From The New York Times:

For Bloggers Seeking Name Recognition, Nothing Beats a Good Scandal

It’s a fair bet that, given a political scandal of a certain scale, the usual blogs - DailyKos, AmericaBlog, Instapundit and Wonkette - will draw traffic and links. Make it a media scandal, like Dan Rather’s “60 Minutes” fiasco or Jayson Blair’s fabrications at The New York Times, and other sites might bubble to the top: Romenesko or perhaps Gawker for a snideways view of things. And why not? As in any other medium, branding matters, and these sites have proven their mettle in scandals past.

But the blogosphere is expanding at a rate of 70,000 sites a day, according to Technorati, the blog search portal, which now tracks activity on more than 20 million blogs in real time - and the right bit of news can always catapult new sites into the limelight.

Ariana Huffington’s relentless drubbing of Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter, drove the relatively new HuffingtonPost.com high into Technorati’s rankings. Her site’s popularity continued right through Friday’s indictment of I. Lewis Libby, the White House staff member accused of making false statements during an investigation into the leak of a Central Intelligence Agency operative’s name. At day’s end, roughly 20 new links per hour were being made to HuffingtonPost.com.

“I would say that’s a pretty significant blogometric pressure,” said David L. Sifry, the chief executive of Technorati.

The White House leak scandal has put some other sites on the map even though they lack Ms. Huffington’s name recognition. Steven C. Clemons, a fellow at the New America Foundation, drew a fair amount of cross-linking to his blog, the Washington Note (thewashingtonnote.com), with reliable coverage throughout the affair. So too did the group blog FireDogLake (firedoglake.blogspot.com), which drew nearly 200 comments in just 90 minutes after a post about the news conference held by the special prosecutor in the leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Friday afternoon.

And with some original reporting on the affair last week, the JustOneMinute blog, run by Tom Maguire (justoneminute.typepad.com), was identified by Technorati as an “aggregation point” for chatter on the topic.

“This is kind of like a look into the global subconscious,” Mr. Sifry said, “when you can expose what people are looking for.”

Once again, Technorati is cast as the keeper of the blogosphere. Not that there’s necessarily a better candidate, but…

Speaking of branding, check out the Idea Grove’s strategic branding workshop.

Technorati tags: Journalism, PR, Public Relations, Marketing

In the wake of the controversial Forbes cover story, “Attack of the Blogs,” here’s the transcript of an Oct. 27 segment of CNBC’s On the Money , featuring Daniel Lyons of Forbes, Micro Persuasion’s Steve Rubel, Mike Kaltschnee of Hacking Netflix.com, and Neil Hunt of Netflix:

DYLAN RATIGAN (HOST): Corporate secrets, some facts and many lies. They’re all spilling out onto computer screens worldwide these days, costing many companies a pretty penny. Forbes magazine calls the Internet rumor-mongers an online lynch mob in this new article, “Attack of the Blogs,” which details the lives and businesses ruined by Weblogs.

With us tonight: Dan Lyons, senior member of Forbes magazine, author of the article; public relations strategist Steve Rubel from CooperKatz; Mike Kaltschnee, the blogger behind Hacking Netflix.com; and Neil Hunt from Netflix — he is their chief product officer.

Dan, in brief, what’s the problem?

DAN: The problem is, most of the blogosphere’s fantastic, and there are lots of great things to say about it. But there’s a small amount of the blogosphere invested in attacking companies, sometimes with intentionally false information, and ruining people’s lives. It’s very, very hard to deal with them. Some companies now really live in fear of the blogosphere; they spend a lot of time and money monitoring the blogs to try to stay ahead of it and try to respond to these things when they happen.

DYLAN: Steve, you’re the PR guy here. You say, “Don’t live in fear of the blogosphere. Manipulate it.”

STEVE: It’s human nature; you have positives and negatives in every society. You have people who want to do good and people who want to do bad. Mike Kaltschnee from Hacking Netflix is somebody who wants to do good. The bloggers we have blogging for Vespa, under the auspices of Vespa at VespaBlogs.com, are doing good.

DYLAN: That’s good but this conversation is about those who are the evil-doers, the liars, the hackers of this world.

STEVE: Blown out of proportion, Dylan. Blown out of proportion.

DYLAN: That’s fair, but let’s talk to Mike. He is a blogger out there. Mike, what inspires you to do a complimentary blog about a company like Netflix?

MIKE: I think people blog about what they are passionate about. People are interested in Netflix. I get about 100,000 people every month coming to my site, looking for news, information, customer support issues, basically anything they can find about the company. They are very passionate and very loyal about Netflix.

