This past week I had a great chat with Stuart Foster, social strategist at Mullen.  We got into a number of topics including the role of creativity in public relations, the incredible (and sometimes forgotten) potential within social bookmark communities and more.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is launching a host of new features to support their system, which connects journalists and bloggers (let’s call them content producers) with PR/marketing folks interested in getting coverage.

According to most accounts, HARO was launched as a Facebook group in 2007 (although HARO had probably been manifesting organically through founder Peter Shankman’s own network for many years prior).  After HARO outgrew Facebook, they transitioned to a Web-based / e-mail-driven service and grew over the next 1.5 years to a community that today includes ~30,000 content producers and > 100K PR/marketing folks (who HARO refers to as Sources).

The basic premise is simple and smart: on one one side of the fence you have content producers with a demand for information.  On the other side of the fence, you have information sources with a vested interest in getting their name into published content.  Facilitate relevant interactions between the two and overlay the conversation with advertising.

The key to HARO’s early success can be extrapolated from their brand: they build for journalists and bloggers.  That has built a good deal of brand equity amongst content producers, which in turn leads to more interest from the marketing folks, which in turn is monetized through the ad overlay.  It’s a good model, especially as the media ecosystem continues to tighten up and become increasingly intertwined.

The new launch really seems to accomplish the following main goals:

• Increase value to content producers through some interesting features including ephemeral e-mails for content producers;
• Introduce top-line scalability by introducing verticalized e-mail digests;
• Increase overalll scalability by introducing more automation of workflow.

The product features are pretty cool but my sense is this is more about positioning HARO for growth moving forward.  I like what they are doing: they have a successful model; a good, clean UI and an insightful, talented management team.   They are definitely one company to watch in ‘10.

I got together with Daniel Odio from PointAbout and Peter Corbett from istrategylabs at 1410Q last week, PointAbout’s new corporate headquarters.

Turns out that Daniel has a much grander vision for the space than simply housing the PointAbout group.  The goal is to create an “entrepreneur-friendly technology innovation hotspot, where we invite tech entrepreneurs to work, luminaries to speak, and offer tech education sessions.”

I love it.  A lot of people will compare it to the Affinity Lab but there are two major differences: First, Affinity hosts a broader array of verticals (non-profit, tech, design) while 1040Q is going to focus more on the tech/start-up community.  Second, the space itself is much larger and more sleek.

There are some pictures of the space at the 1410Q Web site and a registration form to be kept in the loop on upcoming events.

I toyed around with OnlyWire for a while today and wanted to share some initial observations but first a little bit of foreplay.

Bookmarking is a vestige of the Mosaic browser (circa 1993) and has subsequently emerged into a persistent feature of Web browsers.  Bookmarks aren’t rocket science:

• There are a lot of pages on the Internet.
• Some of these pages are interesting.
• It might be handy to have a tool to help remember the interesting pages.

Pre-bust, a number of venture-backed startups tacked on an additional step in this progression:

• It might be handy to have an easy way to share interesting pages with others.

Of course, this was all pre-bust and all the companies that were working on implementing this last point flamed out because there was no financial model behind these startups.

Post-bust, a new wave of startups (most notably Delicious) began exploring this question once again and some of them achieved a modicum of financial success (i.e. Digg).  Although there has been limited financial achievement from social bookmarking sites, the general usage has been more significant and at this point in time the marketers enter the progression and add another point:

• There are a lot of bookmarking sites with a lot of eyeballs so it would be good to share our message with that audience.

And predictably, the service providers enter the equation with:

• There are a lot of marketers spending a lot of time posting business messages to social bookmark sites so let’s create a tool that helps them streamline the process.

Enter OnlyWire and a few others.

So at any rate, OnlyWire is a tool that makes it easier for marketers to post their business messages to multiple sharing sites without having to spend the time and individually share their message.  In fact, the one-off nature of other sharing tools like ShareThis and AddThis is a differentiator that they point to in the brief introductory video on their home page.

‘Saving people time’ is a great benefit prop for online applications however in general I ask the question ‘What is the act that is streamlined.’  For instance, if a tool helps people save time involved with monitoring social media sites (i.e. Radian6) then that is a good thing.  Monitoring and analysis of online conversations is good.

