To summarize, Pollara reported that bloggers and other online “influencers” may not hold as much sway as marketers believe they do. The data point that keeps popping up is this one:

…nearly 80% [of respondents] said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

This survey is part of a larger paradigm shift, real or imagined, that I’ve been sensing for awhile. It’s an incredibly obvious one, and almost boring to acknowledge, but I am compelled to bring it up because the tension between the two sides keeps getting stronger.

My “aha moment” came at the recent behavioral targeting conference I attended. Without any prodding, the speakers one by one began quietly slamming Word of Mouth marketing. While they took pains to differentiate their companies from the other BT solutions represented, they all shared a quiet consensus that anything less than BT was crap. I know I wasn’t the only marketer or PR person on-site that day, and I couldn’t believe they were suggesting it was their way or the highway. But they were!

I’m starting to get the feeling that Marketers (and PR people) are being asked to pick a philosophical camp: Actions or Words.

Words: Word of Mouth, social networks, bloggers, online communities, influencers, “tell a friend”, “friend me”. The Words camp is all about what people say: blog posts, tweets, “user-generated content,” favorites, preferences, and, yes, surveys. Self-expression is its highest virtue. You can even say WOM practitioners have a positive, optimistic view of individuals; whether they’re expressing their likes or dislikes, there is an inherent trust that what the person says is a true reflection of what they believe, and that they have the right — perhaps even an obligation — to say it.

See also: WOMMA, SWOM/Church of the Customer, “Blogger Relations,” “Brand Evangelism,” Malcolm Gladwell.

Actions: Behavioral Targeting (in its true form), clickstream data, numbers, algorithms. Not what people say they do — what they actually do do. I remember the opening speaker at the keynote address of the BT conference making a B.F. Skinner joke…though we all knew he wasn’t really joking. The Actions people hold that our lives are governed by immutable laws that — if we can just identify and capitalize off of them — hold the key to unlocking the secrets of human behavior and, in doing so, marketing. Anything someone “says” is just noise. The question is, were they picking their nose while they were saying it?

See also: Duncan Watts, Ian Ayres, Science-with-a-capital-S.

Getting back to the Pollara survey: from a PR perspective, this is just the latest iteration of a narrative that has been brewing for quite some time. It’s just another log on the fire. (For a reasonable discussion of both sides, you can’t do better than the comment thread on ReadWriteWeb.)

I understand why two-sided arguments work. They’re easy to understand, easy to position against, and the media LOVES them. Props to MediaPost and Pollara for conducting this survey, a very savvy PR move.

However, smart communications professionals know it’s not an either/or choice. To achieve our clients’ marketing and PR goals, we need to pay attention to their audience’s actions and words. Together. So let’s talk about integrating those strategies instead of placing bets on who wins in a cage match.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed a few tweets regarding Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Sarah, a tech reporter for BusinessWeek, was universally panned — not necessarily for the content of the questions she asked, or for the answers she was able to squeeze out of the notoriously hard-to-read Zuckerberg. (As she notes from her Twitter account: in my book, getting mark to publicly admit to the yahoo deal, address beacon, and give news on changes in the platform and france equals successful interview.)

From where I sit, there seem to be two critique threads emerging:

1. She didn’t involve the crowd enough. In an audience teeming with bloggers hungry to ask their own questions, she held off opening the floor for a Q&A until the final ten minutes, an inarguably bad move.

2. Her interview style was more flirtatious than journalistic. This is the meme I find more troubling. Apparently instead of going for Zuckerberg’s jugular, she engaged him in a two-way conversation, often cutting him off to make a point. In the words of this commenter on the CNET post recapping the debacle, Sarah opted to play the “let me pretend to be your girlfriend” trick. She killed the substance of her questions by picking the wrong approach to posing them.

