Everyday, on the Internet, millions of people are voting on thousands of things:

• What they think of movies they’ve seen.
• How they rate restaurants.
• Books they recommend or suggest you never even read the first page.
• Hotels they fell in love with or asked for their money back.

What does this have to do with PR? Nothing, if you choose to ignore it as the ranting of amateur critics. And if you have a closed mind about digital PR, that’s precisely what you may do.

So delete this now.

OK, talking to the faithful, it is so closed-minded and myopic to view the Internet reviewers as amateurs. Forget their academic credentials-which you really don’t need to rate a hotel chain- they have something you need and your clients can benefit from mightily. They have power. (Ask Obama)

And this is a form of power you can harness and leverage if you harvest the public opinion on the Web and use it as proof points for your clients’ products and\or services.

The idea is to stop viewing public ratings (PR) and public relations (PR) as two different worlds. More effective is to view the former as a powerful way to reinforce the latter. By gathering positive votes (which is what the reviews really are), we can build independent support into our media pitches, backgrounders and even create polls based on an aggregation of public reviews as opposed to those created by paid consultants. In effect, we are demonstrating public endorsement of our PR positions.

And you can get as creative as you like. Say your client is a movie studio with a low ad budget indie film. Such movies live and die to a great extent by the volume and the quality of the reviews they garner.

If your film is scoring with the public on movie sites, create a landing page of your own to reflect this grass roots appeal and use print, broadcast and Web PR to drive traffic to your page. In a flash, as millions contemplate which movie to see, they recognize that a low profile sleeper may be a better bet than the mega budget star vehicle.

In many ways, the Web is a great town hall with millions of opinions residing on a Balkanized set of Web sites. By linking this opinion to support your clients’ product or service, you demonstrate that the power of the people can propel the power of your PR!

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Say your client makes a miserably boring product. Like a work cap that keeps employees warm when they have to venture into the elements to load customers’ cars.

A welcome piece of apparel for the employee. Root canal for the PR firm that has to generate placements for a double-lined felt cap. Who the hell wants to do stories on that?

Not the New York Times (unless the cap caused a fatal accident and Bush invested in the company). Not People magazine unless Clooney swears it’ s a babe magnet. Not Exciting Work Hat Week because there is no such publication.

Yes, it may make Work Cap News, but the client wants more than three people to read about it.

So where to go with the story. Well, in the traditional media, there isn’t much you can do with a dog like that.

Would you want to pitch it?

But all of that changes in the digi PR world when placed in the right hands. That’s because the Web is a free- for- all that swallows up and spits out a mash up of stories without any concern for their traditional editorial qualifications.

I’m not talking about TheEconomist.com or The WashingtonPost.com They’re still not in the market for felt-lined cap stories. But digi PR does something so unusual and so very human: have fun with stuff that isn’t considered laughing matter anywhere else.

To make it work, you have to break all the rules:

• Take the wiredest looking person you can find.
• Put that person in strangest workplace you can think off. Say a garbage dump in New Jersey (the garden state???)
• Slap the king of caps on their head.
• Have them sing a song about something ridiculosily appropriate, like Maggie’s Farm.
• Place the whole freak show on You Tube.

You will have a hit on your hands. The Hot HAT will be a phenom. Nike will beg for a license. The skinny bitch will wear it on Letterman. Her guy will wear it on the soccer field.

God bless the Internet.

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So I think Counting Crows is one of the best bands of the past two decades. No Led Zep but who is or was? At their best, Counting Crows was genuinely good, original, and at times (Recovering the Satellites, Anna Begins) exceptional.

And then they lost the artistic magic or Adam got tired or who knows what but a devoted following sat in disgust listening to Hard Candy, the first Milk Dud by a group of guys who seemed incapable of sinking so low.

Ok, so they had a loser. Everyone is entitled to a bad day now and then and so the devoted waited for the recovery album. And waited. And waited. And nothing…..

Until late last month when the band on the run released Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

It is a clunker. It is a once seamless band that made magic instinctively now trying too hard. You can hear the hard work. You can hear all the old riffs repeated here.

