But as the state-run company grows, it is attracting the scrutiny of Brazilian investigative journalists and senators who worry that billions of petrodollars might be put to political use. And that’s not sitting well with Petrobras CEO José Sergio Gabrielli, a left-leaning former economics professor and close adviser to Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. While the Brazilian government holds 38% of the publicly traded Petrobras shares, it controls 55% of the voting rights.

In May, the Brazilian Senate launched an inquiry to determine if Petrobras had evaded more than $2 billion in taxes by channeling funds to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) run by political allies of President Lula in the runup to next year’s presidential elections. It also started looking into alleged overpayments for ships and pipelines. That’s when Gabrielli—frustrated by newspaper reports that he complained were tendentious and quoted him out of context—ordered his public relations team to create a blog called Petrobras—Facts and Figures.

“We’re Going to Defend Ourselves”

Gabrielli says he personally signs off on many of the company’s daily postings on the blog, which is published only in Portuguese. The idea is to rebut what he calls “false information” in the Brazilian press about the company. But the site, which has had more than 1.5 million visitors, is raising questions about whether one of the region’s most respected state-run companies is harming its reputation by being so combative. “We’re going to defend ourselves,” Gabrielli told a reporter from leading newspaper Folha de São Paulo in late June, in a Q&A posted on the blog. “Attacking is also part of defending oneself.”

One of the first things the Petrobras blog did was to publish the entire transcript of an interview Gabrielli granted to a major newspaper—before the newspaper’s article appeared. That infuriated journalists throughout Brazil, who claimed that their questions are the intellectual property of their publications—and in any case, out of courtesy, should not be aired before an article appears in print.

Petrobras agreed to wait until midnight before an article’s publication to post transcripts on the Web, but it still takes a no-holds-barred approach to rebutting, point by point, every major news report.

Petrobras avoids making inflammatory statements about journalists in its daily postings. But its pointed rebuttals spawn vociferous reader comments that accuse journalists of working for political parties or belonging to a conspiracy to turn over Brazil’s oil riches to foreign oil companies. One blog post by a reader identified as Da Torre said that “the Folha [de São Paulo] never tires of making up facts to denigrate Petrobras’ image. Could it be that they are working for the multinationals to knock Petrobras down and…grab the best thing Brazil has, its oil?”

Mesh Media Strategies has always advised its clients who may be interviewed by the media – any media – to record the interview and be prepared to use it to combat misleading media reports which use bits of the interview out of context. This applies to both corporate clients and political candidates. Ideally, the interview should be video-recorded, with cameras on both the reporter and the interviewee. Immediately after the interview is concluded, a verbatim transcript of the interview should be made, and the video or audio of the interview should be prepared for uploading to the web. YouTube is a good platform for video, while a corporate or campaign blog can easily handle an audio file as a “podcast.”

No corporate CEO, organization leader, business owner or political candidate should ever do a media interview without recording it – and no corporate CEO, organization leader, business owner or political candidate should agree to an interview with any media outlet that refuses such conditions.

I have been on both sides of this issue.

Several years ago, I managed to land an interview with music superstar Garth Brooks as his fame was peaking – an interview not for an entertainment magazine, but for a business magazine called Business Nashville. (Today, it’s called Business TN.) The focus of the interview was not music but money and Brooks’ approach to business. In granting the interview, Brooks’ people asked that he be allowed to record the interview.

I had no problem with that request, because I had no agenda in doing the story. I was going to record the interview to ensure accuracy, and didn’t mind if he did the same. I tell clients today, if the media doesn’t want you to record the interview and post the recording or a transcript, they’ve got an agenda.

Brooks did the interview but, as it turns out, his people didn’t record it. They did ask to review the quotes we selected for the story, and although all of the quotes were verbatim, Brooks did ask – not demand – that we delete one sentence because the situation he was talking about – ironically, involving Brooks and a dispute with a major national newspaper – had been resolved since the interview. The quote was accurate but the context had changed, so I made the edit. The result: An accurate story.

