04.01.05


A Conversation With Steve Rubel, Micro Persuasion

By Neville Hobson

Steve is Vice President Client Solutions at CooperKatz, a New York PR firm, and author of the Micro Persuasion blog. He is arguably the most prominent and influential blogger in the PR profession either side of the Atlantic.

Last Monday 21 March, Shel and I interviewed Steve Rubel for The Hobson & Holtz Report bi-weekly podcast.

Link: CooperKatz

We enjoyed a stimulating and wide-ranging 45-minute conversation that covered many topical issues, including blogging as an integral element of the practice of public relations; the General Motors blogs; the growing importance and significance of tags and folksonomies; influence, celebrity and responsibility; ethics and the public relations profession; and whether Steve wears pyjamas when he blogs.

You can download the show containing the interview (MP3, 30.8Mb) and subscribe to the RSS feed to receive future shows automatically.

To complement the podcast, the following is a complete transcript of our conversation. As a transcript, it has no editing nor editorializing - it's the raw conversation including all the ums and ahs, reflecting what happened in our conversation.

One thing words on a page can't convey is the emotion and humour of our conversation. We all had a lot of fun doing this interview! The sense of that comes across best by listening to it.

Here's the transcript:

Shel: Well, Steve, thanks for joining us, we really appreciate your taking the time. And, just to start with, can you tell us how things are going with your blog - any changes planned, any developments?

Steve: Heh! Should there be? Um, no, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, blogging like a madman, and, er, what I'm trying to do is really, I want to shake the tree because I think that PR professionals need to really, you know, get what's going on here and jump on board and I think that the three of us and the other 97 of us who currently blog in the PR industry, we need to do a better job of talking to the everyday PR man or woman and what it means to them.

Because I think a little bit of what we're doing now is talking amongst ourselves, and talking amongst the people who do get it in social media land. Actually, in mainstream media land as well, as you know, with the different opportunities we get to talk to the press. But I think we need to get everyone on board.

I spoke at the Council of PR Firms meeting in Chicago last week, and I talked about RSS and using Bloglines and things like that. I think that's something that we, everyone of us, needs to take responsibility for in getting, you know, somebody in their agency, at their competitor, at their clients, wherever, understanding what RSS is, what blogs are and what this all means, because I think we have a lot more work to do there.

Neville: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Let me add something to that, Steve. You know about the, er, postponement of the New Communications Forum in Paris, right? That was postponed last week. And I think the picture's different in Europe because in the US, that event in January attracted, you know, loads of people who have heard about blogs, not amongst that 100 group you mentioned, who came along and wanted to find out what was going on, what it was all about, how to use it, all that… and the picture's slightly different in Europe and it's got me wondering that, you know, what you mentioned - I do that, you do that, we all do that - and there is a lot of talk amongst the converted, yeah, I agree with you.

But going out to take that message out to people, it seems to be falling on deaf ears a lot over here, so what else can we do, do you think?

Read the rest of this article here