We don't know social media strategist and Podcamp founder Chris Brogan, per se, but we do follow his blog from time to time.

And today, we came across a particularly interesting (and funny) post (thanks Brian Solis!)about a PR pitch he received. The pitch came from CellSpin, asking Chris to embargo news until 9AM ET tomorrow.

Well it certainly rubbed him the wrong way, and he included in his response one of the best one liners we've seen recently: "It's about getting to know me before you fart in my face."

To be sure, we here at PRNewser won't claim innocence from never having farted in one's face, however do try and avoid it at all costs.

Truth is, it's impossible to get to know every reporter, but that is not the only point. As Chris states, "Please at least PRETEND you know me, give a rat's ass about me, read my stupid little blog. Don't just lob something over the wall at me. Because hey, I'm doing something over here, and I'm actually reaching out to potential people in your space..."

Now we're not advocating being fake to people, but someting simple like, "Hey, I saw your post on this, and I thought you'd be interested in my client, who does this," will go a long way into making your pitch stand out.

Marketing Guru Steve Rubel Talks with Brian About Info Overload from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

Edelman's Steve Rubel was recently on the Brian Lehrer show, talking about "marketing pollution" among other topics.

A choice exchange towards the beginning of the interview:

Lehrer: You're saying that the internet itself is polluted.

Rubel: I think so. To a large degree. Because I think what ends up happening is a lot of marketers are going at it the wrong way. And they're just, you know, they're viewing it as a communications vehicle only, and they're blasting their messages out there. There are people who are doing it in a, there are some people who do it in a very correct way, in a polite way, in an inviting way, and then there's people who of course are spammers, and you know, people who put spy-ware on your computer, who do it in a totally different way. But, you know...very few marketers are being inviting and kind of saying 'come and have a conversation with us,' so that we can kind of work towards a shared outcome. And I think we're going to see more marketers do that. It makes marketing more meaningful as opposed to just being a pitch.

Lehrer: But you're working for a marketing firm, a public relations firm.

Rubel: I am.

Lehrer: Criticizing the way marketers are using the web?

Rubel: Yup, as of today.

When asked for an example of marketers doing things the right way, and having a conversation, Rubel cites MyStarbucksIdea.com, the social media site created for Starbucks by Edelman (he did disclose the relationship on the show).

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I really hope not. But lately, it seems like it is a reasonable possibility. For one thing, Robert Scoble speaking at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations conference last week did not help. According to Sally Falkow, about 75% in the audience for Scoble's keynote had not ever seen Twitter. That's not surprising, or unexpected, or bad, really. It's not for everyone.

Meanwhile, Scoble timed this announcement, via Twitter of course, in conjunction with his appearance at the conference: "Anyone who joins Twitter after today is not an early adopter. So, not interesting for me to follow."

Some are pondering the recent spike in users or followers. Others, such as Adam Ostrow at Mashable have gone so far to say, "Twitter Spam Spirals Out of Control."

I've seen a few updates to my Twitter followers since the Media Relations conference, but they've all been people I know or have worked with, so nothing too out of the blue there.

However, given the hype recently, I wonder how much Twitter will be picked up more by the "non-tech geek" types and if so, what that will mean for the medium. (Caveat: it's not only for the geeks.)

I do find Twitter very useful. I am able to connect with other bloggers, journalists, co-workers, and PR people, while sending and receiving more useful information than potentially with any other medium. However, the minute Twitter becomes a flood of "read my post" or "check out this link" spam, which is already happening to a certain extent, is the minute the crowd will move on.

That's not to say it's never ok to plug a link, but if you only ever plug your links, you're not adding anything.

What do you think? Will Twitter be changed by a flood of PR?

Two years after Tom Foremski's original story calling for the death of press releases prompted the advent of the social media release, the conversation continues.

Mark Glaser at PBS' MediaShift, has an excellent in depth round up of some of the key players in the game. Here is his succinct summation of the current environment:

Perhaps at this early stage - just two years into the life of the SMNR vs. 100 years of the text press release - we can only expect small victories for the evolution of the format: a link here, a photo there, a little less spin. More importantly, the mindset of publicists and companies is starting to change as they realize that they are losing control of their tightly scripted message.

Drew Kerr, who handles PR for Businesswire, is understandably excited over this line in the story: "One of the sparks for this story was a recent email I received from a publicist for Business Wire, a wire service for press releases, who noted the newfound power of company press releases..."

In fact, he is the one who alerted us to the story. Read the whole thing here.

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What happens when a brand is hi-jacked, or takes on a different meaning? We've been listening a lot to Charlene Li of Forrester Research, who says working in the social media space involves, "letting customers control the brand if you're a marketer."

We agree, but it's definitely not always that easy for companies to swallow.

