OK, sharing is in.  Daddies are inching onto Mommy territory and marketers want a piece of the growing category of Daddy bloggers.  These are the same marketers who have mined Mommy bloggers to the “nines,” sending them product after product for them to write about, hoping to influence their large followers, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, into trying or better yet, “experiencing” the products, clearly for the purpose of purchase.  (Not much different from the pre-Internet old fashioned word of mouth tool as in “somebody told me about this product and I think it is great, you should try it,” but this time around, reaching thousands, rather than a neighbor or two.)

Enter Daddies, who in large part have allowed the phenomenon of the powerful Mommy bloggers to take place, simply by ignoring them and “letting them do their own social thing.” It took a while, but Daddies have started to recognize what their clever counterparts have known for the last few years — that as soon as they write about their kids, others write about their kids and, in a flash, a whole social network blossoms and they become influencers.

According to SmartBrief.com, Sony Electronics is jumping on this wagon with their new DigiDad project, giving Daddy bloggers new “respect” or, if you prefer, attention.  As such, Sony Electronics is teaming up with influential Daddy bloggers over the next three months, loaning them products like BRAVIA televisions, Blu-ray players, Cyber-shots, Alpha DSLR cameras, Handycam camcorders, VAIO notebook computers and Reader e-books and then asking them to use the products to do projects, like recording conversations with their parents or videotaping a family outing.  And of course, then write about the “experience.”

Clearly Sony is trying to parallel the success of Mommy bloggers, which grew faster than every other category on the Web except politics, according to comScore, an Internet traffic measurement company.  Although Sony emphasizes that the products it is sending Daddy bloggers are on loan, not gifts, and bloggers are not being pressured to write positive reviews, Daddies may now be stepping into the same minefields their Mommy counterparts did.  They may very well feel the looming shadow of the Federal Trade Commission (which I wrote about in my blog of June 11, titled The FTC Steps In Lightly) behind their back.  The FTC is toying with requiring certain types of disclosure and, as it moves in that direction, readers’ trust in bloggers’ opinions as unbiased, may begin to waiver.

Look, Dads have always gotten the short shrift when it comes to know-how or leading the charge of parenting, and I am glad that by raising the bar on Daddy bloggers, it will, at the very least, level the field.

The only thing that I still don’t get is the ongoing stereotyping – electronics for Dad, household goods for Mom.  In this “flatter” world, wouldn’t it be great to just move on…

This week the classical music world will take a first step in widening its reach globally, made possible by a troika – the integration of technology, music and sponsorship.

To date, the reach of classical music has been limited by concerts halls with a seating capacity averaging 2000-3000 people, by disappearing classical music radio stations in most cities, by a dearth of live concert broadcasts on both radio and TV and by the Internet, which has an abundance of classical music video clips available, but certainly does not foster an audience of classical music enthusiasts. Moreover, the available technology for live broadcasting on the Internet, has worked far better for the Pop world, than for a Beethoven Symphony. And because of it, the full scope and breadth of what a symphonic concert can offer, has remained a rarity on the Internet.

But with the launch this week of The Digital Concert Hall, a virtual concert venue of the Berlin Philharmonic, trail-blazed by sponsor Deutsche Bank, the new virtual concert hall will have an Internet venue with a new state-of-the-art audio technology comprised of a high-definition image, exceptional sound quality that is close to CD quality, and even good camera work that will now transmit concerts with thrilling immediacy. Just imagine the staggering audience numbers that can now have the opportunity to “go” to any number of live classical music concerts and experience the thrill that much smaller audiences around the world have known for hundreds of years…

In my blog of April 18, I wrote that the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which took place in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, gave the classical music world a “facelift,” generating interest in classical music around the world from a generation steeped in social media.

The Digital Concert Hall is moving far beyond that…

Music critic, Timothy Mangan wrote in his post Classical Life by Tim Mangan last week that, “the Berliner’s Digital Concert Hall appears to be a horse of a different color, i.e. something worth a ride.” Indeed.

Think about it. You get to sit at home wherever you are in the world, tune in and virtually “be” at a live concert in Berlin and be part of the “happening” in real time. Mind you, not just any concert, but a concert of one of the world’s greatest orchestras. The Berlin Philharmonic will launch its first full season of live webcasts on August 28 with Simon Rattle conducting. Watch the test link yourself (at http://dch.berliner-philharmoniker.de/#/en/tour/).