I think they knew it. I think they recognized this was January compared to August And Everything After.

So what do they do to breathe some life into a wounded bird? They try all kinds of traditional PR, which will drive some heightened anticipation for sure, but its sales they want. You can’t take anticipation to the bank.

They know a little secret about the Internet. You can listen to it. You can hear it. So they take the only hook song on the album, You Can’t Count On Me, create a landing page, give you a link to download and viola, digi does what print can’t even touch. (It’s not called a hook for nothing). It sells songs.

There is still a huge place for traditional PR in traditional media. And we should play it like it’s 1953. But with one hand, while the other is on the mouse. Because that “huge place” is relative and gets smaller every day.

And if you can’t hear the hook, you ain’t buying.

Think about it. The Web sings…..literally.
Mark Stevens
CEO

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You hear so many people whining today that the world is so cold and aloof and impersonal and people no longer relate– and oh God what happened to Mayberry RFD?

To hear them recount it, there is a monster at work here. It is called the Internet and it is driving people apart. No one even knows what emotions are. Instead of talking to each other, writing to each other, they hide behind email. It is a bloodless, forbidden planet. A far cry from the good old days.

But were they really so good?
I write a bunch of blogs that fly out in cyberspace to all kinds of perfect strangers. None are hand written. None of the envelopes are embossed with melted candle wax. None even have envelopes.

What a cold bastard I am. What a frozen electronic world I communicate in.
Just ask the prisoners of the “Good Old Days.” They’ll tell you.

But then, just for the sake of fair and balanced, you will have to ask someone else. Actually, thousands of others. They are the human beings who read my electronic musings and who write back the most personal, sensitive, revealing, heartfelt, vulnerable responses one could imagine writing - not only to a perfect stranger - but to a deep and loyal friend for life.

And I think I know why. When people communicate electronically, they (not all, but many) feel more comfortable than doing it the way it was done in the Good Old Days.

Remember this when it comes to pitches and stories and letters to media contacts and by-line stories. Except for a few clingers to the sides of the Titanic, no one cares how the message is communicated.

They just care about the message.

That will never go out of style.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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We are in the thick of a white water presidential race. A snow-White woman is engaged in a heated political battle with a Black man. She was always in favor of a Black president with the non-negotiable caveat that he had to be
her husband, so to speak. In other words, as long as said Black president was in fact White.

To try and stop the genuine Black man from gaining entry to The White House, the former first lady’s sycophants sent to the media a photo of the Black candidate wearing African garb, attempting to highlight the depths of his Blackness in contrast to the so-called “first Black president” who was (wink, wink) of course White.

To which media did they send this African garb photo? To the old grey lady that is said to present All The News That’s Fit To Print? No, they go digital with The Drudge Report. Why? Because people do more than read Drudge- they believe it. Increasingly, digi Drudge has more credibility and reach than The New York Times. The line between print and digital is becoming more black and white.

When another hit squad took a would-be sex scandal to the media, they chose the old grey lady because they knew her opinion of John McCain is black and white. They should have gone digi, says the Huffington Post, because the grey lady is now black and white. No one believes her. Even her own ombudsman. The story was judged, far and wide, to be a hit job in print.  Black and white.

If you think digi PR is a sideshow, ask Hillary. The Times they are not a changin, they have done a 180.

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Remember when the press conference used to be a viable tool of the PR professional. Today, forget it. Unless you have a presidential candidate slandering a competitor or GM admitting they make junk on wheels and are going to change their evils ways, baby, no one shows.

The Internet is a major culprit. And a savior. But you have to use it to make it work for you. The Web that is.

The fact is news reporters want packaged stories more than ever before. So turning out en masse for a press conference, well in most cases, that’s not happening. Most of us know that. Have learned it the hard way.

