Brendan Cooper, your Friendly Digital Social Media PR, ummm, Thingy

Today, no clever postings about the finer points of grammar or etymology. No long ramblings about RSS feeds. Today, just two vaguely copywritery, bloggy-related items that made me laugh:

• From my copywriting feed, the dictionary.com word of the day is chortle: to utter, or express with, a snorting, exultant laugh or chuckle. What a fantastic, forgotten word. I must use it sometime. Do people still chortle in this age of satire and scepticism? Perhaps chance favours the prepared mind. I’m going to try and catch someone chortling. Didn’t Jasper Carrott introduce the word ‘zit’ to the English language? I’m going to create my own word. Something to express the sound you make when you sigh so loudly it creates a moaning noise of resignation. How about ‘to mognate’?
• From my PR feed comes, bizarrely, this posting: Everybody’s wearing my pants. I can’t explain it, you’ll have to take a look for yourselves readers (all three of you). Some people have far too much time on their hands. And yet, I find this ingeniously viral. Pants: everybody has a vested interest in them. Pants around the world.

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Today my twitching, flinching eye lands on no fewer than three items in my PR feed which slate PR people:

• Public Relations Rogue laments that ‘far too many PR professionals are woefully ignorant of emerging techonology and trends that impact communication’
• His posting is based on another one in the feed, by Dave McLure, in which he gives six reasons why PR doesn’t work if you’re a geek. Don’t worry though because FG put him right on each of those points, especially the one about ewespoons. 
• Scatterbox by Steven Silvers talks about PR and the business of enthusiastic incompetence, boiling all PR’s woes down to one simple truth: ‘the client hires PR people who don’t know what they’re doing.’

And, in turn, his posting is based on Guy Kawasaki’s blog listing the top ten reasons PR doesn’t work. Of all these posts, Guy’s seems the most well-balanced. He’s a nice Guy.

What is going on here? Actually, I think I have a hunch. I think it’s a backhanded self-compliment. A lot of these people are saying “I’m totally on the ball and these other people aren’t. Look at them, aren’t they stupid. One of these days I’m going to be director. I’ve got a blog, you know.” The difficulty comes in assessing what they’re actually doing about it in their own companies. I really do hope they’re spearheading Web 2.0 initiatives or even training people off their own bat. I’m not saying they’re not: I just hope they are. I just hope that for every negative they’re pointing out, they’re endeavouring to introduce a positive.

In fact I’d say that’s true of a lot of blogging. It does generally tend to be a bit of a whinge, doesn’t it?

EDIT: And immediately after posting this I notice another one: Brian Solis, who seems to have picked up on the same wave of anti-PR, and offers brilliant advice for everyone. Bless you, Brian.

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I’ve just been surfing some of the links to the right of my blog, and it occurs to me that I haven’t yet come across another blog that does what I do - namely, that carries its own syndicated feeds and becomes a kind of ‘news centre’ for four specific areas - PR, journalism, copywriting and tech.

That’s just great FG. But how do you do it? Tell us.

Well, readers (all three of you), I do this through Google Reader. I create a tag, and then bundle as many feeds as I can into that tag. So, for example, the PR feed to the right is in fact a tag in my Google Reader, which I have made public, so that it has a public feed that you can subscribe to. In fact, in a way you could say that this blog is subscribed to each of the feeds. And you can too. Just click the title for each feed and Feedburner will tell you exactly what to do.

So where does the magic happen, FG?

When I say ‘bundled feeds’, well the simplest of these is through subscriptions to specific blogs, but there are other techniques you can use. These are:

