After doing battle with scaremongering for the last couple of posts, here’s me wimping out and spinning my own doomsday special for you. Unusually I have had more than enough sleep so this is not sleep deprivation either. The media is awash with the Union Budget news and I don’t seem to agree with anything that is being sold by various economists, interest groups, lobbyists and politicians. As is won’t, this promises to be an election budget with populist measures that will whittle away tax payers money (yes this usually represents a third of your income on the pay slip!) in rubbish schemes but nothing can make me unhappy today. I am surprisingly happy considering the fact that there is really no good news!

So to the topic of my post: Is Web 2.0 becoming Bubble 2.0 and Social Networking becoming Social Notworking (sic)? If you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve probably seen the internet bubble of 2000 and its crazy outlandish pony tail visage. Funny part is, nothing was too freak or outlandish to pitch for a business plan if it included a website in it. The market was awash with venture capital dollars and run rate or burn rate were common place terms in those circles. Not much survived that era and the remnants of this internet bubble largesse did not last.

When Google bought a loss making YouTube for USD 1.65 Billion, followed by the crazy valuations at facebook.com and myspace.com, and a seemingly crazier bid of USD 47 Billion by Microsoft for Yahoo, I knew that Free is Back! Recently AOL decided to offer free e-mail, with many free goodies including XM Radio, Anti Virus, 5 Gig online storage, etc, etc. Incidentally the poor cousin Indian version of AOL does not offer these!

There is more bad news on the horizon as Google stock fell 38 per cent on a report by comscore that AD clicks on Google had been flat in the month of January as compared to last year. This was widely reported across the world and created tremors that were felt far away from its epicentre.

Facebook has recently retreated on its aggressive advertising venture known as the Beacon after howls of protest from its subscribers, numbers which incidentally for the first time started to plateau. Google similarly is showing signs of a slow down. All this coupled with the strong privacy issues that have plagued all large players in the social networking are really a cause for worry where the future of the web 2.0 is concerned.

The benefits that it has bought to the enterprise business in terms of collaboration tools like blogs, widgets, twitters and IM as a result of user generated content can not be ignored but at the same time the impact of social networking has been minimal besides online advertising. This is even more pronounced in India due our insulation from the west both in terms of cultural differences and internet infrastructure bottlenecks across 3G spectrum as well as simple broadband. What it can do is hopelessly mix up your personal and professional life and inadvertently give access to people about your personal information, which you’d much rather keep to yourself and your social ilk.

The other is the time spent wasting company resources while on the job doing what is popularly being referred to as social NOTworking! This is a real concern as, while many managements have draconian solutions but it is important for all CIOs and CTOs to consider how much of the technology and infrastructure that they provide is actual used by employees, and how much is in the nature of freeware which certainly brings a lot of productivity to the enterprise including web based e-mail, instant messaging services as well as social networking tools.

Back into the PR paddock in India, I would love to hear from PR Firms who actually have a social media list they actively use, and dedicated resources who are real practitioners, with real customers without getting my bullshit meter in the red.

If you are bleeding from the budget take hope and have a great weekend!

So you are planning to hire an agency for your company’s social media outreach initiatives? Creating a blog, or a social networking site? Easy. An annual plan, aligned with your overall communication goals? Then it becomes tricky. The social media agencies scenario in India is sadly still in its infancy.

I decide to put down my thoughts on this after seeing a good round-up by Gaurav. It made me ponder a bit. He wrote

The Indian players offering social media marketing services can broadly be divided into three categories:

- Digital advertising agencies offering social media marketing services with a focus on virals, social network apps, social media campaigns etc.

- Public relations agencies/ practitioners offering social media services with a focus on online reputation monitoring and social media outreach etc.

- Prominent bloggers offering, basically, corporate blogging consulting services and workshops.

He has also listed down a few companies that are today engaged in providing social media outreach programmes for its clients. Now when somebody looks at this list, he might wonder which category is best suited for his company. My not-so-perfect take on this is simple:

There’s a media, and there are ways to leverage it for a corporation. In the traditional setup, a corporation would hire an advertising agency to buy ad space on that media and hire a PR firm to engage with the editorial of that media publication. I suppose it wouldn’t be so drastically different when it comes to the social media.

A digital advertising agency today would primarily look at creating blog banners, websites, and applications, while a PR 2.0 agency would look at engaging with relevant bloggers to spread its client’s messaging, and participate in social networking sites and engage with the end consumers.

Both have their weaknesses. While a digital advertising agency might not have the expertise to engage continuously with a client’s target audience, a PR 2.0 agency would lack the technical skills required to say perhaps create a Facebook application.

Now as a corporation, you would probably want to hire a firm that is good in providing both the services.  Why have two different service providers? As PR agencies have been handling your communications programs with other media, you might perhaps want to work with them and combine your traditional media approach with the new media. But is that so simple?

This can be one reason why I could imagine a lot of partnerships between digital advertising agencies and PR 2.0 firms in the near future. This might work out in a way where PR agencies are outsourcing the technical part of the job to application developers and website creators while they take care of the messaging and maintaining a particular property with the target audience.

