The kerfluffle over Federated Media’s hamfisted attempt to obscure the line between advertising and editorial is neither trival, as Michael Arrington suggests, or some kind of of noble experiment in bringing advertisers “into the conversation,” as John Batelle would have it in his downright laughable defense of the practice.  All successful news publications, online and off, develop a trust relationship with their readers which is based on those readers’ belief that what they are getting is the publication’s best sense of the facts, unencumbered by deliberately obscured little things like advertising money.  In this case, Federated Media pushed the line and the publications that agreed to be used in that manner deserve to lose credibility because of it.  Scoble seems especially dense on this particular issue.

That’s why there exists in all trustworthy print publications what is generally referred to as a separation of “church and state.’  And I can assure you that it is strictly enforced.   Over the past 25 years, I have written and/or produced maybe 150 advertorials–those ugly little hybrid mixes of text and advertising–for Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week.  Combined, I suspect they produced more than $100 million in ad revenue.  This would make me a success story in most companies but the truth is I have never met a Forbes or Business Week editor.  I know one editor at Fortune that I haven’t seen or spoken to for 10 years and although some of my most successful “sections” appear when John Huey was editor there, I met him only a couple of years ago because he rents the apartment next to mine. I’m not sure he even knows I’m one of the mercenary trolls who made him look like a hero although he did admit to another rep I know that there was “a lot of money to made in picking up garbage.” 

In publications that care about editorial integrity and regard it as their most valuable asset, ad salesmen do not speak to editors and vice versa.  They don’t take meetings together; they don’t lunch together; their offices are deliberately separated.  No self-respecting reporter ever set foot in an ad agency unless it was to interview someone for a story.

In print publications, advertorials are required to be clearly labeled “Advertisement” and they are written, produced, and designed  separately from the magazine or newspaper itself.  There are also strict rules for informing advertisers that what they are buying is advertising and not editorial.

This is how it should be or else there is no point in pretending there is something called journalism that can be trusted to put the reader’s interests in truth, fairness and accuracy above all other considerations.  Over time, this becomes a reputation and a even, may I be naive enough to suggest, a positive contribution to society.  It’s why I trust the reporting of the Wall Street Journal, for example, although I wouldn’t have the opinion pages in my outhouse.  It’s why ad agencies don’t lean on great publications to do squirrely things.  It’s why Rupert Murdoch must never, ever be allowed to own the Journal, or the NYT or the Washington Post.

Michael Arrington has to decide whether he wants to be an editor or a publisher because no one can effectively be both.  And, I do know that if you produce a publication that a lot of people trust and want to read, advertisers will come–on your terms, not theirs. 

As for Batelle and his fine line of bullshit about making advertisers part of the conversation, most readers are sophisticated enough to realize that the Microsofts and Ciscos of the world don’t want to have a conversation; they want to sell them stuff,  and that ad agencies like FM are simply doing what marketers do–pimping their clients and trying to turn trusted writers and sources into endorsement bitches. 

Now it can be told.  For the past few months, one of my favorite social software startups, Blogtronix, has been working with publishing giant Reuters to create a new online community around environmental markets called ReutersInteractive, which quietly opened in beta last week.   For those of us who are fans and charity users (Social Media Today runs on Blogtronix), the demands of the Reuters project on a small, growing company has meant having to wait for the long-promised release of a major update of the Blogtronix platform. 

I’m still waiting for my own setup, but having had a few days now to play with the updated version on ReutersInteractive, I have to say the wait was worth it.  The platform’s social networking functions, particularly, have been greatly enhanced and make Blogtronix a much stronger prospect in the commuity-building space.   

If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you may already know that I’m a huge fan of Blogtronix, which is the Swiss Army knife of collaboration/publishing platforms.  Other companies offer blogging, wiki, workgroup, RSS, social networking and web publishing software but Blogtronix is the only one I know that does it all.   Granted, it does some of these tasks better than others.

