(This is an Open Letter guest post from travel expert Tim Leffel, who wants to help public relations (PR) and marketing folks who are stumbling around in the dark regarding Web-based tourism development.  Anyone who still deals with a recalcitrant boss about these issues, even if you aren’t in travel and tourism, will find something helpful in his suggestions.)

Dear person who handles the marketing budget for your travel destination:

In case you have not been reading the news, the media landscape rug has been pulled out from under you. What have you done to adjust?

I’m a travel writer who writes a lot and travels a lot. In the past year, I’ve had two dozen PR and marketing people working in travel tell me that their boss or executive board is at least a decade behind the times in their marketing focus. While my contact person telling me this may be clued in to what matters, the people controlling the marketing purse strings are still fully stuck in the old world they understand, namely print and TV press and advertising.

A couple of times a month, I’ll get a call or e-mail from some PR person about an article I wrote for Perceptive Travel, the Practical Travel Gear blog, or Luxury Latin America—all sites I run myself. The caller needs to put together some kind of ad value report to show their boss or board because, well, that’s the way it’s always been done and that’s the report that has to be written. If the article can’t be measured in monetary terms, it doesn’t matter in their eyes, regardless of how many visitors it brought to their door.

The problem is, while that may have sorta worked in the print world, it doesn’t on the Web.

It was never a very accurate gauge anyway, as this article will attest:   Why most magazine industry metrics are bogus (and that’s from a publishing industry trade!) Anyone on the inside can tell you the circulation numbers are bogus, the published advertising rates are bogus and the demographic breakdowns are bogus.

But at least the suits are used to those particular stretches of credulity. On a website, however, this is an exercise in futility; an invitation to just make up a bunch of numbers to please the boss.

There’s no such thing as a “full page ad” to value to start with. Just banners. There’s no real circulation—just unique monthly visitors and page views. And how do you place an ad value on an article that people will keep reading for years, month after month? How do you value a link to your site? For someone who knows about search engine optimization, that link is very valuable. To a visitors’ bureau board member who still doesn’t know what a blog is, it’s worth far less than a one-paragraph newspaper mention.

Everybody’s heard of the Detroit Free Press, right? So it must be more valuable than being on something called BoingBoing, right? (Um, hate to break it to you, but no. It’s not even close. Besides, the Free Press is the one that had to cut back home delivery to three days a week because it’s a financial wreck.)

I promise you that your potential visitors, including the ones who increasingly can’t remember the last time they read a newspaper, are getting their information from all over the Web and from social media. They are relying less and less on what the traditional gatekeeper people you always pitched (newspapers and magazines) have to say. Unfortunately, this means you have to work much harder now.

Your universe of 20 magazines and 50 newspapers is now a few less of those, but 100 or even 500 blogs. And some of those writers contribute to multiple outlets. You’re no longer pitching an outlet, you are pitching a person: an influencer. The good news is, you get to the right influencers, you’ve got champions who will send you visitors by the planeload, year after year.

This requires a radically different approach and a vastly more fragmented way of spending your resources. Buying one of those silly “special advertising sections” in a general travel magazine is going to pale in effectiveness compared to spending that same amount on Google Adsense and 20 specialized travel websites. Inviting a dozen freelance print writers on a press trip will get you spotty results over time, but inviting a dozen prolific writers who blog on subjects specific to your destination’s appeal will pay off for years and send measurable traffic to your official site.

Here are six things you can do right now to drastically improve your destination’s marketing effectiveness and pull in more visitors:

1) Figure out who is already writing about your destination and engage them the way they want to be engaged. This may be e-mail, Twitter, phone, Facebook or LinkedIn. It is almost surely not by spraying them with press releases.

2) Figure out which blogs and sites are already sending visitors to your website. (You do monitor your stats weekly, right? You do have Google alerts set up, right?) Those are obvious ad targets for the marketing people and those are editors/bloggers your publicists need to be talking with. First go thank them, then build a relationship.

3) Spend some time researching which websites and blogs are a great match for your visitor demographics. As a cheap destinations expert, I hear regularly from and/or have been on press trips with Honduras, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, parts of Mexico and Panama. I haven’t heard a peep from most of the other destinations profiled in The World’s Cheapest Destinations book or on my blog, even though I am quoted in the major media every month and my blog is one of the top 100,000 sites on the web. I’m the best-known travel writer in Nashville, Tennessee, but in a decade of living here I’ve never heard from the city’s visitors’ bureau. That’s just silly. If you run a family travel destination or attraction and don’t have Sheila Scarborough or the Traveling Mamas on your radar, you’re missing a huge opportunity. It’s even easier to target sites focused on specific geography. For some destinations there are fewer than 10 people who generate 80 percent of the search engine hits. For a place like Nicaragua it’s two or three. Do you even know who they are? Those people should be on your cell phone’s speed dial.

