PR Face2Face:Shel Israel, Editor-in-Chief, Conferenza Premium Reports and Co-Author, Naked Conversations

Shel Israel has been consulting innovative companies for over 25 years. In the span of his career, he has played a key strategic role in introducing some of technology’s most enduring products including: SoundBlaster, PowerPoint, Filemaker, MapInfo, Sun Microsystems workstations and more. He played pioneering roles in the introduction of such technology categories as Desktop Presentation, Desktop Mapping, PC Sound, PC Databases and e-tailing.

Most PCs today contain one or more products, Israel helped to introduce. He is editor-in-chief of Conferenza Premium Reports, the leading newsletter covering technology conferences, where technology trends are often first spotted. He is currently co-authoring Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. with Microsoft’s Robert Scoble one of the 100 most popular bloggers.

Shel Israel, Consultant, Co-Author of Naked Conversations

You have more than 20 years of tech consulting to some top companies. How do you see blogging affecting the product launches and public relations?

Well, the first thing I have to say is how I saw launches as a PR guy. I saw them technically as the moment that the press release hits the wire. The product launch is the transition point from not wanting anyone to talk – or to have anyone write about what you have – to wanting to have everyone write and talk.

This "hard launch" is a fundamental point where PR no longer works the way it used to. The ceremonial launch is rarely well received and its claims are viewed with skepticism, and even cynicism. The efficacy and language of a fancy press kit doesn't work anymore.

Theoretically, let's look at, let's say, Ford Motors. Let's say that there is a team of engineers trying to work on a new engine, and they blog for two to three years about what they are trying to do. Finally they have a car that works. It's a new motor in a new car. It's the greatest thing to happen in automotive engineering since, well, let's say the Edsel.

Now compare that impact of that engineering team blog to what Ford's PR firm will do at launch. The PR team will put out a spiffy, multi-colored, expensive press kit stuffed with chatchkas and full-bleed brochures, quotes for the press.

As an editor or customer, which would you believe more—the blog or the press kit? Problems with traditional PR launches are good examples of why I think the PR industry is in trouble and needs to change. The definition of what a launch is—when it begins and ends, and who should be saying what to whom and when—have all become blurry. Not only have the mechanics of a PR launch fuzzied up, but so has the reception of PR introductions by press, target audience and the general public. In short, the effectiveness has diminished, while the cost has increased. By contrast, blogs are highly credible and much less expensive than traditional OPR launches with press kits and conferences, tours and promotional events.

Why are blogs so important?

They demonstrate the reality and humanity of what people are trying to do. They replace the monolog of a traditional PR campaign with a dialog. Blogs provide you with an unrefined, unfiltered form of written-or spoken—communications. Compare it with a press release, which is often adulterated by committee edits. One group tries to limit the risk of forward looking statements and another tries to insert 'buzz,' or artificial claims ("the first fully rust-free, left-handed monkey wrench using that miracle ingredient Teflon®") The collective result is a document often crammed with horseshit.

I once had a client who sent back a release that called her software "reliable and proven" in one place and "leading edge and breakthrough" in another. When I mentioned that it was impossible to be leading edge and proven, she didn't care. She told me that her focus groups said they liked both words. Blogs reveal real people working on real products, share the issues of real problems and get actual customers to advise you on what they'd like to see in the product. Your customers often have better ideas than either your marketing or product development teams. Blogs let you listen to these people. Press releases try to persuade by boasting or shouting. Blogs are credible, press releases are not. When was the last time a quote you used in a press release got picked up by a legitimate media organization?

You have been putting chapters of your book on the blog, open to comments. Jeremy Wright put out a call for sidebars to his book on his blog. How do you see such collaborative measures changing publishing?

We have been following some pioneer attempts by others who blogged all or parts of their books including Dan Gillmor (We the Media), David Weinberger (Small Pieces, Loosely Joined) and JD Lasica’s Darknet. I agree with all three that our blog readers are helping us write a better book. They are great fact checkers. They have brought fascinating cases to our attention that we would have otherwise missed.

There is, however a mismatch that we have noticed. Our blog readers know a good deal about what we are covering. Our target book reader is a business person who knows much less about it and wants to read a book to help him or her figure out what it is all about. So we have to consider the source on some suggestions. We got told that writing about EnglishCut, Bob Lutz (GM) and Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks) was obvious, but we don't think it's obvious to our target book reader. We also have heard complaints that what we are posting reads more like a book than a blog. Well, that’s because it's goal is to become a book.

As far as Jeremy and his book goes, we welcome his contribution. We've been on friendly terms with him throughout this process and I think he's doing some quality work. His publisher and ours have different views on how blogs should be used. Our publisher—John Wiley—loves this process, and sees the blogosphere as a new marketing channel. They think that our blog readers will become our word-of-mouth evangelists when the book comes out and we hope that they prove right.

Neither Wiley nor Robert and I have fears of plagiarism from the blog. First, we are only posting early chapters and the finished ones are often radically different. Second, we have thousands of witnesses as to what constitutes our work and intellectual property and we doubt anyone would try to lift it.

By the way, we think there's a huge market for blog books beyond, ours, Jeremy's and several others we've heard about. My numbers are a bit off, but in October 1994, there were eleven books on the Internet, ten were technical. In October 1996, there were 13,086 books about the Internet and according to various persons, most were selling well.