For example, it is especially awesome for an aggregation site like Social Media Today because it allows me to set up an “Autopost” function for each contributor that automatically pulls their updated feeds into a preview area where an editor—in this case, me—can quickly review them and select the ones that are on target for the site and delete the ones that aren’t.  It takes about 15 minutes three or four times a day to review the new input from about 50 blogs and select material to publish—something that would have been a full-time job for two people in the old world of print. 

On the other hand, the old version that I’ve been using for the past six months had many built-in social networking features (the ability of users to create profiles, comment, rate posts, and post directly, for example) but they were hard to find and not clearly marked.  In addition, users could not build their own customized network or communicate directly and immediately with each other. There was no “Forum” feature. 

The new version addresses the missing elements and  makes the interface much more “social.”  Comments now appear directly under posts and note the placement of the ”Rating” and “Add Comment” links on posts:

The updated user profile page lets community members add connections, build customized teams, subscribe to RSS feeds and communicate instantly with each other.  The page also offers a “Posts” and “Spreadsheets” view of the user, as well as a “Profile.” 

I’ll have more to say about the new Blogtronix upgrade when I’ve had a chance to use it for awhile but check out ReutersInteractive for a good preview.  And, see the movie. 

One of the many reasons things have been quiet around here lately is that my longtime friend and sometime collaborator Robin Fray Carey have been sorting out exactly how we might add value (and perhaps make a couple of bucks) in the social media consulting marketplace. 

There is no shortage of talent out there but I like to think Robin and I come to the task with some unique qualifications.  Over the past 20 years, separately and together, we have sold somewhere between $50 million and $100 million in advertising and produced and written what is now fashionably called “paid content” around dozens of topics for–at different times–Fortune, Forbes and Business Week.  We have worked directly with at least a quarter of the Fortune 500 companies, helping them tell their stories and achieve their marketing goals.  I also had a long career in corporate communications. 

I started blogging three or four years and one of my early projects was building a very active  and influential (according to Technorati) community called Sequenza21 around composers and musicians involved in contemporary classical music.  This was before the words “online social community” were commonly heard and the site won an ASCAP award as best internet music site in 2005.  I started writing about social media here a couple of years ago and, together, Robin and I launched Social Media Today at the beginning of this year. Her SMT webinars have been very successful. We have in the pipeline communities involving clean tech, SMEs, and CMOs.   

In short, we understand the needs of companies and know how they traditionally communicate. We understand what makes online communities succeed or fail and have decided to offer our services as a new business called SMTodaymedia.

We have developed some guidelines that will give you a flavor of our approach:

 The Five Principles of Successful BtoB Social Communities

•  Design and build your community to achieve a specific business purpose.  Want to increase sales in a specific category or market?  Generate leads?  Build reputation with influential constituencies?  What we call “purpose-built.” If you’re  doing it just  because everyone else is and hoping for the best, that’s not a good reason. 
• Make it exclusive.  Decide in advance who you want to become community members, design the content of the community around their interests, and invite them to participate.  Other people may be able to read material on your community web site but only registered members should be able to interact with other members.
• Make your community only as large as necessary to achieve your business goals.  Research indicates that smaller, tightly focused communities produce more active, engaged and loyal participants.  Why try to become a Facebook when there are only a few hundred or thousand people that you really need to reach?
• Leverage existing resources.  Identify and incentivize internal “evangelists” to interact honestly and openly in community discussions.  Re-purpose appropriate internal content. Build a customized network of external bloggers.  You don’t have to start from scratch.
• Keep it real.  Online social communities depend for success on trust and transparency.  No overt selling.  No obvious agenda.  No talking when you should be listening.  No promises you can’t keep.  Nothing kills an social community faster than members who feel they’re being hustled. 

As I mentioned, our new business is called SMTodaymedia.  Drop by our modest web site.  If you’re interested in talking to us or getting more information, contact Robin.

With so many blog, wiki, and social networking applications–some authorized and some not–finding their way into enterprises these days, CIOs are under increasing pressure to bring these social computing ”rat nests” under some kind of formal IT control by integrating them into the enterprise system.  For Jive Software, the most influential software company you may never have heard of, this is the sound of opportunity knocking…again.  