4) Add every relevant site to your RSS feed and visit them often. (You do have an RSS reader set up don’t you?) You can’t pitch to blogs if you don’t know their style, tone and subject matter (or at least follow them on Twitter if that’s your thing.) Blind pitching doesn’t work anymore. Mass market advertising doesn’t work anymore. You need to focus and converse, not broadcast.

5) Stop worrying about bragging rights. Sure, it’s great to say “As featured in Travel + Leisure” when they write a few sentences about your destination on page 148, right behind the fold-out ad for Lexus, but in terms of influencing travelers to visit, did it matter? Was that one-page magazine ad that ran for one month really more effective than advertising on 20 very well-matched websites or blogs for an entire YEAR? Focus on the actual objective, not on what sounds impressive on a report.

6) Listen to your people at the bottom. The most junior people in your organization probably already know what needs to be done. They don’t have your built-in preconceptions and prejudices and will always be two steps ahead of you. Give them a budget, stop worrying about whether they are “wasting time on Facebook,” and turn them loose.

If you still have questions after reading this, let’s get together at Travel Media Showcase or Visit Europe Media Exchange (VEMEX) or have a drink in your destination’s best pub. (“Will work for beer.”)

But if you really want to jump on the social media train with both feet and don’t know where to start, keep reading this blog…or just hire Sheila and Connie!

Tim Leffel is the author of three travel books, editor of the award-winning webzine Perceptive Travel, and editor of several blogs.

He still likes to write for magazines too.

You can see his portfolio and contact information at TimLeffel.com.

More from Every Dot Connects

• Blogging Basics: How to start a blog, and whether you’ll ever make money from it
• Today’s lesson: your private conversations ain’t so private
• A different breed: what to expect from bloggers

Valeria Maltoni is one of the very few people for whom, if she said, “Jump!” I’d respond, “How high?”

A couple of weeks ago she asked me to jump, so I did. I’m very honored to be one of the 12 marketing bloggers she invited to make a contribution to an eBook called Marketing in 2009.

Our assignment was not to make predictions for the upcoming year but prescriptions, looking at what we think will be important trends and directions for marketing in general and social media in particular, and then sharing our mandates for execution.

That opening “e” in execution seemed to jump out at me and became my theme. My contribution is called: MARKETING PRESCRIPTIONS FOR 2009: VITAMIN E.

The three E’s in my Rx are

Explode your firewalls

Educate your employees

Explore, experiment, empower

The other contributors are

Olivier Blanchard, The Brand Builder, @thebrandbuilder

Matt Dickman, Techno||Marketer, @MattDickman

Mike Fruchter, My Thoughts on Social Media, @Fruchter

Francois Gossieaux, Emergence Marketing, @fgossieaux

Beth Harte, The Harte of Marketing, @BethHarte

Lois Kelly, Beeline Labs, @LoisKelly

Christina Kerley, CK Epiphany, @ckepiphany

Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide, @JenniferLaycock

Amber Naslund, Altitude Branding, @AmberCadabra

Mike Wagner, Own Your Brand!, @bigwags

Alan Wolk, The Toad Stool, @awolk

Download the free Marketing in 2009 eBook from Conversation Agent.

In the continued blurring of the lines between content creators serving as “new media”, public relations professionals, mainstream media and the combination of all of the above, I was given press credentials and a media kit for an excellent haunted house here in Austin. In keeping with the interactive nature of social media, I was even invited to participate.

The Mansion of Terror Haunted House, in its fifth year in Austin, is inviting members of the media, including social media, to interact with and even be a part of their haunted house.

If you choose to, and they think you can handle it, you can be a part of the Mansion of Terror, getting a full Hollywood Make up FX session, as well as a Hollywood quality costume and acting lessons.

If you’re not feeling that much of the exhibitionism spirit, but still want to see how it all works, you can still hang out with the actors while they perform. We received invitations, as media, to hang out backstage and shoot footage, interview the actors, and generally get a “behind the scenes” view of a night at the Mansion of Terror.