The question is, what do we do with the knowledge. One sound approach is to spell “press conference” as “webinar.” If you have a message of urgency and importance, the build it and they will come axiom will prevail. Ideas are the currency of the Internet. The really great thing is that by fusing the Web and a powerful idea, you can be a PR direct marketer, taking your message not only to the reporters’ blackberries but to their readers as well.

If the idea is big enough, the bloggers will attend the webinar, the reporters who monitor and\or cover the bloggers will attend and voila, what’s a press conference again?

How do you make this work:

• Save your silver bullets for the really big ideas. If the idea doesn’t have the power to turn heads, you will put on a show no one will attend.
• Remember the old Hollywood rule: Make a bad movie and people will stay away in droves.
• Salt the web with teasers before you run the Webinar. A compelling video clip on YouTube or a podcast that hints at what’s to come.
• Reach out to key movers and influencers, giving them special access to or participation in the Webinar.
• Pull out every stop to bring in a major brand, product or celebrity.

There’s only one Meet The Press and Tim’s not letting you on. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s not 1990.

You don’t need him!

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I am standing here in the midst of a blizzard. One I brought on myself, with the help of a few thousand of my closest friends. All I did was press the Blizzard Button and voila, the perfect storm began.

There is no snow or wind associated with this storm. Just words. Ideas. Opinions. And they riccochet off each other and fly off into space and zoom off satelittes and pounce on websites and materialize on blackberrys.

I tossed out a proposition about God, that we can learn from Him (from the great religions of the world) to be better businesspeople. And then my PR team placed the concept on the websites of various magazines and readers liked or hated what I said and passed on comments and, emailed friends, and shot off fyi’s to other editors and on and on.

All we did was throw an intellectual stone into the middle of the cyber-ocean and a chain reaction of responses transported my proposition from New York to Delhi, from the Christian community to the business elite, from CEOs at Siemens’ Ascent Conference in Berlin to Donald Trump, to a realtor in Orange County.

The true power of digitial PR is that once you give birth to a provocative idea, a million carrier pigeons take over, spreading the message for you. Unlike traditional PR, you don’t have to ask, or should I say plead, with others to run the story, you can’t stop them. The blizzard is a self-perpetuating machine. It is a thing of awe and beauty.

How do you seed the storm:

1. Make sure your idea has teeth. No one is going to get viral with pablum.
2. Help to accelerate the wind speed by incorporating your messsage in a blog and linking every blogger who responds to your idea to your blog.
3. Seek links from every site that picks up on your message and broadcasts it to their community.
4. Ask opinion leaders in each relevant community to opine on your idea and to spread their thoughts to their constituents.

Then sit back, put a log on the fire and enjoy the storm. Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow.

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I took in Fox’s News Watch Thanksgiving weekend and the subject was blogs. The subject: Are they important, if so why, how do they influence the media and ya da ya da ya da.

This is usually a well-produced and informative program on the inner workings, biases, power and lack of it in the media. But in this case, it was like listening in on a group of bewildered time travelers wondering why and how the good old horse was replaced by the automobile.

But let me back up for a moment. There are two kinds of blogs. Actually, I take that back but I’m too lazy to delete it and start all over again. There are three kinds of blogs:

1. The 70 million or more no one reads except for the writer and extremely lonely and devoted friends. Although these are technically blogs, they are really personal diaries about sex, acne, and the challenges of motherhood. For PR professionals, zero value. Push the delete button.

2. The few hundred thousand or so that have a real following. Think of them as mini Daily Oregonians with passion. The ones that cover your clients’ interests are important to PR people and should be pitched based on a sound knowledge of who they are and what they write.

3. The 800 pound gorillas, like The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post. These beasts are powerful, influential and viral. Pound for pound they are MORE important than any traditional media outlet. PR pros must learn them and find out how to break into them.

The Fox News Watch talked about-incoherently, but talked about nevertheless-blogs, as if everything posted as a blog really is one. You have to dismiss the diaries, dance with the real ones and romance the hell out of the divas.

Now, the show also postulated that traditional media makes the blogs stars and also really influences opinion and the course of events. One of the guests postulated that Dan Rather would drive a hapless blogger to stardom and then Dan would be the one changing history.

