Events

Speaking at a PRSA conference in Florida, PRSA chair and CEO Michael Cherenson stressed to attendees that now is not the time to "hibernate" when it comes to the new media landscape.

"There's no doubt media has changed," he said. "It's gone from a passive form of news to active, but I don't think traditional media is gone. This is just another tool." Regarding social media, Cherenson said, "People are embracing this stuff because it's cool...But they need to be doing it for strategic reasons."

RELATED: PRNewser Interview: PRSA Chair Elect Michael Cherenson

I'm here at the first 140 Characters Conference put on by Jeff Pulver in New York City. It's day two, and the group on stage is discussing digital diplomacy. If you need a wrapup of the most heated session, with Robert Scoble, Ann Curry from the Today Show, Rick Sanchez from CNN, and Clayton Morris from Fox News, the TechCrunch post by PR guru Brian Solis is the best.

On-the-floor color, and naysaying can be found within Kelly Samardak's Just An Online Minute column.

This PRNewser moderated the "Blogging Tech" panel at today's PRSA T3 Conference in New York, alongside Peter Kafka of AllThingsD, Matt Sarrel of PC Magazine and Caroline McCarthy of CNET.

A comment by McCarthy may have driven the most note taking among the crowd when she stated, "Twitter has pretty much replaced ProfNet" when it comes to her sourcing stories. ProfNet already faces competition from Peter Shankman's HARO, and it's natural that Twitter and other social networks/sites will start to creep in as well.

We've heard from numerous agencies on both sides of the fence, some have canceled or are considering canceling their ProfNet subscriptions, while others believe the service provides unique value. What's your take?

Just how much money is there at the table in the digital "turf war" among PR, advertising and other related agencies? At the PRSA T3 Conference today in New York, Voce Communications New Media Strategist Josh Hallet said one of Voce's larger clients has an "SEO budget of $13 million a year."

The statement doesn't jive with what we've heard about SEO rates/spend, but we'll take Hallet's word for it. Branching out into measurement tools, Hallet said he uses a combination of Radian6, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, FeedBurner and TweetBurner, while also using free survey tools such as Survey Monkey to poll targeted audiences. "Can we unify this all?" Hallet asked, pointing out that there is a golden opportunity for vendors in this area to either aggregate tools or provide their own comprehensive offering.

Hello there! This is just a quick reminder that our next PRNewser party takes place tomorrow, Tuesday, June 9th in NYC.

Come mingle with Jason and me at the M1-5 Lounge on 52 Walker Street in Tribeca. We'll have free appetizers and awesome drink specials for everyone in attendance. Make sure you RSVP here.

This is somewhat of an after-party for the PRSA T3 conference. The conference is hosting their own Tweet-up, but we hope you can make both as they're very close by!

BusinessWeek.com Executive Editor/Editor-in-Chief John A. Byrne began his talk at Mediabistro Circus today citing management expert Jim Collins and his "five stages of corporate decline." He said the media business is currently in stage 4: "grasping for salvation."

Byrne said any new business model, "won't be one thing, it will be a lot of things. Deep and intimate engagement with readership is key to making it work." With behavioral advertising, advertisers can basically "get the demo they want for a fraction of the price" on other sites like Facebook, and Byrne reminded us that trend "will continue to erode the value of a media brand" and that the next three years will be "gruesome."

He then said, "The only way to fight these trends is engagement."

"Many players will not want to do what I say, because they are in a quantity game," he said. Dow Jones (WSJ, Barron's, etc.) has 2,000+ journalists, versus BusinessWeek with about 200. They will play the quantity game. We have to play engagement game."

Byrne named a number of engagement initiatives, but did say he initially had to "bribe" journalists to get involved with the online conversations around their stories. He told journalists that if they did not participate, their story would drop off the homepage in one day. I said "no dialogue, no homepage," and "you'd see how fast journalists would want to now engage with readers."

In terms of being too public with reporting as a risk to outing story ideas and sources to competitors, Byrne said, "80% of what we do we can be more open about, 20% we need to protect for competitive reasons."