The Digital Concert Hall will behave as every other concert hall does – charge for tickets or season subscriptions. The difference is that the ticket price for a single concert is $14. Try that at Carnegie Hall…

But I bet one thing will really change forever. Extra mirrors will need to be placed backstage for musicians who will now have to also look the part — and maybe check out that “long hair”…

In my blog entry of last April 3rd, titled, And Now Ghost Twitterers, I commented on how ghostwriters had invaded the legitimacy of  “tweetidom” with high-profile celebrity twitterers hiring ghost twitterers to do the job they had intended to do themselves, in the first place.  My disappointment with this was the trust factor, imagining how fans would react when they found out that they had been following a celebrity ghost twitterer.

Now it turns out ghostwriters inhabit medical research as well, primarily to serve the interests of pharmaceutical firms – a much scarier thought than the invasion of “tweetidom.”

According to the New York Times article on 8/18 titled Ghosts in the Journal, “there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies — articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.”

Look, we in the PR industry know about ghostwriting.  We do it ourselves, writing on behalf of clients who do what they do very well, but are not writers, and therefore we write.  We wordsmith their thoughts, and use that “wordsmithing” to portray them in a favorable light vis-à-vis their audiences, but only when substantiated.  Pursuit of transparency needs to be relentless  – and is.  But never, ever, do we ghostwrite an article without it being in the “voice” of our client and only with their direct input and approval.

Apparently, that is not what is happening in the medical profession, where the results are far more critical.  That thought can scare the “heebeejeebies” out of anyone.

Minh Uong/The New York Times

Just consider the following example given in the article: Wyeth, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, hired a medical writing company to prepare an estimated 60 articles favorable to its hormone drugs with the goal, in this instance, to de-emphasize the risk of breast cancer associated with hormone drugs, promote their drugs as beneficial and blunt competing drugs – all written by ghostwriters who may or may not (unclear at this point) have had minor, or none, input from doctors who had attached their names to the papers.

I understand that the National Health Institute (NIH) offers grants to doctors and institutions to publish medical research and that, due to their time constraints, the ghostwriting of medical research has flourished — and mostly gone unchecked for nearly a decade.

Pharmaceutical companies have benefitted, while the public-at-large has been the victim of private interests. Thankfully, experts in medical ethics have come to the fore and condemned this practice.  But it will take a far harsher look and edicts from the NIH to stop this practice and offer incentives for doctors to get back to their desks and take time out to write their own research.
Or not publish at all…

Rival sniping commentators, Keith Olbermann (Countdown on MSNBC) and Bill O’Reilly (The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel), are at it again, flinging insults across the airwaves. The long-running name-calling saga, silenced last Spring by parent companies MSNBC’s General Electric and the FOX’s News Corporation with a handshake agreement for a cease fire, sparked again last Monday night and erupted into a raging fire.

A pretty mad Olbermann, insulted his rival, Bill O’Reilly and the News Corporation’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, by calling O’Reilly a “racist clown” in reference to an O’Reilly statement made two years ago about a black-owned restaurant and brought up again by O’Reilly himself, (but this time much tempered and changed), following the arrest of Harvard’s Professor Gates. Olbermann, fired the first shot, and called O’Reilly on the re-worded statements and repeated, on air, his inappropriately racists remarks of two years ago. Not surprisingly, O’Reilly shot back, claiming that G.E., through MSNBC, was “promoting the election of Barack Obama, and then seeking to profit from his policies,” — which brought the “parents” back out scrambling to salvage the old cease-fire and mend fences.

Their reasons for concern are self-serving. Apparently Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Immelt are concerned about any perceived damage to their corporate reputations, when in fact it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the freedom of the press.

So the old question begs as to who sets the boundaries in reporting – “parents” who pay the bills, or journalists? Whose interests do the journalists serve first, their parent’s or that of the public at large?

I commend Olbermann for throwing caution to the wind by going against his “parent,” in using his own judgment as to what should, or should not, be said on his program — and when and how. It gives me renewed hope that “parental” pacts cannot, and should not, infringe on journalism and that unbridled journalism will prevail.

I say let commentators keep commentating. No more corporate agendas, please. No more corporate handshakes. Let the judgment of a journalist dictate as to where the boundaries lie, as long as it stays within accepted broadcast legal parameters.

Advertisers are on the prowl again, this time around with checks in hand, to recruit Twitterers via the newly launched Sponsored Tweets, a new Twitter advertising platform that connects advertisers with Twitterers.  Now, those who tweet as a lifestyle (really most, per the headline in ClickZ, July 30, 2009, “Twitter Surpasses Facebook as Top Link in E-mail”) have the opportunity to get paid by advertisers for their tweets when tweeting about products and companies.

