The Voce Nation recently had the pleasure of hosting a lunch
with Tom Foremski, a long-time Silicon Valley tech columnist for the Financial Times who earlier this year resigned (surprisingly)
from the paper to develop and launch a new full-time blogging venture called Silicon
Valley Watcher.
We easily spent the better part of the
afternoon in what can best be summarized as a lively conversation about
blogging and its impact on journalism and public relations. Where we could, we
tried to walk Tom through some real-world communication case studies and
collectively dig a little deeper on the practical application of micro media strategies and tactics in these
situations.
We had Voce staffers and clients share some of
their successes and challenges with various micro media projects to date, be it
corporate, executive or employee blogging initiatives, to influencer outreach
activities, to tracking and measurement best practices.
It’s amazing to see just how quickly the
conversation with respect to blogging is evolving. Six months ago this same
discussion would have taken more of a tutorial slant, given the industry (at
least the tech communications industry) was still relatively new to the
blogging concept – that’s not the case anymore. Blogging, RSS syndication,
wikis, etc. have all in some degree taken foot in the Valley’s marketing
vernacular.
That being said, I think most communicators are
now moving past simple awareness and understanding to strategic thinking and
broader scale execution, and as I see it that’s both promising and problematic.
It’s promising in that we’ll begin to see more
companies creatively thinking and approaching the blogosphere in the next
several months and that’s exciting. And on the flip side we’ll begin to see
more companies failing to think through their blogging and broader micro media
strategies, and that too will play out publicly for all to see and for
hopefully all to learn from.
This was actually a bigger theme in the
discussion because this shift impacts how journalists and public relations folk
coexist in a rapidly changing media environment, so having someone with Tom’s
experience (meaning his background with both the macro and now the micro media)
was extremely insightful.
All sorts of good ideas shook out of this meeting, some I’ll
be writing about here in future posts, others I’ll be working on quietly until
it makes sense to share them, regardless it was very cool to participate in
this conversation and personally speaking, it was even more rewarding to take
what was formally an online relationship with a fellow blogger and turn that
into an offline get together. Thanks again, Tom.
Update: Tom shares his take on the day's discussion. Also, I don't care what anyone says about the picture, it's staying damn it...
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