RSS as a research tool: Using RSS to subscribe to news and web search feeds

After our last class, some of you expressed an interest in using RSS and del.icio.us to help you with your research. Here are some ways to do so:

• Subscribe to the RSS feed of a news search using GoogleNews (see slides below)


• Subscribe to the RSS feed of a web search using GoogleAlerts (see slides below)


• Subscribe to a particular tag on del.icio.us by entering the following URL into your feed aggregator: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/NameoftheTag

I've put together a brief tutorial to show you how to do the first two. Click on each slide to navigate to the next.

Social bookmarks as a PR Tool Slideshow

I've uploaded the lecture notes on social bookmarking, del.icio.us, and their use as a PR tool. As before, you will need to click on the slide to move from one slide to the next.

Some of the ideas we discussed about using del.icio.us as a PR tool came from Todd Defren's Social Media Tactics Series. You may want to check out his original posts on his PR Squared blog:

• Using del.icio.us for Thought Leadership


• Edgework With Social Bookmarking

Remember that your blogging assignment starts this week. Now that we've examined technologies such as blogs, RSS, and social bookmarks, and that you've read about and listened to podcasts about Web 2.0, you should think about posting a reaction to the readings and class discussions. How do you think these technologies will impact the PR profession? Do you have any examples of how they have changed the practice of PR? How can PR professionals use these technologies to communicate with their various publics? You don't necessarily need to answer these exact questions in your blog post, but you should engage the course material and examine it from a public relations perspective.

Video about StudiVZ, a German version of Facebook

Here's a fun video introducing StudiVZ, a German version of Facebook. StudiVZ recently changed its license agreement and forced its members to either accept it, or be kicked out of the community. Unsurprisingly, this move has angered lots of users who are now migrating over to alternative, noncommercial platforms such as Kaioo.

Note that the video is in German, but I figured some of you might be taking German as your foreign language and could use some practice.

Hillary Clinton promises government blogs in an effort to entice voters

In a campaign speech in New Hampshire on Monday night, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton suggested that blogs could play a key role in making the U.S. government more transparent.

According to Clinton, "We should even have a government blogging team where people in the agencies are constantly telling all of you, the taxpayers, the citizens of America, everything that's going on so that you have up-to-the-minute information about what your government is doing, so that you too can be informed, and hold the government accountable."

If corporations can blog successfully, why not government? Would be interesting to see though if government blogs could convince the rest of the blogosphere of their authenticity and honesty. Judging by the current level of mistrust of all things government, that should prove to be a difficult task. Maybe comparable to Wal-Mart's trials and tribulations entering the social media scene?

Update: Incidentally, the White House yesterday launched its first version of a blog - a travel blog designed to report about President Bush's trip to the Middle East. The Trip Notes from the Middle East seems more like an online diary than a real blog though since it lacks any interactive functions (there's no comments feature).

Web 2.0 & Social Media Slideshow

Here are the slides from our class discussion of social media and web 2.0. You will need to click on the slide to move from one slide to the next. The embedded video clips show up as a still rather than a video since I don't think Keynote exports embedded video to a Flash file. If you need to review the videos, just google them - you should be able to find them easily.



If you are interested in learning more about specific social media technologies and/or Web 2.0 sites, check out this page which contains a self-running slide show of over 1,400 Web 2.0 sites.

British Monarchy launches Youtube Channel

Just in time for the Queen's yearly televised Christmas message, Buckingham Palace today launched its own Youtube channel to broadcast this year's royal Christmas wishes. The Queen is hopeful that the new medium will make her Christmas message "more personal and direct" and reach younger audiences.

A nice PR move to make the royal family more attractive in the eyes of the younger generation.

Facebook tries to save face with Beacon apology

Seems like it finally dawned on Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, that he needed to join the Beacon conversation! He posted an official apology on the Facebook blog today, acknowledging that his company was wrong in the way it handled the Beacon problem. Note that he directly addressed one of the hot-button issues in his post - his choice to make Beacon an opt-out instead of an opt-in program - thereby showing that his company is listening to user concerns.

Zuckerberg's blog post is structured like a textbook example of a crisis PR response:

• Paragraph 1: Apologize for the specific problem


• Paragraph 2 & 3: Explain what happened/what let to the mistake


• End of paragraph 3: Condemn the mistake


• Paragraph 4: Explain what needs to be done to fix the problem. In my opinion he would have been better off addressing Facebook users directly here instead of referring to them as "people" (not very personal)


• Paragraph 5: Explain what has been done to fix the problem and tell users about it


• Paragraph 6: Thank users for sharing their concerns, thereby validating them. The only thing he didn't do at the end was discuss how Facebook plans to "make up" for their mistake (such as Apple offering in-store credit to early iPhone adopters, or JetBlue issuing vouchers after the Valentine's Day disaster). But then again, Facebook is a free service which sets it apart from those examples.

Zuckerberg's apology is similar to Steve Jobs' open letter to iPhone users after Apple upset its fan base by dropping the price of the iPhone after only a few months on the market. The apology is not the only similarity though. Facebook and Apple both managed to anger an otherwise ultra-loyal public - the people who love their service/product. Apple's iPhone faux-pas and Facebook's Beacon dilemma also act as a good reminder to companies not to underestimate the power of their key publics to organize online and pressure for change.