Stage Two Consulting

Today I tried a new medium for pitching a story - a twelve second long video pitch. There’s continuous discussion about PR spam, and what’s the right way to pitch stories to bloggers and to press. Stowe Boyd explained his clear and unequivocal preference for being pitched via Twitter. This lead to a follow up post, and Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb also wrote a piece on twit-pitching.

I have pitched a few stories via Twitter, and in fact I was one of the 1st people to follow and post to the Twitter account called micropr, which I heard about from Brian Solis. I’ve pitched there numerous times, though I’ve never actually gotten a response (nor have we had success from #twitpitch or #pitch140). That said, I remain undaunted, and I truly do believe in the potential of new communication/social tools.

I have a story going out on the wire tomorrow morning at 9AM for Spleak Media Network (announcing some big new content partners - to give some perspective, their last content partnership announcement was with Hearst Digital Media).  If you want the news prior to embargo, please email/twitter me.  This morning, the first thing I did was login to my 12seconds.tv account (by the way, 12seconds.tv is nearing launch - stay tuned!), and record a couple of twelve second pitches. My first was terrible, so I canceled it. The second was a little better, take a look:

Spleak on 12seconds - take 1 on 12seconds.tv
Spleak on 12seconds - take 1 on 12seconds.tv

But still, it seems like there’s a dearth of information. How will someone make any kind of judgment call about whether it’s worth following up? So I tried a third take; my favorite so far:

Spleak, take: better on 12seconds.tv
Spleak, take: better on 12seconds.tv

I think this is an interesting tool for pitching stories. Considering the ongoing changes in communications and the media landscape, It’s important to explore various media and pitch avenues. While I agree with the folks at RWW that not everyone wants the standard email pitch, for many people it is still the best way to share news. But it’s part of my job to experiment with and try different mechanisms and tools for communicating both with clients and with press. If you have thoughts on video pitching in twelve seconds or less, I’d like to hear them. How were my attempts? What would you do differently?

The music lovers at TuneUp Media, a client based here in San Francisco, launched their iTunes Companion software today. Here’s an overview of what they are doing:

What’s the one problem most people have with their digital music collections? They’re msesy, err… messy. They’re missing albums, artists, or track names (Track01 ring a bell?). For most of us, this is something we tolerate because we don’t have the time to fix songs one by one, and previous tools are too complicated or ineffective to bother with.

Introducing the new TuneUp Companion for iTunes. TuneUp plugs into your music collection and automatically fixes your mislabeled song information. It takes the audio “fingerprint” of a song, compares it to over 90 million songs in the Gracenote database, and fills in the missing info. No more “Track 01’s”. No more Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones, and TheStones. No more headaches looking for music on your iPod or iPhone. We like to say, “It’s your music’s new best friend.”

TuneUp also automatically finds missing cover art for your albums and lets you pick from up to 4 options so if you really want that import cover, you got it. You can even save all of the album covers at once with a handy “Save All” button.

So you’ve cleaned your music, found your cover art, what’s next? TuneUp integrates seamlessly beside iTunes to present the web’s best content in the “Now Playing” tab. Every time you hit play, TuneUp searches the web to provide music videos from YouTube, merchandise from eBay, song/album recommendations from Amazon, and news from Google for the artist and song you’re playing.

Additionally TuneUp lets you know when artists in your collection are coming to town with a “Concerts” tab. Even better, they pull information from both national and local sources so you won’t miss the next Justice concert, or the next show from local artist Sean Hayes.

TuneUp has something for everyone, and you can try cleaning your first 500 songs for free at www.tuneupmedia.com.

Useful links:

• TuneUp home page
• TuneUp blog
• TuneUp news feed
• Launch press release
• Online media kit (includes demo video, pix, etc)
• Joint press release with Gracenote

Coverage so far (will be updated throughout the day):

• Geek.com’s detailed review
• Lifehacker
• TechCrunch
• Venture Beat
• ZatzNotFunny
• UberGizmo
• KillerStartups
• Addicted to Digital Media detailed review
• Download Squad
• CNET Download.com detailed review
• Boing Boing
• GeekBrief.Tv

Next to “Web 2.0″ it might be the most commonly used vaguely defined term I hear in technical and marketing circles today.  I don’t like the fact that companies are chucking millions of dollars at people in the “social media” field, because they need a “social media strategy”.  I love the new forms of online interaction and what they represent to a marketing organization, but why do we need to lump everything into a single nebulous bucket?