It is really the other way around. No one does or thinks in any special way because Katie Couric suggests it. But when Drudge or Huffington take a stand, millions go with them. With fierce determination. With a near unstoppable force.

Fox News Watch didn’t have a PR pro on the panel. Just traditional media journalists. They can afford to live in the past.

We can’t. And it’s more fun here too.

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Why do I write a blog for this publication? Why do I write one for Brandweek.com?

Both a highly-respected publications written by seasoned professionals. Why did they ask me to write blogs for them? I don’t work for them. I am a free agent. I can write whatever I want to write and have not an iota of fear about being fired.

Asking me, and other bloggers, to voice our opinions in their space, that takes guts. And these are brands with guts. And even more so, this is what the digital world, in its purest form, is all about. Guts. The free exchange of information. Outlaws writing on Berlin walls in properties others own. Not as hackers but as invited guests.

Whenever I have guested in traditional media, there were 10,000 questions, a Kafkaesque due diligence to make certain I embarrassed no one. In the digital world, just the opposite. “Will you write a blog for us, Mark?”

“Would love to.”

“Go for it.”

It is that simple for brands with guts, brands that understand the digital world, because if it is about control and limitations, it is not about cyberspace. All of the good behavior rules of traditional PR need to be re-examined when it comes to digital PR. Because caution doesn’t work here. It is actually against the rules of the game.

The big mistake is to think that the transition from traditional media to digital is all about the alphabet vs. binary code. It has almost nothing to do with the function and virtually everything to with form. You need to read the language of the Web. To visit a zillion sites. To witness the abandon that runs through this world where in seconds science can pop up to politics and politics to food and food to sex.

The beauty of digital PR is that its “rules” have not been written yet. You can write them. And then relish in the fact that they will change the day after.

The more you can accept this, the more you can accept a blank slate, the more you will succeed.

There are no experts in digital PR. We are all Magellan circumnavigating the world. Enjoy the ride. And make a mark on the world.

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The spin about the Internet is that it is the most democratic form of communication. You can say whatever moves you on any and every subject and presto it’s there for the world to read. Like it or not.

In this brave new world, legend has it, there are no censors.

Lovely concept. Total myth.

One of our client’s businesses is focused almost exclusively on the Internet. The company creates intellectual property, which is targeted at a specific community, and uses all manner of PR to drive traffic to its site and its offerings. When people see what they like, they buy on line. Direct, precise, and straightforward.

One of the ways the firm gets its message out is by writing a blog on web sites frequented by its core demographics. The sites agree to carry the CEO’s blog and in the process of informing and entertaining his audience, he builds his universe of prospective customers.

He is an outspoken and provocative guy, and that’s what the market wants and expects of his blog.

And then this theory turns to reality and a reader who disagrees with one or all of the blogs makes a holy stink and threatens to bring the wrath of hell down on the website that hosts it and the democracy of the Internet turns into a dictatorship. Fearing all manner of retribution (none of which is valid), the host site asks the blogger to censure his work or his blog will be dropped.

What to do? As PR professionals, cave in to the threat to keep the placement or insist that your client’s voice be an honest one or none at all?

I am facing a similar issue. With my new book about God and business coming out in January, most business and religious sites are embracing it and asking for stories on it, review copies and the like. But a few are concerned that it will upset some of their readers who have hardened opinions and refuse to allow new thinking into their worlds. They have decided to assume the role of censures even before any of their community has a chance to read what I have to say and voice an opinion of their own.

As PR professionals, you know where your clients’ messages are likely to resonate and where they will initiate a healthy and passionate debate. Most of the universities Ann Coulter speaks at detest her message but love the debate she generates. Fox News has no love for Hillary Clinton but would love to bag her for The Factor. It’s all part of the free for all that is the signature of an open and democratic society.

A wonderful free-for-all I am part of and embrace. A free-for-all I thought, until recently, was best exemplified on the Web.

Those naive days are over!

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