Please join us June 12-16, 2006 for a blog program: Direct-to-Consumer News Releases, with discussion leader David Meerman Scott.

ABOUT THE TOPIC:
The Web has changed the rules for press releases. Press releases are now read by millions of consumers on Google News, Yahoo News, newspaper and magazine sites and thousands of vertical market sites, But many PR professionals resist direct-to-consumer PR. Is it time to step it up and consider the promise Web 2.0 public relations holds? Do we need to alter the way you think about press releases? Or, as Steve Rubel has said, do "direct-to-consumer press releases suck"?

ABOUT THE DISCUSSION LEADER:
David Meerman Scott is a writer, consultant, conference speaker and seminar leader. David’s latest book Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers Into Buyers is a riff on using Web content to drive revenue and other action from Web site visitors. He is the author of the e-book phenomenon "The New Rules of PR" downloaded to date by 75,000 people. David is a contributing editor at EContent Magazine, a contributing writer at Product Marketing Magazine and his writing has appeared in diverse publications including CMOMagazine.com, MarketingProfs.com, BusinessWeek, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, North American Review and many others. In his consulting work, David specializes in using online content to market and sell products and services to demanding customers worldwide. He has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Hong Kong and has presented at industry conferences and events in over twenty countries on four continents.
Contact him at www.DavidMeermanScott.com and read his blog at www.WebInkNow.com.

I have a pet peeve about fascinating discussions taking place in e-mail that belong on this blog. So let's kick it out, ladies and gentlemen, and see if we can get This Week on IAOCblog.com up and running again with a discussion of Online Communications in Investor Relations.

Don Dunnington broached the subject because he is giving a presentation at the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) meeting in Philadelphia on Thursday. The focus of the program is IR and blogging, v-blogging, and podcasting -- something like that.

Online IR was given a big boost by the Security & Exchange Commission's Regulation FD, requiring full disclosure of material financial information to all investors simultaneously. Webcasting earnings reports is one of the few ways to stay on the right side of Regulation FD.

My take on this was that IR folks are going to need to learn online video if they want their earnings reports to spread far and wide (of course, sometimes you don't want earnings reports spreading at all). I've been working with online video for four years now and I can tell you it is tough sledding. In some ways, Apple has made it easier for us because there are only two formats of digital video that play on iPods and cell phones. When you realize that there are hundreds of compression settings you can use with online video, narrowing the number down to 2 is a great relief. I'm thinking if you're broadcasting earnings reports, you'll want them to go onto handhelds.

Don found some interesting stats about subscribers to IR casts and then Dee Rambeau dished some info about how it's relatively easy to syndicate earnings reports through RSS. I hope those gentlement will post on this topic in the coming days and that you, dear reader, will chime in, too, and then This Week on IAOCblog.com will be back in business!

It’s a good thing RSS feeds have no weight, or Cliff Allen might have to be a body builder to carry around his complete collection, which he once told me numbers in the hundreds.

In his latest email to me, he admits, “I still seem to collect RSS feeds faster than I collect bookmarks!”

Both his consulting firm and his CRM software firm are focused on sales and marketing, and that’s also the focus for much of his blog reading. Some of his current favorites:

CRM Mastery is a blog by Jim Berkowitz on Customer Relationship Management (CRM). StartWithALead is the apt URL for a “B2B Lead Generation Blog” by Brian Carroll, which focuses on leads and marketing for “the complex sale.”

The next blog is for a book, which should warm the heart of our Book Blog host, Steve O’Keefe. Read this item from the Thursday, May 5th post and your heart may be warmed, too. The blog title, Never Eat Alone, is the same as the book title. I happened to see the book at a local book store on Sunday and almost picked it up. After seeing the blog, I’ll go back and get it this weekend. If you want a good tutorial on the process and rewards of making honest, personal connections with strangers (and sometimes even the people we work and live with are strangers), this will do it. While it seems to be largely a handbook for face-to-face connections, we are seeing that the same dynamics apply to blog connections.

For his final RSS feeds, Cliff likes a blog that aims high: How to Save the World is Dave Pollard's collection of “environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essay.” And if you’ll forgive a bit of self-congratulation, he concludes, “the iaocblog looks great!”

GG is on the road for the rest of the week, but before she got away we took a look inside her RSS bag...   more »

Continuing my research into the use and abuse of RSS feeds among both the internet cognoscenti and those who still insist on using old media like newspapers.

Speaking of newspapers - I have on friend who publishes one, and another friend who edits one. Niether of them has any feeds at all. The editor said he had to go to the newsroom to find out what an RSS feed was.

I liked Dave's comment from Monday - that is a LOT of information Dave! I have no idea how you keep up with it.