Garth Brooks didn’t need to record the interview because I came to it with no hidden agenda, but today’s professional news media is so rife with bias and agendas that you can’t take that chance. Even if the media isn’t biased or coming at you with a hidden agenda, the chances are still high that you will be misquoted or information you give will be used in the wrong context. No member of the media knows more about your business or your campaign than you do, which means there is a good chance they’ll get it wrong.

Having audio or video recordings and a verbatim transcript means you can quickly respond when they do.

Transparency is a two-way street – a media outlet which demands transparency but refuses to grant it is not to be trusted.

But MP&F doesn’t deserve all of the criticism for taking the money – the city agency deserves criticism (and a budget cut) for using tax dollars that way. It’s an ethical lapse on both sides. No government agency should use tax dollars to lobby its legislative branch to spend more tax dollars.

MP&F does deserve all of the criticism of the deal from another perspective: The firm is charging outrageous, indefensible, unreasonable fees for simple services like following the convention center debate on Twitter and sending emails. And its spending is out of control: The contract was for $75,000, but MP&F has billed the city more than $458,000.

Outrageous.

Mesh Media Strategies doesn’t operate that way. We don’t charge outrageous fees for anything. (We also don’t over-bill by counting a 15-minute task as an hour of billable work.) And our proposals include cost caps and a policy of never doing work that hasn’t been approved by the client, including approval of the price.

Our goal isn’t to make money at your expense, selling you services you don’t need at prices that don’t make sense. Our goal at MMS is to help your business, non-profit organization or campaign to grow and succeed – to make more sales, get more clients, attract more supporters and donors – by using the right media tools and the right strategy, for a reasonable price.

As for the larger ethical issue raised by MP&F’s current predicament, Mesh Media Strategies accepts government agencies as clients but will not accept tax dollars from one branch or agency of government to do media relations work intended to lobby another branch or agency of the same government on behalf of any project that would result in more spending of taxpayers dollars.

NashvilleCityBlogs.com

Leah Betancourt, digital community manager at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, gives journalists a good guide to using Facebook.

Social media is transforming journalism from all directions – from within and from the outside, as newsrooms deploy social media tools, the web enables “print” media to use video, and the audience – formerly known as “viewers” and “readers” – is now actively engaged in creating news content.

Mesh Media Strategies founder Bill Hobbs helped the Nashville City Paper build its first foray into social media, the Nashville City Blogs.

Tomorrow morning, the entire lifestyles department of the Tennessean will be hitting the road to talk to the communty – in person. No using phone calls to get information. No calling people to come speak with us. We’re going to reach out to the community by using the power of human interaction. Instead of planning a story, we’re going out without a planned budget. The only thing planned is interaction.

We’re going to be taking photos, tweeting, Facebooking – finding the pulse of the community by being in it… As journalism used to be.

More years ago than I care to number, I was a general assignments reporter at the same newspaper. One day, I came to work with a story idea – not a huge story, just the impending opening of a new jazz club in a somewhat blighted section of downtown Nashville, about six blocks from the newspaper’s offices. There had been no press release.

I wrote the story, turned it in, and a colleague on the business desk – whose beat included covering new businesses, real estate development and the resurgence of downtown – saw it and asked how I’d found out about it. Who called me and gave me the exclusive? Who emailed me the tip? Where did I get the jump on the story – ahead of the business desk? When does it open?

“I walked past it while going to lunch,” I responded. “It opens next Monday.”

Like many, probably all metropolitan dailies, The Tennessean has a cafeteria in its building for employees. And, at least when I was working there, too many reporters and editors would eat there, instead of leaving the building for an hour or so and getting out into the community they are supposed to cover.

