Ask Craig Newmark to describe what he does, and he’ll respond with the most humble of answers: “I do customer service for a living.” Even his business card lists his title as simply “customer service rep” — oh, and on the same line, given the same level of prominence, “& founder.”

We sat down with Craigslist’s philanthropic entrepreneur this week in San Francisco as part of Marketwire’s ongoing media relations efforts (although I must admit this particular visit proved to be among my favorites).  What we learned from Craig further underscored what really matters: A company can make a difference and still make a profit by always striving to do the right thing. Putting the customer first and asking “what’s the right thing to do?” — something Craig Newmark and Marketwire have in common.

As Craig sees it, this decade is pivotal with a rebalance of power shifting to the people. “Trusted social networks win,” he said. Which is why it’s so important for all of us to listen to the conversations being had and to engage with those communities. Marketwire’s acquisition of Sysomos offers a powerful tech tool for doing just that and more, and we’re thrilled that Craig’s interested in giving it a spin. He, too, is interested in finding out what’s being said about him and the things most important to him.

In addition to Marketwire’s leveraging of the latest technologies to advance the way the world communicates, we’re also interested in social networking…the old-fashioned way. And so we’re equally thrilled to offer our services and to participate in the Craigslist Foundation Bootcamp on Saturday, August 14 at UC Berkeley. With 1,500 people gathering to strengthen their neighborhoods and empower their communities, we encourage more to join us and this remarkable group to discover, engage and to make a positive impact on the future.

During the recent mesh10 conference in Toronto, I interviewed Jason Fry, former columnist of The Wall Street Journal Online. As a panelist of the session “How Do Platforms Change Content Consumption?” he and three others discussed the onus put on new high-tech devices to save traditional media and convince the public to pay for content. Afterward, we focused on journalism as it stands today.

But since the mesh conference is all about social and new media, we decided to keep the topics related. Jason gave me insight on his latest ponderings on the intersection of journalism and personal branding: How much personal information should journalists reveal online? Should journalists’ personal brands outweigh those of the news agencies they work for? How much self-branding is acceptable in this “me” era?

“Social media is now considered the norm and is integrated in most journalists’ lives in some way or another,” says Jason. “It is a tool and a way to build relationships with your audience and peers. And more often than not, many journalists start out as part of a media entity and then branch off on their own.”

An example: Carson Daly, an icon during my adolescence, started out as a Los Angeles radio DJ, then hosted with MTV, and now has his own late-night TV show.

“Exactly,” Jason confirmed. “And usually in those days it happened faster with TV and radio personalities. With social media, however, it becomes easier for them to use networks such as Twitter and Facebook, etc. to promote their own brands than ever before.”

One thing is certain: The social conventions of the web are changing and are not really in anyone’s control. Jason said that, five years ago, it was considered odd and rude to Google someone. Today it is the other way around.

“It’s almost considered rude for someone not to have voicemail set up or not to reply to a text message,” Jason says. “But ‘Googling’ someone before you even meet him or her in person is practically expected.”

When he asked me if I had happened to search him on Google before our interview, I sheepishly admitted that I had.  I proved his point.

Jason’s three passions in life are what he writes about: digital journalism, the New York Mets and Star Wars. He recently apologized to his followers in his social networking sites for the other two subjects they might not be interested in following. His guilt has even led him to consider separating the three instead of letting them live together on Twitter. Given the whole discussion on personal branding, I suggested that his fans wouldn’t get to see who he really is as a multi-faceted person, and in turn, he wouldn’t be able to promote his own personal brand.

Since his days at WSJ.com, Jason has been helping news organizations reinvent themselves to cater to consumers’ growing desire for news delivered online and through social media. To follow Jason Fry’s view on the challenges and opportunities for digital-age journalism, visit: Reinventing the Newsroom or on Twitter: @jasoncfry.

Aside from Jason’s session, I was also very impressed with the workshop session on “Death and the Digital Legacy” by Adele McAlear. Covering one’s digital assets after passing is not often brought up or even discussed in this digital age, although covering our physical and material assets might be.

Or learning from Kim Fox on how the CBC used social media to help Canadians identify and find their friends and family during the disaster in Haiti in her session, “Social Media and User-Generated Content in the Newsroom.”

The Mesh conference was created in 2005 by five Toronto-based founders — each unique and with different backgrounds but sharing the same vision of putting together a top-notch social media conference. Their goal was to provide a platform for their fellow Torontonians to discuss, inspire and connect with other like-minded people who are interested in the web’s impact on media, marketing, business and etc.   Most of the attendees and the panelists this year were from different parts of North America.