The commenter goes on to raise the larger question the tech establishment should be asking itself:

This points to love/hate relationship that geeks have with the women who try to invade their territory. Treat them with respect and genuinely act as one of them, and you get treated like Veronica Belmont or Cali Lewis. Fail to do this, and you get treated like Sarah Lacy.

There’s a whole category on Valleywag devoted to Valley Foxes — of whom Smoking Sarah Lacy is one. It’s easy to see that Sarah Lacy’s reputation as a “flirtational” reporter preceded her. Was this SXSWi keynote a disaster waiting to happen? Why did it catch anyone by surprise? And, if she really did get the goods from Zuckerberg, does it really matter how she did it?

I’ll leave the sexist subtext for another blogger to tease out of this story. (Exhibit A: Dig a Tech Girl). In the meantime, I await Sarah Lacy’s official, non-Twittered response.

Updated: Looks like Sarah’s BusinessWeek cohorts have her back: Facebook CEO Admits Missteps totally sidesteps the controversy. The lines separating journalism and PR just got a little blurrier…

Updated again: The video emerges. I haven’t watched it and probably won’t get to until much later in the day. I wonder if what I see will totally undermine this blog post.

While they’re good for reading up on trends you may have missed — like Left-Hand Turn Elimination, genius! — they are equally good for a gloating over the memes you have already embraced and thrown to the curb. Lite-Brite Fashion? No big surprise to anyone who read the introductory issue of O’Reilly’s spin-off of Make, Craft. In 2006.

There are also typically an entire cast of “winners” at the end of each year. Why? Because marketing & PR pros in virtually every industry know that a bestowing a clever or timely award is great way to create noise for your organization. Those taking advantage of the calendar’s end include:

Oxford Word of the Year: Locavore
Time Magazine Invention of the Year: iPhone
Sys Admin of the Year: Matt Timken
Information Week CIO of the Year: Tim Stanley
Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year: Brett Favre

Though I tend to prefer the more intellectual bent the New York Times takes with their 2007 wrap-up, their editorial process is basically identical to how the more broadly appealing awards are selected. Whether we’re talking about the winning memes, or the winning people, it’s still fun to sit around the table making lists such as these. (Just ask your nearest Nick Hornby fan.)

And who knows — maybe 2008 will bring a client whose product speaks to the larger Community Urinalysis conversation. Arm thyself, PR pro!

The case was lost Sept. 19 when a driver for a Boston-based contractor failed to follow company procedures when loading it onto his vehicle, according to a statement e-mailed Wednesday by Laura Sudnik, spokeswoman for Iron Mountain Inc.

Even if you have never resided in the state of Louisiana, “Anyone who has completed a FAFSA and included a Louisiana postsecondary institution as an institution to which FAFSA data should be sent” may also be affected.

A few thoughts:

• Are there so many data breaches these days that large news outlets don’t blink when they hear of another one? Surely there are a lot of parents, and students, in the New York City area who may be interested in knowing that their names, social security numbers, and financial information may be compromised — merely by clicking “yes, send my FAFSA to Tulane.” Will The New York Times pick this story up?
• I understand why Iron Mountain wouldn’t want to call attention to the data breach on their website. But, still, as someone who may be adversely affected by their mistake, it annoys me to visit their home page and not see the data breach mentioned. When there is a safety recall for a food product, or for a toy, aren’t companies legally bound to acknowledge and spread news of their mistake? Is identity theft somehow less of a consumer risk that spinach that may or may not contain e. Coli? Shouldn’t Iron Mountain be the first to admit their error and work overtime to resolve it, using all the tools in their arsenal — including their website?
• How come my alma mater, Loyola University, hasn’t sent out an email blast to all of its alumni yet? My personal email address is registered with them, and they contact me frequently via direct mail as well. What role should the universities most affected by this breach play in alerting students? If I were on the university communications staff, I would do more than post a press release to the rotation that eventually leads — 4 clicks in — to this page.

