Social Media

With friends like these…

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

What might Condi Rice say in an IM to Ahmadinejad?

There’s an interesting site, affiliated with the Huff Post, called 32/6 with speculative “news” like this. Rice’s IM name is Condi4peace’ while the Iranian leader is ‘nonukes4U.”  Now if only they could Twitter..

Is there a difference between “uppercase Friends” and “lowercase friends?”

With all the following, poking and spamming going on between so-called friends, it’s becoming an issue as to who one’s real friends are. It takes someone like CC Chapman to put his finger on (and bring his microphone to) something that resonates with a lot of us. Catch his podcast, Managing the Gray for more on this.

Seth and Jeremiah on Social Media

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I just attended a webinar on Using Social Media to grow your business. They discussed Meatball Sundae, and PR, and how the millennials ought to make us change the way we communicate with them.

Seth spoke of how people often think of PR in terms of ‘managing your company’ and it’s image, or straightforward ‘publicity.’ It just doesn’t work that way, he said because of the way social media works. Beating up on journalists won’t get you the media you want. Case in point the iPhone launch. Everyone seemed to think of it as a hyped up event, Seth pointed out. But the truth is, Apple’s PR people did not go after the media. They made a product so good that it had a story to tell.

Lesson for PR folks. Don’t be afraid to tell your boss or your marketing department that no, you won’t promote the product unless it has something newsworthy. I guess the lesson for organizations trying to massage the media with PR is this.  Don’t create press releases out of non-stories.

The other speaker that drew me to the event was Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Walmart’s new blog. This time it’s for real

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It’s encouraging to see Walmart return to the social media world, after getting badly burned with a fake blog last year.

Influenced by Robert Scoble, they invite participation:

We know you’ve got plenty to say. On this blog, we encourage dialogue about the products discussed by the writers. We welcome your thoughts and opinions on any and all of those topics.

With some caveats. No personal attacks, bad language of off-topic comments.

It’s a team blog, with eight experts whose photos are on the main page –clearly an attempt to get as far as possible for the fake stigma they earned before.

They started off right with discussion of the organization’s ” past bruises” and recognition that “is not as far along the path as we’d like it to be, but every day it is getting better…” But most of it is essentially about gadgets, movies, lawn & garden etc. The section on ‘sustainability‘ will be getting a lot of attention, for sure.

The site is called Checkout. Check it out!

Press kit not a sales kit in social media world

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Great post today by Charlotte Risch, a co-editor of ValleyPRBlog.

How many times have you called up a company for details about a product or service, to be told something like “we don’t have a press kit, but I could send you a PDF of something we took to a trade show…”

If only the Social Media NewsRoom had a lot more takers.

GM’s newsroom looks like a blog, with Flickr, Delicious, and YouTube links.

The image on the left of a 2007 concept car, the Beat, is being pulled off the Flickr site that has some 152 images.

What better way to provide the media with photos, instead of taking months to create and maintain a separate photo archive.

Paperless travel arrives at gate

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I couldn’t wait for this to happen.

Continental Airlines has followed on the heels of Air Canada, and started allowing passengers to use a code sent to a cellphone as a boarding pass.

Marketers ought to take note about what this means for all other forms of paper validation, such as:

  • Coupons with short expiry dates and location-based offers (say a book discount at a Borders store in just one zip code)
  • Tickets to events that could be promoted and ‘pulled’ by a self-qualifying target audience

Text messaging campaigns are amazingly affordable, and less complicated than people think. Renting a short code, or buying a vanity code is a lot cheaper than, say, a magazine ad. Besides saving a lot of trees, and making you look good, too.

Barry Kluger on finding your niche, taking risks

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“Who wants to hear from a PR person who spins stories for a living?” That was Barry Kluger‘s rhetorical question to a class of film students at ASU last Thursday. In case you haven’t heard of him or read his column in the Arizona Republic now and then, Kluger is the managing partner of the Kluger Media Group here in the Valley. (Formerly handling corporate communications and PR at Prodigy Inc. and before that at VHI.)

Kluger was there to get students fired up about entrepreneurship, and how to break into the market dominated by big ticket names such as Disney.

Kluger made some good points, specifically:

“If you can’t beat them, quit. Go beat the other guy.”
Seth Godin fans will find this slightly reminiscent of some of the arguments in his latest book, the dip, as in “Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt-until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.”)

“Creativity has no residency, no locale.”

“Don’t try to out-Disney Disney.”

“It’s all about finding the right audience.”

Kluger came back to PR now and then, to put an asterisk on the craft that he stressed will only get you so far unless you take risks, push the envelope. “Try a few stunts, do something different,” he urged, and left off with this gem:

“He who whispers down the well
about the things he has to sell
will never make as many dollars
as he who climbs the tree and hollers.”

Lavatory search via text messaging

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Not many people still realize they could perform a Google search on a phone –using a short code. I’ve written about this before.

But did you know that if you were in London, you could find a toilet using a short code? The British press is reporting this story of the Westminster City Council publicizing a short code 80097. If you’re in the West End, and you gotta go, simply fire off a text message with the word “toilet” to the short code, and get results of the nearest loo.

It’s supposed to reduce… I won’t go there. Go read all about it, if you must.

Friday Survey

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

We all love email. We all hate email.You may have noticed how the last few weeks were all about spam, not from the usual sources, however. It’s been variously called “co-worker spam,” “workplace spam,” and “PR spam.” Even “Facebook spam!”

While porn spam is on the decline (yeah!) workplace spam is burying us (you’ll find this Pew Internet report a good read.) to the point that 71% of us use email filters.

So we wanted to know where you stand when it comes to what irks you, and what you’d like to do about it. It should take you less than three minutes.

Take the survey here.

(This has been cross posted from ValleyPRBlog)

Unexpected Axe effect –on Unilever

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

There’s one side effect about not being entirely sincere about your marketing. You could get called out, ranted about, and exposed. Or you could get body slammed as in having someone create a mashup.

The latest is one guy’s take on the hypocrisy of attacking the ‘beauty industry’ by Dove Soap (if you’ve not seen the brilliant Unilever Dove commercial, stop now, and watch this) and the same company promoting radically sexed-up behavior for Axe.

The creator of the mashup is, um, an ad guy (a strategic planner) who has cleverly replaced the fast cuts depicting the beauty industry in the original commercial, with girls gone wildish cuts from Axe commercials.

Axe has been consistently positioned (as in the example, left) as a fantasy spray for men. See the funny but envelope-pushing long-form video about people with “unchecked libidos” and you’ll know.

Unilever must have factored this in to its marketing, knowing full well what it was entering when it attacked the beauty category defined by liposuction, botox, cosmetic surgery and all manner of dietary fads. They’ve pushed the pedal to the metal for some PR, and they’re getting a bit of consumer-generated whiplash.