DYLAN: And Neil, as a principal at Netflix, how do you feel about someone out there who is obviously very well-informed about your company … but you have no actual control over what he says or does?

NEIL: He’s extremely well-informed; in fact, we find that the comments posted on Mike’s blog and other similar blogs are extremely useful for us to help keep a pulse on what people are saying and thinking out there. And like any other communications channel that brings in a lot of customer input, there’s going to be a lot of good stuff and there’s going to be some fringe stuff … You have to figure out which is which, and which to ignore. But in general we find it a great channel.

STEVE: Dylan, part of the problem here is the companies aren’t listening and responding to the people who have complaints. So maybe if they actually used it as a customer service channel, listened to what is actually being said in the blogosphere and then didn’t just sit on the information but did something with it, then maybe there wouldn’t be this backlash.

DYLAN: Is that what you found, Dan? Maybe the problem is the companies are unresponsive and so they set themselves up for it?

DAN: Actually, that’s a really good point, because what we’ve found is that a lot of companies are almost asleep at the switch. I spent some time talking with one of the top PR guys at Microsoft, and he said, “Look, we’ve been very aware of the risks of the blogosphere for a long time. We spend every day, all of the PR people get up and monitor the blogosphere in addition to the mainstream media now, to make sure nothing bad or nothing false is being spread about us. The potential for brand damage from the blogosphere is really, really high, and most companies are focusing only on how to exploit the blogosphere to spread their PR message, to get their marketing hype out, which is great and the blogosphere is a great vehicle for that. His argument is, you also have to be aware of the potential for brand damage and try to be on top of that. He calls it the four-hour rule; when something gets out in the blogosphere, he says he’s got four hours to get on that and address it and put the truth out ahead of it.

STEVE: You know what, I actually think that people are not taking the steps to be proactive here and empowering the bloggers. No one here is thinking, “What are the blogger’s motivations? Why is Mike Kaltschnee spending his free time blogging about Netflix, because he loves it? Why are people complaining? What’s their motivation and how do we address those motivations?” We’ve got to treat these people like people.

DYLAN: Thank you all.

Technorati tags: Journalism, PR, Public Relations, Marketing, Forbes

It’s OK to be cynical; it’s just difficult to be cynical toward others and generous toward others at the same time.

Does anyone believe the rock-charity send-up “Do They Know It’s Hallowe’en?” – featuring performances by Beck and other top artists — was conceived to help people?

I don’t.

I think it was created to project the hipper-than-thou cleverness of the artists involved, as this New York Times article makes amply clear. The fact that proceeds go to Unicef is an afterthought.

One of the most important things that good public relations practitioners do is work with clients to determine their goals and what they are trying to accomplish. If this project had come from a sincere place to begin with, and if the objective had truly been to help people, the stars involved could have produced a song that raised far more than the $10,000 to $20,000 expected here.

Maybe I’ll write a more honest charity song for these artists: “How Can I Help Dying Children and Still Look Cool?”

I love Beck, btw; I just find this an unfortunate use of his talents. Here’s the video, if you’d like to watch it.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Paramount Pictures has begun removing billboards promoting 50 Cent’s upcoming film “Get Rich or Die Tryin’ ” near schools after community activists complained that the signs promoted gun violence.

The billboards for the semiautobiographical film show the rap star — whose real name is Curtis Jackson — with his back to the viewer, holding a gun in one hand and a microphone in the other. The film, which opens Nov. 9, tells the story of a gangster drug dealer who abandons crime to become a musician.

But both message and the messenger were unwelcome when the billboards went up too close to area schools…

Paramount was mum on the subject Friday, but one studio official, who asked not to be named, said: “We reevaluated those signs. Some of them came down Wednesday, some on Thursday and some [Friday].”

Asked how many of the signs were coming down, he said, “We’re not going into specifics.”

50 Cent says he welcomes the controversy. Reports Reuters:

“I do appreciate it,” the rapper told Reuters in an interview on Friday. “They are talking about it on media outlets I didn’t have plans to market the movie to. They are helping me out.”

He’s right; it will help the film. The old saw that there’s no such thing as bad publicity is nowhere truer than in the hip-hop world. For context, read Seandra Sims’ piece, “Hip-Hop: Publicity Stuntin’ 101?”

I wonder, in fact: Could any revelation about 50 Cent actually hurt his earning capacity? I came up with only two possible career-killers.

He’d be done if it came out that —

1. He lied about being a drug dealer and street thug, and had actually been an honest, hard-working, law-abiding citizen before he became a rapper.

2. He’s gay.

Other than that, he’s got nothing to worry about but continuing to churn out product.

Well, kind of. Check out a brilliant ad and the story behind it here. It makes the creative teams behind most beer commercials look like chimps.