Communications

Stories in PR and social media

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Summing up a few interesting stories last week.

1. The walled garden of Times Select may soon open up to the rest of us who don’t want to part with $7.95 a month.

2. AT&T ‘censors’ Pearl Jam’s words. they didn’t want to to get Dixie Chicked, for supporting an anti-Bush band.

3. A company called Fatdoor has come up with an interesting way to use social networking to get to know the neighbors. It’s a mashup of public information, a wiki, maps etc. Good explanation here. 

4. A very cool idea from Edinburg, England. Using a camera phone and text messaging to detect art.

5. Taking story #3 to its logical conclusion, how about using a social network to get to know your dog’s owners? Technology Review magazine had a story about how your dog’s FaceBook-like page (called a PetWork, I kid you not!) could enhance your social life.

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And when I die would you Twitter my buddies?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

A story in the Arizona Republic
yesterday about a Tucson company creating graveside memory capsule may
seem a bit awkward, but the technology got me thinking. If you could
make a digital tribute downloadable at the grave, it opens up many
other possibilities.

Indeed John Stevenson’s product is more low tech than the
competition, which the article says, is a digital headstone that plays
a video. A sort of a flat screen atop one’s final resting place.

Ten years ago, we would have never thought the media or digital
content would visit this fine and private place but let’s get real. If
we use digi-formats to preserve everything we do while we are around
(Flickr family albums, Facebook profiles, digital photo frames, and
people who Twitter about everything they do in life) someone might as
well put these profiles to use after we have hit the final escape
button. It seems to me these are opportunities waiting to be tapped.
Some free advice:

1. MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn and Plaxo memorials

2. Turning expired (no pun intended, honest!) domains into permanent
markers that redirect to online memorials. Perhaps an idea for GoDaddy.

3. Archiving of Google search results for a person’s name as a legacy (OK, vanity) item to stuff into the graveside memorial.

4. Preserving tweets from a heavy Twitter user.

5. WiFi for cemeteries. I bet this exists.

6. Bluetooth connectivity on headstones –to download those digital
memories. Right now one needs to bring a laptop and cable to the grave.

7. The ability for people to text message condolences to the family from anywhere and turn these into a card or book.

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Netiquette and Debbie Weil’s email

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Debbie Weil is a terrific writer and blogger. But she made one small slip a few weeks back that had some people –bloggers, mainly– jumping all over it crying foul. Her crime: Allegedly attempting to "seed" a blog with comments.

The debate around "comment seeding" is not in the same league as, say, someone ratcheting up a company’s image with fake posts, as did Whole Foods’ CEO’s Yahoo postings. But in the touchy blogosphere that is admirably the cheerleader for transparency, it comes off looking that way.

What Debbie did, as this accompanying post suggests, was send a few people an email asking for their reaction and/or comment. The reactions were swift and some severe –on her blog. Her email soliciting comments was posted.

As Debbie says, she was only using email as a back-channel, and didn’t mean to deceive anyone.

There are two big issues here:

First the expectation of privacy. When someone contacts a professional colleague or ‘friend’ (itself an ambiguous term in the MySpace and FaceBook era) there is a tacit understanding that those conversations will be "off the record." But as any experienced PR person will tell you, there is no such thing as "off the record" anymore. Sadly so.

Second: Social media Netiquette. "What’s that?" you ask. In this huge, rough experiment we are engaging in, netiquette (which got attention when email and forums were the biggest things) has been dispatched to the basement. Dan York, wrote a related post around the same time that Debbie Weil was being harangued. It was about the need for updating netiquette to embrace social media realities. Is it OK to email a professional colleague about your organization or client, or would that be considered a shameless pitch? Or to turn it around, is it OK to decline to participate in the back-channel? Or are all the back-channels including IM and Twitter, no longer back-channels?

Debbie’s slip, which is more a poorly worded piece of communication than anything else teaches us a lot.

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Stop slamming Arizona!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Needle
While I was away on vacation, taking pictures of some amazing cities, celebrating their positive side, the Economist
magazine trashed my stomping ground and I am not a happy puppy. I am
particularly annoyed, since they conveniently ignored so many good
things that are happening here.

If you haven’t seen the Economist’s July 26th article on Arizona (“Into the Ashes”) go read it and come back.

