Well, Steve Rubel retired, so I threw my hat in the ring with Jaffe and I'll be the first guest host on Across the Sound in January. If I don't act too much like an asshole, and if I somehow manage to outperform three other industry luminaries (two of whom are good buds of mine), then I might have the gig regularly. Anyway, we're recording tomorrow and I've got a huge list of industry issues and all sorts of happy crap I'd like to discuss. Wish me luck!
I don't care if you have the most boring business in the world. There's always something interesting going on that can provide fodder for some great stories. I was looking at this article I found through Fark about Roto-Rooter. Looks like they put something out to let the public know about the five most interesting things they've recovered from drainpipes and trenches over the past year.
You can say what you want about Roto-Rooter, but this kind of thing is the perfect thing to blog about. If Roto-Rooter could have let the field staff write about the most interesting things that happened to them during the course of the day, I bet they'd have an interesting bundle of content after just a few months. Maybe not everyone would subscribe to the RSS feed, but it would help to make what on its face seems like a boring business more interesting.
Remember clipping services? When I was a weekly humor columnist for The Ring-tum Phi at Washington & Lee, I penned a column that reviewed each and every one of the cheap wines available at the local grocery store, from MD 20/20 to Wild Irish Rose. Within a week, a letter from the Ernest & Julio Gallo company arrived on my desk at the Phi's offices. Evidently, Gallo's clipping service had picked up on my column (written in a college newspaper with only a few thousand circulation, no less) and had one of its PR staffers pen a response to my column.
We printed the letter in the next issue, along with a response from me. It was funny as hell that Gallo took enough time out to write us and set the record straight in a humorous way. (I had gotten some facts wrong regarding which cheap wines Gallo made.)
If you take a step back for a sec, realize that what occurred here wasn't all that different from a conversation on a blog. I published something in a tiny venue, Gallo had its feelers out and somehow found it, and they took the time to respond and join the conversation. The participation part is the tough part, but I find many advertising agencies are failing where PR agencies succeed - at least they have their feelers out and they're listening.
Some of the folks I converse with online who work for advertising agencies are amazed at the speed at which I respond to blog posts about me, my writings or my company. Others who work for agencies are always asking me how I find opinions and articles on certain topics, particularly the ones that are important to my clients.
One of the reasons is that I have a lot of custom searches saved up. Google News sends me an e-mail any time anything of significance is written about "Hespos," "Underscore Marketing," "Wading River" (my hometown), "The MathWorks" (a client) or any other number of phrases. I also have searches for these terms built into my RSS reader, so I'm actually subscribed to similar searches on IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Blogdigger and a few others. I get these updates via my Sage RSS reader on a nearly real-time basis.
So whenever someone writes a blog post or sends out a news article about me or several topics that are important to me, I know about it fairly quickly. From there, I can take my lunch hour or a spare few moments in between meetings to respond.
Not many folks are used to getting information this way, though. It may seem simple to me or to many folks reading this site, but a lot of people are plumb mystified by the notion of getting real-time search updates or near real-time news alerts. I can't picture doing it any other way.
Back to my original point, though. The fact that PR agencies are at least listening to the conversation means that they're a step ahead of the ad agencies in the conversational economy. Hopefully the ad agencies will start listening soon as well.
There aren't any serious threats to Christians' abilities to celebrate Christmas. They exist only in Bill O'Reilly's mind. (And even in his own mind, he's completely making stuff up.) But that doesn't stop the Religious Right from getting all up in arms and trying to swing the pendulum completely back in the other direction. I've spoken to a few of my religious friends, and many of them are convinced that there's a war being fought with the PC police on one side, them on the other, and their right to celebrate their holiday hanging in the balance.
As a result, you see a number of people who you would normally consider intelligent writing in to whatever publications will run their letters, offering up arguments that essentially boil down to "Christians are the majority. Deal with it."
It makes me wonder where some of these people were educated. It was hard enough dealing with the notion of people failing to aspire to ideals that don't include freedom of speech (e.g. - the "dissent is un-American" debate still lingering today). It was even tougher dealing with the notion that many people really don't dig religious tolerance anymore (e.g. - post 9/11 Muslim-bashing). Now we see behavior that's indicative of people failing to understand that their own Bill of Rights protects them from the "tyranny of the majority" types of situations that are so well summed up by a "Christians are the majority, deal with it" attitude.
This all makes me think that we need to, at a minimum, send everybody back to history class for some lessons on the ideals to which our forefathers aspired.
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