There is a lot of room for these types of books.

With the online mentality that content is, and should be, free, are you worried about cannibalizing books sales because of the blog readership?

There are three answers for that:

First, the book is being written for business users who don't blog yet. The people that visit Naked Conversations are bloggers or blog enthusiasts. We hope the blog community will champion Naked Conversations to other people, such as they continue to do for Cluetrain Manifesto.

Second, we are posting only early unfinished chapters. Even so, I doubt many people would want to read 70,000 to 80,000 words on a blog. It's not the right medium for that much content.

Third, it is really hard to steal and use our ideas on your own blog, because there are so many witnesses on what we have posted. If another author took our chapters and ideas, our words and thoughts, and used as their own, a great number of people would point it out. Newspapers and magazines articles have had amazing similarities to what we have written, though. That doesn't hurt us, but it reinforces the stories we are using are good. And, most of the stories we wrote on were already written in the blogosphere.

It is true that the way we are publishing is interesting. Robert said lets do the whole thing transparently, and Dan Gillmor is right: the blogosphere is helping us write a better book, particularly in providing content resources and fact checking. Our blog readers are making sure that there is a story that is interesting.

How did the idea of the book come up? How did you hook up with Scoble as the co-author?

The shorter answer: Go listen to Cameron O’Reilly’s G’Day Mate podcast.

The short, quick answer: Ever since I got out of PR, I wanted to write a book. And, since I gave up on journalism for PR, I gave up vows of poverty. I had touched base with Chris Shipley about doing a book. I had tried to write a book with my friend Richard Brandt, formerly of BusinessWeek and Upside, about a book on Google which never fully germinated. Richard is now doing that one on his own.

Andy Ruff – a group manager at Microsoft for Mac products – woke up one morning and decided that Scoble should write a book. He shared this thought with Buzz Bruggeman, a mutual friend, and since they were coming to dinner to my house, Buzz took it upon himself to invite Scoble, and in the middle of dinner, Buzz bounced the idea off the two of us.

My immediate thought was "click, YES, AWESOME." Robert just smiled. "Great dinner" was his most specific response. A week went by. I emailed him. I emailed again, told him I wanted to visit to discuss, and he said great, so I went up to see him in Seattle.

A few weeks passed after that meeting and then I heard from Scoble that he wanted to go for it. My surprise was to discover that we were going to do most of it transparently on a blog. I found that out when he posted our agreement terms and book idea on Scobleizer. I had no idea about that part until it happened, but after all—he's Scoble.

How did the name Red Couch come up?

Robert has a new red couch in his family room, and when I went up to talk Robert into partnering with me on the book, I sat down on the red couch. Robert took a picture of me sitting on it, and being Robert posted it on his blog and wrote about it.

Your chapter on PR did create some controversy. How did you choose the PR bloggers to profile?

It was arbitrary and capricious – but there was some thought to it. We took bloggers that we thought were interesting and had diversity on where they are coming from. Renee Blodgett in her home office to Richard Edelman and his position in public relations and global relationships. There aren't too many bloggers in the World Economic Forum, and Richard is.

In terms of blogosphere response, Robert and I thought we must be doing something right. Half of the comments were from PR people saying that we didn't know anything about the PR business and we had been overly harsh. The other half were non-PR people who said we didn't know what we were talking about and were being too kind to PR people. This also led us to believe that we were not the real subject of controversy. The PR industry is.

The Naked Conversations PR chapter is intended to show there is hope for PR, in that practitioners don't necessarily face a future in the restaurant service business. But they are going to need to adjust course from the current broadcast model to a more conversational one.

You added to the chapter on public relations and publicity due to trackbacks and comments – particularly Trevor Cook. Did you expect such input and changes?

The blog process has taught me to really listen closely to criticism, no matter how sharp or argumentative it is. We were glad to receive such dynamic input. I say "me" because Robert already knew this and I had to learn it. For example, I really liked the old book title of "Blog or Die," until Steve Streight, often one of our toughest critics, pointed out that in some countries the option really is "blog AND die." I had to really listen and see that he was right. So we changed. We don't really agree with what Trevor had to say, but we thought he made some good points and we thought including him would make a better chapter. Our readers can decide for themselves who they should agree with.

Any final thoughts?

I have two and they are unrelated:

1. There is a massive technology change going on. It is bigger than blogging, which is merely a tool. The change is in how companies communicate with their constituencies. For a long time, they could just broadcast messages to mass audiences. It didn't matter if 98 percent of the people receiving the message didn't want it. The economics for the company remained fine if just two percent responded.

The problem is that all too often, most of us are in the remaining 98 percent and we are pissed off at all this crap that is being thrown at us in ads and press releases, in messages we don't want and don't believe.

When I first went into the business, PR-tech PR at least—was about building relationships and about establishing credibility. Most PR people I know credible, ethical and relationships-oriented. But technology has made too many of the mechanical aspects of the business less than optimally effective. It is time to change from a command-and-control tactical model to a listen-and-respond model.

2. When I was a PR operative, about the best I could do for a client was a cover on BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes. Today, the best place for a client to appear prominently is on a search engine like Google. Blogging will get you that prominent position faster than a million press releases or even a full page ad. Those business magazine covers are still very important, but the best way to get it is not with a press release, tour or conference. It's by having that same prominent position on a search engine.


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