The members and board of the IAOC seem to have a little more interest in these things, and Don Dunnington contributed a few of his - though with the disclaimer that they are "mostly predictable!"

For online PR, B.L. Ochman's What's Next Blog  and Steve Rubel's Micro Persasion  are at the top of my list. Some might say that's out of loyalty: B.L. and Steve were both early IAOC supporters. With Steve O'Keefe, they both helped lead the march to get us on the agenda for last year's PRSA International Conference. And they both participated in the BlogFest 2004  that launched the IAOC blog. But the reason I keep going back to them is that they're good writers and reporters who I can trust.
 
For fun stuff, I like BoingBoing  and Kevin Kelly's
Cool Tools . I think BoingBoing is popular because it has these short items with good photos like Cory Doctorow's "How
to build a bike-frame from bamboo" and Mark Frauenfelder's "Submarine rides are coming back to Disneyland." I don't ride bikes anymore, much less have an interest in building them, but it's a fun read.

But they have really useful information, too, such as "Multiple elements on TV screen are distracting" from David Pescovitz:

"Researchers say that the chaotic, distracting mess of multiple information streams that is CNN and many other channels today isn't working. (Surprise!) ...people [are] splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content...."
 
You never know what you might find on Cool Tools. This week they had the "Nozzle Socks Tube sealer," http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000717.php
which looks like a condom for caulking tubes. They say it really works to keep the contents of opened tubes fresh.
 
My favorite Cool Tools item this week was on Lindsay Publications.  Cool Tools describes it as catalog that specializes in hacking metal: "But why stop there? The same skills apply to hacking with chemicals, electricity, and home-made versions of big science equipment. In fact, if it is big, heavy or dangerous, Lindsay will tell you how to do it." The example pictured with the story is of a book on home metal casting and building your own foundry. This actually is useful information for me. Before he got his MBA, my brother was a metallurgical engineer. Cool Tools just solved this year's problem of what to get him for his birthday.

Next, a couple of hot picks off my feedlist!

Happy Monday Everybody!

Last week I had a rare couple of hours for catch-up work, and I found myself tidying up my RSS feeds. Going down the list I was muttering to myself, Wired news is getting much too political these days, might just delete that one in favor of Reuters Tech news... hmmm... what possessed me to subscribe to that New York Theatre news feed?... Hey! shoes on sale in LA this weekend!

Looking at my diverse and occasionally strange list of news and blog feeds, I started to wonder what was on the list of some of the people I know. What were they reading, and would their list give any insight to their hobbies and interests?

I started checking around. The first thing I saw was that RSS feeds are definitely not fully in the mainstream yet.

My friend the travel writer and expat living in South Korea wrote back, "RSS??  What's RSS? I'm in Phuket, I don't think we have it here. Does Bill Gates own it? Weather's Great!"

My PR Powerhouse girlfriend, who is a well wired, ipod-toting, text-messaging under thirty type said, "I'm embarrassed to say that I like to read my blogs the old fashioned way. I don't have any feeds!"

A techie friend from the code-writing side said, "I haven't set up any feeds - I get newsletters and emails from lists which get filed in a folder that I never have time to open and read anyway."

Though this kind of response was a bit discouraging in terms of finding all the neat and funny RSS skeletons in the closets of my friends, it does remind the early adopters among us that the mainstream is a big place, and full adoption takes time.

My friend Ann Coombs, futurist and author of the book The Living Workplace said that though she doesn't get any RSS feeds herself, she does have an email broadcast with a mailing list of 250,000 and by the way, she's looking for speakers for the International World Futurist Conference in July, 2006 in Toronto ; check out: www.wfs.org. Hmmm.

Another friend, young and heavily wired into the gaming crowd said that he reads Warren Ellis' blog (www.warrenellis.com) on a regular basis... in response to my email, he said he thought he might just set up some feeds this week.

More to come this week - the email replies are trickling in to my laptop - but please do post your favorite feeds! Inquiring minds want to know - What's in your Feedbag??

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Up Next on IAOCblog: Gwendolynn Gawlick has contacted her long list of high profile internet people and asked them, “what’s your RSS feed?” And starting next Monday she's hosting a week-long blog chat revealing what the Internet's cool and interesting people are really subscribing to on their RSS feeds.

If you’ve got some interesting feeds in your RSS feedbag, leave a comment with contact info here  or send an email to Gwendolynn at gg@roadgirl.com.       

Long known to the online community as the PR Diva, Gwendolynn is an Internet professional who admits to going “way back when chat rooms were only about open coding or the Xfiles.” A marketing instructor and consultant, she’s recently embarked on a new career as Proprietress of the brand new Pink Addiction online store devoted to clothes, accessories, and all else that's pink. “I’m learning about online promotion from a whole new girly perspective,” she says.

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