Here are some ‘working definitions’ of social media…

SocialMediaClub: Social Media is redefining how we relate to each other as humans and how we as humans relate to the organizations that serve us. While it is commonly represented by blogs, podcasts, vlogs, wikis, user generated content and social networks, it is not about those specific things as much as it is about what happens around and because of those things. This includes most notably the ability and desire to easily share with each other, to build upon that which is shared and to discover people, places and things that are of interest to you, because the sharing of these things with these new tools, is making visible that which was previously unknown.

Wikipedia: Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories, and understandings.

Uh… dictionary FAIL.

Tamar Weinberg put together a blog post yesterday with quotes from many “social media experts” looking to define common traits.  It’s a good, albeit long, read, but I can save you a bit of time.  The most commonly used (relevant) words were: “social media, marketing/er, community/ies, audience, conversation, understand, relationships”.  Over and over again, across numerous sites, it all continues to boil down to engaging in a conversation, yet we are lumping all these disparate methods and technologies into a completely inappropriate term.

Why does this bother me so much? First, I feel it “dumbs down” a fairly interesting topic.  The same way any generalization creates issues (such as racism, elitism, etc), it creates a certain amount of sensationalism around something.  And with any hype comes inevitable backlash (I find the Amanda Chapel twitter stream particularly interesting to follow), which will in turn cause incorrect behavioral shifts.

Today social media consultants can charge a boatload of fees to marketeers who are unfamiliar in the space.  Fundamentally, many of their techniques will fail, not due to a lack of trying or expertise, but simply because there are too many round pegs being shoved into square holes (great example).  The same way the bottom fell out of the “Web consulting” industry in the late 90s, those who have hung their hats on “Web 2.0″ and other nebulous terms will find themselves wondering how the well dried up so quickly.

So to my peers in the social media community who understand the conversation, consider narrowing your field into the area you are particularly good at.  Community managers are needed, and will be for a long while.  Blogger relations people are needed, and will be for a long while.  Expertise is worth more money than generalism. Being able to easily and rapidly articulate your skills and the benefits you bring to the table will keep more food coming to your mouth long after this generation’s “Web producers” are still trying to sell untrackable, unmetricable, unfocused success.

LOUD3R is a client based in Los Angeles, CA. They launched their network of vertical websites today, and it’s going off like a house a’fire.

LOUD3R uses a semantic publishing engine, combined with human editors, to create websites. The websites are each targeted at a different subject or niche, things like custom sneakers, motorcycles, wine and cricket. They launched today with 25 websites, covering a variety of topics. The goal is to create really great destination sites for all kinds of topics, including subjects that are often under-served online. The sites include:

One of the goals behind the technology is to help cut down on all the noise. For many of us, RSS readers daily become full of WAY too many stories, and often those feeds include duplications, spam, splogs, dead links, and other junk. LOUD3R uses semantic technology and natural language processing to find, filter, cluster, rank and display only the best, freshest stories about a particular topic. This way enthusiasts for a particular subject have a great destination to go, every day, to find the best new content for their topic of interest, be it mixed martial arts, custom sneakers, soccer or motorcycles (or anything else.)

Each of the sites shares the same 3R branding (SNEAK3R for custom sneakers, DECANT3R for wine, FAST3R for motorcycles, etc.) They own more than 550 URL’s that share the 3R brand umbrella. They will continue to publish new websites at a rate of 10-15 sites / month. The press release is up on PR Web here. If you have any questions about LOUD3R or want to chat with Lowell Goss (the founder and CEO) please contact me here: david@stagetwoconsulting.com.

Here are the first few articles to break today (we’ll be updating the list all day long).

• Louis Gray was the first I saw today.
• Mashable
• Webware
• Journalism.co.UK
• Download Squad
• BNET
• drob
• Social Media Club

Go LOUD3R go!