If a tool helps people save time interacting within various social media sites that is also good.

The issue for products like OnlyWire is that I’m not sure if they are a tool that helps people save time engaging within social media or spamming online communities.  My initial impression is that in the spam-engage continuum, OnlyWire falls further on the ’spam’ side and that is fine – as long as their roadmap is eventually focused on moving customers from spam to engagement.

From a realistic perpsective, posting a bunch of messages (without engaging) is a short term proposition.  You will probably drive traffic at the outset but over time if you are just posting and not engaging you will be either tuned out by the community or banished.

Now I know that since their acquisition they have attempted to place filters in place to prevent spam practices but if I were PM’ing OnlyWire I would seriously be thinking about how to solve the following problems:

1. How to help customers be selective about the community sites where they are going to be active (instead of providing them with a big page of community sites where they enter credentials);
2. How to help customers listen to conversations going on in those communities so they are actually plugging-in.  This doesn’t mean offering a full blown monitoring solution like Radian6 but it may mean helping them aggregate and organize feeds;
3. How to help customers engage beyond their own posts -

My guess is that a use case where one customer signs up for two or three sites and spends time engaging is going to result in greater longterm tangible benefits (SEO, traffic, business, etc.) than spending the same allotment of time autoposting to thirty sites.

What other people are saying about OnlyWire:

• OnlyWire, the Automated Bookmarketing System that Almost Died
• OnlyWire Under New Management

I chatted with CT Moore from NVI Interactive Strategy at Pubcon a few months back about several topics including some of the things we’ve seen from Google News in the past year or so.

Note to self: Remember to take off that ridiculously large event badge next time.

Business Wire recently announced the launch of “unique features that ’super-charge’ press releases.”  After spending several minutes trying to slice my way through marketing sludge (that included an actual reference to “global-mobile-social-measurable features”) I think I managed to distill the following:

• Increased mobile distribution – Business Wire will be distributing content via the mobile applications of several of their partners including the AP, Yahoo! Finance, Morningstar and several others.
• EON inclusion for all releases – Business Wire will be providing distribution over EON to all customers when they purchase a standard circuit.
• Analytics enhancements – They are rolling out some additions to their analytics platform.  Browsing the features I wasn’t able to discern what is new from what was provided prior to the launch of “global-mobile-social-measurable” but I think the sharing data is new.

These are all things that make sense however I wouldn’t use words like “unique” or “super-charge” to describe them.  They are just ongoing enhancements that should bring some incremental value to Business Wire customers.

File sharing company drop.io is currently working on a news release creation tool called PressLift.  PRNewser’s Joe Ciarallo provided a good synopsis of PressLift this past week.

Without taking a deep dive into the product, the key components seem to include:

• A basic CMS that will provide users with the ability to create a Web hosted version of the release;
• Analytics to show how often it has been shared, tweeted, etc.
• No external distribution or syndication

Ciarallo quotes a drop.io rep. as saying “most companies not using cheaper wire services such as PRWeb and PitchEngine. . .have to use [wires like] PRNewswire. . .and this is a compliment to that.”

If the quote is accurately stated then I’m a bit perplexed by the drop.io perspective.  If PRWeb and PitchEngine are being classified as “cheaper services,” then why would consumers “have to use” more expensive wire services?

Setting that confusion aside, why would PressLift be a compliment to traditional wire services when the traditional wire services already have their own Web-oriented products on the market like EON (Business Wire) and WebMax (PR Newswire).  Furthermore, how is this product any different from PitchEngine besides the fact that it looks like a hacked WordPress template?

I think Drop.io is a good product and I’m sure PressLift is going to be leveraging many of the core platform technologies that Drop.io has.  That’s a good thing.  Furthermore, PressLift is still very much in pre-Alpha so I’m not going to jump to any conclusions yet but I definitely have some initial questions.

Yesterday, the Google News team announced the beta launch of Living Stories, a platform that aims to provide a new way for users to consume news.  The prototype blends Google technology with content from the Washington Post and New York Times.

According to Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager at Google News, “The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online.”

