Jim Voorhies gives about the best advice I’ve read in awhile to companies as well as politicians.

Yep, I’m writing you a letter just like I did REI when they screwed up. Some of you are already doing it. You’re ignoring the new media “opportunities.” And you’re getting sliced and diced out there. Politicians are too.

I know, things move soooo fast here. It seems like you can’t keep up. Well, you can’t. But you have to know what’s going on. You have to do something quickly. You cannot ignore this new media stuff and expect to survive it.  There are three basic rules:

First, you have to make sure you know what’s going on in the innertubular lands. You ought to have people who do nothing but check out Twitter and YouTube and The Consumerist and Facebook for you. Yes, I’m saying you need to pay people to do this for you. And these people need to have their speed dials set to your best and brightest communications people. Yep, you’re going to be paying someone to surf the Internet. Get used to it. Plus, they need to use and understand these media places. That’s important.

Second, you need to chill out a little. Don’t blow up as soon as someone posts something hateful about your company. Stop and think. People do get carried away because the web can be pretty anonymous. People can fill in their email address as joe@Ihatebobscompanybecauseitsucks.com but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a real email address or a web site. The web goes from asleep to hysterical in a nanosecond. Remember, stop and think.

Third, be a player in your own Internet life. You (or your best and brightest communications people) have to be involved and you have to be honest. You have to be willing to say “we screwed up for you and I apologize.” Use the medium by responding in the same place where you got slammed. Do not try to bull your way out.

Jim is right on target here. If you aren’t managing your online persona, you can bet someone will be and it may not jive with your mission or your message. Shouldn’t these companies and political entities be controlling their own message?

Instead of cleaning up messes, engage on the front end. People are much more forgiving when there is a conversation.Similar Posts:

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So, there is a movement this week about the dreaded meme and how these things kill kittens and that they are navel gazing.

Of course memes are navel gazing. This is the Internet.

Memes can be  good for journalists. Not writing them necessarily, but reading them. Jane Devin addressed the issue on Facebook meme’s 25 things, which has received a great deal of negative publicity in Mainstream Media this week, but I wish to expand why exactly they can be used as a tool for journalists.

First of all, from a non-journalism standpoint, you learn about people. You find out things about what makes folks tick and this is what social media is about. Being, I don’t know, social perhaps, is the anatomy of a meme and that’s what Devin discusses in her post.

Now, why can a meme be useful for journalists? Because, campers, you can learn things at times about either the subject of a story you may be working on or, let’s say a crime has occurred, than you have something you can add about the mindset of the person accused perhaps.

If someone were to Google the name of a person of interest and you find a meme that person wrote, it’s not going to be the crux of your story, but it could help give you some insight.

Another thing a meme can do is help to discipline new bloggers into being more comfortable with writing and give them a focus. Not everyone has a business agenda and some people do just want to post pictures of their cats or their latest knitting project. Which is more than all right because there are no rules in blogging.

The meme is helpful in the blogging community. Blogging is highly personal to some people and these sort of things can create bonds. From Wordless Wednesdays to Thankful Thursdays, the meme helps non-professional writer become comfortable with the medium. There surely isn’t anything wrong with that. I had a conversation with a new blogger this week who is a former journalist earlier this week who just started a new blog. She was tentative about jumping into the fray. My suggestion to her was discipline yourself to write at least once a day, and start with memes and online blogging trends until she was more comfortable.

And, if you don’t like memes or viral blogging of this nature, don’t read them and don’t write them. Nobody is holding a gun to your head to do either. It’s really that simple.

It’s been said that Twitter was a waste of time and compared by a friend of mine a couple of years ago as the same thing as a bunch of drunk folks writing on a bathroom wall, however, look what has happened with that resource over the past two years as being an effective tool for journalists and business.

Anyone remember Ashley Dupre? Journalists tracked much of her social online networking through her MySpace and Facebook pages after the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke.

So, in defense of the meme, I’ll keep reading them and encourage everyone to join the fray. They can be fun on a social media plane, help fledgling bloggers and occasionally help you out with your story.Similar Posts:

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I’m not even going to do a pull quote here.

Just go read Katie Allison Granju’s blog right now.Similar Posts:

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A review and interview with Trace Sharp (newscoma) and Scott Adcox (sadcox) at KtownLowDown courtesy of the site’s kind host, Svandyke.