Or you can directly shadow a specific Mansion of Terror actor. By hiding in the shadows, wearing black, and staying quiet, the Mansion of Terror Haunted House will allow you to document how their scenes and scares actually work. You’ll know the all the secrets.

I opted to be on the receiving end of the performances and went through both sides of the Mansion of Terror. It’s some pretty scary stuff, and I grew up on this kind of thing – thanks Mom! – so I know more than a little bit about what’s scary and what’s just corny. The Mansion of Terror will make even the most hardened among us start looking for the exits.

I’d recommend to any social media types who are here in Austin to contact them and see if they will allow you to take them up on their offer. If you don’t feel like being a reporter, you can go as a customer. It’s worth it. I promise you. Check out the Flickr slide show and the film clips on the website.

To get in touch with them email dneff22@gmail.com or DM on twitter @daveiam.

The Mansion of Terror is very social media centric. When you check out the website you’ll see they’re on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and, of course, FlickR. With so many ways you can follow and connect with them, it’s great for really getting into the Halloween spirit.

The best way to really know the feeling of horror and fear you will get from the Mansion of Terror, however, is to go visit in person. Good luck and Happy Halloween.

WARNING:
This haunted house has intense sequences of graphic violence, extensive blood and gore, small claustrophobic enclosed areas, extended periods of total darkness, strobe special effects. This attraction may be too intense for patrons under 13 years of age.

~Mike Chapman

More from Every Dot Connects

• Social Media: Too Much of a Good Thing?
• Social Media Blog Carnival – Your Best Shots
• Travel and Tourism Meet Social Media

Chris Brogan has another project. How does he do it? Dad-O-Matic goes live today.

I was honored to be asked to join a group of great bloggers and, more importantly, really great people who also happen to be dads or have something to share about dads. Please visit the new site and comment, especially on my post. You know how fragile the male ego is. We need a lot of reassurance.

You know, I feel kind of feel like a proud dad all over again, just by being part of the project. Thank you Chris.

~Mike Chapman

P.S. Don’t forget, the victims of Hurricane Ike need your help. Use the ‘Strike Back at Ike’ widget over on the right to help directly with your online contribution.

Note: The following article originally appeared in the May issue of the Marketing Watchdog Journal. A recent post by Mike Volpe of Hubspot on the role of PR firms reminded me I had not published it here.

While most business executives have never heard the term social media, PR and advertising agencies are adopting it as their latest buzzword, along with terms like conversation and community. These are powerful concepts that deserve attention at the C-suite level, so it is disheartening to see those with minimal understanding of the concepts attempt to cut-and-paste them into their marketing materials.

When used in relation to media or networking, the word social simply refers to people rather than computers. Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Ning and other social networks connect people via an unseen maze of hubs and nodes, much like a LAN connects a business’s computers. Through technologies and tools such as blogs, YouTube videos or iTunes podcasts, social media allows people to interact with content creators, and it allows the employees, customers and stakeholders of a business to co-create content and engage in discussions that can reshape a company’s product or service offerings.

PR professionals, whether internal teams or outside agencies, are being swept up in the maelstrom created by the collision of top-down messaging and bottom-up innovation—and there have been casualties.

Recently, Gina Trapani, author of the top-ranked Lifehacker blog, published a blacklist of PR agencies who had spammed her personal e-mail address with poorly targeted press releases. She wasn’t the first. Last year Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, did the same thing. Gina’s blacklist, however, went further: It included instructions on how to permanently block any e-mail address from a company’s domain name.

It’s important for companies to get coverage by top bloggers and online media outlets, but the practice of blogger relations is like navigating a minefield: You have to know where to step or you can trigger an explosion that will maim your campaign. It requires detailed knowledge of new and emerging media as well as old-school relationship-building skills.

Yet when it comes to PR and marketing campaigns, most of the executives responsible for decision-making have no personal familiarity with social media tools or technologies, let alone the culture or ethos of the blogosphere.

How can you tell if your PR team is social-media savvy? Ask these questions of the top people responsible for your public relations efforts—not the digital natives who are junior associates, but the digital immigrants who occupy the head chair at the conference table.