So, whether or not you live in the Toronto area, the question to ask in 2011 is: Do you mesh?

In a world where newspapers are shutting down, laying off staff and making as many cuts necessary to stay alive, two ambitious hyperlocal news sites, TBD.com in Washington, DC and CivilBeat.com in Hawaii are attempting to get seats at the already crowded table of media outlets.  According to Rick Edmonds, author of Poyntner Online’s Biz Blog, they share similar strategies for breaking through online clutter:

• Online-Only: Both publications are only available electronically, alleviating the production and circulation costs traditionally factored into a newspaper launch.
• Mainstream editors: You will follow your hairdresser to a new salon or your favorite bartender to a different bar because they always get it right. CivilBeat and TBD are banking on that strategy. CivilBeat hired John Temple, former editor and publisher of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, while TBD recruited Jim Brady, former editor of washingtonpost.com.  TBD, which will operate a cable channel as well, also hired established DC-area broadcast reporters for an on-screen presence.
• Audience-driven:  The two sites encourage reader feedback, inviting their audiences to play an active role in determining the direction the publications will take.

But, the sites are not without their differences:

TBD:

• Crowdsourcing:  TBD took to the virtual streets to gather ideas from their potential readers about content, social media and conversational methods, believing that their audience members would feel connected to the paper because they helped mold it.
• Off the beaten path:  The site used the example of sports teams to illustrate this point: They will cover the Washington Nationals over the Washington Redskins because the Redskins readers, although more numerous, already have plenty of options to read about their beloved football team, while Nationals fans do not.  By providing in-depth Nationals coverage, TBD will attempt to be a big fish in a small pond.

CivilBeat:

• A few relevant topics:  Instead of soliciting ideas from their readers, CivilBeat decided early on that it would concentrate on a small number of topics in order to provide exhaustive coverage: Hawaii, Honolulu, education, land and money. They believe that these beats are most important to their audience.
• Paywall:  The majority of the CivilBeat content is available to subscribers who pay the $19.99 a month for full access to the site.
• Online community: CivilBeat adopts an “online civic square” model, connecting readers to one another though the information they provide.

Which do you prefer: hyperlocal sites or mainstream media? It seems that there are as many ways to deliver the news as there are ways to consume it. Stay tuned for future posts on this very topic.

Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s new “Open Graph” platform – a move that is guaranteed to change how 400 million (and counting) Facebook subscribers interact with the internet. As the No. 2 site in the world (as of May 6, 2010), Facebook is giving its users the ability to personalize their own web experience through this social-bookmarking-on-steroids approach. 

To wrap your head around this in more “everyday” terms, Read Write Web contributor Alex Iskold provides a great analogy, “If both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook’s markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites… now, the information about a friend’s likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web.”

This sounds cool right?  Users get to see everything their Facebook friends are interested in all over the web, but what if there were other parties involved with a vested interest?

This is where the trade off between personalization and privacy in the online space has never been so evident.  Facebook will give marketers (for large sums of money) the ability to target hundreds of millions of consumers unlike ever before.  The precision to which online marketers will be able to identify and target potential buyers based on their interests and what they “like” around the web is truly unprecedented.

What seems to be most troubling is the questionable way in which the company might force its users to make their information public.  For example, Facebook’s new “Connected Profile” tool that most users will unsuspectingly sync to their profile without much thought will, in reality, grant marketers open-season on their personal details.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook subscribers react to the changes ahead, particularly with regards to privacy and business.

What do you think about Facebook’s Open Graph platform? Have you already adopted it on your Facebook page? What do you predict the impact will be?

As the Hispanic population grows within the United States, many companies develop concerted marketing campaigns that target US Hispanics, but without a full understanding of the demographic. The 2010 Hispanic Marketing Trends Survey, conducted by Los Angeles-based Hispanic advertising agency Orcí, polled 9,300 senior marketing and advertising executives of top-tiered businesses in the US. It revealed that “while the vast majority of respondents recognize the market’s impact on American culture, there is a lack of understanding of the Hispanic market’s power as a driver of business.”

Other revelations included:

• 51 percent of US businesses do not market to US Hispanics in Spanish
• 31 percent of those businesses claimed that they invest up to 10 percent of their budgets on Spanish-language advertising
• 82 percent have no plans to create or increase the initiatives targeted to Hispanics within the next year
• 74 percent of responders do not know if social media is a viable way to reach Hispanics
• 78 percent said they have not used any social media to engage Hispanics.