Going by some letters in response to its editorial last Wednesday in the Republic, readers
were as critical. Two out of three letters criticized the editorial for
not facing reality. One, however was a letter from a couple who thought
the criticism was undeserved. They signed off as being “London by
birth, Arizona by choice.”

Why such a paucity of positive commentary? More pertinently, where
was our PR clout when this kind of ‘rubbish,’ as the Brits say, was in
the works? How does someone from a magazine like this get to slant an
article so bad, when some of the points raised are actually good: less
smog than LA, new schools emerging, the opportunities that Light Rail
will bring etc. They paint us as a “crime ridden mess” apparently
because of the Light Rail system construction , snowbirds who leave
their homes unattended, and clueless visitors.

That’s like saying London is the armpit of England because of the
overcrowded subway system, clueless tourists, constant terrorism
issues, and Crossrail construction –conveniently ignoring the amazing positive sides of this colorful, cosmopolitan city.

Why are positive stories hidden from view, tucked in the back of the paper —like this today, about the growing state economy? It’s time we started telling telling our own stories, if no one else will.

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Seatwave brings people power

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If you have winced when forced to buy tickets to a music act or the theatre at the "rack rate," you’ll like Seatwave.

It’s a sort of a trading hub for entertainment and sports tickets, where buyers and sellers post, bid and guarantee the sale through Seatwave which acts as the intermediary. Whether it’s for last minute Prince concert tickets (£ 35.95) Hairspray the musical (£ 49) or a test cricket match between India and England, they are available here. Needless to say they are largely for a British audience. But if you don’t mind paying it forward, so to speak, with £ 2,799 for the 2008 Super Bowl (here in Phoenix), that is supposedly the price range.

But the most interesting part of this bottom-up trading system is the fact that the acts reviewed by the hoi polloi, are impacting sales. Some in the audience are even writing reviews in the interval, the Producer of The Lord Of The Rings is quotes as saying.

And if you think this is wild, consider TxtReviews, a service in Canada offering people movie and book reviews via phone. In Canada, you need to send a message to this sort code 416 -7384397 (stands for 416 REVIEWS) with the movie name or book ISBN number  and you’ll get a sms-abbreviated description back via a text message.

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“Cult of the Amateur” argument, sounds like Maurice Saatchi

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Andrewk_book
"These busted boomers," writes Constance Lavendar, "are clinging to an argument based on authority, hierarchy, and privilege; they
despise digital democracy because it threatens their existence, challenges their
authority, and breaks down their well-preserved hierarchy."

She is commenting on a post in the Chronicle, about The Cult of the Amateur argument by Andrew Keen in his book about how "experts" are more valuable than the chattering masses, and the internet is killing culture.

She could well have been commenting on Lord Maurice Saatchi’s "Google Data Vs Human Nature" in The Financial Times in May. The core of his argument is in this sentence

"It is an inconvenient and stubborn fact that outside Newton’s universe,
where physical laws govern reality, the world is conditioned by
perception."

Attacking the predictive model of marketing is not different from dismissing the hoi polloi who are suddenly on equal footing with experts. The old guard wishes it –and wikipedia, and blogs, and the ability for non-agency folk to come up with hugely popular Diet Coke/mentos uncommercials– were not so.

In a later column, Mr. Saatchi wrote: "Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising." You know he is troubled by this algorithm thing. It must be tough watching the digital natives over-run the place.

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Dow’s Blue Plant Run. Could Press releases make this much impact?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

DowhusplashThe Dow Chemical’s Human Element campaign may not have taken it to a level of humanizing it in it’s first iteration of the campaign, but it was a start of showing the company’s commitment to critical issues facing the world in which it operates.

This is tough when you’re a positioned in people’s minds as a “chemical” company. But they try.

So could press releases and advertising be part of an extreme makeover kit? Consider what they are up against. Dow inherited (OK, bought) Union Carbide in 2001. Those of you born before 1984 will remember that Union Carbide was associated with Bhopal, the huge pesticide-related tragedy in India that killed thousands of villagers. Dow has to operate in a PR world where organizations other than them keep this story alive, and issue ‘lipstick on a pig” press releases like this about long term contamination. Thanks to the internet and our access to information is only a keyword away, straightforward PR won’t cut it.