My good friend, colleague, pseudo-competitor, fellow blogger, and much better photographer Brian Solis put a guest post up on TechCrunch today entitled the Evolution of the Press Release. If you are in marketing, I’d call it a must-read. I’m pretty sure his inspiration for the post is what Elliott refered to as “PitchMeme“, the minor brouhaha which occurred around Gina Trapani’s controversial “bad PR people’s wiki“. I call it controversial because I don’t like the “lumping in” of all PR folks into one big batch - the same way bloggers don’t like to all be looked at the same way (think about it!). The topic’s been pretty well covered already, and my thoughts on how bloggers should address things were in my blog post Friday.

I thought it would be prudent to put up a note on how we recommend our clients write and structure press releases (UPDATED: DON’T FORGET TO NOTICE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT (FROM THE ORIGINAL POST) - for when they are necessary, that is). Some of this is very traditional, some of it’s a bit “two-oh-ish”, and it’s an evolving, living process. When dealing with marketing strategy and outreach in today’s high tech world, it’s important not to get fixated on what worked yesterday as it may no longer be relevant. UPDATED: IF YOU THINK I AM SAYING “DO THIS ALL THE TIME”, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE (YES, IT TOO WAS IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE): Further, there’s no true “one size fits all” approach, you must tweak your strategies to meet your clients’ specific needs. That said, here’s our rough template:

Opening
Title - should communicate in a “non-tricky/clever” manner the message. No need to be cute here, just summarize your news in one sentence (which is why I’m so bullish on the importance of positioning).
Subtitle - optional, use if a 2nd sentence helps fill out the details.
Opening paragraph - 2 or 3 sentences that quickly get the info out. Assume your audience won’t read any further than this, so if you can’t figure out how to be interesting this briefly, odds are pretty good you either have (1) too much story, or (2) not enough story. Both are bad, consider either making multiple releases or not doing it at all, respectively.

Supporting Details
Okay, this is your time to give some background, help flush out the rest of the story. Stats, market size, demographics, details details details all belong here. I recommend being to the point, again, keeping away from the “cute” factor. 4 sentences max, and if you have a lot of details, consider making a bulleted list instead of a paragraph.

Quote
The simplest reason to have a quote is this: it will inevitably get copied-and-pasted into an article somewhere, and it saves the journalist from having to email you for a quote for their article. Your quote should sound like a human being said it, and not be jargony robot-English. Also, there’s no reason to deviate from the “standard quote” format of:

“I said something cool,” said FIRSTNAME LASTNAME, the TITLE of COMPANY. “I’m excited about that cool thing I said especially because it’s so cool.”

Focus on the business implications, and/or partnership details
This is a good time to explain why the story matters SOOO much. Either there’s a huge opportunity for the company to expand, or possibly a big deal with a big partner/customer is being announced (if so, make sure you’ve referenced this earlier!). Think about the business/industry implications of your announcement, and make them clearly comprehensible.

[optional] partner/3rd party Quote
IF you are working with a partner, give them their quote here. If not, but you have a *very well known* fan of the company, they can make a quote. It’s absolutely not necessary otherwise, and should fit very naturally - if not, don’t include something just to fill in space (shorter press releases are always better than longer ones).

Background
This is a good place to wrap it up, either by including some broad background info on the company (such as a boiler plate) or some content you generically use to describe the company/service/product/market. It’s okay to reuse this content, it’s helping out those who may be new to hearing about you.

Useful Links
In “social media PR” style, we’ve begun including a bulleted list of relevant links. These links could include a company home page, blog, product details/specs/pictures, partner home page, useful resource, Twitter URL, RSS feeds, or anything else. In my opinion this section should have every link a journalist would want to be able to find other details that complement your release.

Contact Info
Phone number and email is a must-include, and I’m generally recommending having IM information here as well. If you use Twitter or other means of near-real-time communication, you should have this included as well.

That’s it for the Stage Two-styled New-Meets-Old-Media Press Release (as of May 11, 2008 - who knows what this will look like a month from now!). Hope this is helpful, and I welcome/encourage feedback via comments.

UPDATED: I’ve added two very large callouts in the beginning of this blog post.  This is because I want to make sure that anyone who is just ’scanning’ the post instead of reading it fully notices that I am not advocating a strategy of “always write press releases, and always make them the exact same.” Sorry about the big, bold text, it felt necessary.