It is a bit of a bold strategy, calling on all of us to promote his conference in the context of helping a charity at the same time. I’m not sure I love the strategy, actually, but it is bold and it has the potential to be a new model:

• Paying for mailing lists =”tired”
• Paying a charity in exchange for people’s attention = “wired?”  (Or even Causewired?)

Lee’s article is below – go read it, sign up (and tell them where you found out about it, eh?).

Social Media: Can it Raise Just 5000.00 Dollars to Help 5 Year Olds? – Emerging Communications Blog

Let’s have a public test of the effectiveness of social media. Let’s do it with the aim of measuring the reach and usage of social media (and hopefully with some serendipity regarding the results). Let’s do it in a way that helps us understand the role and significance of social media on the emerging communications landscape.

THE PAY IT FORWARD CHRONICLES: The Small Good, A New Book and A Busy Fall

First the Small Good. A concept that I first ran across earlier this year as I listened to a podcast. Here’s the basic premise:

Someone has a need, an issue, a problem. They come to you for help. From your prospective it takes little effort to help this person – maybe a referral to a tax attorney you know or a tip on how to get better publicity for your company.

To the person your helping, it’s HUGE! You have saved them time, money, worry – whatever that may be.

My Small Good for the day is letting you know about this. I hope it provides you good value and something to think about.

Sidenote: the history of blacklists is much more serious and a heavier topic than is being given credit in all this banter about them. They’re an attempt at keeping people from acting in a certain way due to social and societal pressure, and they’re against the spirit of what I see as social media. Blacklisting spammers is, to me, appropriate, because they’re clearly flaunting law and culture. What I see many bloggers and PR professionals ranting about it not blacklisting but a lack of transparency and accountability.

Geoff Livingston seems do be quite reasonable in his analysis of the situation.

Nasty actions like publicly outing PR professionals and firms hurt real people. Bloggers (and some reporters) often act without professional ethics or thinking about how these acts affect others. I got one thing to say back to you: Take responsibility for your words and stop harming people.

Jeremy Pepper clarifies the whole Gina Trapani story, noting it was her personal email address being spammed. He also notes that junior staff at PR firms aren’t being trained and supervised not to make these mistakes. And, in typical Jeremy humor, he has a plan worth reading.

Jason Falls of Social Media Club Louisville notes that the bloggers themsevles need to be blacklisted -

I am saying that a journalist (or a blogger for that matter) who publicly humiliates someone just trying to do their job – even poorly – or goes a step further by declaring that person’s employer on a permanent banned list is performing the adult (though not mature) equivalent of Chris Hargensen ordering up buckets of pigs blood to be dumped on Carrie White at prom.

Jason makes a very good point. Not everyone at the firm that spammed you is an outright idiot. But just as we, as bloggers shouldn’t blindly blacklist PR firms, PR firms shouldn’t blacklist journalists.

Of course, Aaron Brazell is happy to be on a blacklist, because he doesn’t want to be pitched, unless a PR pro has created “some kind of professional rapport” with him. He also notes a possible solution:

I think it’s high time that the PR community finance the creation and support of a third party broker that would maintain the authenticity, privacy, trust and relationship with the blogging comunity. I’m talking about an OpenID sort of trust-based system that includes the trust-relationship management as well as a CRM tool/plugin-in for sending communications in a standardized way. This tool would provide the recipient a means of “opt out” as well as trust-based ratings, reviews, advocacy and management.

Aaron’s solution is interesting and thought-provoking. I’d like to hear more.

Jason Kintzler over at PitchEngine discusses some ways that PR professionals can more effectively get the word out including Social Media/New Media Releases, and remembering that news distribution can be effectively done via the wire services. Pitching to people requires a different tact.

Again, I go back to transparency and accountability. Sending an email to lots of people pitching something irrelevant is timewasting and is potentially asking for someone to ‘out’ your pitch. Contacting people in the way the provide for you, being clear about who and what you represent is clearly a way to get some respect.

Finally, I’ll publically state that I’m happy to hear a PR or Blogging professional’s pitch, via my email, or via the huge “Call Me” button I keep handy on the side of my website, as long as said professional has looked at my blog enough to know what interests me. I’m also on Twitter if you want to hit me that way.

UPDATE: Seems I missed something that helped start this whole thing, in which someone from Brian Solis’ team did something wrong, and Brian made an apology and some distinctions that are quite relevant.

So You Want To Talk To Mommybloggers…

So You Want To Talk To Mommybloggers… So basically there are these big ‘ol corporations who are just salivating to get their money grubbing claws into women online.

It gets more harsh from there.

Skype – hard but gives people way to make free phone calls so people use it.

Adam – fotolog – doesn’t deny the appeal of the long tail, but too much or too many will reduce usage.

Pip Coburn’s model about getting people over pain of adoption – by giving them value.

Whether you call it restrictions, constraints, or simplicity, there’s something that helps people get over that pain of adoption. Rules vs Guidelines.

John B. – Everyone thinks they want infinite choice but it turns out they really don’t adapt well. Less choice can drive more behavior/purchase/etc.

Hardware guys ship and they’re done – web guys can iterate -

Games guys do this constraint thing well – give rewards, test a huge amount, watch user behavior.

Is Facebook Simple? Yes and no. The applications can be overwhelming, but the social dashboard, keeping track of friends, and photos is easy and well done.

Great group of people. We’re seeing some demos of the apps now.
Tumblr is up. Interesting – I though they were just meta-aggregators – but it’s really an interesting way to ‘microblog’ in a different way than Twitter is a microblog – chunks of content that can include photos, videos, audio (coming soon), text, links etc. And it can aggregate a bunch of sources that you have with feeds like Flickr, your own blog, etc. I like it. Have to try this out.

Now up – Public Square – the power behind the “Boxes and Arrows” blog that generated the story I posted about yesterday about “what’s above the fold.” The site enables online community or group writing sites. Gives great things like reputation on the site, and in the back end communication between authors and editors. They’re also offering publishers simple tools for them to make money including taking ads, job boards, etc. They have over 1100 sites, with 25% publishing regularly. 150k page views a week.

Billy from Fichey next. Great way to quickly scan top site’s top pages (like top pages on Digg, Del.icio.us) then easily jump from an image of the page to exploring the site, and back. Love it. New morning way to scan the net.