Before I worked for The Tennessean, I was a reporter for the Nashville Business Journal. The NBJ offices, on the other side of downtown Nashville, did not have a cafeteria. The reporters and editors sometimes brought lunch, but more often than not we exited our cubicles, took the elevator to the ground floor, and joined thousands of our fellow citizens of the Nashville business community on the sidewalks of the city, headed to lunch.

It’s amazing what kind of stories we could find just by interacting with the community we covered. It’s why the little, understaffed and under-funded NBJ routinely trounced our daily competitors – there were two back then – on business news.

The social media tools that The Tennessean’s Lifestyles section staff will be using in its grand experiment didn’t exist back in the early 1990s, but the lesson of the lunchroom still applies: Interaction with the community, over lunch or over the web, is a key to producing vibrant news media that’s relevant to the community it is supposed to be published for.

For others thinking about using social media communications tools, remember this: It isn’t about the technology. It isn’t about the Twitter and Facebook logos on your company’s or campaign’s website. It’s about interacting with people. It’s about having a conversation with your customers or clients, or your supporters and donors, and inviting new customers, clients and supporters to join that conversation.

If something gets in the way of that – whether it be an in-house cafeteria or a new technology or a fear of new tools – get rid of it or get over it. Or lose the game you’re trying to win.

Blogs will play an important role in this election by default. Over the next year, traditional news organizations will do the occasional “take out” on the race. …  But day in and day out the gossip, the trivia, the minutiae, and the obscure details that thrill political junkies will be found on the blogs. … Blogs can provide information that is not general enough for mass media. That will be especially true for special-interest issue blogs. No doubt SayUncle will keep us informed on where the candidates are on gun issues, for example.

Blogs do not, by and large, have the reach of traditional news organizations. At least right now. But they do have a great deal of influence with political insiders. And they are often read by newspaper editors and television and radio news directors. Thus they often set the tone of campaign coverage. They can get the “talk right” for a candidate, or reveal the candidate to be a bumbling fool. This campaign, they may set the storylines that play out in the course of the campaign.

The founder of Mesh Media Strategies launched Tennessee’s first successful political blog in November 2001, with demonstrated impact on public policy decisions, campaigns and media coverage during its seven-year run. He now consults with candidates, campaigns and political organizations on how to use blogs and other social media as an “offensive weapon” and effective communications tool.

(It’s a crazy notion – all those links and story snippets out there that so irk the AP actually drive traffic to AP stories on AP-member websites, thus increasing the value of the AP content to the publishers of those sites. Rather than try to stamp out the spread of AP stories via social networking, the AP ought to be trying to encourage it – so that they can charge AP members more to use AP content.)

The AP also seems to have forgotten the “fair use” doctrine well established in American copyright law – it won’t be difficult for Google or your average small-traffic blogger to show that their usage of an AP headline and a paragraph or two is protected by the fair use doctrine.

The AP’s announcement of its new policy demonstrates that the AP has become a pointless and unnecessary part of the media. Let’s consider first the three basic things the AP does, why they are no longer needed (and what has or can replace them), and then consider how this impacts business marketing and campaign communications.

First, the AP does the following three basic things for newspapers (and fills similar roles for broadcast media):

1. It moves stories from AP-member newspapers that published them to AP-member newspapers that want to publish them.

2. It takes content generated by newspapers, edits it, and distributes the AP version electronically to AP-member newspapers that want to use them.

3. It publishes original stories written and edited by AP staffers for use by AP-member newspapers.

The AP is a middleman in the first two roles, adding zero value in role #1 and minimal value in role #2. The Internet has put middlemen on the endangered species list.

The AP’s greatest real value, and the hardest to replace, is what the AP does in role #3. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The newspaper industry, if it chose to do so, could replace the AP in role #1 simply by creating a central web hub where newspapers would upload their content and download content from other papers that they want to use. Each paper would agree to pay other papers a flat standard fee for use of the other paper’s content. If the standard fee was $10 and Paper A used three stories from Paper B and Paper B used one story from Paper A, at the end of the month Paper A would send Paper B $20. Layer on a system of category and tag indexing and a simple system of processing compensation and the AP is no longer needed as a middleman.

