Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta on How Blogs Amplify Traditional PR

Shortly after this blog launched I received an intriguing email from Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta about how his company fused blog PR and traditional media relations to help build brand awareness. Rich agreed to take this to the next step with an email interview, resulting in the second in my ongoing series of Micro Persuasion’s “Bloggerside Chats” with CEOs, bloggers, PR professionals and journalists.

Prior to joining Topix, Rich held a variety of senior roles at Netscape/America Online, including including Director of Engineering for Netscape Search, AOL Music, and AOL Shopping. He joined Netscape/AOL upon its purchase of NewHoo/The Open Directory Project, where he was Co-founder & CEO. By the way, Topix has a great page to keep up with PR industry news.

[Note: Topix.net is not a client of CooperKatz & Company, where I am employed.] If there’s someone else you think that my readers (journalists, marketing and PR pros) would benefit in hearing from, please drop me an email.

Q) Rich, what is the long term plan for Topix.net? And what did you learn from your days with NewHoo/Netscape about running an Internet business in what I am calling the Internet renaissance?

SKRENTA: There's way too much information on the net for humans to make sense of, so automation is needed. In the search engines this takes the form of clever algorithms to help users locate relevant websites quickly.

Topix is applying search engine and AI algorithms to the discovery and delivery of news. Since news is an editorial product, there's even more opportunity to create differentiated products than with a web index or catalog.

Running an Internet business provides the opportunity to track business metrics in real time at a very detailed level. There's a lot in common between ecommerce and direct marketing. You have to know the right questions to ask, do proper A/B studies to determine what works and what doesn't, and let the market tell you where to take your product rather than relying on personal guesses.

Q) Your site provides local news for every ZIP code in the country, more than 30,000 cities and towns in all. And your system is completely automated. Some newspapers, like in Spokane, are enlisting bloggers to help them cover local news. What role do bloggers and personal journalists play on your site? Do you have plans to "slurp" their RSS feeds?

SKRENTA: Blogs take several forms. Some are heavy on quoting and linking; for those, we'd rather index the original sources directly than through a blog. Others write high-quality article-length original material; those are the kinds of sources we'd like to add to our system.

Currently weblogs make up just 1% of the sources we are crawling. But I'm very excited about participatory journalism. If blogging helps folks get out and write about their community, that's great content being generated at the hyperlocal level.

Q) What are your most trafficked topics/zip codes?

SKRENTA: About 50% of our traffic is on the local pages vs. the subject pages. The traffic is spread pretty evenly across the site though. Traffic on local pages pretty much corresponds to population density.

Q) In your email to me you said that the blogosphere is making Internet PR easier and more cost effective now than it was five years ago and that you started Topix'net's campaign with single IM to an influential blogger. Who did you start with and why? Why a blogger and not say, John Markoff of The New York Times?

SKRENTA: We started with Mike Masnick of TechDirt. I've been reading TechDirt daily for years and thought Topix.net was on-topic for his site and that he'd be interested in hearing about it. This was a pre-launch, so we were purposely testing the waters with savvy net-heads before approaching the mainstream press. We wanted to get feedback from a more forgiving crowd to help us refine our message before going to the next step.

Mike wrote up a nice entry about us, and it spawned a halo of attention and linking. It was a perfect soft-launch for us.

Q) After your launch it sounds like you moved into a more traditional media relations campaign. You have had extensive coverage in eWeek and The Seattle Times and elsewhere. Did you simply work with bloggers just for the launch or did you continue the dialog? Did big media pick up on what the bloggers wrote? Do you use bloggers to seed stories into the general press?

SKRENTA: We've definitely continued the dialogue. What we found was that after our mainstream PR launch the blogs provided a second boost of traffic. The Mercury News, Seattle Times, etc. coverage was great. But each time an article came out in the mainstream press, the blogs would augment the effect by focusing even more attention on the stories we were getting. It amplified the value of the traditional PR effort that we did.

We can also more finely tailor announcements to bloggers that cover a specific area of interest. With a publication like a metro newspaper, you need a big story to get their attention. Everything we do isn't necessarily worthy of that kind of coverage, but there are often interest groups that do like to hear about smaller developments.

An example is our expansion from 3,000 to 6,000 sources. This had a lot of interest for the research librarian community, and we got coverage on Gary Price's ResourceShelf.com and in Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz.com. When we announced our integration of the commercial KeepMedia story archives, on the other hand, we were covered by Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org.

To do this right you need to know who's writing about what, and why. It's very focused PR instead of a shotgun approach.

Q) What is your vision of the future of participatory media/blogging?

SKRENTA: The blogosphere is a great platform for netizens to conduct public dialogue. We haven't decided how we're going to best include all this material in Topix.net, so we're proceeding conservatively, adding sources that meet our editorial review standards for article-length posts.

Q) What's the best piece of advice you can offer other CEOs and marketing/PR execs interested in working with personal journalists? What tips can you share?

SKRENTA: It's essential to understand what individual bloggers write about and what angle of your pitch might be most interesting to them.

Also, it's helpful to have your own blog, so you can participate in the conversation. The blogosphere doesn't like megaphone-PR pointed at them; they'd rather have a conversation with you. This can be a great source of feedback from your most influential users.

Q) Is there anything else you feel my readers (PR pros and journalists) should know about what I call "micro persuasion" (e.g. using blogs and participatory journalism to convey key messages)?

SKRENTA: The net isn't a one-way broadcast medium. That's not only because it can talk back -- it's also because there are so many narrow interest groups that a single message isn't appropriate to send out to every participant on the net.

Companies have an opportunity to involve net users in the development of their messaging and their products. Companies often conduct small focus groups to find out what users think about their stuff; but with bloggers, you have a large, ongoing, literate group willing to give you high-quality feedback in real time about what you're doing. Keep them informed, and listen to what they have to say.

Comments

[Kevin Dugan]

Steve - great stuff. did you see how the BBC relied on readers to help cover a news story recently? interesting participatory journalism angle. fyi.