A SHEL OF MY FORMER SELF — Despite a flood of recommendations to create one, there are still a lot of companies without policies that let employees know their obligations when engaging in social media. One survey from last August found that one in three lacked policies. A Deloitte survey from just a few months earlier pegged the number at half. And just this month, according to a study from Cisco Systems, only one in 5 companies have formal policies. It doesn’t matter whose numbers are most accurate. Any way you look at it, a lot of companies are without policies. The reasons to have a policy are just common sense...

A SHEL OF MY FORMER SELF — Chris Brogan is a well-known name in the social media world through his prolific blogging and speaking, his involvement with organizations like and now with the book he has co-authored, “Trust Agents.” On the eve of the launch of “Trust Agents”, blogger Leah Jones questioned Brogan’s trustworthiness after he accepted a consulting assignment from Sony, a client with which he first made contact at the Consumer Electronics Show, which he was visiting as part of a blogger outreach campaign marketing firm crayon managed for its client, Panasonic. In this interview, Chris discusses the issue and talks about the book...

A SHEL OF MY FORMER SELF — If your reading was restricted to social media purists, you’d think that PR and marketing had no role left to play, that the rise of the trusted peer has so marginalized the communications profession that agencies everywhere should just fold up their tents and encourage their employees to learn a new trade. The purists are right, but only if marketing and PR counselors ply their trade exactly as their predecessors did 30 years ago. Most don’t...

A SHEL OF MY FORMER SELF — Computer maker Dell has earned a reputation in recent years of being one of the organizations most engaged online with customers, influencers, and anyone who has an interest in Dell and what they do. Not only that, Dell say they actually make money as a direct result of their online engagement activities, notably in reporting multi-million-dollar revenue attributable to one Twitter ID. FIR Co-host Neville Hobson joins with Dell’s Richard Binhammer, who’s based at Dell’s corporate headquarters in the USA, and Kerry Bridge, based at Dell’s EMEA headquarters in the UK, in a wide-ranging informal conversation...

I wouldn’t have thought I’d be writing a Social Media Release 101 post, given the volume of content already out there dedicated to the topic. But given Dan’s question (which leads me to believe there must be a lot of other people have the same question), coupled with developments with the Social Media Release Working Group, it’s worth revisiting the basics. The notion of the SMR has sparked a lot of opposition, mainly from people who think the press release is dead and that the SMR is a lame attempt to bring them into the social media era when they should just be scrapped and replaced with more SEO-friendly alternatives or social conversations (depending on whom you listen to). In fact, there has been a significant amount of debate over the merits of the SMR, all of which seems odd to me, given what the SMR really is and what it was designed to achieve...