But why is this social network gaining millions of users when Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc are out there already and are very entrenched?

Because they focused on a smaller niche. Their social network is ONLY for mobile phones.

I love this company and its service.

Want to get up to date on the mobile industry and hear all about BluePulse? You know what to do.

Venture Wire has the facts on BluePulse’s announcement. Blognation has other details.

Oh, and BluePulse is yet another best-of-breed companies that came from Australia. What are they putting in the water there?

Oh #2: this video, with CEO Ben Keighran, was filmed in YouTube’s original offices. Is this going to turn out to be a “lucky office?” We’ll see.

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During this past week, though, it seems that everyone and his granny has jumped on board.

Twitter is… what? A chat tool? A social network? A text messaging service? A place to dump your daily triviality?

Whatever you think it is – it’s all this and a lot more – it’s clearly captured a lot of imaginations in a very short time. Lots of people have signed up for and are using the free service to chat via the website, via their instant messenger and via their mobile phone.

Lots of people are suddenly talking about Twitter, as this Blogpulse graph indicates:

The service itself is creaking a bit under the strain of such an influx of users that it’s frequently slow and sometimes unavailable. Yet that’s not stopping anyone.

What is it about this service that prompts people – including me – to almost bare their souls with public snippets of comment that often seems to be the most mundane, and very often comes in a torrent?

Ross Mayfield expresses it well:

[…] Twitter, in a nutshell, is mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network. You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM.  A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac. Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, “what are you doing?” A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence — and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.

It’s that extension of your own social network that I think is what makes it quite compelling to so many people. Seeing snippets of thought from people in your own social circle (which can be personal or business, or both) adds to your knowledge about them and your connectivity with them. You read their blogs and listen to their podcasts; now you get to know a little more about them in a different way, and share a little more of yourself in return.

Ross mentions a tool that makes using Twitter easier, an application for the Mac. There are already lots of Twitter add-ins and I bet more will come soon (such as a Twitter plugin for WordPress).

One I discovered yesterday is really excellent for when you’re in Second Life – post your tweets (as your snippets of thought are called; thankfully not ‘twits’) from within the virtual world with TwitterBox. If you use Yahoo Widgets, there’s a desktop widget that lets you post your snippets.

Whether people will sustain Twitter as a great way to extend connections and conversations, or whether it’s a flash in the pan until the Next Cool Thing comes along, is anybody’s guess.

I think it’s got legs. It’s just beginning to gain traction. Tweets show up in Google searches. Technorati will rank your Twitter profile, just as it does with blogs. Indeed, that makes your Twitter a blog (or a micro-blog, as some are calling it).

Whatever you think of Twitter – cool or just another waste of time – don’t brush it off. In fact, why not join in, at least paying attention to some of the streams of consciousness (just as you do with blogs, right?).

If you want a place to start, try my group of friends.

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I usually refuse to tell them, because it is about me and my tools and my skill set. It is not about making the industry better, but about pushing myself forward as the numero uno dude.

Oh, wait, that is not how I work. Damn. Well, if it was, I would totally beat down people. Totally.

Okay, really, I work with the interns here and try to teach them the best tools that I have found on monitoring the blogosphere. Why? So they have the skills here, so I can send them work to begin, and then when they go off to their career, they will be able to use some of the tools I taught them here, and then pass on the knowledge to other PR people. It’s all about learning.

So, what do I use to find appropriate blogs? Easy: Blogpulse, Technorati, PubSub. Those three are great free tools to monitor and find information on blogs. Yes, they are not perfect, but they have been perfectly good tools to do what I need to do when finding and tracking and monitoring – they get the job done, for free.

And, there are other tools that I love to use, such as Biz360 and Buzzlogic. I got a demo of Buzzlogic, and think it is a great tool for PR and marketing folks to follow the conversation thread in blogs.

Because, that is what it is about – the conversation. The conversation can start anywhere – a bike messenger board, a low-readership blog, in the real world – and it can steamroll. That is the whole point with new media – that it is the conversation that starts, and can take a full whole new life on other blogs with trackbacks, which are easily monitored.

