ION Digital

I knew I would struggle when I started blogging a few years ago. I blame my years of journalism work. Sentences had to be carefully crafted, and words chosen carefully. My first editor at BusinessWeek told me, “Magazine real estate is precious. Use it wisely.”

Now we live in a new world that is no longer shaped by printing presses and information scarcity. Yet everyday I see companies that make these mistakes: they want to launch the perfect blog, create the polished video, craft the right message.

They are suffering from the curse of the corporate perfectionist. (more…)

1) The Yelp “extortion” debacle (also note the responses: “Yelp Extortion: True or False?”  and “PR 2.0: Yelp Gets a Bad Review: Embracing a Crisis to Shape Perception”)

2) Top 100 Social Media and Internet Marketing Bloggers

3) “25 Most Shocking Crimes in Social Media History | Masters in Criminal Justice” 

4) Demystifying social media for companies–some good tips, steps

5) NY Times, Wash Post lead top 10 newspaper sites

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February was a busy month on Facebook, which now seems primed to take over the universe–or at least the lion’s share of the social media audience. It now has over 175 million subscribers,  which would supposedly rank it as the seventh largest country in the world, almost as  large as Brazil.   Amazingly, it’s still growing, up to 5 million new users a week, or about a Twitter every week.  With this growth comes enormous exposure and new criticism.   My top 10 favorite articles and posts for February:

1) The rising power of Facebook (Fortune profile)

2)  Everyone else is on Facebook. Why aren’t you? Slate Magazine” (more…)

Will social media specialists go the way of the blacksmith? Yes, if you believe Steve Rubel, the well known Edeleman blogger. He believes the social media manager will be extinct in a few years. Where will they go? Absorbed into the corporate marketing and PR machines, says Steve.

Steve is one of my favorite bloggers and always seems to be on top of the latest trends.  But this is one I’m hoping he misses.

Steve’s argument is that PR professionals at most companies will soon be well equipped to manage social media activities as well as a lone-wolf specialist. These skills aren’t rocket science and can be easily picked up by a savvy inhouse communications manager. Most companies don’t have the “luxury” of these specialists when instead they can sweep it up into existing PR or marketing organizations.

I think this would be a huge mistake.

Social media requires different skills and mindset than PR–in fact, it’s the antithesis of PR. Ever hear of a PR manager who really believes in letting go of the messaging or allowing employees free reign to engage in wide-open conversations?  PR is about message control and spin. Don’t try to disguise it as anything else. Public relations and “transparency” are like oil and water.

There’s no reason we can’t continue to have separate positions for social media marketing managers or strategists, and that public relations organizations can’t be involved of course. As social media strategist and Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang points out, we already have specialized marketing managers in large corporations sorted by industries, mediums, and channels (ex: web marketing, search marketing, event marketing).

Here’s what really bothers me.
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When I was down in Texas, I took a sidetrip over to my hometown of Port Neches, Tx. “Sidetrip” is a misnomer–I ended up staying there 4 days cleaning out my mother’s house, rummaging through old memories, reliving a slice of my childhood days.

Some of the photos dated back to the late 1940s when my father met my mother in the nearby refinery town of Port Arthur. They were like oil and water–he, confident, athletic, handsome; she, intelligent, quiet and shy. But they hit it off and got married in 1950, and started into what looked like a great life, at least for a high school educated refinery worker. He went to work for Gulf Oil, one of the famed “Seven Sisters,” and rose to become a “pipefitter” in the sprawling refinery on the Gulf Coast. In 1963 he even made it onto the cover of the Gulf Oil annual report, as part of a group photo (he’s the seventh one in line, behind the secretary and the welder). People around town began calling him Mr. Gulf.

But a year later in 1964 he suddenly died of cancer, shocking everyone. He was only 38.

I was only nine but I knew when I saw grown adults crying life was about to change. It did, and now forty years later I find myself closing one of the final chapters. The house he built in 1959 will go up for sale later this summer. Mom lives on, but she’s a shell of her former self and gets around in a wheelchair. Strangely she can remember small details from 40 years ago but has a hard time recalling what she ate for breakfast.

One of the things I came across was an article I wrote about him back in the early 1990s for Texas Monthly magazine, a lively, somewhat literary publication hazardous duty article.

I took off a month to research his life, and learn about the man I never knew. I interviewed friends, work buddies, and siblings–he grew up in a family of 9 (7 brothers) in Alabama (I’d recommend this to anyone seeking to find out more about their parents, or ancestors, and themselves). This rekindled long dormant memories–the stories he spun at my bedside every night, the camping trips, vacations, and so many baseball games (he co-founded the local Pee-Wee league).

I have to say he wasn’t the most educated or sophisticated man, and would seem out of step with the business crowd I associate with. But he taught me early lessons that would stay with me a lifetime–how to live, learn, and enjoy the people around me, and life. He lived life with grace and good humor, and I can only hope I inherited a little bit of that…and his will to make the earth a little better place.