It’s getting to be late Sunday afternoon, I am avoiding work (I wonder why), and preparing to head down to my good friend Brian Solis‘ home to catch the end of the game and to say “see ya” before running East for the next month.

Brian and I spoke early this morning about the entire dustup that has been going on over the Social Media Release, hRelease, or whatever flag it flies under at the moment. One of the more salient points we discussed was that there was indeed two arguments being made, just piled together.

My partner in crime (and business), Stowe Boyd seemingly sparked this conversation with his post last week, “Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong.” You can read it for yourself, but Stowe touches on the first half of this problem, the PR industry.

As I see the problem, there’s a small issue of mechanics and a large issue of culture. The mechanics issue really boils down to the nuts and bolts of how press releases are presented to the world. Chris Heuer quite aptly refers to the hRelease as the “presentational layer” of the social media release in his post titled “The Social Media Release is about getting the facts right.” However, the mechanics really are nothing to bat an eyelash at – a standard is and will be resolved and anyone who chooses can put it to use.

The problem, as I see it, with the Social Media Release, is the cultural problem. The problems that Stowe outlines initially are pointed at the professionals and institutions that perpetuate a specific line of thinking and mode of operation. There are brave souls, such as Brian, that are willing to stand in the flames and share his knowledge with those that only are starting to get it – or more likely a bit curious about it.

The problem in my eyes is that we are hanging these cultural issues under the banner of the Social Media Release – but it’s simply too much responsibility for a simple specification on how to express a collection of bits and bytes. The hRelease format does not come coupled with a Code of Conduct, Best Practices, or other treatise on HOW to make the content more truthful, honest, and transparent. Unfortunately, and I don’t think it has been intentional, we here these concepts used interchangeably when the are nothing of the sort.

In a followup post, Stowe addresses head on the issues of hRelease and his position on the matter. This sums it up best, I believe:

I applaud any efforts, philosophically, that are an attempt to shake the corporate centroids into a real dialogue with us, the edglings. However, I don’t believe in hedging, over-simplifying, or reusing outdated rhetoric in an attempt to make it easier for the poor, benighted corporate types to make the trip to the promised land without hard work. The core dynamics of webology can’t be put aside for the sake of offering PR agencies’ clients a baby step by baby step path into the new age of interaction. We are putting aside lying, so let’s not even lie to the liers. Let’s not perpetuate false and misleading metaphors, like “audiences” and “crafting messages for our markets”.

/Message

Amen. Despite all the magical powers and abilities we obtain from technology, it cannot replace the need for change – an emergent force that comes from within, often after weathering a significant amount of trauma from without.

If we truly want to effect change on an aging business practice and culture, we need to attack the problem from both within and without. From within, we need to invigorate the various parties as to the “soft”, human rewards. From without, we must present the metrics, case studies, and best practices that compel and propel all business decisions.

technorati tags:stowe+boyd, brian+solis, chris+heuer, hRelease, social+media+release, social+media+club, pr, pr20, press+release

Jeremy Ballenger raises some interesting questions about x:posted, and more precisely, about the methods and tactics that should be used in raising the Intention Economy barn.

…seems a little like consignment sales, sell-side driven to provide a service to buyers. Intention (going by Doc’s idea) is more like buyers yelling ‘I want to buy X‘ and sellers falling over themselves to get to you. X:posted is a central respository or market for sellers – buyers visit and sample the wares. In other words, you still have to go to them. Similar sites are eLance and Guru.I might have misinterpreted Doc’s original idea, but to me something like x:posted or Shel’s approach is close, but not quite there. A functioning intention economy, and for the moment we are restricted to discussing web-enabled commerce, seems to essentially be a search problem. On reflection, my earlier thoughts on this were a little off in describing buyer searches. I think it might actually work the other way, through seller search, buyer filters and maybe even the intelligent use of something like tags.

think mojo

I think he’s right, based on what’s presented in this post. I think we’ve come a long way in terms of the definition of what we’re building and the direction in which we’re moving towards with Social Roots – definitely the thesis is much deeper.

However, Jeremy goes on to add some more fuel to the mixture.

With the increasing use of tags, blog uptake and developments in search technology, this is an example that may have some legs. Ideally, an independent operation would develop the vendor search technology under open source (GNU), alongside parallel development of a plugin for bloggers providing ‘intention tags’. I’ve got nothing against Google (aside from the whole censorship-in-China-thing), but a benefit of the intention economy should be lower transaction costs.

think mojo

The remainder begins an open consideration of providing more and more value to third parties. I think we’ve seen this problem many times over. For example, one point he seems to lay out is that independent parties can come along, spider the web, and essentially sell leads against it. That’s probably great news – for all the usual players. The incentive to search, parse, and store data on resources that makes you know money is considerable and eventually – no one’s indexing people looking for Irish Wool, just home refinance.

As for the disparity in costs for these systems, as noted “The more
cash you have, the better search technology you can afford.” the
reality is that that’s a two-way street. You’ll also need bath tubs
full of cash to index the world to find the valuable intentions.

At the same time, we have another pit to overcome – incentive. This problem correlates nicely to the barriers being faced by the Structured Blogging / Microformats groups. Why exactly do I bother to markup this data? Why do I add work to my workflow? Is there an inventive for me other than being a better citizen? Once that’s proven, there’s more traction in all directions.

We’ve had to spend considerable time as we’ve built Social Roots to understand how to create enough value for the user without having cold, hard cash. It’s very difficult and we don’t know if it will work. Chicken and egg indeed.

I recommed everyone join in on this conversation. There’s quite a lot at stake here.

technorati tags:structured+blogging, microformats, economy, intention+economy, doc+searls, marketplaces, socialroots

Last night, I attended the 1-year anniversary party for microformats. Luckily, I got to catch up with a few people I hadn’t seen in a while, especially Rohit (I love that guy). Anthony rolled down with me and came through in a pinch to lead the music for the first hour and a half – serious thanks to him for setting the tone.

Today – why not yesterday? – Yahoo! has announced that they are now even more broadly supporting microformats throughout the Yahoo! Local site.

Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews. There are a few reasons behind this change, which for now, will be transparent to almost everyone.

Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog » Blog Archive » We Now Support Microformats

Admittedly, microformats are still pretty geeky in nature and we haven’t really seen serious movement in collecting them and leveraging them (for good and evil undoubtedly), but it will happen. SocialRoots will have microformats everywhere we can put them – I can promise that much right now and make good on it in a few days ;)

technorati tags:microformats, yahoo, hCard, hReview, hCal