• How to blog like a lobster dealer

    My favorite blog isn’t a newspaper site. It’s a blog by a lobster dealer who started working on the docks when he was 9 years old. Good Morning Gloucester gives a daily snapshot of life in Gloucester, Mass., the nation’s oldest fishing harbor. It’s hugely popular, with 22,000 to 30,000 page views per day.

    The main reason Good Morning Gloucester connects with readers around the world is because it’s so real. The language is how real people talk and the people on the blog come across as real, likable people with interesting stories. There are lessons there for those of us who communicate for a living. Use simple, clear language. Be likable. Tell a good story.

    My friend Joey Ciaramitaro is the lobster dealer behind Good Morning Gloucester. We interviewed him for ideas on ways to engage readers, build an audience and create, as he would say, “a blog that doesn’t suck.” Here are his tips.

    What do you think? Which tips did we miss?

    Matter

    ,
    , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  • Exposé, Exposure and Transparency

    I recently spoke with a friend who used to be a client.  Neither of us is tied to the company through which we met, but we stay in touch.  That company (I’ll call it ThatCo to protect the innocent) was recently included in an exposé of its industry at the hands of the Wall Street Journal. It’s the kind of story CEOs dread.  The week-long series shed a light on the industry’s accepted, self-policed business practices, and painted those practices as something the world should be concerned about, complete with paranoia-inducing headlines.  The story has since been echoed on NPR and in other outlets. (more…)

    Matter

    , , ,

  • New versus Old Media

    New versus Old Media

    Are bloggers wired differently than traditional journalists?

    This week I came across new research by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that uses hard data to quantify the differences between the news agenda of new and old media.

    The Pew Research Center’s study, titled “New Media, Old Media,” collected a year’s worth of data on the top news stories linked to on blogs, discussed on Twitter, and shared on Youtube. The major finding was that each social media platform “seems to have its own personality and function.”

    Among the other key findings:

    • Bloggers tended to focus more on stories that “elicited emotion, concerned individual or group rights or triggered ideological passion.” Often these were stories that people could easily share on social networks with their own personal thoughts;
    • Social media tends to focus on stories that don’t get a lot of traction in the mainstream press. Rarely does a story get picked up in social media first, then by traditional media outlets;
    • Technology is a big topic of discussion on Twitter, while politics is less so. Blogs tended to focus more on politics and foreign events, less on technology;
    • All three social media platforms (blogs, Twitter, Youtube) shared the common characteristic of not staying on one story very long. On blogs, 53 percent of top stories remain on the list of the most discussed stories for no more than three days, while on Twitter, the same is true for 72 percent of lead stories.

    What does this all mean for PR professionals? Keeping in mind the different personalities of the new and old media, and how they interrelate, is key. There is a huge disparity between what the mainstream media considers to be the most important news and what each social media platform is most interested in discussing. It bears close watching as to whether traditional media outlets will continue to adjust their news coverage to better align with the interests of each social platform.

    Erik Arvidson

    ,
    , , , , ,

  • What are you reading?

    For years, ‘what have you been reading lately?’ has been my favorite question to ask when interviewing a potential Matter employee, to the point where I am often teased by some of my colleagues for asking that very question. Nonetheless, I have always believed that the question gives you real insight into what a person offers beyond the ABC’s (writing, organization, press and client relations) of PR. (more…)

    Matter

    , ,