Bpr_day40_3
Against this backdrop, take a look at Dow’s second phase of the Human Element campaign. The press releases on the Dow site don’t scream out CSR (corporate social responsibility), but bring attention to climate change issues, water and food supplies are built-in. It’s sponsorship of Blue Planet Run with National Geographic has a non-linear approach to a PR campaign, that has advertising, celebrity, media, and outreach all blended together. There’s a Celebrity-endorsed sneaker selling on eBay (auction closes July 20th). There’s a team blog covering the 95-day, 16-country Blue Planet Run. And there are press releases like this that don’t tell you much considering what good in-depth coverage is coming off the blog.

No matter what your position is on Dow, you have to recognize that this is a well thought out program supported by good marketing communications. If it’s good PR, it’s because it’s so well integrated into the other components, and invisible.

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Harry Potter’s social media impact on branding

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Potterbook
Harry Potter is an extended tale of no, not just wizards and magic
but the wisdom of the crowds in action. But that story got buried in
the hoopla around the launch of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows last Saturday.

Very predictably, the traditional news media covered the event in
the same way they did, say, the iPhone. Too much attention to people
queuing up for the book, the parties, the ‘education’ component, but
very little about the phenomenon itself.

The fact is, the Harry Potter franchise just doesn’t belong to J.K. Rowling
anymore. The books may be in 200 countries and 63 languages, but the
Potter brand goes beyond that geographic reach. It’s been open-sourced
in more ways than you could imagine; the wisdom of the Potter crowds
has always ruled when it comes to creating their own message channels,
cranking out their own Potter-esqe stories etc. Despite the fact that
this is a book, and not a digital product, the fans are all over the
social media map. There is:
    * The Mugglecast podcast run by high school students, that has some 50,000 listeners a week, and features Elton John and Bono.
    * The Leaky Cauldron leaks news about the books and carries a disclosure that it is in “no way affiliated with J.K. Rowling.”
    * No shortage of Potter blogs, including one that suggests a Bollywood storyline for an Indian audience.
    * The Harry Potter Fiction store, that’s not managed by Scholastic, the book publisher; it’s also “unofficial.”
    * The Academy of Virtual Wizardry, at “Caledon Highlands” in you guessed it, Second Life!

I could go on…

So I wanted to track how the raving fans were behaving. I had a
haunch that there would be an equal outpouring of passion on Saturday
the 20th July around midnight not in front of the bookstores where the
TV crews were waiting in hoardes, but on Wikipedia. At 11.00 pm Pacific
Time the discussion (on the “comments” page of the Harry Potter Wikipedia showed
signs that things were heating up. The Wikipedians had been discussing
the value of locking down the Wiki, since everyone knew the book had
leaked and the plot was being discussed elsewhere.

“Just wait until the official release time. Then we can put
everything up in 5 minutes or so, considering the number of wikipedians
interested in this.” said one editor at 11.03 pm. This was clearly a hard core editor, but also a big Potter fan. “Most people, me included, will be too busy reading the book on Saturday to check the article.”
Others like him (or her) were unhappy that some editors had moved to
freeze the pages until a week after the launch. Fan passion was
expressed in the form of outrage that some newspapers’ reviewers had
created spoilers by discussing the plot before the launch. Reading
through their discussion gives you a glimpse of not just how these
unpaid wikipedians work, but how fans operate late at night, doing a
thankless job for what? To them this isn’t JK’s book. This is theirs.

If only other brands let their customers work their magic this way!

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Two stories, different brand awareness

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Shrek_cereal
You’ve probably seen or heard stories about food marketers, supposedly scaling down their marketing to children. Great story, except they have a lot of wiggle room about what they plan to market, and how. Packaging is the one place they obviously won’t give up, with boxes of cereal saying more about the characters like Shrek and Spiderman than the contents.

So while the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association is busy debating the topic how to do the minimum and seem like its members are helping the consumer, it’s good to take a look at another story about actually anticipating a target audience’s needs and doing something about it.

Samsung has started installing charging stations for cell-phone and mobile accessory  at Los Angeles International Airport. It sems so simple, that you wonder why carriers like Verizon or T-Mobile hadn’t thought of it before. It’s a great way for a brand to communicate that it understands what its customers (and all potential ones) face when traveling.

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