Here’s a snippet:

Being familiar with the bloggers that founded NTZ, one is personal friend and helped me start KTOWNLOWDOWN (sadcox/Scott) and the other was someone I had been reading for some time (Newscoma/Trace), I thought I’d bring you a bit of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of how this monster idea was ‘birthed’.  And don’t make the mistake of thinking that the way this site came about is strictly about a couple of on-line folks creating a website.  This is a model of how many businesses and joint ventures will be started and the efficiency at which they can operate for at least a decade.

Thanks for the kind words from the folks at ktownlowdown. And be sure to read the whole article because we pontificate a bit on what’s going on at NewsTechZilla.Similar Posts:

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I have tried to be as transparent as possible in regards to my lack, and blinding fear, of online technology. I think I’m better than the average bear in some respects and completely incompetent in others.

I believe that some of us, and it doesn’t matter if you are a journalist or not, let the little tech problems we run into completely gobsmack us. When I look on my FriendFeed account and see everyone from Robert Scoble to Louis Gray talking about new tech, video implementations, computer plug-ins or CSS coding, I glaze over. I made the mistake about four years ago of buying some books on CSS/HTML coding that completely and positively confused me.

Enter Sadcox.

I have a humble blog that I post silly things about zombies, my obsession with working at Weekly World News, items about myself that I call Annoying Autobiographical Pauses (a term I got from Stephen King’s Danse Macabre), politics, running my dog Mabel for president and other inane things that amuse me.

And thus the idea for NewsTechZilla came from that it was those small, and not so small things on our blogs, that confounded me to the point of me pulling my teeth out with a rope.

Sadcox wrote last night of an ongoing issue I’ve had on my blog regarding comments. I’ll let him tell you the whole thing, but because I wasn’t sure what I was doing, I became extremely frustrated. I want my silly Flickr pictures on my sidebar. I’ve tried to FTP the plug-in a dozen times. I’m not making it work.

These things go from small to huge obstacles for those of us who are learning technology as we go.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Sometimes for those of us who are novices regarding technology become completely overwhelmed by the little stuff that we won’t tackle the larger items that could send our blogs/websites to the next level.

What are some of the things some of you have had issues with that have set you back?

Let’s ask Sadcox!Similar Posts:

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Well, if we don’t, no one will.

NewsTechZilla received a wonderful write-up about this new endeavor in the Knoxville News Sentinel in the Sunday edition.

Here’s what Michael Silence wrote about us:

Two Tennessee bloggers, one a journalist and the other a techie, are launching a Web site for citizen journalists and others who need technical assistance navigating the pixels.

Trace Sharp, managing editor of the Weakley County Press, and Scott Adcox, a Knoxville techie who built his first Web site in 1995, are hosting NewsTechZilla, http://www.newstechzilla.com.

Sharp offers the bottom line of the endeavor: “Our plans are to write about what we know, what we want to learn and hopefully be a guide for other journalists trying to be viable in new markets. There is some fantastic information out in the blogosphere that we will spotlight all in one convenient location.”

Adcox called it, simply, “citizen journalism for journalists.”

A quick thank you to Silence and go read what he had to say.Similar Posts:

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Robert Scoble is reporting that Twitter has taken on a new dynamic. The focus: the war between Israel and Gaza.

Israel and Gaza are going at it on Twitter (and in real life, as reported over on news site Memeorandum). Shel Israel reports.

When one thinks about the relevance of Twitter in the news, new dynamics are happening constantly.Similar Posts:

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There’s a great post over at The Inquisitr predicting 2009 will be the year we’ll see consolidation in blogging with the trend being the grouping of smaller blogs under larger “uber blogs”. Most notably for those coming from old media:

The rise of the uber blog will also mark the beginning of the time new media starts to surpass old media. The thing holding back new media to date has been its obsession with niche plays that didn’t naturally lead to scale that sets them up well to compete with old media titans that went wide online as they did offline in print. The new media uber blogs of 2009 and beyond will offer real substitution of old media like we haven’t really seen before, and with lean structures that are best placed to last the recession, could ultimately emerge on top.

This actually sounds like an exciting prospect for journalists who are making the old media to new media jump.

There are some other 2009 predictions over at ReadWriteWeb, which happens to be an uber blog.Similar Posts:

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