Mike Melanson asks “Does your PR firm need a PR firm” in a post on ReadWriteWeb.

Mike bemoans the crass “carpet bombing strategies” used by some PR firms, as reported by VC Jason Mendelson. These firms have simply added bloggers to their lists of victims for mass email blasts.

I bet they brag about being social-media-savvy.

The irony is that they are missing the real opportunity of social media for what we call “influencer relations.” Social media is all about sharing, not broadcasting. If you have information of value to share, you can maintain a relationship with an influencer.

Twenty years ago, you could only befriend journalists by socializing with them at events or taking them to dinner. I know, I was a journalist once and had some great meals on the corporate dime. One reason I took up running.

Now journalists write blogs and appreciate insightful comments. They use Twitter and appreciate responses and retweets that add value to the topics they cover. It’s not that hard to maintain an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship – if you know what you’re talking about!

So when your PR agency talks about how many bloggers they have in their email database, it may be a sign they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Want to watch some uber-geeks do something really cool? Go see the most-watched video on AMDUnprocessed, AMD’s YouTube channel. A team of “overclockers” super-cool a quad-core AMD processor to near absolute zero and run it at 6.5 GHz, thereby setting a new world processing record. It’s a hoot to watch as they pour liquid nitrogen and then liquid helium onto the processor.

This video is just one example of how AMD is employing social media during this challenging economy. You can learn much more about AMD’s marketing strategy in this BtoB Magazine interview with AMD’s senior VP-CMO Nigel Dessau. Dessau discusses how AMD is using social media and other cost-effective marketing tactics to engage its target audience. In Dessau’s words, “free and universally available social media tools leverage my team’s existing core competencies and helps amplify the impact of our other traditional marketing programs.” Social media is “not just an add-on or afterthought but an integral part of our marketing campaign.”

It strikes me that social media can act like liquid nitrogen when added to marketing plans, speeding up the rate at which a company can process interactions with its stakeholders. At AMD, many executives and employees interact directly and immediately with customers and partners, much faster than they would using more traditional marketing techniques. Also, through social media monitoring, the success of different tactics can be measured in near real time.

“We have a thriving online community with our partners and enterprise customers who appreciate the value of having AMD employees openly addressing issues and listening to customer feedback,” Dessau explains. “You can have all these very detailed metrics on the success … it forces you to constantly evaluate and innovate.”

Read the interview and then visit AMD’s YouTube channel and blog page to see for yourself how one tech company is chillin’ this year through social media.

Image from “AMD Phenom II Overclocked to 6.5 GHz – New World Record for 3DMark” video on AMDUnprocessed YouTube channel.

[Note: McBru has sponsored this post.]

A recent report from analyst firm Forrester endorsed a policy of paying bloggers for “sponsored conversations,” the exchange of goods or credit for blog coverage. In the report, “Add Sponsored Conversations to Your Toolbox,” Forrester advises marketers to take advantage of sponsored conversation as a means to engage online communities.

The blog purists, on the other hand, say the industry is starting down a slippery slope.

For example, Marshall Kirkpatrick expressed well-measured concern in the ReadWriteWeb blog. “The prospect of this young media being overrun with ‘pay for play’ pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.” He admits that paying bloggers is a “complicated question,” explaining how ReadWriteWeb draws the line at  “sponsored posts” written by its advertisers.

Given that this is a controversial and hazardous practice, we believe that fellow high-tech marketers should proceed with caution. (McBru, for one, has never sponsored a blogger or journalist.)

In the words of the report’s author, Forrester’s Sean Corcoran, “This practice makes the most sense for marketers with low awareness and/or little buzz but do have confidence in their brand.” If you find your product or service fits that definition, you may want to take the risk, namely a potential backlash against your brand and credibility problems for the bloggers you’ve chosen.

You can control that risk by following Forrester’s guidance about transparency and authenticity:

• Sponsorship transparency means making it crystal clear to the reader that the blog content is paid content.
• Blogger authenticity gives the blogger complete freedom to use his or her own voice and point of view, even if you perceive it as negative.

If you must take this risky road, choose your opportunities on a case-by-case basis. The more credibility a blogger has, the more his or her review of your product can help (or hurt) your company: at the same time, the more careful he or she will be about accepting a sponsored conversation. If your product or service aligns closely with the blogger’s editorial focus, you are more likely to find the common ground to proceed.

For more established companies, products or services, we prefer to follow our well-defined alternative approach. Similar to media relations, this practice builds long-term relationships with influential bloggers so we can help our clients communicate effectively with them. This removes any stigma associated with sponsorship. Authenticity remains the purview of the blogger.

We are curious to see how this issue plays out. We respect the need for bloggers to make a living. But, like Kirkpatrick, we’d hate to see the end of the independence that makes the blogosphere such a refreshing alternative to traditional high-tech media channels.

For more reading on the subject, Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang provides a list of examples of sponsored conversations as well as his view of the matter.