Launched in New York in 2001 by a couple of University of Iowa Java wizards named Matt Tucker and Bill Lynch–soon joined by CEO David Hersh–Jive quickly became the group discussion application of choice for large online communities at Sun, Amazon, Apple and many other sites with millions of users. 

Tucker and Lynch had realized early on that none of the free PHP forum software had enough cache capacity to handle that kind of traffic so they created their initial application, Jive Forums, as an open source, enterprise solution, using 100% Java, tweaked for maximum caching.  That proved to be a key differentiator.  Today, Jive Forums powers many of the largest online communities throughout the world, including the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and ships as a standard part of SAP NetWeaver.

In 2004, after their significant others had finished up with grad school in New York, Tucker, Lynch and Hersh packed up the company and moved to Portland, Oregon where labor and overhead was a lot cheaper.  The move cost the company a little momentum, but you’d hardly know it–it has been growing like gangbusters ever since.   Jive Software ranked 443 on Inc. magazine’s list of 500 fastest growing private companies last year.  Jive now has 50 employees, 1,600 customers, and expects to do about $15 million in revenues this year, according to Hersh.  And all this without a penny of outside investment.

And things could get even better as the call for order in the collaboration space increases.  Jive’s response to the growing enterprise demand to bring all their social software into a unified system is a new collaboration platform called Clearspace, (released in February and already in Version 1.1) that unifies all content tools (whether or not they were made by Jive) using an open, plug-in architecture, that emphasizes real-time communication. For users, Clearspace presents a unified portal-view to content from all over an enterprise. Relationship mapping directs users to content that has changed by topic, not by application.  Rather than going through a lot of blogs or wikis  to find out if anyone has been discussing something they’re interested in, they can look at a category and see if anyone has written a post, IM, or document on the subject. They don’t even need to know where to look, since communities are defined by categories, not types of applications.  

Beyond providing a unified view of the content being  created anywhere in the enterprise, Clearspace also contains its own impressive tool kit that allows collaborative document creation in the form of wiki-style pages; activity management; blogs; document management; threaded discussions; and content syndication. Users can also create dynamically configured workspaces, which can be restricted or open for use with partners and customers.

For enterprises that have already invested in other legacy  solutions that are working well, Clearspace’s open architecture allows them to hang on to applications that people are already comfortable using.  And just last week (May 14), Jive released Clearspace X, an application that allows companies to build communities with customers and partners by pushing out content they want to share.

“Our goal is to bridge the gap between the big, expensive and complex collaboration systems like Sharepoint and the sort of enterprise IT chaos and inefficiency that results from having a bunch of unconnected point-solutions,” Hersh says.  “You don’t have to go the Microsoft or Lotus route to achieve the benefits of collaboration.  You just need a secure, reliable way to tie all the pieces together and to expose the content and connections to users who need it.  Clearspace does exactly that.”  

Jive appears to be following the same “bridge the gap” model with Openfire, its XMPP-based (Jabber) communication RTC server which now has more than a million users and is widely considered to be a less expensive, less complicated alternative to Microsoft’s Live Communication Server and Lotus Sametime.  Formerly called Wildfire and developed as a cross-platform open source project, the new enterprise edition (introduced in March) adds voice capabilities to the popular IM platform.  Users can now  talk from one PC to another while sharing screens, participating in discussion threads, and sending instant messages   

For all the impressive technology, Hersh says he thinks Jive’s most important asset may be the experience it has developed over the past six years in working with many large organizations and IT departments.

“We’ve been put through the wringer many times,” he says.  “There are a lot of companies jumping into the collaboration software space right now but we’ve been out there for a long time now and we have the products and the experience to create real business value.” 

While doing a little research on blogging platforms this morning, I was startled to be reminded that WordPress, which is far and away best of breed IMHO and feels like it has been around forever, has been in open circulation for less than two years now.  The Blogger folks started in 1999, Ben and Mena Trott launched Movable Type in 2002, but it wasn’t until November 2005 that WordPress became available to anyone who wanted it. 

True, Matt Mullenweg started forking the by then extinct b2 platform to what is now WP in 2003, but the simple, amazing fact is that WordPress is about 18 months old and absolute proof of the old adage “the early bird may get the worm but the tardy mouse gets the cheese.”

