The Sam Whitmore Sampler

Is Social Media Killing PR?

That was the name of last night's panel at Horn Group San Francisco. I enjoyed moderating. We did a pretty good job of asking and answering that question. Short answer: no. Here are posts from all three panelists: Jeremiah Owyang, Kara Swisher and Susan Etlinger. Here's the Tweet stream keyed off the event.

A question left unexplored was, can PR as an industry preserve its primacy (and pricing power) in an age where publicity and media relations are worth less, and speaking directly with constituencies is worth more?

For what it's worth, the PR industry needs to reconstitute its collective skill set. Agencies should employ verbal, visual and kinesthetic learners in equal measure. Most are far too word-heavy right now. Pitching "influencers" should be no more than 30 percent of an agency's value proposition. The greatest potential lies in enabling clients to tell their own stories and helping them to measure their impact. If that means senior PR executives should step aside, or go to night school for a marketing degree or MBA, or hire fewer (cheap) kids and more (expensive) 40-somethings, so be it.

PR budgets, traditionally defined, won't be rising anytime soon. When the economy comes back, opportunity will look different. It already does. Look at Federated Media with its "conversational marketing" initiatives. Look at BzzAgent and its WOM initiatives. New elements are emerging. They're not killing PR. But they're casting a shadow. How to step out from it might make for a good follow-up panel.

Jackson Browne

Christy and I caught Jackson Browne's concert this week in Portland, OR. "In '65 he was 17," and "in '69 he was 21," so that would make him 60 today. He didn't look it or sound it. The show was great. He's touring with a seven-piece band including two powerful female back-up singers, Chavonne Morris and Alethea Mills, and they could have carried the show all by themselves.

Abridged song list: opened with "On the Boulevard." Love that guitar riff. Song 4: "Fountain of Sorrow." Uptempo version sans the pathos. Lots of material from the new album, titled Time the Conqueror. Ended with "The Pretender" into "Running on Empty," which he and the band genuinely seemed to enjoy playing. For the encore, Browne skipped the usual "Stay" in favor of the seldom-heard "I Am a Patriot."

Browne kept the political discourse to a minimum and let his powerful music do the talking, to the delight of a packed house. If he's heading your way, catch him. Here's a review of the recent New York City show, with the upcoming itinerary included.

Twitter 50, FriendFeed 50

Radio station program directors assemble playlists from all the music available to them -- and they rotate their playlists as time marches on. I've decided to do the same thing with my Twitter and FriendFeed subscriptions.

From now on I'll subscribe to 50 Twitter feeds and 50 FriendFeed feeds. That's it. Over time I'll go back and add in folks I used to subscribe to, and add some new ones, too. Just like those program directors, I'll rotate out a commensurate number of choices, and the process will repeat every couple of months.

It got to the point where I didn't even know who I was subscribing to. I never noticed when someone went silent. Speaking only for myself, I prefer voices who post occasionally -- not too frequently and not too seldom. I also am trying to monitor voices from many segments of the tech industry -- media, PR, investors and so on.

Is less really more? Let's see how this grand experiment works out. Here's my current Twitter and FriendFeed lineup. Whom should I add?

The Somalian Pirates

Have you heard about the Somalian pirates? They use speedboats to board ships, steal cargo and kidnap crews. The ransoms help the pirates buy fancy cars and drugs. Beats working! But the killer is, these pirates have an official PR person! Here's an excerpt from this Sept. 25 New York Times article:

“The pirates are highly organized. They work in teams. There is even a pirate spokesman (who could not be reached for comment on Friday).”

It's unclear whether the pirates' PR person is in-house or from an agency.

Vinnie Mirchandani

Those interested in enterprise software editorial need to bookmark Deal Architect, the blog of Vinnie Mirchandani. A former Gartner analyst, Vinnie knows the ones and zeroes as well as the business side of enterprise tech. Vinnie's been blogging for a while; this blog post is hardly a news flash. It's just that, as the New York Times, the FT and other publications rediscover the attractiveness of enterprise edit, other voices have emerged in the meantime that one should consider equally authoritative -- if not more so -- than the battleship edit brands.

Seeking Alpha's Sramana Mitra is another, but we'll leave discussion of her work for another time.

Barney Frank and Chris Dodd

You've got to hand it to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. They appear to be standing tall against an executive branch which, as it did post-9/11, wants us to hurry up and make incredibly fateful decisions nearly overnight. A Massachusetts state rep, Frank appears to have wrestled concessions from Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, limiting executive pay for the greedy bastards who got us into this mess in the first place, and also securing some measure of relief for the foreclosed-upon. Connecticut senator Dodd is driving a deal to make sure the taxpayers wind up owning a good part of the financial institutions that line up for this mind-numbing handout.

The negotiations are far from over. But the Democrats have won Round One.

Cute Overload

If you ever find yourself sick of news and current events, you can always pay a visit to Cute Overload. You'll see lots of cute photographs there, mostly of animals. They're guaranteed to make you say "awwwwwww..."

And life will seem a little bit better.

Aug. 22 birthdays

John Lee Hooker. Carl Yastrzemski. Claude Debussy. Valerie Harper. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. My next-door neighbor, Carolyn Goldberg. And me -- 52 today. Never felt better.

Questions

Back when I ran PC Week edit, I used to ask job candidates the following question:

"Think back to the last time you laughed really hard -- we're talkin' a deep-down belly laugh. What were you laughing at?"

I always felt that a sense of humor was the single most valuable asset a worker could have. And what a person thinks is funny reveals a lot about them.

Now look at these questions -- the kind that HR asks of job candidates at Google and Microsoft.

What do they reveal?

You Think YOU Feel Guilty??

I heard a chilling broadcast late last month on This American Life. It was a series of interviews with people who accidentally killed someone, or believe they did. Can you imagine trying to live with that kind of guilt? These individuals did. One 18-year-old motorist -- now 36 -- killed a bicyclist. What became of the second half of his life?

The podcast is long, and one does need to be in the mood to listen something like this. But I found it to be quite nourishing. Hope you do too.