As for role #2, the AP versions of stories are intended to be shorter and, I daresay, blander version of the original story published by the newspaper. Back when newspapers were limited to publishing with ink on paper, shorter stories from the AP allowed newspapers to carry more stories (and transmitting them over the wires was less expensive). In today’s web world, pixels are not so limited so stories can be whatever length they need to be. AP re-editing stories that were already produced by reporters and editors at AP-member papers is mostly redundant – and contributes to bland, boring journalism. If you’ve never been to journalism school I have a revelation for you: Learning to write stories the way the AP re-edits stories is not an upper level writing class. J-schools teach AP style and the basic AP story format – the dreaded inverted pyramid – as a basic skill set because the basic AP story structure is a good guideline for a rookie reporter to follow in reporting a basic news story.

But the inverted pyramid – the most important info in the lead, less important info in each successive paragraph – is a formula by which each sentence in a story is more boring and less important than the sentence which preceded it. You won’t find examples of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism or book-length journalistic works of non-fiction written following the AP’s style and structure.

So much for AP Role #2.

Now, let’s consider Role #3 – the AP producing original content.

Can the news media live without it? As a former newspaper reporter and magazine editor, I believe it can – and in fact would be improved by doing so. Too many newspapers have become lazy and stopped sending reporters to cover many important stories, trusting the AP would be there. For example: Nashville’s daily newspaper, The Tennessean, often doesn’t cover things that happen at the state capital, just a few blocks away, because the AP will have a reporter there. Many newspapers across Tennessee rely on the AP for coverage of the state legislature, with the result being that newspapers all across Tennessee all have the same bland, boring AP stories filling much of their pages.

But if the AP ceased doing original content tomorrow, what would replace it?

Well, for one, newspapers would have to cover more stories that happen in their town, city or region – and they’d have to rely on each other for stories from outside their region – which means sharing content and coordinating coverage planning with each other directly via that central web hub rather than continuing to pay the AP to perform middleman roles that no longer add much value to the media process.

So much for the media biz commentary – what does the AP’s new anti-social media policy mean for you and your effort to promote your business, organization, cause or campaign? Chances are, the AP won’t be able to enforce its policy. First, fair use doctrine virtually guarantees it will lose in court if it chooses to sue. But if it tries to enforce it, you’ll see a backlash against the AP on the part of bloggers and users of other social media. Fewer links to AP stories on AP-member sites will reduce the value of successfully pitching a story to the AP.

Ironically, the AP attack on social media will, we believe, only serve to increase the value of blogs and other social media as outlets for information. As the AP slides ever-more-rapidly into irrelevance, we will see the continued rise and flowering of a more decentralized and grassroots media in which stories spread virally from person to person via blogs and Facebook and Twitter based not on the reach of the outdated AP system but based on what people find interesting and share with others.

Newspapers print an AP story because it’s what is available and because they paid for it.

The social media spreads a story because it is what people find interesting.

This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.

Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.

The trend won’t be limited to the Silicon Valley, or to tech-related products and services. A media relations strategy which doesn’t include a significant social media component is a strategy that is ignoring a sizable and growing portion of the population.

The new resource from the online video sharing site “will feature a host of top journalists and media experts sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting,” says TechCrunch.

What does this mean for the media relations efforts for your business, organization, church or campaign?  The YouTube Reporters’ Center is just the latest in the ongoing trend of decentralizing and democratizing the creation and distribution of information. A press release to the local media just isn’t going to get the job done as effectively now or in the future as it did in the past. Many of your current or future customers, supporters, donors, members or voters are going to be too busy creating content to spend time watching or reading what we traditionally think of as “the news.”

You need your story, your message, your presence to be where they are, not where they are not.