The conventional wisdom is that WordPress came along at exactly the right moment–just after the Trotts began charging for Movable Type–and that certainly helped.  But, I think WP would have become the people’s choice anyway because it is more flexible, customizable, and has so many great plug-ins and off-the-shelf themes. 

And don’t unestimate the “geek wannabe” factor.  Installing WP, creating databases, and tweaking themes requires a little bit of knowledge and effort and practice.  Not so much that you need to be a software engineer or write PHP in order to do it but enough that you can feel superior to your lame friends who are still using AOL.  That’s worth a lot.

To end with a complete non sequitur, we all know that WP releases are named for jazz musicians–Mingus, Strayhorn, Ella, Duke–because Matt Mullenweg (now a ripe old 23-years-old) is a musician and composer who digs jazz.  But, do we know why the Trotts named their first Movable Type release “Serge” in honor of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg?  Je ne sais quoi.

Unless, of course, it’s that dirty song.

As regular readers of this blog (I’m planning to write both of you a thank you note soon) may have noticed, I haven’t been writing a lot lately.  This is partly due to having been busy on some other projects, like playing traffic cop at Social Media Today, but mostly it’s from frustration at losing a year’s worth of comments here when my Wordpress comments database file somehow got corrupted and the lads in Mubai were unable to repair it.  You don’t get a lot of service with the $9.95 a month hosting plan.  The only positive is I did learn how to create a MySQL file from scratch so it wasn’t a total loss.  The depression is lifting now and I hope to be back to more regular posting in the next day or two.  Thanks for your patience.

A hot topic among social media bloggers these days is exactly which big companies “get” the value of connectedness, community and emergent technologies and which don’t.  A subsidiary discussion to that is around which traditionally managed corporations are jumping on the bandwagon for PR reasons because they want to be seen as one of the cool kids and which ones are actually making fundamental changes to way they interact with their customers, partners and employees.  

Having spent a lot of time talking with a number of SAP executives at SAPPHIRE in Atlanta earlier this week, I’m delighted to report that SAP is one of those forward-looking giants that get it.  Big time.   I’m not talking just about the fact that the company invited more than 20 of us lowly bloggers to sit in the big room with the regular press and analyst corps or that Mike Procenco and Stacy Fish put together a dynamite program of sessions with executives on topics that were of particular interest to us. 

Or even that they provided access to any executives or customers we wanted to talk to and let us talk to them without hovering protectively in the background.  All of those things were welcome and displayed a level of transparency and candor that just didn’t exist in any big corporation I know of five years ago.  

The new SAP attitude is clearly rooted in the company’s discovery that communities and co-innovation are a superior approach to the ”assign an army of software developers to a task and see what they come up with” style of development.  Opening up the process to partners and customers (and, indeed, anyone who wants to participate) provides the kind of give-and-take that leads to better products, satisfied buyers, reduced costs and happier employees.  

The granddaddy of these communities–the SAP Developer Network (SDN)–has grown from 340,000 members in 2005 to more than 750,000 today. (SDN has its own “evangelist,” Craig Cmehil.)  The Business Process community (BPX) was launched in the third quarter of 2006 and already has more than 100,000 members.  Both have proven to be invaluble resources and converted even the most skeptical oldtimers to the belief that there may be something to this Enterprise 2.0 business afterall. 

Another hub of 2.0 activity at SAP is the Emerging Solutions unit, led by general manager Dennis Moore, which is working on things like creating widgets that make it much easier for authorized users to get to the data they need inside SAP systems and a joint project called Duet with Microsoft that will allow SAP users to seamlessly use Office tools to work with processes and data.  The unit even has its own vp of “imagineering,” a bright young man named Denis Browne.

Emerging Solutions was also involved in building a kind of internal MySpace/LinkedIn social directory called Harmony where employees with similar interests and skills can find each other.  I was sitting way down at the end of the table when Dennis Moore was explaining Harmony but I somehow got the impression that Harmony is, at least in part, an attempt to provide SAP’s best employees with an alternative to posting their resumes on LinkedIn or MySpace where they can easily be poached by other firms.