An interesting example is Scrabble vs. Scrabulous. Scrabulous is an online version of the offline game that has gotten popular on Facebook, attracting about 600,000 users. Hasbro and Mattel, who own the rights to Srabble, originally threatened to sue the two developers who made Srabulous. Meanwhile, RealNetworks has deals with both companies for the digital rights. Jordon McCollum at Marketing Pilgrim takes a deeper dive into the rights issue here.

Here's the lone PR quote in the NY Times story from yesterday:

RealNetworks would not make an executive available for an interview for this article, but the public relations manager, Ryan Luckin, said in an e-mail message that the company had been "working with Mattel for a few months now on a version of Scrabble for Facebook." Scrabble by Mattel is "in beta," the message said, meaning it is still being tested.

Our take: We're no legal experts, but with the time and money spent on a lawsuit, why not just divert that into buying Scrabulous? The game has proven its popularity and by suing the makers or creating a rival game, aren't you inevitably going to be labeled the "bad guy?"

As always, we welcome your thoughts. (Comments are coming soon, we promise.)

It's most likely not a good day for PR team at popular photo widget Slide.com.

According to Duncan Riley at TechCrunch, Slide employees were busted for posting fake positive reviews of the application on Facebook:

Fake reviews seem to be part of the norm these days, however most companies are smart enough to cover their tracks; Slide employees on the other hand post from accounts that are part of the Slide Inc Facebook network.

Unfortunately, we agree with Duncan that fake reviews are becoming all to common, and are hurting the crediblity of much of what we read online.

The thing is, it's not like Slide is an application struggling to get attention. According to comScore, the site has 117 million unique monthly viewers. They are also generally well liked by users. So why the need for fake reviews?

Ellyn Angelotti has an excellent interview with New York Times manager of internal communications and public relations Stacy Green about the The Times Company's Facebook strategy.

The Times has more than 12,000 Facebook "Fans" and has even launched a News Quiz application.

A few highlights:

Who updates content?
The NYTimes.com marketing department updates the content at least once a day on Facebook with articles and blog posts that New York Times editors have chosen to highlight on the homepage of NYTimes.com.

What about traffic?
We've seen a positive effect on traffic. Referrals from Facebook to NYTimes.com have increased since the launch of our NYTimes.com profile page last fall, as has the number of Times articles being shared among Facebook users.

Click here for the full interview.

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NY Times tech reporter David Pogue wrote yesterday about his experience at a recent PR industry event he was invited to speak at.

An emcee asked the following question before he spoke: "Why isn't your company (or client) taking advantage of Web 2.0?"

Some of the answers he heard were:

"Not enough money." "Don't understand it." "No technical resources." "Not enough manpower." "No visible return on investment." "Fear of ridicule." "Fear of slander." "Fear of permanence." "Fear of the public running amok."

Fear is definitely a factor in many of the situations I've run into. Recent events like a Cisco employee blogger getting the company sued don't exactly help either.

There are also other industries, such as pharmaceuticals, where it is virtually impossible to engage in an online conversation about certain topics.

When you can have fun is where it works, like this Ketchum campaign for Dr. Pepper offering everyone in American a free can of DP if Guns N' Roses puts out their Chinese Democracy album out in 2008. The album has been "in the works" for over a decade. They even got Axl Rose himself to acknowledge them on the Guns 'N Roses website.

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HP, for paying a mom $1000 to have her kids destroy a Fuji camera in favor of HP, all in a PayPerPost scheme.

Ok, so the judging criteria for the SXSW panel: "The Suxorz - the Worst of the Worst in Social Media Marketing for 2007," wasn't exactly scientific. Campaigns were judged on the following criteria:

Advertisers acting like asses

Out and out lying to customers

Corrupting authentic voices

HP managed to "beat" out other campaigns, including the now infamous "Wal-Marting Across America," and "Cisco's Human Network."

For a complete rundown, visit Scott Monty's blog.

(image via wired.com [arrow added by PRNewser])

We must admit, the Facebook PR team is quick on their feet. There's never a dull moment when you're watching over the year's biggest rockstar CEO. Case in point, is when they saw Mark Zuckerberg posing for a picture with Star Magazine editor-at-large Julia Allison and her pretty lady friends. Not wanting any potential internet rumors to spread - see what happened with Allison and Digg founder Kevin Rose at least week's Future of Web Apps conference in Miami - the PR team got Zuckerberg's sister Randi in on their work:

Apparently Randi was acting on a directive from a member of Facebook's PR team, who feared a picture of the CEO and the women might be taken out of context. Randi's reaction was to dive into the picture herself, separating Zuckerberg and perhaps sparing him some embarrassment.

I guess "taken out of context" is a nice way to put it. Either way, we're not quite sure who was spared the potential embarrassment: Mark, or his sister Randi, who later told Wired.com that her actions, "might have been the eight glasses of champagne talking."