But, that is just half the conversation. The deeper conversations are taking place in comments, and beyond the ego-fulfillment to see if someone has responded to your comment, you want to be able to monitor comments merely to see what people are saying and because now too much happens within comments. And not much works well there so far.

So last night, I met up with Assaf Arkin who founded Co.mments. We had a long discussion on everything Web 2.0, dotcom boom and bust, surviving the bubble (and surviving the next bubble burst), and Co.mments.

And that is the interesting part. He tracks the conversations through the comments submitted through his service. Instead of looking at the full ginormous blogosphere, he is able to look at the conversations that his users are finding important. Think about that: he’s getting a magnifying glass view of the blogosphere, through the comments.

But beyond ego-tracking, the tool is a necessary tool for PR people. It’s in my bag of tricks, because it is not just enough to track blogs, but you need to track conversations. Well, baby steps for PR firms and clients – first let us at least track the conversation. Then we will get to the next step on tracking the conversations within the conversations.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

• At its core, public relations is the management of an organization’s efforts aimed at building and maintaining positive relationships with its strategic publics. A strategic public is one that, in the absence of a strong relationship, could produce obstacles to the organization’s ability to achieve its objectives.
• Public relations is about influence. Organizations can and should wield influence ethically. Among academics, ethical public relations is often referred to as “two-way and symmetrical.” That is, the relationships result in win-win scenarios in which both the organization and the public achieve their goals. The tools of two-way symmetrical communication include negotation and boundary-spanning.

These two concepts-relationships and influence-go hand in hand. It is easier to influence somebody who is on your side than it is to influence somebody who thinks your organization is a bottom-feeding, ethically challenged bully that makes Enron look like a candidate for sainthood. The desire to be perceived as a good corporate citizen leads a lot of organizations to embrace the notion of “doing well by doing good.” Enlightened self-interest drives corporate efforts to be socially responsible.

But, at the end of the day, the organization still wants something from its strategic publics: buy our product, vote for our candidate, support our initiative, don’t boycott us, don’t burden us with new regulations, invest in our stock, join our family. Influence remains the goal.

Interestingly, we have translated this notion to the blogosphere. I check my Blogpulse Profile to see how much influence my blog has. BlogPulse splits citations of my blog posts into two sections: “Recent Citations from Top-Ranked Blogs” and “Recent Citations from All Blogs.” Clearly, bloggers crave citations from top-ranked blogs. More people read them, which means they wield more influence. And the more top-ranked blogs that link to a blogger, the more clout that blogger can claim.

Technorati is another resource for assessing one’s influence, according to many.

Accountant-blogger Dennis Howlett is questioning Technorati’s ability to rank influence and reputation, noting that some of the more influential people he knows get “piffling Technorati rankings….So where does the reputation of an individual blogger lie? In other words, does the claimed value a blogger is said to deliver through their Technorati ranking reach people of influence who matter in the commerclal world? I don’t think so.” Howlett hopes something will come along that will do a better job of assessing influence, a “Technorati on steroids.”

Neville and I discussed Howlett’s post on yesterday’s installment of “The Hobson & Holtz Report.” Since then, I haven’t been able to get the notion of influence as PR’s end game out of my head. I don’t think Dennis went far enough. Not only should we question whether Technorati is relevant to reputation. We should question whether influence is the road to a positive reputation at all. To put it another way, if public relations is about managing relationships between institutions and their strategic publics, why aren’t relationships the defined goal of our PR campaigns?

In many instances, influence still must be the goal of public relations efforts. I remember the PR campaign to stop Dakota Minnesota & Eastern Railroad from running coal trains through the middle of Rochester, Minnesota. The campaign-managed brilliantly by Weber Shandwick-had one goal: Influence the Surface Transportation Board (a U.S. government agency) to extend the public comment period following the release of a Draft Environmental Impact Statement. (The effort succeeded.)