What most convinced me that SAP gets it, though, is the enthusiasm of the people I spoke to.  You couldn’t help getting the feeling that SAP has become a fun place to work.  Not the kind of thing you would expect from a aging–how should I put this…German…engineering-oriented–software company with a reputation, not entirely undeserved, for making complex and costly products mainly for big companies.  The new SAP is rapidly becoming a classic case study in how Enterprise 2.0 technologies, combined with a collaborative, social mindset, can give a giant corporation a second wind.

I am a journalist by training and inclination and learned early on the truth of the profession’s widely-known mantra.  “If it bleeds, it ledes” is a not simply a reflection of the cynical view that young journalists quickly develop of their fellow man, it reflects the inescable economic reality that violence sells.  Not as well as sex, perhaps, but well enough.  When the local version of the “Hillside Strangler” decides to drop a confession or a new threat in your mail box, you go with it.  Sure, you call the cops but only after the newspaper or broadcast have gone to bed. 

Nothing wrong with that.  Scoops have a long and honorable tradition.  We need a vigorous and nosy press to keep a skeptical eye on killers, politicians and other psychopaths.   Perhaps because I came of age in this sort of environment, I  have always been an absolutist against censorship in any situation.  Except one and that is: when it will, or may, save human lives.

Given the incendiary nature of the images and video that the Virginia Tech gunman mailed to NBC and are now flooding the airways, and the fragile psychological condition of many of our fellow citizens, I believe this is one of those rare exceptional moments when self-censorship would have been the responsible course. 

Stewart Mader has some excellent thoughts on his blog and I was struck by a comment left by Sterling Hager:   

I have a question for which I honestly don’t know the answer. Maybe you have a view. If a crazed gunmen entered NBC News studios, killed a receptionist and a clerk, walked to the post office to mail video like this to NBC, then returned in a couple of hours, chain-locked the doors, and killed 30 more NBC on-air and off-air employees, would NBC run the videos? Would Fox News demand the videos be shared?

Remember this is the same NBC that last week fired a popular radio comic who has raised more than $100 million for charities for a bad taste joke after much loud, public soul searching and posturing, and ”listening to its employees.”  

Less than a week later, the same “virtuous” network has  committed the journalistic equivalent of yelling “fire’ in a crowded theater. The hypocrisy sickens.

Brian Oberkirch and I had an ugly dustup yesterday over his having used Social Media Today, a web site I facilitate that pulls together–with the permission of the individual bloggers–material from 40 or so of the best social media blogs, to illustrate a post called Should You Get a Say in How Your Posts Are Used? 

Although the post didn’t say so explicitly I felt it left the impression that I was using Brian’s posts on SMT without his knowledge or permission, which is not true.  Some of the early comments suggest that others had that impression, too.  Like all of the other bloggers who participate, Brian was formally invited and some of his posts have been appearing there for several months with, at least, his tacit approval.  (I say “tacit” because I can’t lay my hands right now on the original e-mail exchange.)

But, that’s all so yesterday and Brian and I have agreed to move on to some of the more substantive issues he raised in the post, beginning with the question he poses in his headline.  My short answer is: “Of course you should have some say in how your posts are used.”  No one should be able to simply re-post full posts of another author on another web site without the consent of the creator.  

What is unclear is how much is too much since a certain amount of ”syndication” is valuable.  I’m not sure there is an enforceable rule at this stage of web development (except for celebrities and big media companies who can a afford a lot of lawyers) but there need to be clearer guidelines.

Aggregation is not inherently a dirty word.  Everyone who starts a blog hopes, I suppose, that they are going to become a Michael Arrington or Om Malik.  Most are not.  Your chances of becoming an “A’ list blogger who can make a living from sponsors and ad revenues are roughly the same as winning the Mega Millions lottery. 

Most bloggers realize (or soon learn) this and they blog for other reasons.  They view themselves–not their blogs–as the brand and they use blogs to market themselves and their services or products.  For these people (and I’m one of them), having your posts appear on multiple blogs means a bigger audience and is a positive thing. It is such a positive thing that Blogburst was able to build a successful business around aggregation and has only recently started to pay contributors something.   Many of my posts appear not only on Enterprise Web 2.0 but also at WebProNews, the FastForward Blog, and Social Media Today.  