Although the study does not provide solid answers to address these gaps, it seeks to initiate a conversation by providing food for thought. How can businesses capitalize on the immense buying power this population has? What do we need to know about them to really tap into this demographic? What are the challenges that prevent us from doing this?

As businesses seek the answers to these and other questions, Marketwire provides its clients with an already established connection to Hispanic media – in the US and abroad — that gives them maximum exposure to Spanish-speaking consumers. Press release distribution – in English and translated in Spanish – has been highly effective to reach this population.

But, as we continue to delve deeper into this topic and learn more about this demographic, how will you tap into this $1trillion market?

Next time you are riding the bus or train to work in the morning, look around you. How many people are staring down at electronic readers, such as Amazon’s Kindle?  How many people are holding a newspaper, a book or a magazine? According to some, the amount of the former is on the rise, which leads one to believe that the number of the latter is on the decline.

There are certain elements that detract from the “e-Reading” experience, particularly, the unfamiliarity of scanning the news or reading a book off a handheld electronic device. From its tactile nature to the process of turning the pages or highlighting a passage from a book, magazine or newspaper article, people are generally more comfortable with reading from printed paper.  We do indeed “see” with our hands, so, to some, reading a flat screen does not afford the same nostalgic feeling as paper does. (For a slightly different take on this topic, check out Lisa Davis’ post, “What’s news with you?” on the changing of news delivery and intake.)

Fortunately, eReader technology is making great strides to repair this void.  In January, LG Electronics debuted flexible ePaper in Asia, in a newspaper-friendly A3 size.  The “paper” can be bent and rolled without warping the images displayed on the page. The Human Media Lab at Queen’s University Canada is developing a “paper computer” that allows readers to visually flip and dog-ear touch-screen pages, as well as highlight passages with their fingertips.

These innovative products are still a few years away from hitting the market. But when they do, it will still be tough to predict whether news consumers will give up what they’ve been accustomed to for so long — actual paper.

It’s a well known fact that Marketwire has its own media relations department. But, unlike what most people know “media relations” to be, we do not build relationships with the media in order to garner publicity (that would be our marketing department’s role!).

As a company that provides services for PR, IR, marketing communications and media professionals, we have a different perspective and a different definition of media relations. Perhaps “media liaison” might be a more appropriate name because, essentially, we act as a bridge between the media and Marketwire clients to ensure that journalists, analysts and online communities receive news and information on their areas of interest, in the formats and via the distribution mechanisms they desire.

But why is this important? How does Marketwire benefit from forging relationships with thousands of media outlets? Here’s how: When a media outlet receives the most up-to-date news and information of interest to its readers, the client issuing that news also wins because that media outlet is on their targeted list. By providing a service to the media, we, in turn, provide a service to our clients, enabling us to maintain and strengthen credibility on both ends.

The Marketwire media relations team makes a concerted effort to provide the most effective and efficient products and services that journalists, bloggers, editors and the like can use to the fullest. Some include:

Email Platform: Marketwire offers members of the media Personal Beat, an opt-in news service that caters to the media’s need for content, news and information from companies they are interested in, including Bombaridier, Cisco, Costco and Research in Motion.  This free and customizable service lets the journalist identify the type of press release they want, as well choose the way to receive them: a one-a-day newsletter format, in a RSS feed or in real-time as the release crosses the wire. There are over 140 different industries and sub-industries to choose from, as well as profiles to filter by geographic location, ticker symbols or by keywords. Subscribers can also create multiple profiles to help organize and monitor the content they need.

1. Direct Newsfeeds and Online Partnerships: Various online partnership opportunities are also available to the media by providing updated news releases through either an RSS, file transfer protocol (FTP) feed or microsite (a site hosted by Marketwire that maintains the look and feel of the media’s website). These feeds are created to cater to the media outlet’s specific industry or audience while adhering to their individual editorial needs. This helps them increase readership, revenue and web traffic.
2. Media Visits: To ensure lasting relationships with the media, Marketwire’s media relations team also makes “desk sides” to various outlets within their regional territories. During these visits, Marketwire is able to determine how news copy is processed and reported internally as well as identify which Marketwire specific products and services that the organization would benefit from the most, suggesting both short- and long-term solutions.

In short, Marketwire’s media relations department serves as a facilitator of information flow and an educator of clients and members of the media. That benefits both the media and our clients – and, in turn, it benefits Marketwire.

Since The Wall Street Journal began charging for access, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and a host of other sites have followed suit.  The New York Times has announced a plan to begin a “paywall” structured site in 2011. Similar modifications are under way at abcnews.com and Newsday Publications’ sites to make way for paid-for content.