However, given the shift from message delivery to conversation, I question whether influence should be the goal of all PR efforts. Rather than set a goal of getting something from our audiences, the relationship itself should be the final objective, whether it’s for our institutions or for our own blogging. A couple of experiences have reinforced this thought.

First, there are the many times I have worked with organizations on the development of a mission statement. In nearly every case, the senior leadership starts the process by insisting their mission is clear: Produce a superior return on shareholder investment. In fact, I conducted a Google search on “mission statement,” “return,” and “shareholders” that produced 250,000 results. In order to move the process along, I insist that producing a return on investment is the result of the organization achieving its mission; it is not the mission itself. When I worked in the communications department at Allergan, we finally wound up with a mission statement that explains the company’s reason for existence, to focus “on specialty pharmaceutical products for specific disease areas that deliver value to customers, satisfy unmet medical needs and improve patients’ lives.” If the company succeeds in this mission, it will make a ton of money and produce superior returns on shareholder investment.

To reiterate, the return on investment is not the goal; ROI is the positive consequence of achieving the goal of improving patients’ lives.

The concept translates quite well to the blogosphere. Many bloggers craft their posts in a blatant effort to influence readers’ thinking. Just read any of the political blogs; the political philosophies they embrace don’t matter-they all want you to think the same way they do. I generally don’t read these blogs, even the ones that lean the same way I do. I just don’t like it when somebody tells me how I should think.

Yet I am influenced by a number of bloggers who are not trying to influence me. In episode #2 of the new podcast by Allan Jenkins and Lee Hopkins, the pair note that they have more in common with their colleagues in the PR blogosphere than they do with their neighbors. I agree; I like being part of this neighborhood. Think about what people in real neighborhoods do. They stand at the back fence and talk about what’s going on in the neighborhood. Every conversation about any given topic adds to the community’s aggregate knowledge and understanding of that topic.

Sure, we all write some posts that simply point to what somebody else has written, but we add our own observations, opinions, and commentary. Our goal is not to influence anybody but simply to participate in the conversation, just as we would if we were holding coffee and standing at the back fence.

Sometimes, what we say results in influence. Sometimes, something I write resonates with the community and is embraced. It’s very cool when that happens. It is not, however, my goal. I just want to talk with all these PR bloggers I admire and respect. At that level, the number of links to my blog becomes irrelevant beyond its obvious function as a search engine optimization tool. The only links I care about are the ones that further the conversation among the community I care about.

As conversations become the principal characteristic of company-public engagement, the relationships themselves will prove more valuable to organizations than influence. As with the notion of the mission statement, focusing on relationships for their own sake will surely lead to the outcomes organizations seek (sales, friendly regulatory environments, minimal activist activity, support for initiatives, etc.). Or, to put it more simply, who needs to wield influence when you’ve got friends?

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

But, part of the big problem – especially for PR people – is that it is not possible to track the conversations. And, let’s be honest – that is a big part of what blogging is really about: the comments and trackbacks that add to the conversation. The best way to do this so far – and what I have had to do with certain posts that I think can be detrimental to clients, or lead to something more – is to go back again and again.

From Robert Scoble comes news of coComment. After I read the post – damn, it only had 12 comments at the time – I signed up for the beta, and actually got one. It’s pretty cool, and an interesting service. You download the bookmarklet and then add it to your Firefox toolbar, and prior to commenting, you click on coComment and … voila, your comment becomes tracked, as does any other comments on that post, and you have one page to view your comments and other comments. It’s an all-in-one stop to view comments and conversations on blogs, without the original post. Stowe Boyd has already taken the time to break down the system step-by-step.

Now, this is not the first service I have seen for tracking comments – actually, Blogger has a tool that plugs into Firefox. To quote: Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you’re on.