Now, if you’re more interested in trying to crack the “A” list, as many “B” level bloggers (say, 500 to 10,000 in the Technorati rankings) are, then you want all the hits and comments to go to your own page.  The emphasis is on turning yourself into a power broker or your blog into a media property or maybe just proving to blogger rivals that your dick is bigger.   Nothing wrong with that but it’s a different game from that played by most of us blue collar slugs. 

Brian raises a point about finding a site on SMT labeled ‘Brian Oberkirch’s site” that he didn’t know about.  That’s my fault for not explaining properly to SMT participants how the software that runs the page works. 

SMT is a de facto demo site for Blogtronix (no money involved, although they let us use the platform for free and host the site), whose extremely social software was orginally designed primarily for enterprise collaboration and community building.  Although I’m not sure the nice folks at Blogtronix anticipated it at the beginning, it has emerged as one of the best and most useful publishing platforms because it makes life so easy for editors–all feeds are pulled into a centralized staging area where a single editor can review dozens of new posts in a few seconds and instantly approve the ones he or she wants to use and they immediately appear on the front page. 

When a new “member” is added to the site and the system is set up to collect “autoposts” of the new member’s feed, the system automatically generates a user page called “Dah Dah’s site,” that pulls all of the individual’s posts, not just those approved for the front page.  The individual’s page (or site) accomodates a photograph and a link to background information and expertise.  This is just one of the social, community-building features of the software and I’m sure you can see how it would be useful, particularly in enterprise settings.   

What the page really is at SMT, and what it really should be called is “Dah Dah’s page” or “Dah Dah’s SMT page,” not ”site.”  Alas, there is not currently a way to turn this feature off but I will ask my Bulgarian friends if they can re-label it for this context.  

Jeremiah raised the issue of losing a comment from his site to SMT.  This is not much of problem, at least in my view, because in order to even see the “comment” or ”rate a post” buttons, viewers must be logged in.  The only comments you’re going to get there are from other members of the group who have SMT user names and passwords.  Casual viewers are not even aware that there is a comment function.

As for revenue-sharing,  I believe sites that depend on aggregated content should split the revenue with bloggers, once (and if), they have something to split.  SMT has no revenues.  There is no paid advertising on the site. There are a couple of things on the page that look like ads under a Friends of the Family heading. That’s exactly what they are. Companies that have been friendly and supportive of the web site. No money has ever changed hands.  Should we be fortunate to get the point where we attract a sponsor, there will be an equitable revenue sharing plan which contributors will help devise.  At our current readership level, we might be able to generate $5 a month for each of the 40 or so bloggers.

Finally, Brian raised the point that there are “several other authors aggregated on the sidebar, some of whom I would never associate with.”  I have no idea who he is referring to or what the issue may be but I don’t think that being on the same blogroll as someone whose opinions you disagree with constitutes an endorsement. 

I have tried to avoid politics when selecting people to be part of SMT and simply base my choices on whether their writing is interesting and contributes something to the social media discussion that readers will find useful.  I am a journalist by training and inclination and I believe deeply in a diversity of opinions. 

A few SMT bloggers have complained about the not-very-anonymous “Amanda Chapel” being on the list.  For the record, I didn’t invite “Amanda” to be part of the group, but he/she/it was the only person so far to figure out how to register themselves and create a subsidiary blog on the site without being invited (a glitch that will be corrected in the next version of Blogtronix when it comes out in a few days).  I could block “Amanda” but the three or four posts “she” has left there have been extremely civilized and well-written.  On the other hand, I have not given Amanda access to the e-mail back channel where the family secrets are kept. 

I don’t know who else Brian might have a problem with or why but I don’t believe you can manage a good and fair publication if you allow every contributor to black list all the people they don’t like.

I hope this clears the air a little.  Let’s keep the conversation going. 