• Which blogs do you read regularly?
• Are you familiar with the popular feed readers? Which one do you recommend?
• Have you ever created a blog or written a post for one?
• How often do you comment on blogs?
• Have you ever uploaded a video to YouTube?
• Have you ever uploaded digital photos to a site like Flickr?
• What social networks do you belong to? Do you use them for personal or professional reasons?
• How do you use your cell phone besides making calls?
• Do you have accounts on any microblogging sites such as Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce?
• Have you ever had an audio conversation on Utterz or a video chat on ooVoo?

I’ll stop there because I’m sure you get my point: The people making the decisions usually have a total disconnect with social media and Web 2.0 technologies. They may be familiar with the buzzwords, but they have no hands-on experience.

Now, it’s not necessary for C-suite executives to be able to answer all these questions. The important thing is that they be willing to work with—and take advice from—those who know the answers. To bring them in at the inception of a campaign, not call them as an afterthought.

Some people are digital translators—those who can bridge the knowledge and experience gap between digital natives and digital immigrants in the workforce—and these are the folks you want on your PR team. They are old enough to have solid experience in traditional methods but have immersed themselves in Internet culture and practice enough to be adept at new technologies and open to innovative methods.

Like all translators, they are articulate communicators with finely-tuned people skills. At this stage they are not easy to find, but they do exist. Search out these people and nurture relationships with them if you want your PR efforts to remain relevant in the age of Google.

I’ve mentioned my favorite political blogger here several times. She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s extremely knowledgable on politics, and I give her much of the credit for getting me interested in social media. Now I get to be on some high powered panels with her as part of My ooVoo Day Political Edition this Sunday and Monday.

My political blogging hero is Eileen Smith, creator of In The Pink Texas and editor of TexasMonthly.com the online edition of Texas Monthly magazine. OK, I tricked her into doing this with flattery and small bribes. That’s not really true, but if you read her blog posts regularly, you’ll get the spirit.

The Pink Lady and I don’t always agree and when we don’t, she’s always right. Well, except on a few issues and I won’t mention what they are. If you watch the replay of our panel here on Every Dot Connects, or on one of Eileen’s blogs, you’ll probably figure out what those very, very few issues are. Here’s a hint, I supported Barack Obama and she still wants Hillary to take it to the convention. Other than that, we agree on everything.

Politics can get really boring for normal people. Eileen gets that and makes the issues of the day fun. She isn’t Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert…she’s better. Recently, she posted about our upcoming panel, which just happens to be on Obama’s birthday (I thought you’d like that Eileen) and, once again, she cracked me up.

Here’s her take…

When my blog friend and yours, The Other Guy, started telling me about some new, exciting platform for online communications and digital media, I quickly said “unsubscribe” and hung up the phone. But then he told me it had something to do with a live video chat and I’m like, sign me up. Who am I to pass up yet another opportunity to embarrass myself and the entire staff of Texas Monthly?

God knows I’ve had plenty of practice, appearing on panels I have no business being on, where I nod my head thoughtfully and continuously blink so as to appear awake. No matter. I’ve already coerced the lovely Karen Brooks and the lovely Andy Brown to appear on the virtual panel so they can save my virtual ass.

ooVoo is the hot new video chat and conferencing tool (and I say it’s “hot” and “new” because I just found out about it). They’re hosting several virtual political panels over the next week. You can sign up to be a participant if slots are available (especially if you have a mac and a built-in web cam). Live streaming is not an option yet, but you can watch the recorded sessions once they’re uploaded. I’ll be posting them here once they’re online so you all can make fun of me while I get all defensive and then burst into tears. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?! Who’s the Other Guy?

Here’s the full line-up:

Adriana Maestas, Marisa Trevino & Edmundo Rocha / Latino Politics Blog, Latina Lista & XicanoPwr
Albert Maruggi / Provident Partners
Arlene Fenton / Black Women Vote
Baratunde Thurston / goodCRIMETHINK
Eric Roston / Carbon Nation
Eileen Smith & Mike Chapman / In The Pink Texas & Every Dot Connects
Erin Kotecki Vest / Queen of Spain
Jason Rosenbaum / The Seminal
Joanne Bamberger, Glennia Campbell & Stefania Pomponi Butler / PunditMom, The Silent I & City Mama
L.N. Rock / African American Political Pundit
Leslie Carbone
Liza Sabater / Liza Sabater, culturekitchen, Daily Gotham
Mary Katherine Ham / HamBlog
Matt Parker / Political Buzz
Morra Aarons / Women and Work
Nicco Mele / EchoDitto
Robert Millis & Will Coghlan / Hudson Street Media
Todd Zeigler / The Bivings Report

Join us or one of the many others who are participating in the ooVoo Day Political Edition. Tune in.