• Set up a search in Google News or Yahoo news, then subscribe to that search. If you click here you’ll see that I’ve set up a Google News search for you - for ‘blogging’, as it happens - and all you have to do is then subscribe to the RSS or Atom links you can see to the left of the page. Oh, alright then, I’ve done the same for Yahoo News for you, but on Yahoo the subscriptions are on the right. Go on, take a look, and remember: if you subscribe to them on your reader then effectively what you’ve done is set Google and Yahoo out to search for news for you and send it back to you. This is seriously powerful.
• You can do the same for Google Blog Search, but this is much more contained within the blogosphere, so it updates when there’s a posting that Google Blog Search picks up rather than a news item. Again, I’ve set up a search for you, so click here and you’ll see the results of a blog search for the term ‘blogging’. As above, all you now need to do is subscribe to that search.
• WordPress tag searches are also effective. Let’s continue with the blogging theme: click here and you’ll be taken to a WordPress tag search for ‘blogging’. This is a feed generated from all the WordPress posts with that tag. This time, take a look to the right of the page and you’ll see that familiar, welcome, orange RSS icon.  Subscribe to it, and you now have WordPress doing some searching for you too.
• Digg does the same thing, but here you have the beauty of a set of articles that other people like too. I know there’s an argument that this just magnifies group stupidity but heck, at least you’ll be as stupid as everyone else. Again, click here to find a Digg feed for the ‘blogging’ term, and find the orange RSS icon to the left of the page. Unfortunately the Digg searches don’t seem truly boolean, so for example you can’t search for ‘PR’ because apparently it’s too short, but then you also seem unable to search for +public +relations or “public relations”. Bummer.
• You can also build some nice feeds through Technorati. I did once try this but I found it to contain quite a lot of spam. This cool article takes you through what you can do, and I might just give it another go - looks like the Favourites feature could be interesting.
• Finally, MSN newsgroups. I’ve never quite figured what’s going on here. If you click here you’ll find a search for blogging, as with the other resources I’ve mentioned above, but nowhere on the results page can I see something that will allow me to subscribe to any feeds. However, if I click my incredibly useful ‘Subscribe as you surf’ button, Google Reader finds the feed. I’m not convinced this will work properly so I haven’t pursued it. The other techniques work fine for me.

Techniques schmechniques. Tell us everrrrythinnnng. 

I’ve just given you the techniques for bringing together lots of powerful features and if you followed the links above you’ll have seen how easy it is to subscribe to them. If you did subscribe, then on your feed reader they’re probably all separate feeds now, right? Well, if you have Google Reader then I suggest without further ado you create a tag called, for argument’s sake, ‘Blogging’, and place them all in that. I’m sure other readers have a similar feature.

And here comes the really clever bit. In Google Reader, click Settings, then click Tags. Set your new ‘Blogging’ tag to be public. Now click the link to go to the public page. First of all it’s cool enough that you’ve created a public page through these feeds, because that’s great for people who don’t ‘get’ readers. But wait - can you see what I see to the right of that page? Yes, that’s correct: it’s another feed icon. In other words, you’ve gathered together all these feeds under one tag, and now that tag itself is generating a feed. You’ve built your own feed.

Perhaps other online aggregators will let you do that. If so, I suggest you find out because it’s very, very useful.

Wow.

This is great because you can build feeds for people, effectively becoming a news syndication service. I do this regularly at work now: if people want to get updates on stuff and they can’t be bothered to figure it out for themselves, I’ll build it all into one feed, so all they have to do is subscribe that feed. I use all these techniques, bringing together news, blog and tag searches and subscribing to them, then bringing them under one tag, making that tag public, and giving them the feed URL.

Another cool aspect to this is that I can remove, add or change feeds around within that tag, and the feed is unaffected. So long as I don’t delete or rename the tag, everything continues as before. You can be even cooler and use Feedburner so that you can change everything around and the feed will remain intact.

Wow.

That’s exactly what I’ve done on this blog. To the right you’ll see the results of this, with the four feeds using these aggregation techniques, together with quite a lot of sifting to find the right search terms. Feel free to subscribe to them:

• PR - http://feeds.feedburner.com/FriendlyGhostPR
• Journalism - http://feeds.feedburner.com/FriendlyGhostJournalism
• Copywriting - http://feeds.feedburner.com/FriendlyGhostCopywriting
• Technology - http://feeds.feedburner.com/FriendlyGhostTechnology

Friendly Ghost, you are a god.  

Thank you, nice of you to say readers. All three of you. Just don’t call me a maven or a guru.

As I say, I haven’t come across a blog that does the same thing. Which makes me unique. Although now I’ve told you how to do this, perhaps I won’t be unique anymore…

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I’m often asked about the difference between these two words. When I go into a great speech about their real difference - ‘effect’ is a noun, ‘affect’ is a verb - I tend to get blank looks back. So I explain that something affects something else to produce an effect. Still nothing.