I have that one also installed, and I ran into two problems: first, it was overwhelming and too much. Second, it’s not centralized. While it was a great way to track comments to my blog and on other blogs – and posts on the same issue – it was too much a pain. I think coComment is a better application for PR people … but you have to comment on the post to be able to start tracking. Often – well, almost always – there is no reason for me to be commenting on a post on a client, nor should a PR person entertaining such a thought (unless it’s to correct erroneous information). In that instance, the Blogger Web Comments might be a better tool – but it’s not centralized on one page, like coComment.

So, a mashup of the two might work best for PR folks, and help track the second part of the blogging conversation – the comments.

An interesting sidenote … as most people know, I strongly dislike (read hate) moderated comments and only use them when I have no control/choice on the platform. Well, I posted a comment using coComment on another blog … and while it does not show up on the blog, it does show up on coComment. Here’s an interesting twist: a blogger can moderate all he/she wants, but on coComment it shows up immediately; it’s going to start showing out some people quite quickly who try to control the conversation flow for their own purposes.

This, in itself, is going to be dangerous and become ugly for PR: the outing of comment moderators, which includes clients’ blog. If clients have a blog and do not let through comments … well, that is now a wasted effort and perhaps more detrimental than letting through a comment and answering it. Likely, most corporations are going to opt to just turn off all comments, thinking that is the best way to control and not track elsewhere.

Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

diaries (e.g. personal journals), politics, movies/TV, tech, sports, health, religion, meme, food and more. According to the FAQ, it’s updated by the minute.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

Intelliseek has been acquired by BuzzMetrics which is now part of VNU (okay, so if I get this right, BuzzMetrics acquired Intelliseek and then was acquired by VNU … I think) and will be known as Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Yep, that’s a mouthful. The full press release is here, and everyone’s favorite blog measurement Website, Blogpulse, will still be around as will everyone’s new dad of twins, Pete Blackshaw. Crappy timing, though, since VNU announced that they were up for sale to be split up.

Okay, so the quick analysis of this: no brainer that the measurement industry is going to contract and we were going to see either companies go through M&A or just die. It’s the same with the Web 2.0 companies, and while I use BlogPulse, I have not used BuzzMetrics nor know much about them beyond the emails I get from Max Kalehoff and his columns in MediaPost. But, while word of mouth marketing is hot right now – and the WOMMA conference should be fun – let’s boil it down to what it really means: Nielsen wanted the capability to track this crap so they bought a company to do it – well, actually two companies.

Another interesting piece of news is that BusinessWire is being bought by Warren Buffett. From O’Dwyer’s …

Berkshire Hathaway, the $75 billion conglomerate run by Warren Buffett, has moved to acquire Business Wire in a deal expected to close in the first quarter of ’06.

BW’s management team, led by newly promoted CEO Cathy Tamraz, will remain in place and operations will not be affected by the ownership change, according to BH. BW will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the conglomerate.

Business Wire sent a letter to BH last year pitching the potential acquisition.

Buffett had high praise for the 44-year-old newswire. “In making this acquisition of Business Wire, we have followed our blueprint of buying profitable companies that are industry leaders, yet have significant growth potential,” he said in a statement. Buffett cited the company’s experienced management team and called it a “gem of a company.” He added: “I expect BW to continue to do what it has always done and I’ll be there if I can help it in any way.”

BW, which is privately held, said it posted double-digit growth in 2005. It has grown significantly overseas in the last few years.

Last month, founder and CEO Lorry Lokey promoted Tamraz, a 26-year-veteran of the company, to the top executive post and said he would focus on his philanthropic pursuits, which have totaled $160M to date.

Lokey said BH is “committed to providing a supportive environment” that will allow the newswire to continue overseas expansion and pursue “emerging opportunities.”

BH companies include Benjamin Moore & Co., Fruit of the Loom, Buffalo (N.Y.) News, and GEICO Auto Insurance, among a roster of 42 companies.

This is interesting, and I have been working on a larger piece about the Wire services and whether or not they are needed nowadays (hey, how about those layoffs at PR Newswire). But, hey, congratulations to Lorry as he is a nice guy and philanthropic. I will have more to say about this later in the week, after I meet the CEO of Primezone. But, the telling part here is that BW actively pitched BH to be acquired. There’s got to be a story there, but I will leave that to the reporters.

Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

The merger comes after BuzzMetrics, Inc., owned by Nielsen parent company VNU, acquired a 50.1 percent stake in Intelliseek. The newly formed company’s goal is to measure and understand word-of-mouth behavior and influence-mostly though studying the goings-on in the blogosphere.

Intelliseek’s Blogpulse is well known in the consumer-generated market as a way to track 20 million online conversations as they occur.

The deal marks the third in a series of word-of-mouth research investments supported by VNU. In February 2005, VNU acquired an equity interest in Israeli-based Trendum, a leader in media and linguistic analysis technologies. In September 2005, Trendum acquired BuzzMetrics, and the new company adopted the BuzzMetrics name.

The new combined company will build on its search and text-based analytics to help marketers develop more effective marketing strategies, gain new consumer insights, and enhance their relationship marketing and corporate reputation. The new company also will continue its research and development activities to measure the next generation of media technologies by which consumers create and share information, including audio and video.

“We know from experience that marketers are using CGM to make better, smarter, and more profitable business decisions, from marketing effectiveness to crisis management,” said Mike Nazzaro, president and CEO of Intelliseek, who will become president and COO of the new BuzzMetrics.

“This deal will help us scale much more quickly, leverage the experience and expertise of Nielsen, and expand our client insights, analysis and recommendations.”

A star client roster comes with the territory. The combined firm boasts of cross-industrial clients including Canon, Comcast, Ford, General Motors, HBO, Kraft, Microsoft, Nokia, P&G, Showtime, Sony, Target and Toyota, 14 of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies and eight television networks.

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There was even a recent San Francisco Business Times article on the growing of PR firms in the Bay Area.

Steve Rubel picks up the post by Tom Forensky (sic), and makes it about SEO PR – search engine optimization public relations. That’s all good and fine, but it does not help tell a story, but rather is about cooking the results in Google and other search engines, such as the blog ones like Blogpulse, PubSub and Technorati. It’s a great way to make yourself into a top tier blogger, but hand someone enough rope …

But, it’s not about SEO, it’s never been about SEO, and it shouldn’t be about SEO. The reason PR is growing is because it is about the expanding media universe and how to reach that universe in a smart, strategic way, while at the same time reaching the older, more established yet shrinking media universe. It’s two sides of the same coin, where PR is best suited to do the work.

But, does that mean launching a blog? No, not necessarily. For Vespa, instead of blogging, a MySpace community would have made just as much sense, if not more – a social network for a social activity. When I think Vespa, I don’t think “let’s sit behind a computer and blog” but rather “let’s find others that also love to ride Vespas and meet up and take pictures and then post them to a something similar, like, oh, a social network.”

It means being smarter, thinking smarter, doing smarter PR that takes into account all various outposts, from MySpace to Blogs to audio and video Podcasts (I prefer Audioblog because Eric Rice rocks) to newspapers to radio to television. It’s covering the whole media universe from the shrinking to the expanding.

PR is growing because companies realize they need us, and need us to maneuver the new landscape. It is time for PR to shine, to own that 100 percent and not let advertising or marketing pervert blogs.

As an aside, every interview I did for the PR Face2Face series, I would go off the record, and would talk about the dot-com boom and bust. I would ask if PR as a whole learned anything – and the answer was always no, we had not learned anything. The boom in PR firms in the Bay speaks to that, I believe.

Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

I look at these, but as the volume increases I will not be able to scale. This is true for many of the more popular bloggers.

So, here’s a blog relations tip for you. One way to get coverage on a “top-tier” blog is by identifying who he/she reads regularly and then pitching those sites.

Here’s how to get this done. Start by going to the BlogPulse Profiles site. Enter the URL of your favorite blogger and click on the Sources tab and you will get a sense for their linking habits. For example, here’s Scoble’s. Use the smaller blogs as stepping stones that help you get “coverage” on the larger ones.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.