~Mike Chapman

More from Every Dot Connects

• Blogging Basics: How to start a blog, and whether you’ll ever make money from it
• World Sjogren’s Day | Every Dot Connects
• Our ooVoo Debut: From Connections to Community

The New York Times has done it again. They’ve taken a story about women in tech and relegated it to the Fashion and Style section. In “Blogging’s Glass Ceiling,” a story about last week’s BlogHer conference, Kara Jesella wrote, “There is a measure of parity on the Web. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among Internet users, 14 percent of men and 11 percent of women blog….Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming 3 women on its list of 25.”

Well, hello! Yes, there’s a glass ceiling. And instead of addressing the question, the New York Times editors are part of the problem. A story about men who blog, especially if they had built the kind of powerhouse network the BlogHer folks have, would have run in the business or technology section of the newspaper. But women’s accomplishments in the blogosphere are celebrated in Fashion and Style.

(Hat tip to Amber Naslund for pointing out the Times story and the disparity.)

A few months ago, in my post Five White Men Talk About Social Media, I pointed to another New York Times article that diminished the accomplishments of women by its placement in the Fashion and Style section. “Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain,” by Stephanie Rosenbloom, details the gender gap in tech among teenagers. “Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of ‘The X Files.’ On the contrary,” Rosenbloom wrote, “the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.”

These women cyberpioneers, young and old, will have a better chance at smashing through blogging’s glass ceiling when editors quit assuming that all stories about women belong in the Fashion section.

UPDATE:   Tricia Romano at Pop + Politics asked the New York Times, Do you need a suit and a penis to be in the business section? She published Style section editor Trip Gabriel’s response. Short answer: the journalist only pitched the story to Fashion & Style, not the technology or business sections. For the online edition, the story has now been cross-posted under Technology.

More from Every Dot Connects

• Blogging Basics: How to start a blog, and whether you’ll ever make money from it
• 6 ways to improve your destination marketing (and why you’re toast if you don’t)
• Today’s lesson: your private conversations ain’t so private

This past weekend I had the opportunity to catch up with my former colleague and political phenom, Steve Hildebrand, Deputy Campaign Manager for the Obama Presidential campaign. Steve and several of the key staff members from the Obama campaign were speaking to the Netroots Nation conference about their online campaign.

Steve recounted that while planning the campaign with the Obamas, they decided that “Barack had to be authentic.” The online campaign, like the overall campaign, had to be about the movement and changing the country. Further, it had to allow for volunteers to be true partners in the online efforts, allowing for a wide range of affinity groups created within the campaign’s own website and for local volunteer organizations to be truly empowered.

They recognized that the “internet alone won’t win elections. It must be combined with on-the-ground efforts.” That combination could allow Obama’s skills as a community organizer to be translated online to reach out in ways never before possible on a Presidential campaign.

According to Hildebrand, they determined that the Iowa caucuses could provide the “path of credibility” they needed to go the distance. Simultaneously, they began preparations for a full-scale national campaign based largely on volunteer support and coordinated largely online.

They discovered that Obama would draw support from across the country and further used their website in a serious attempt to win the “the first primary, the financial primary,” in spite of the huge advantages of their opponents. When the fundraising results for the 4th quarter of 2007 were announced, they had won the “financial primary” with a record number of donors and dollars coming from their online efforts.

The goal of MyBarackObama.com, the hub of all Obama campaign online activity, is not to win awards, but to win the election. The Obama campaign has kept it simple, sticking to the fundamentals. All functions of the online campaign are specifically done to compliment traditional campaign strategies.

The Obama campaign is fully embracing the potential of the online organizational opportunities and they are active in a number of online social networks. While the online activities of the Obama campaign did not win the nomination, they were a integral and key component. Fundraising, community organizing, get out the vote (GOTV) activities, voter registration, meetups, and rapid responses to media and opponent charges, are all greatly enhanced by the internet efforts.

Smart companies, non-profits, and government agencies will certainly be studying the Obama online efforts to see where they might enhance their own consumer and constituent services.

~Mike Chapman

Valeria Maltoni’s request on Twitter for examples of engaging detractors was the stimulus I needed to finish writing a short case study, Negative Product Review Revised after Company Founder Engages with Critic. (Click on the title to download the free PDF.)