Well, there goes the “neighborhood,” so to speak, or the end of Twitter as we know it…

Look, getting paid for blogging about a company’s product, etc. is not new. It’s known as a “sponsored conversation,” which is a social media marketing technique in which brands provide financial or material compensation to bloggers in exchange for posting social media content about a product, service or website.  In fact I devoted a blog to the topic last June 11, titled “The FTC Steps in, Lightly” questioning the credibility of paid bloggers and noting FTC’s watchful eye hovering over it all.

And now enters the next iteration of “paid-for-opinions” online, in the pay-per-tweet platform. It somehow seems more invasive with Twitter, which originally was set up as a quick communication path for keeping up, almost hourly, with the minutest details of everyday life with friends near and far.  It even became a conduit for transmitting first hand news in real time (as in the plane that landed in the Hudson River trumping all news outlets).

This all begs the question, “how much is your Twitter soul worth?” Getting paid for tweets really sounds like a Twitter “sellout” to me…

By all accounts, I have plenty of company in that thought.  Per Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, “Personally, I think any review – on a blog or on Twitter – is immediately de-valued if the author is being paid to write it, because the objectivity is lost.” And according to an article that appeared on Mashable on the launch of Sponsored Tweets, “when you throw Twitter in the mix, there’s always the potential that your followers won’t understand that your sponsored tweet has been commissioned, even with the obligatory “hashtag” (or disclosure in the ad copy, which may, in the hurry to scan 140 characters, easily be overlooked).

Still, looking at the brighter side of things, it’s not really a bad thing for those unemployed Twitterers, and could potentially be seen as a “boost” to the hordes of still unemployed whose unemployment benefits may soon be at the brink of running out.  It could mean pocket change, a lively entrepreneurial business or a potential goldmine for Twitterers who can set their pay rate and find opportunities to tweet on behalf of advertisers, getting paid per tweet and/or click.

Interestingly enough, the cost per tweet (CPT) does not run cheap for the advertiser.  It can run between $2 and $30,000 per tweet for a 140-character message. The message goes from one Twitter account to as many people as the person has following.

Apparently there are already 200 paid Twitterers, among them celebrities who are ready and willing to be compensated for the appropriate Twitter advertising campaign.  I suspect that Sponsored Tweets will have a runaway crowd of Twitterers waiting in the wings for advertisers to beckon.

As it turns out, George Orwell’s science fiction book titled “1984” was not quite on target, as we look back 25 years later. Its futuristic predictions had a “Big Brother” watching, literally on screens everywhere, our every move in a totalitarian society that would dictate how we were allowed to live, what we could read, watch and do — basically turning us into a will-less robotic society.  Happily that’s not what happened, for unlike the Orwellian futuristic story, nobody is watching.

However, ‘They,’ whether Big Brother or other, are taking “copious notes…”

It’s well understood that a mountain of information is known about our offline lives like income, credit score, home ownership, what car we drive, etc.  It’s also well known that our every move online is traceable, through a technology known as computer “cookies” (a small text file which contains a unique ID tag, placed on your computer by a website). But now comes the news, as reported by Stefani Clifford on the front page of the New York Times, July 31, headlined “Ads Follow Web Users and get Deeply Personal,” that technology has made possible fatter and better “cookies” – ones that connect our offline information to consumers’ browsers.

Just think of a delicious wafer cookie, with a layer of cream in between two wafers.  Now add an extra layer of cream (your hereto private information or real world data) and bingo! — marketers and advertisers start salivating. In this case not at the taste, but at the opportunity to now take out the guesswork involved in online-only profiling. They can use this trove of information to show different products to people with different shopping habits, in many formats, i.e., ads, e-mail messages or semi-personalized Web pages.  Retailers that are already taking advantage of this tactic include Gap and Victoria’s Secret.

According to the article, this melding of offline information with online tracking will result in “a sea change in the way consumers encounter the Web.”

Although consumers can delete those “cookies” from their computers that allow such tracking, not many do and, according to the article, “it is easy for companies to add cookies without users noticing.”

This has an Orwellian feel to it, knowing that a lot of this is done invisibly.

In the book“1984”, it was the totalitarian government that intruded in the lives of private citizens.  It would seem that Corporate America is doing likewise, for nobody gave anyone permission to use the offline information to further typecast us as to our wants, dislikes and behavioral patterns.

To be fair, I suppose that there are benefits to this all around, not just for advertisers, marketers and companies showcasing products.  Even some consumers will be pleased to have their “wants” “come to them” based on their online profile, rather than go hunting themselves.

But what — are we going to make George Orwell right in becoming a will less society in which others do the choosing for us, those who now know what we think and want?  Do we want to be so predictable?  What about randomness? What about individuality?

In recent times there has been much discussion about online privacy issues.  I say this raises the bar on privacy concerns all around…