Also it is interesting to note how PR agencies  are ramping up their processes to offer social media outreach services to their clients. An improvement from my last post - dare I say

Apart from Fleishman Hillard and Edelman that Gaurav mentioned in his post, we have  Weber Shandwick starting its social media division Screengrab in India. Then we have 2020 Media, Redifussion PR, Adfactors PR, and Genesis Burson Marsteller starting their own.

So when all these are happening, the biggest hurdle would be lack of good manpower - professionals who know how to handle the communications of a client as well as understand the social media well. That goes for the another post. Till then let’s wait and watch and smile a bit. What’s you take? Leave a comment.

Some time back, press releases were perhaps meant only for the journalists. Not so anymore.

Today the consumer is fast becoming the fourth estate. With the increasing influence of social media in our lives, we are now reading/listening and expressing our views using blogs and podcasts, watching videos on YouTube, sharing pictures on Picasa and Flickr and sharing our lives and views with the virtual world through social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook and giving updates through Twitter. Now, if we want to share some information with our friends, we just don’t send them links, we want to share the videos, photographs, audio with each other.

Now if corporates want to target this lot, the traditional plain Jane press releases are a complete no no. We use what is called the Social Media Press Release (SMPR) that enables all these sharing in an interesting manner with ease. Since this not only provides the opportunity to share information in a way our new age consumer wants but at the same time also gives enough opportunity to engage the consumer and the critics in an ongoing dialogue.

One of the companies that use the Social Media Press Release effectively and efficiently is Ford . I particularly liked the “Digital Snippet” concept in this Social Media Press release only because it is like providing information to the blogger the way he/she would like to see, share, and publish through his/her Google reader or Bloglines.

Now how do we create a social media press release? The latest template has been developed recently by Social Media Group. This can be downloaded here.

There is another format developed by Shift Communications that can be downloaded from here. This particular template was simple to understand and easier to information as was briefed in within template limits.

If not for anything else, the Social Media News Release can come very helpful in certain traditional PR practices say for example in creating a video news release. Using the new release format, you can skip the tedious process of having to burn dozens of copies of CDs.

So are you using any social media press releases for your company/clients? What are your experiences? Share them for the community here.

Imagine you are pitching a story to a blogger and the latter is not convinced about your story idea. Still you persist. The blogger gets really pissed off and writes a nasty piece about you, your client, and writes in detail about what you have been doing. That is blogger relations for you - not like dealing with the usual mainstream media journalist who might bang down the phone but at least won’t write his/her personal jaunt with you.

Ok I exaggerated a bit. This can happen very rarely. Bloggers, especially the top ones, can be very professional and do take decisions objectively. But the point is this is an area that calls more a more sensitive handling than you would have been doing normally.

To help get things stated, this is a good post at Problogger that details 21 tips from the full-time blogger himself on tips that one can keep in mind while pitching to bloggers. Problogger is considered to be the top resource site on blogging so you might just want to check what the expert has to say.

Well, the tips are not any secret mantra and are what any good common sense would say. You need to understand the writer, what he writes about and appreciate it, and try to bring value to him/her while pitching for your client. The end objective should be a mutual benefit for both parties.

To put it from another perspective, we all hate telemarketing phone calls. Don’t we? We hate them all the more when a telemarketing executive calls us to offer a free credit card when we already have three. That’s what happens to ill-researched telemarketing calls made to random numbers from a random consumer phone number list. But if the same executive finds out a bit about us and calls us to offer a service that will help us pay off all credit cards at one go automatically every month, we might stop and listen.

1. Corporate Voice Weber Shandwick Delhi won the 2007 United Nations Grand Award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Relations - The CVWS Delhi team has won this prestigious award for its campaign on sensitizing people on the use of condoms. Read this story in The Hindu Business Line - an excellent case study on the use of traditional media relations, direct mailers, advertising, events, and the new media. Kudos to the team.

2. Shekhar Ghosh to head Sampark PR as CEO - Shekhar moves from R&PM:Edelman where he served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO). Prior to Edelman, Shekhar was the Director, Strategy at Hanmer & Partners for over five years. Read the release here.

3. Ogilvy PR to handle Satyam’s account - To help build Satyam Computer Science’s brand on a global mandate.

4. PR is a noble profession - Public relations, unlike in the past commands respect today as a noble profession like journalism and is meant not just to sell concept or an idea, but to educate, enlighten and empower the masses, chairman of Prasar Bharathi, Dr M V Kamat said.

Free Email Mailing List Managers Annotated

Good Communications Is about Talking Like a Real Person Annotated

“I learned to just say what I have to say, and worry less about how I’m coming across. This is especially important for a freelancer. With the limited time a client has to look for freelancers, they will appreciate proposals that are straightforward and to the point, while ignoring those that place more importance on making a good impression. The same applies to anyone looking for information online.”

How to Write a Social Media Press Release Annotated

It should be presented as a story that has value to readers first, because if it happens to be picked up by a journalist, you’ve just made his job easier by presenting an angle.

Gartner Urges Caution on Virtual-World Business

PR 2.0 - Silicon Valley Annotated

62 ways to improve your press releases Annotated

CBC Journalists Cannot Add News Sources as Facebook Friends Annotated

China’s handouts to journalists skew media coverage Annotated