Any PR person still pitching Robert Scoble via direct messages on Twitter should be fired.
Scoble more than any other influential in the media has made it painfully clear how he would like to be pitched, “I hate getting pitches via email or direct messaging. Just post your pitch in public so I can retweet, thanks!” (via @Scobleizer tweet)
“OK, if you’re a PR person, and you’re on FriendFeed, leave your name, URL, and a short pitch for what you’d like me to know about. Stowe Boyd calls this a ‘twitpitch.’ Since you have more words here on FriendFeed, and because things are put into threads, it’s better to pitch me here than on Twitter. “- (via Robert Scoble on FriendFeed)
“I still remember when a PR person called me when my mom was dying and I was in the hospital with her. She didn’t even think of looking at my blog before calling me (I had been writing about it for days).” - (via Robert Scoble on FriendFeed)
If you’re pitching key influentials on your product or company, read their blog / coverage, know what their interests are and then craft your pitch such that it is of interest to them. If you’re pitching Scoble, read his personal blog, check out his work on FastCompany.TV.
For example, for Scoble, make your pitch is video-genic. That is, think about the visual experience. Robert is a photo and video nut. Think about how can you provide him with an experience that he can video or take pictures.
If it still isn’t clear, “NOTE TO PR PEOPLE AND ENTREPRENEURS: I am far less likely to talk about you or do what you want if you DM me than if you just beg in public.” - (via @Scobleizer tweet)
More on pitching influentials here.
NoiseRiver vs FriendFeed NoiseRiver vs FriendFeed
With the conversation moving away from “Twitter killer” and focusing more on how FriendFeed will evolve. There are new tools popping up to help FriendFeed fans get the most out of the microblogging, lifestreaming service.
FFtogo, for example is how I access FriendFeed from my Blackberry. FFtogo provides a better user experience than the mobile version of FriendFeed because in addition to being able to post to my FriendFeed stream (both services do this) with FFtogo, I can “like” posts as well as comment on them.
As FriendFeed users subscribe to more and more feeds of the people they are interested in, a common complaint emerges: FriendFeed is “noisy.” That is, there are lots of conversations going on at once and it can be hard to follow them all.
There is a reason for this. If one of the people you follow comments on or “likes” something someone you aren’t following posts, that post shows up in your feed.
This “noise” is great for discovering new people you might be interested in, but can be overwhelming. FriendFeed itself has introduced new functionality lately to improve filtering, but a new company called NoiseRiver has taken FriendFeed filtering to a new level. Louis Gray has a nice write up of NoiseRiver functionality on his blog.
NoiseRiver MEDIAdeluge:
For those not quite ready to apply filters to FriendFeed, simply accessing your FriendFeed stream via NoiseRiver can be of value because of the subtle tweaks NoiseRiver has made to the FriendFeed UI. They UI adjustments are small, but make following FriendFeed streams much easier.
Something feels a little different today in microblogging land. The tide seems to
have turned. Twitter, the trend-maker that has seen better days now seems to have died a slow and painful death of a thousand cuts. Twitter has been limiing along, not quite ready to die. It made it through Apple’s WWDC when we thought it wouldn’t, but since then, Twitter has been hamstringing functionality for uptime. That may have been a trade off the Twitterati wouldn’t accept.
Accompanying the empty feeling one gets on Twitter today, the inverse seems to be true on FriendFeed. Influentials are asking aloud how to tie FriendFeed to their blog comments, they’re enabling FriendFeed to post their updates to Twitter. They’re making it known that they will be spending time on Twitter instead of Twitter. Their readers are taking notice and moving to FriendFeed as well.
There was some questions as to who would reap the spoils of Twitter’s defeat. The victor seems to be FriendFeed… for now.
Time will tell whether FriendFeed can captivate and grow this fickle audience. If not. Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku and others are waiting in the wings to be the next microblogging platform of choice.
IntenseDebate Re-Posts FriendFeed Conversation Back to The Originating Blog IntenseDebate Re-Posts FriendFeed Conversation Back to The Originating Blog
With the increased popularity of sites like FriendFeed that aggregate content from across the web and then facilitate discussion around that content, there is growing concern voiced by bloggers that conversations initiated on blogs are being fragmented as they get distributed and republished.
IntenseDebate may have a solution. The blog commenting company has a new FriendFeed integration, FriendFeed Comment Retrieval, that according to IntenseDebate will re-post comments made on FriendFeed — that are in the context of one of your blog posts — back to your blog.
The service can be added to a blog in addition to other third party blog commenting services.
IntenseDebate admits this is the “first step and there is one immediate limitation - FriendFeed does not support threaded comments which prevents comments made in FriendFeed from being threaded on your blog. Also, comments made in FriendFeed that are posted in IntenseDebate are tied to your FriendFeed account instead of your IntenseDebate account.”
I’m trying this out on MEDIAdeluge. It will be interesting to see how it works.
New York Times Launches TimesPeople New York Times Launches TimesPeople
The New York Times reading faithful now have a new way to discover what other NYT readers find interesting as well as share articles, videos, slideshows, blog posts, comments on articles, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants and hotels with friends.
While TimesPeople is a social network of sorts, MySpace and Facebook it’s not. Safe to say, there won’t ever be embarrasing pictures of you drinking a bit too much at a friend’s picnic on TimesPeople.
MEDIAdeluge here:
The NYT has done a nice job with the execution. It’s understated and lightweight and offers much of the functionality one would expect of a social news network, but ultimately its just a network of NYT readers.
TimesPeople is a clear step in the right direction for the Old Gray Lady, but it’s nothing more than a social bookmarking site (like Delicious, Magnolia, StumbleUpon and scores of others) except TimesPeople is limited to readers of the Newspaper of Record.
Currently, TimesPeople is in Beta and is available as a FireFox add-on. The add-on works with Firefox 3.0 and the NYT promises the public launch will work on all major Web browsers.
This is one worth following. It will be interesting to see how TimesPeople evolves over time and to watch and see what other big print publications do as they shift their focus away from print and more toward online.