A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Institute revealed that, if asked to pay for online news access, 82 percent of those surveyed would find their news elsewhere.  That begs the question: Who  belongs to the leftover 18 percent?

Answer: The fiercely loyal readers.  The New York Times has said that the paywall structure targets its die hard online consumers.  This goes against the grain of our consumer-centric culture. After decades of rewarding brand loyalty with frequent flier miles and frequent diner discount cards, paywall news sites aim to turn the prevailing consumer logic on its head by encouraging indiscriminate news site surfing.   Readers who glean their daily news from a multitude of sites, or simply skim headlines without delving into full-text articles, columns, and blogs, will escape having to pay, leaving an allegiant few with the check.

To learn more, read an overview of the Pew Research Institute’s study, entitled “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer,” or download it in its entirety.

When British soccer sensation David Beckham arrived in America in 2007 to play for the Los Angeles Galaxy, he had to correct himself after dropping the proverbial ball with the name of his beloved sport.  Beckham made a mistake by calling his sport “football.”  He then said, “Excuse me… soccer.” Even he was confused as to what to call it in the US.

Unfortunately, Beckham likely will not play in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, thanks to an untimely Achilles tendon injury he suffered last weekend.  But as sports fans everywhere tune in to the matches, some in the US might be wondering why they keep calling it football.

The British invented football, but why do we (North Americans) call it soccer?  It seems as if every other country in the world, people call the sport “football.”  For those of us in the US and Canada, that’s a totally different sport, played with a different ball.  Some online sites that explain the history of the sport in Canada say Canadians call it soccer just to be able to communicate with their neighbors to the south (thanks!—so it’s the Americans’ fault).

Seems that the word “soccer” is actually the evolved contraction for “Association Football.”  The term was butchered and evolved into “assoc’er” and eventually “soc’er” to what we know today in North America as soccer.  Thus, the nickname soccer was born.

No matter where you are and what you call it, fans everywhere are gearing up for the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa — the first on the African continent.  Marketwire’s South Africa Soccer Newsline (promoted as South Africa Football Newsline in the UK) is designed to reach more than 20,000 media organizations around the world, targeting sports writers and trade publications covering the historic event.  You need not follow soccer or have operations in South Africa to take advantage of this unique newsline.  This is a great opportunity to make announcements related to emerging markets, corporate social responsibility and expansion plans in Africa.  It’s even a great avenue for non-governmental organizations to announce initiatives in developing nations.

The fact that David Beckham won’t  participate in the World Cup and his adoring (female) fans won’t have a chance to see him in action is a major disappointment for enthusiasts of the sport, and a blow to the soccer star himself — he would have been the first English player to participate in four consecutive World Cups.

To find out more about the South Africa Soccer/Football Newsline, contact your local Marketwire office.

Colombian investigative journalism lost an important contributor last month when Casa Editorial El Tiempo announced the restructuring of Cambio, a well recognized magazine which, from 1993, focused on investigative cases; a vast majority based on political corruption. (CNN covered the topic last month in an article entitled “Shutdown of Colombian magazine raises questions.”)

Grupo Planeta, which owns Casa Editorial El Tiempo, announced that Cambio was having financial difficulties, which led them to change Cambio’s circulation from weekly to monthly, cease the coverage of all investigative work and focus mainly on entertainment content.

Nonetheless, in the journalism circles in Colombia, very few believe Grupo Planeta’s arguments in changing Cambio’s editorial line since it was reported that, at the present year, it had generated close to $700,000 in advertisement. In Colombia, there exists the speculation that the decision to change Cambio was based on pressure by very influential politicians of President Alvaro Uribe’s government as well as economic interest in Grupo Planeta.

In 2009, Cambio published several investigative pieces which exposed the Colombian government. In the middle of 2009, Cambio revealed the first signs of new content from the military agreement between Bogota and Washington, for the use of seven military bases. In November of the same year, Cambio highlighted the increase of violence and the decline of Uribe’s security policy.

These are the main reasons why Colombian journalists believe that Cambio’s new structure obeys political reason; especially when:

• The presidential elections are in May (Uribe, the current president, is trying to change the constitution to allow him to be president for a third term).
• A license for a third national private television network will be granted by the Colombian government, in which Grupo Planeta is bidding.
• Journalists Rodrigo Pardo and Elvira Samper, who directed the editorial line of the printed publication, were fired the same day Cambio’s future was revealed.

Many blame the economic crisis for the closing of media networks in the US, but is it the same reason why Cambio ceased publication?