Being a Redskins fan (nowadays a euphemism for “a bitter, jaded NFL fan”) I fiddled around with the Living Stories page focused on the Redskins.  Here are the key components of Living Stories from what I can tell:

1. Content is aggregated onto one page – Much like a blog, Living Stories aggregates related stories onto one page.  Articles throughout the page can be expanded and shrunk on the page.
2. Enhanced navigational elements – Living Stories seems to have some interesting navigational elements that are aimed at making it easier to interact with a news story.  You can browse chronologically, by sub-topic (I think they are using some clustering algorithm to distill sub-topics), and by content type.
3. Personalization – Living Stories will tell you whether or not there are updates since your last visit and will make some changes to the presentation of stories based on your usage.

So after spending some time playing around with Living Stories, here are some initial observations I have:

1. It’s innovative - Google, The Post and The Times are trying something new and experimental and I commend them for that.  I think in some ways, newspapers have been moving in this direction for a while however this seems to be a bit of a leap forward.

2. I like the aesthetic – I like the fact that the aesthetic is pretty spartan, a clear departure from the aesthetic on display on many newspaper Web sites today.  In typical Google fashion, the focus is on content and providing a clean UX.

3. I like the timeline UI - The timeline presents a pretty simple way of viewing a story chronologically that is interactive and allows you to to easily navigate to the story you are interested in.  Furthermore, there is a persistent navigational elements that contains the prominent stories, chronologically organized, which I found to be a useful navigational tool.

4. I’m not crazy about the scrolling - I prefer a multipage/hyperlinked approach.  I’m not crazy about extensive scrolling and the expanders on the Living Stories page cause you to scroll quite a bit to navigate through the content.

5. Provided the newspapers host the page, I think it will help drive search traffic -  I am assuming that the reason this is hosted on the Google domain is because it is still in beta and the ultimate plan is to transition the domain onto the newspaper Web sites.  If that assumption is true then I do believe that this will help newspaper sites rank better in organic search for high-volume topics.  For example, the Post currently ranks 10 in Google organic for “Washington Redskins.”  If this helps them get above the fold then it will help increase their overall traffic significantly.

6. It seems like this could harm ad revenue - Aggregating all stories onto one page seems like it would cut back on available ad inventory.  Initially, newspapers would map one page to one story and as they became more sophisticated about optimizing inventory, they started mapping one story to multiple pages.  This is almost the opposite approach, which seems like it would significantly reduce ad inventory.

7. I can see how this might help the bottom line – I’m guessing this is all arranged algorithmically so if it is equal or better from the reader’s standpoint that would mean newspapers wouldn’t have to pay editors to arrange all this content, which would reduce operational costs somewhat.  That being said, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not.

8. Living Stories could be more social - It seems like there was almost a deliberate effort to eliminate social features like sharing.  It does seem like there is a ‘comments’ section but it is buried far below the stories.  I find this curious.  I also find it interesting there isn’t any user-driven arrangement of content on the site.  My recommendation would be to think about how these stories can be socialized a bit more.

If I were to verbalize the problems that Living Stories (in it’s current form) solves, I would list them as follows:

• Newspapers don’t do a good job leveraging original content to tap into organic search traffic.
• Newspaper users are not satisfied with the information architecture of content on newspaper sites.

I think Living Stories will answer #1 for sure and possibly #2 for a segment of more sophisticated news consumers.

That being said I think there are other issues that Living Stories doesn’t solve, including:

• How do we address the blurring lines between media production and consumption.

That being said, I know this is still in Labs so I’m sure Cohen and his team are going to be iterating rapidly over the next year.  I’m excited to see how this things evolves.

Several weeks ago, Mihaela Lica from Everything PR presented a critical perspective on a news release we had issued in which she raised some good questions about the goals and target on a news release.  Her posting prompted me to give her a call and there were two outcomes from that discussion.  First, the discussion influenced some of my thoughts in the article I recently drafted for Visibility Magazine.  Second, she followed-up her initial post with feedback from some industry professionals in an article called, The SEO Value of a Press Release.

We work with a lot of Internet marketers who focus on a lot of different goals.  Over the years I have heard a lot of different reasons why Internet marketers use news release distribution.

I have put together an article (for Visibility Magazine) that contains my perspective on the real search value of news releases.