The debate about whether the punishment truly fits in the crime in the case of a now former shock jock who has raised more than $100 million for childrens charities and the subsidiary argument about exactly who gets to sit in judgement on whom is likely to go on for awhile but there is certainly one thing we can all agree on:  the way Imus handled the media feeding frenzy was a public relations disaster. 

From the moment the story escalated from a clumsy attempt at ghetto humor into a total media circus, the Imus affair is a text-book-worthy example of how not to do damage control in the current incendiary, 24×7 mashup of old media and social media. 

The classic way of dealing with this kind of firestorm is what I call the “starve the beast” method: 

1.  Issue a written apology accepting total responsibility and offer a full and unconditional apology to anyone who could possibly have been offended. 

2.  Announce a plan of rehabilitation.  Americans will forgive almost anything if they think you’ve learned your lesson and become a better person.  Worked for George W. Bush. 

3.  Disappear as quickly as possible.  Do not go within a five miles of a microphone or television camera until everyone calms down. 

4.  Call all of your friends and allies and tell them that under no circumstances are they to give comments to the press or appear on cable talk shows.  Refer journalists to the web site about your charities and good deeds.

5.  Call all your enemies and tell them you will destroy them when you’re back on top if they comment or appear on cable shows and say bad things about you.  This is a step that has worked beautifully for the Clintons over the years.

6.  After the news cycle has moved safely on in a couple of weeks, reappear somewhere–the Oprah show would have been ideal–and admit that you did a very bad thing and that you’ve learned your lesson for real this time and will never do it again.  In Imus’ case, that probably would have meant replacing producer Bernard McGuirk with a person of color  (It works beautifully for Howard Stern) and establishing a scholarship fund for black female athletes.

The ’starve the beast method’ works because sensational stories need fresh meat every day to stay alive.  With endless hours to fill, cable TV is an especially hungry medium that constantly needs “new developments” to keep a story going.  Those talking heads need new tidbits to chew on.  Viewers have short attention spans.  If there is nothing to eat in one part of the woods, the beast will quickly move on to another.   

Remember when Vice President Dick Cheney shot a friend in the face while hunting on a Saturday, leaked the news to a small town newspaper on Sunday, and refused to say another word about it…ever?  The story had completely disappeared by Tuesday.  This is Hall of Fame crisis management stuff. 

Sure, the blogosphere kept on hammering on Cheney for awhile but–as much as we would like to think otherwise–bloggers and YouTubers cannot keep a big story going without the complicity of the mainstream media.  There have been a few cases where bloggers have been able to force the MSM to come back to a story that wasn’t fully covered the first time through–see George Allen– but the relationship is still largely parasitic.   Starving the mainstream beast starves the blogosphere, too.

Imus did everything wrong by feeding the beast at every turn.  He apologized but instead of just doing it once and refusing to discuss it anymore or simply disappearing, he kept on apologizing.  Each apology attacted more attention, more talking heads, more analysis, more coverage.  He tried to reason with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, two con men who happen to be exceptionally talented and lethal PR pros with a vested interest in keeping the story alive.  He offended many in his fan base who thought he was apologizing too much and to the wrong people.  MSNBC threw a big log on the fire by firing him.  CBS quickly followed suit.

By Thursday of last week, the media beast had become an insatiable monster, its jaws so firmly locked into the Imus apology session with the Rutgers women’s team that it couldn’t even be diverted by the news that a major injustice had been set straight in the Duke lacrosse players case or that the governor of New Jersey was lying bleeding and near death on the turnpike because he had been in a big hurry to cash in on the Imus moment.  The crucial question in the universe, according to the big silly Anderson Cooper, was “will the team forgive him?”  And they wonder why sensible people have stopped watching news shows and reading newspapers.

Imus’ biggest mistake was trying to reason with the beast and to stand up and take his licks like a responsible person.  After 30 years of on-the-edge talking I suspect that he thought to take any other approach would be hypocritical and dishonorable.  He failed to realize that the more blood and flesh the media beast consumes, the hungrier it gets.  It won’t stop until there is absolutely nothing left on the plate.  Starving the beast may be the coward’s way out, but sometimes it is the only way to survive a PR diaster.