Even I if go back to primary school definitions, that one is a ‘doing’ word while the other is a ‘thing’, there is still incomprehension. It’s generally difficult to explain the finer points of language to people who don’t know what verbs, adjectives and nouns are.

When someone I was explaining this to the other day finally got the idea, they said “Ah, I’ll just remember ’special effects’ in future.” And that seemed to do the trick.

So, if you’re stuck, remember that special effects are things, so if what you’re talking about is a thing, use ‘effect’. Any other case, use ‘affect’.

And just forget about effecting something. I know, I know, it’s also a verb but you’ll hardly ever need to use it. And as for affect as a noun, well you’re in copywriting, not psychiatry…

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Over at PR Disasters Gerry McCusker gives an account of Saatchi and Saatchi’s sacking over a tasteless ad campaign featuring famous dead people wearing Doc Martens boots, the idea of the campaign being that, unlike their wearers, they’re ‘made to last’. The agency’s reaction is none too clever either: Creative Director Kate Stanners says the ads are ‘edgy, but not offensive’. Gerry’s insight is that this is a prime example of when the ad agencies should bring in PR for crisis management. I’d add that this is also a case of damage to a brand that really should know better. We’re all in communications, so how could S&S make such a cock-up of it?

If you handle a crisis badly it can be severely damaging. The Cadburys salmonella episode is a case in point: while the financial effects have been classed as ‘minimal’ there is severe damage to the Cadburys brand which is associated with wholesome family values. This will affect the brand well into the future and I predict that S&S will be counting the cost of this disaster for some time to come, over and above the immediate lack of revenue from losing the account.

I’d also add that it smacks of internal communications gone bad. While Dr Martens CEO David Suddens is trying to do the right thing, now saying “We do think that it is offensive. We made a mistake,” it turns out that he didn’t even know Cobain had been featured in the ad. This not something the CEO should have been told: it is something the checks and balances of effective internal communications should have stopped before it even became public.

This one looks set to run. It’s all over the place. Watch and learn.

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A few weeks ago I decided to try out Google Web Accelerator on my 4MB broadband connection and it seems I have saved 23.3 minutes of time so far by using it. Does this mean I am now 23.3 minutes into the future? Or does this mean I have 23.3 minutes to spend on something more profitable. What does it take 23.3 minutes to do?

When I was young I remember having difficulty quite getting the point of summer and winter time, ie ’spring forward, fall back’. Which one meant I got an hour more in bed? I used to get quite anxious about having ‘lost’ an hour. What if I never got it back? What if I died with that hour less in my life? Would that mean I’d have died an hour early?

Google Web Accelerator does essentially the same thing as the Onspeed service I used for a year in the old days of dial-up. Instead of receiving content directly from a website, it is first routed to the provider’s servers, compressed, then forwarded to you where software decompresses it, the idea being that the difference in transmission time is negligible while the difference in processing time isn’t. Google Web Accelerator seems to use several techniques to speed up your connection such as (it says here):

• Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
• Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
• Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
• Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
• Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
• Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Clever. And, the best thing about it, free, unlike Onspeed.

The only problem so far has been with Windows Update, which didn’t like it. But, in a similar way to pop-up blockers, you can simply tell the accelerator software not to accelerate specific web addresses. Sorted.

I have to say I haven’t really noticed that I’ve saved 23.3 minutes but I suppose I’ve been busy doing something else while saving that time. I just have to trust that the Google Web Accelerator isn’t lying.

I just realised, it took me about 23.3 minutes to write this blog post. So I saved enough time for one blog post, Google got a free plug, and you found out something new (I hope). Everyone wins. Except I am now living in the present. Or am I? It now says 23.4 minutes.

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Google seems to have finally decided that people are also bots: check out this post, in which it’s claimed that searching for a description of a Spam Assassin rule yielded the above response. It’s doing the rounds at digg right now.

I just posted about this on Seamus McCauley’s Virtual Economics blog, and, on submitting my comment, was told an error had occurred that involved me typing a challenge/response code to prove I wasn’t a bot either! So be careful if you comment on this one: if, like me, you find these bot-proofing systems difficult to read then I wonder what happens. Does Google/WordPress/Blogger ‘ban’ you?

The idea of intelligent search engines - more intuitive than keywords - is a fascinating one. Check out my post on the subject.