Simon Owens has an excellent post over at Bloggasm, The Politics of Digg.  He gives an indepth analysis of how top “Diggers” use and/or game Digg to get high rankings.  It involves a helluva lot.  Relationship building.  Timing.  Persistance.  Free time.

It’s very much now a quid-pro-quo environment.  It’s people developing relationships over time to help one another’s Diggs.  While that may be obvious, the point is that for the top people on Digg, it has become IMPERATIVE for long term success.

by Jonathan Trenn

I just read to intriguing posts on PR.  One is by Michael Arrington on, of course, TechCrunch.    It would be a great piece except that I disagree with his key point.

Then, as Chris pointed out, The PR Roadblock On the Road to Blissful Blogging.  Jeremy Pepper wrote something really special with Can I Get a Big Cup of STFU Please?

I figured I’d add my two cents here, somewhat separate from the above, but nevertheless related to them.

Jeremy Pepper just wrote a blog post entitled Can I can get a big cup of STFU please? that you should read.  The long story short is that  social media is just one part of public relations and that everything really hinges on relationships and connections:

The fact is that social media is ONE part of public relations. A SMALL part, if you are a good PR person or firm. The other parts are traditional media (while it might be shrinking, it still reaches that middle part of the country), analyst relations, events, and more.

For some time now, those in social media have talked of authenticity. We’ve talked of transparency. We’ve said that organizations must engage their stakeholders and listen. They can’t just send out forced marketing messages. If they do, it will fail. They can’t be unauthentic or they’ll lose valuable trust.

We’ll say all of this in online discussions. On blog posts. In online magazines. In podcasts. On Twitter. At conferences. At TweetUps. Podcamps. Everywhere.

And you know what? I completely agree.

But we may be in the minority and it may be - at this point - impossible to do much about it.

I have been going through Google Docs and discovered an internal document I would like to share with you from back in the beginning of 2007. Taylor Donlan wrote it to explain to our new staff how best to reach out to and engage online on behalf of our clients and in general. I was inspired to share it based on this comment by Jonathan Crawford from the article What motivated you to learn about social media? Check it out and tell me what you think:

Disclosure: Philosophically, I’m equidistant between John McCain and Barack Obama. I like both. And I haven’t decided whom I’m going to vote for. I’m an independent and I’ve always voted for the person.

Okay…

When I say internet, I don’t mean the thing that was started by the Pentagon after World War II. Nor do I mean this great medium that we can do marketing on.

When I say internet, I mean the internet as a catalyst that’s causing huge cultural shifts in the way we as individuals and organizations present ourselves, from the way we communicate and the way we handle commerce. It’s changed. It’s a massive change, it’s a widespread change, it’s a permanent change.

Most of think of social media through our marketing lens eyes. As we should. That’s likely its greatest use. But the reality is that social media encompasses so much. Or more importantly, it will soon touch on most internal business operations.

That’s why I wrote that latest post. We seem, in our attempts to define it, to be actually inadvertently limiting it. Much of our call-to-change, if implemented, could result in ineffective disjointed efforts that lead to disappointment and even failure.

I’m in the process of pitching a potential client. From what I see, if this works out, it will be an excellent opportunity. They’re a marketing service provider that offers the traditional services to their client base. The methods they use are still very much needed, they aren’t out of date, and they won’t be out of date any time soon. But in this era of digital marketing, those methodologies clearly aren’t enough. Not when the users of their clients products are more likely to look online for those very products.

I’m gonna run with this concept of community for a while. I’ve touched on something that’s created a bit of a spark. In other words, I value the contributions people have made here and I want to keep the discussion going.

I woke up to an amazing article written by Jonathan Trenn, The fallacy of community, and I responded in a comment to a pretty passionate article and a passionate comment string, and here’s what I wrote — and I have expanded the argument below, so it is an expansion:

One of the most sacred principles in social media is the concept of “the community”. It serves as the foundation of what social media marketers base their business models and methodologies on. “Engage your community” we are told. “Engage or die”.

Companies today are seeking to create their own communities, be they formulated around the company itself or around brands the company produces. Some of these attempts do well, others fail. Those that fail do so for a variety of reasons.

Saul Wainwright is the Director of Operations for Abraham & Harrison. Saul has worked for A&H for just on a year having worked his way up from OCM to Project Manager to his current position, Director of Operations.

A big part of what my firm, Abraham Harrison LLC, does is online outreach and blogger relations. We’re doing our first book promotion campaign for our client, Survivor Corps, and Jerry White’s new book, I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis, and we have been having a lot of fun and plenty of success. We are very proud and excited by our work on this campaign.

A big part of what my firm, Abraham Harrison LLC, does is online outreach and blogger relations. We’re doing our first book promotion campaign for our client, Survivor Corps, and Jerry White’s new book, I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis, and we have been having a lot of fun and plenty of success. We are very proud and excited by our work on this campaign. Here are a bunch of the blog posts that we have been able to collect over the last few weeks of active campaigning of people and bloggers who have chosen to be responsive to our blogger promotion in the form of blog and forum posts (Via Chris Abraham and Marketing Conversation):