What the case study can’t convey is the series of rapid-fire exchanges with an understandably upset client, Aruni Gunasegaram of Babble Soft, when her new software product received a seriously snarky review by Jennifer Laycock, author of The Lactivist, an influential blog in the market Aruni hoped to reach. Her first email came in while I was at dinner with friends. I started to ignore the flashing red light on my Blackberry but was glad I checked when I found Aruni’s message alerting me to the criticism and asking, “What do I do?”

To her credit, Aruni not only asked for advice, she followed it. She did not respond in anger, but did her homework and learned something about Jennifer, her blog, and her readers. When Aruni did add a comment to The Lactivist, it was well received. She and Jennifer also exchanged e-mails, establishing the basis for a relationship.

Several months later Aruni started her own blog, entrepreMusings, and she and Jennifer follow each other on Twitter now. And to show what a small world it is, I had dinner with Jennifer last month at BloggerSocial08 in New York. We shared a laugh over how the situation had unfolded and how the former critic had become an ally.

Here’s the summary of the Case Study:

Company
Babble Soft, provider of Web and mobile software for parents of newborns

Challenge
A press release for a new product launch was picked up by an influential blogger who wrote a very negative review.

Solution
Every Dot Connects worked with Babble Soft on a strategy to engage the blogger in constructive conversation.

Success
The blogger apologized for the tone of the review and continued to interact with Babble Soft founder via her blog, email and, later, on Twitter and other social networks.

If you’d like to read more, including the guidelines I drafted for engaging with blogger critics, download the PDF: Case Study: Negative Product Review Revised after Company Founder Engages with Critic

I really enjoy irreverent comedy and I regularly DVR Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. He says what many are thinking but are too polite to say out loud. He also brings in guests from every end of the spectrum and no topic is off limits. It’s a little like the blogosphere.

One of Maher’s regular features is a segment called “New Rules.” In it, he pokes fun at conventional wisdom and current events. Recently, referring to a photo of the Pope walking with President Bush, Maher announced that new rule would be, “from now on, the Pope has to wear a slip,” making fun of the fact that you could see the outline of the Pope’s legs through his garment. I laughed. Others might have been offended. Watching is optional.

Back to the blogosphere, Gina Trapani, of the very well known Lifehacker blog, let it be known this week that she is going to filter and block, using gmail, all incoming emails from a long list of PR companies. Gina had apparently established some rules regarding submission of tips for her to consider writing about. PR firms that ended up on the list had violated her rules with the usual spam-like mass pitching that some PR firms engage in. Her response to them not following the rules of her blog is to black-list them, and to share her list with other bloggers. This is big news because Lifehacker is a very widely-read blog and the PR firms on the list will have to adjust their clients’ strategies if they involve her blog and others who might follow her lead.

My own thinking is that if you want to get something printed in a blog, you have to follow the rules, customs, whims, desires, superstitions, or whatever is involved, of the author of that particular blog. No standard set of rules applies. For the millions of blogs now in existence, each is their own nation, with their own local laws and customs. If it sounds like too much work, then it’s probably not the work you should be doing. Of course, you could just get lucky.

To date there have been a number of suggestions for how PR firms should deal with bloggers, but no hard and fast set of rules is in place for general use. Even if there was one I imagine it would still be a pretty standard thing for certain bloggers to deviate from them. Blogs proliferated in the first place because of a convergence of new technologies and the strong desire to get out from under the limited world of the “mainstream media.” What incentive is there to recreate the same or similar rules?

Maybe the new rule for media relations is that there will never, ever be any one set of rules for dealing with social media, the blogosphere, and social networks. Perhaps the new rule, which is really a very old rule, is that you should treat everyone the way you would want to be treated; the golden rule.

Here at Every Dot Connects, we blog. So, hopefully, when we communicate with bloggers on a cause, an issue, or on behalf of a client we’re working with, we have the ability to relate to what they’re going through. Maybe not on the same scale, but we can relate. Because no college course, certificate from the state you live in, authoritative book, study guide or instruction manual, will even come close to providing a handy guide to the new media than being directly involved.

In the meantime, I know I’ll be making some mistakes and doing some good work at the same time. And, like the rest of us in social media, I’ll be watching to see how these many new rules play out. Because, just like on Bill Maher’s show, new rules are probably being written even now. And someone, maybe even the Pope, is already breaking them.

~Mike Chapman