P.S. Kirkpatrick gets the “Best Subhead of the Month” award for scribing “How Much Marketing Would a Marketing Blogger Blog About If A Marketing Blogger Could Market Marketing?”

I have become more and more interested in the ways corporate blogs may reach customers, specifically BtoB blogs. The excellent Chris Baggott’s Guide to Blogging recently shared the new Forrester Research report “Time to Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas” that raises some extremely valuable points on how to be more strategic with your corporate blog. The study has some simple recommendations for company blogs to take such as being honest and transparent to “using Twitter as both an on-ramp and a promotional tool” to help draw attention to posts that you want your audience to read.

The nice point that this study raises, looking with my BtoB/Deep Tech glasses on, would be to “get your employees in on the act”. Instead of corporate communications being the voice of blogs, using “corporate sanctioned bloggers” such as product executives, product managers, and field marketing or sales support people who better understand audience needs and “develop product connections with their particular customer groups”. (This continues on nicely from the recent discussion between David S. and Douglas Karr on this blog concerning “When Should a Company Dive Into Social Media?”). All in all this is a great study to take a look at if you have doubts on the power of corporate blogs.

A recent entry by Tom Murphy of the Murphy’s Law blog called to my attention an article in The Economist about blogging going mainstream. Before I even clicked through to the article, my mind went immediately to my own use of blogs on an everyday level, and I tried to consider if they’re even part of the “mainstream” in my own life. (Please note that while my inspiration does not directly align with Tom’s entry or the article in The Economist, both are worth a few minutes of your time.)Right now, I really look to blogs for quick information related directly to my work. I check in on various journalists within the industries pertaining to my clients’ products, see what they’re writing about, get a feel for tonality, etc. Because of the niche audiences, I feel like the authors are able to take a more personalized tone with their readers than, say, a general daily news blogger. Their audience speaks a certain language and follows the same products and “movers-and-shakers” within the industry, and these common interests and traits lend themselves more an air of intimacy, even when opinions differ.However, when I want to go in depth on a topic, I rarely start with one of these intimate blogs; rather, I begin my research directly within a printed or virtual magazine, newspaper, topically dedicated website or book. They usually feel less personal in their tone, but for some reason I find them more useful when I’m new to a particular subject or product.I’d like your insight on the matter. Where do you turn to start your learning process? Do you find that the blogs you’ve come across to be roadblocks (because the language, tonality, and lack of basic information leave you at an impasse) or bridges (because the tone and dialogue format of a blog helps you to feel more engaged with the subject at hand?) Are blogs in your mainstream?

Blogs are often used to break news, and according to a recent New York Times article, they are now being used to break even the bleakest of news: company-wide layoffs.

Editor Claire Cain Miller writes, “Blogging about staff cuts is particularly prevalent in Silicon Valley, where tech gossip sites pounce on every rumor and Web-savvy employees broadcast their every thought on personal blogs and Twitter feeds. Companies feel pressure to break bad news on their own blogs so that they can better control the message.”

It’s interesting to note that both companies and employees are using blogs to discuss layoffs. For example, “Some companies that have skipped the layoff post have suffered. After Jive Software cut 20 percent of its staff, one of the terminated employees, Chris Kalani, called it an “all out massacre” on his personal blog and said he had been forced to leave behind his things, including his wedding photo. Tech blogs immediately picked up the story.” Jive Software was left scrambling to communicate its own message, unsuccessfully using Twitter to react to Kalani’s posts.

In an age of pseudo-transparency, how transparent do layoffs need to be? And to whom do they need to be transparent? The ex-employees or the entire online community?

This morning, McBru CEO Kerry McClenahan and I participated in an InnoTech panel called Strategies for Planning and Building an Online Community as part of the conference’s eMarketing Summit. I really got a lot out of not only the insights from fellow panelists Dawn Foster and Barry Tallis of Jive Software, but also the audience questions. They ranged from how do you integrate print advertising with an online community and how do you measure the success to how do you find the time and how do you light light a fire under your staff.

Ruby Gates of MarketShift Strategies asked a question around how the panel thinks online communities will impact the business community in the future, which I’d like to expand on.

Five years out, I believe one of the main shifts in the business community will be attitudinal: There will be less fear.

Today, one of the main objections I hear from companies considering creating an online community is that they fear the two-way conversation: criticism on other sites, criticism in their comments sections and other feedback features and even criticism from their own company.

More times than not, once a company notices that the sky doesn’t fall when they’re criticized online, and they actually learn something from the experience or turn around a detractor, the company gets a little more comfortable with the two-way conversation inherent in online communications. And as other companies watch their peers go through the process — sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly — they too will learn to discern what’s a communications crisis and what’s not. They’ll learn what kind of community participant to take with a grain of salt and who to trust. They’ll begin to view these communities as, sure, risky — at least more than producing another piece of collateral — but with a lot of potential upside, if you can brave the rapids.

For those in the Portland area, there is still about another hour left in today’s eMarketing Summit. And tomorrow has a full day of talks, too. Go check out the agenda; I’ll sure you’ll find something worth the trip to the Oregon Convention Center.