So, what is BusinessWeek.com's metric for engagement? Byrne said that the team "thinks about what we output to the world - how many stories and how many blog posts do we put out to the world and what does the world give back to us in terms of inputs. And the ratio is what we look at. We are aiming for 100:1."

BusinessWeek.com has had success with their new Business Exchange topic site/search engine. Byrne said that for one third of Business Exchange topics, the first result on Google search for that topic is a link to the Exchange topic page. The site has two million pages registered in Google for only 1500 topics, and there is, "big success on the advertising side, we are sold out. We cannot get enough impressions to meet demand of advertisers," he said, citing the example of advertisers being attracted to certain topics and being able to sponsor that topic, such as Toyota potentially sponsoring the topic page for hybrid cars.

Edelman Digital SVP and Director of Insights Steve Rubel spoke at Mediabistro Circus today in a presentation titled, "Marketing Using Corporate All Stars." Rubel started off with a bit of a lay of the digital land, saying, "We're all dealing with this firehouse of information and there is no end in sight."

However, as it is PR and marketing's job to get attention for products or services, our room for getting that attention is increasingly limited. Rubel reminded the audience that the average American visits only 111 domains and 2,554 web pages per mont, and "I don't think those numbers are going to bet bigger," he said.

Citing the Edelman Trust Barometer, Rubel said that people trust conversations with company employees most. He hinted at the idea that companies who have the most evangelists are going to win. "You need to put your individual employees out there and let them become brands," he said.

Why is this important? "It's about who we follow and when," and it's often going to be someone "who I feel is like me," he said. "Recommendation engines for content and friendships are going to get better and better." The first way to do this is to think about who the "rock stars" are in your company that are "already out there today that you can blow up. If the answer is one, how can you cultivate them?"

Here are questions we think a few brands would ask about this strategy:

What specific policy, if any do I have to set around this type of communication? What if I am a publicly traded company, how does this change my strategy?

What if my "rock star" leaves, taking his or her network with her? Does this mean it is important to build out a team and not rely on any one evangelist?

"The 4-Hour Workweek" author Tim Ferris addressed the crowd at Mediabistro Circus today. One of the topics that came up was how he marketed the best selling book. From Chris Ariens at WebNewser:

Ferriss talked about how he marketed "The 4-Hour Workweek," now in its 41st printing, starting online then to print, then TV and national radio and then longform print. A Today show booking, the holy grail for most authors, put Ferriss' book at #12 on Amazon.com for a few hours. But a mention on Robert Scoble's popular blog put him at #3 for the whole day.

Ferriss says its that kind of Web traffic and the recommendations from sites like Digg and StumbleUpon that will can make or break a new book launch. "I'd rather be on the homepage of Digg than on the homepage of The Wall Street Journal," said Ferris.

Ferris says he spent $25,000 to get the word out about "4-Hour." "I spent $18,000 on a PR firm which was a big waste of money." The other $7,000 was spent on sending galleys and meeting in person with influential bloggers. "Buy them alcohol," he advised.

Now that's strategy! Forget the PR firm, just get a lot of bloggers drunk. Seriously though, we know Ferris has done much more than that, but we couldn't help but chuckle at that advice. Does it work for PRNewser? No comment.

We're previewing Mediabistro Circus, our annual conference today on the mediabistro.com Morning Media Menu podcast. Carmen Scheidel, director of education, events, and multimedia content at mediabistro.com joins to give us the lay of the land. From Tim Ferriss' "4-Hour Workweek" to Keith Ferrazzi's "Who's Got Your Back?" Scheidel is calling in live from The Times Center, and gives some behind-the-scenes of the just started conference.

PRNewser will be reporting live from Circus tomorrow. You can listen to all mediabistro podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

In town for the PRSA T3 Conference? Hungover from Internet Week? Want to mingle with the NY PR crowd and your PRNewser editors? All are perfect reasons to attend our next PRNewser party, which will take place next Tuesday, June 9th in NYC.

It all takes place at M1-5 Lounge on 52 Walker Street in Tribeca. We'll have free appetizers and awesome drink specials for everyone in attendance. Make sure you RSVP here!

The festivities begin at 6:30pm.