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

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

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.”

Publicity stunt or graffiti?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Sometimes art and ‘stunt’ exchange marker pens. Or in this case, aerosol cans.

Bansky, the British graffiti artist (who placed an inflatable doll of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner at a Disney theme park last year) is promoting his art on the famous security wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, with images like this.

This stunt is timed with the move to bring tourists back to Bethlehem.

Bansky had a sound bite that beats anything the city could do to draw visitors concerned about their safety.

“If it is safe enough for a bunch of sissy artists then it’s safe enough for anyone,” he said.

Do you reveal your age if you don’t text?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

There are two things that reveal your age these days. Do you wear a wrist watch, and do you use text messaging?

I thought about this when asked to contribute an article to a student newsletter last week, pondering what could someone out of college for over twenty years say to someone who prefers text messaging over talking on the phone.

I am not being cynical here. The kids we are going to hire, and ‘”empower” are more versed in some of the things we have no clue about, even though we have lots of anecdotal evidence that they don’t “get” Twitter, blogs and Wikis.

Heck, these are people who enter an annual event called the National Texting Championship. There’s a WIRED article on this, about how one thirty-something guy asked if he could use his cell phone’s T9 feature. He was booed.

In case you aren’t a texter, T9 is the ‘predictive texting’ feature (based on nine keys) that people-who-miss-QWERTY (us) think is cool, because it sort of guesses what dictionary words we’re going to use. At least two words in the preceding sentence would have stumped T9.

If you’re curious about my answer to the two age-related questions, it’s yes and yes.

Lavatory search via text messaging

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

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.

Quotes for the week ending 1 Dec, 2007

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” ‘Buy American’ and ‘Long Tail’ are just so last year; marketers are all about good old-fashioned customer satisfaction and retention.”

Advertising Age story on Seth Godin being picked as the top business guru, over Steve Jobs and Malcolm Gladwell.

“GoDaddy will go ahead with Super Bowl ad.”

Article in Arizona Republic stating that the domain name registrar will once again air a risque ad during the Super Bowl, a tactic it has done for two years now.

“Inventing a way to charge people for free stuff? Now that’s what I call a technological breakthrough.”

Technology reviewer Brian Collins, writing in The Sunday Times, UK, about Amazon’s e-book reader, Kindle, that charges users $14.99 a month to read newspapers, and 0.99 cents a month to read blogs on the device.

“The chilling effect on expensive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America.”

Stephen Crocker, Federal magistrate, in a June ruling against the subpoena for Amazon.com records on a mail and wire fraud case. Reported this week on CNN.com. The court docs were unsealed last week.

“Journalists and PR people have to hold each other responsible.”

Barry Kluger, former VP of Communications for Prodigy Inc. and senior exec at MTV, at a lecture at Arizona State University.

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)