subscription cards, filled it out, and everytime a new issue of that particular magazine came out it would be delivered right to his house. I think this is a great analogy, except that the best part about subscribing to things via RSS is that they are free and magazines aren’t.

Get started by first signing up for (or downloading) an RSS reader. There are plenty out there, but I prefer Google Reader. It is easy to sign up for at http://reader.Google.com and you can start using it right away.

While some sites will require you to manually input the address of the feed you want to subscribe to, clicking on the RSS logo on a page will generally take you right to Google Reader and allow you to subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you use Firefox, the little RSS icon will often appear in the address bar to let you know you can subscribe to that particular site just by clicking on the button, and being brought to Google Reader.

So what else can you do with RSS?

If you perform searches on a regular basis, it might be easier to subscribe to them via RSS. That way, you’ll be notified everytime a new search result comes up.
Technorati allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed of their search results, as do Twitter and Google.

I also use the Hype Machine to look up music fairly often Since I’m super into an artist named Lykke Li, I subscribe to an RSS feed of search results for her name on the Hype Machine so that I can always get the latest remixes.

For those of you using Yammer for internal communication, you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your company’s conversation so that you can stay in the game.

If you have an account with Delicious, you can also allow people to subscribe to either every bookmark you save, or just ones you save with certain tags. For example, you could subscribe to my Delicious account at http://delicious.com/parkernow and get every single book mark I save or, if you’re like my roommate, you could choose to just subscribe to the bookmarks I tag ‘music.’

And if you monitor certain Wikipedia pages, you can pay attention to them more easily with RSS. By going to any Wikipedia page and selecting the history tab near the top, you’ll be able to bring up another menu down the left-hand side. One of those items is “RSS”, and subscribing to it will alert you everytime someone makes a chance. Not only will it let you know that the page has been changed, but it will let you know how the new version compares to the old version.
If you start making your RSS reader part of your routine, you’ll realize how much time your saving and how much extra information that you’re absorbing.

Oh, and Dave Fleet has some great tips for using Google Reader to help you with your media monitoring.

I’m sure I’m missing some RSS tips here…any other suggestions?

-Parker

As ReadWriteWeb reports a regional court in Germany ruled that Google is violating German copyright law by displaying thumbnail previews of copyrighted images. From the piece:

German photographer Michael Bernhard and cartoonist Thomas Horn had sued the Google and demanded that their images be removed from Google’s index. According to the judge at Hamburg’s regional court, “no new work is created” by displaying thumbnails.

Google, of course, has no way of discerning whether an image in its index is copyrighted or not. Based on this decision, we would not be surprised if Google decided to block image search for German users. However, we also assume that Google will try to appeal this decision.

Ah ze Germans… Ten years after Google they still haven’t figured out the Internet: A conscious decision to prevent people from accesing valuable information about one’s visual work, hampering any form of self-promotion that would somehow resemble 21st century practices; all this backed by an unwordly, anti-business court whose ruling could potentially throw the Fatherland back into ze digital stoneage. And you thought having to pay for newspaper articles on the web was a bad idea…

-Jens (Thanks for the link Malte!)