This blog is a companion to the book ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’. It will be published in a couple of weeks. Last week as a first time author, I got to see my book in printed, hard copy form for the first time. For me at least, writing the book was a long held ambition, I found myself on garden leave with some free time but even when the book was accepted for publication it seemed unreal. There are various stages that make the unreal, real; the point when I stumbled across it on Amazon was one, but getting hold of the physical manifestation was the real milestone.
If you have a book struggling to get out or you are in an early stages of the process of getting your first book out here are a few things that I wasn’t prepared for;
- The publisher decides what it looks like, as a first time author you have no experience of what works and your views or wishes won’t count for much.
- You write, edit, re-read and proof read. An author will read their own book four or five times in its entirity before publication.
- Reading your own book when it is printed sometimes feels like you are reading someone else’s book. I suspect that in the months between submitting and publication you start to forget some of the 60,000+ words. I really felt when I dipped in to the published copy that some of it was new to me (and I found it interesting!)
- When you’ve finished writing, the writing doesn’t stop, there are blogs, guest posts and articles that all need to be written. Time consuming but if you were never sure whether you were a writer or not, the confirmation is right there.
If you are interested in reading it too it’s available to order from the publisher Kogan Page and from Amazon.
Not long after I discovered the concept of blogging I became aware of the convention known as the ‘blogroll’; the list of blogs, usually placed in the sidebar, that reads as a list of other recommended blogs (you’ll find one to your right and down a bit).
A fierce debate is playing out as to what skills are best suited to the conditions created by a digital world to which everybody has access. The era of single message mass marketing is coming to an end. In a presentation to 250 marketing and advertising executives in New York in late 2007, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “for the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation and they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”
Last night I got involved in a heated debate about PR and search engine optimisation (SEO) . Partly because the debate was on twitter and it was late into the evening (I think most of us were on UK time) it was fast moving, free flowing and it also involved many of the people who know most about the emerging roles of digital PR.
“Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system, and that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.” These were the sage like words of Clive Thompson in a piece called the ‘The See-Through CEO’ in Wired. March 2007. He identified a major new challenge for the PR industry; the need to consider and deliver against the results of relevant search.
With the use of twitter currently soaring there are many new users who sign up and then wonder just what to do next. This is the second in a short series of blogs offering a selection of hints, tips and bits of advice for those wondering what to do with twitter …and how to do it. 
Businesses are often nervous about the naked conversations that take place in and around blogs. They are right to be concerned, careless comments can hit a corporate share price. 
Companies are waking up to what is happening with their brands and there is concern in the boardroom. To them the web 2.0 world is the wild west. There are people staking claims, there are outlaws and there are wild rumours of huge fortunes. This is a digital frontier where the laws of the old world do not apply and voices are raised against the might of the old corporations. There are already celebrated examples of major brands and corporations capitulating in the face of on-line challenges like the David and Goliath battle between Jeff Jarvis and the mighty Dell. 
PR and the Social Web 