We use many tools to monitor news of data breaches and laptop theft on behalf of our clients in the computer security industry. But you can always count on good old word-of-mouth networks to alert you of the news that affects you personally, before the story hits the headlines. Thanks, Mom. I’ll be keeping an eye on this (and calling Experian shortly).

I often find myself a member of someone else’s target audience just walking the streets of Brooklyn. This morning, for the second time this month, I found Zipcar set up near the F train passing out postcards.

Zipcar had staked out parking spots in front of the uptown and downtown subway entrances. I didn’t get a good look at the car on the downtown side, but the uptown one was a boxy Scion decked out in Brooklyn Cyclones wrap. (I wonder if you can rent that one? Might be fun.)

The car’s windows were down, and some funky — think K.C. and the Sunshine Band funky — instrumental music was wafting toward the commuters. The head Zipcar guy made a self-effacing comment about the song selection, which made me chuckle. He and the rest of the team were decked out in lime green polo shirts with the Zipcar logo and were handing postcards with coupon codes out to anyone who was game.

All in all, a reasonable promotion that was effective without being completely in-your-face. But what struck me more than the attitude of the promotion was its green theme. Zipcar had held the same guerrilla marketing campaign in my neighborhood in 2006. I remember because I kept the postcard and its generous discount on my fridge for several months (though I never used it).

While last year’s postcard had been all about branding Zipcar, this year, Zipcar took it up a notch. Their marketing team is now making a concerted effort to establish Zipcar as an environmentally-friendly choice.

My first thought: Isn’t that a little…weird? How can opting to drive a car be “green”?

Using my ‘hood as the site for their promotion is a great idea. Like many people in my zip code, I don’t have a car, and I’ve only begun to toy with the idea of getting one. But where Zipcar’s previous marketing encouraged me to drive instead of walking, Zipcar is now encouraging me to drive their car instead of driving my own car.

How is that green? How can you ask someone to tap into their environmental consciousness, but only so much? “Sure, we recycle…our paper plates.” Seems like a dangerous bit of logic to me.

That said, it’s a well-done promotion, down to the NYCLEAN coupon code and mentions of Minis and hybrids in the postcard copy. I’d love to get a source for the claim that “each Zipcar takes around 20 personally owned vehicles off the road,” though.

Lately, everywhere I look, I see green marketing. The September Fast Company cover story — which I must admit I haven’t read yet — details environmentalist Adam Werbach’s move to Wal-Mart. Like me, you have probably read about Wal-Mart’s ability to lure progressives into its PR lair, and even their energy-saving lightbulbs push. I’m interested to read Werbach’s story. (Incidentally, FC’s August issue had Al Gore on the cover.) eWeek’s Storage Goes Green feature also comes to mind.

While we’d love to get our clients into some of these green conversations, we intend to do so in a less eyebrow-raising way. Many of our clients’ technologies have very environmentally friendly applications. For us, it’s not a matter of just mixing blue and yellow (pardon the metaphor). It’s a matter of highlighting the true green-ness of what they already offer.

I was glad to read Church of the Customer’s response to the weekend New York Times story The High Price of Creating Ads. They remind us that the big agencies have a lot to lose when it comes to “decentralizing” their creative power:

Don’t be too surprised if the pitch for this particular story came from the ad agency owner who’s quoted in the piece. Message-creating agencies are threatened most by sharing power and influence with citizen-participants. The loss of control is threatening, but nothing will stop the democratization of participation. There’s too much broadband and too many cellphones and laptops and too many people accustomed the idea of sharing their opinions. Better to accept it now than two or three years from now when an upstart gains marketshare because it embraced participation and all of its quirks.

Though I’m a marketer at an agency that also offers PR services, I still occasionally need a friendly reminder that public relations practitioners play in my sandbox, too. Thanks, Church of the Customer.

Some other favorite recent posts from their blog:

• Communities vs. neighborhoods
• Lessons from a 40-date book tour
• Why we stopped podcasting