For those inquiring what’s going on in Sri lanka, here are some perspectives:
US-Lanka joint naval exercises
Visit of Assistant Sec. of State
London Times on the Galle attack
The new creativity: start something new and daring today
I have a saying that makes people pretty uncomfortable in marketing communications: If you’re doing today what you’ve done one year ago, you’re in a rut. You’re not moving the needle. Your competitors are passing you by.
To many of us, this may sound obvious, but if you look at what people are doing, and even how job descriptions are worded today, they look like they were written ten years ago. "Must be demonstrate strong writing skills, including writing biographies, press releases, PR letters, powerpoint presentations and edit newsletters."
My favorite, is of course the sentence somewhere below the line says ‘must be an out-of-the-box thinker’ that says, without any irony: ‘Must adhere to departmental, corporate, and strategic guidelines."
My point is that job descriptions need to march in tandem with the rapid movements in marketing and technology. Strike that. Job descriptions should leap ahead of what’s going on in marketing and tech. A few years ago Google, Del.icio.us, search engine optimization and RSS readers never existed. Even as we drool over the possibilities of YouTube, there are tools like MetaCafe coming over the horizon. In Second Life (thanks to Steve Rubels link) over one million people have registered. Some of these are big name companies such as Reuters and the BBC. Surely finance companies, universities, and hospitals will follow.
So, if we are not getting our feet wet in these realms, and still clinging to ‘collateral’ development and writing the brand guideline book, we are obviously in a time warp.
What are you doing today that you were not doing 365 days ago?
Edelman speaks up on the Walmart train wreck. What now?
The waiting is over. I wondered why it took so long for Edelman to say this much. The PR agency, which we often uphold as a model for PR in the emerging media world, had been identified as being behind a fake Walmart Blog.
Edelman Chairman, Richard Edelman’s statement admitting the ‘error’ of having not disclosed the identity of the Walmart bloggers, doesn’t go far enough to tell us (a) how this happened, (b) what checks and balances are in place, assuming they have this, being who they are, to keep the ‘transparency’ flag flying.
That they support the Word of Mouth Marketing Association guidelines (Honesty of Relationship, Opinion and Identity) is great in the face of having egg on their face from several or the prominent media and PR organizations. Just to take up one WOMMA point, Honesty of Identity that says:
We do not blur identification in a manner that might confuse or mislead consumers as to the true identity of the individual with whom they are communicating, or instruct or imply that others should do so.
As Shel Holtz, observes,
it takes guts for a CEO to admit to a boo boo of this nature. I am certain
there are huge legal issues involving a PR company apologizing for something
they do on behalf of a company, so we may have to be patient for the details to
come out. I would like to see Edelman use this to take the discussion of
transparency to a new dimension.
On a related note –of transparency– Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine has a long observation on how the Guardian is approaching it.
“what it means to run a newspaper along the sort of ethical
lines we tell everybody else to run their corporations.”
To a great extent, it’s not enough to practice what you preach. You need to fine tune the practice of what you preach if you are perceived as, or want to be the engine pulling the train. At this juncture, Edelman’s engine driver has hit the brakes; before the cars behind him begin to buckle, he’s gotta find ways of moving PR forward.
But there’s the other player in all of this: Walmart. How come it have not come out with a statement? Nothing here at Walmart Facts or on the news section of their main site. As a client, shouldn’t it bite the ‘transparency’ bullet as well? If it believed in the power of blogs for positive word of mouth at the outset (as the BusinessWeek article suggested) then the company should be concerned about not engaging the social media for damage control.
The fake Walmart blog reopens a can of worms
Now that the Walmarting across America blog has been outed as being maintained by two people paid to do this by WalMart, the question is, what should we could do to fight this kind of stealth work and similar forms of astroturfing. The two bloggers put it this way in their most recent post on the Walmarting blog:
"So I called my brother, who works at Edelman and whose clients include
Working Families for Wal-Mart, in order to find out if we’d be allowed
to talk to people and take pictures in Wal-Mart parking lots."
Walmart Watch, earlier identified the photographer. Waiting to see what Edelman has to say in all of this. This isn’t very different from the Al Gore penguin video, that was traced back to a PR and lobbying firm. What do you think?
Sun dives into Second Life
Jonathan Schwartz may be the first Fortune 500 CEO to blog, but he did one better. Sun Microsystems yesterday announced it had held its first virtual press conference in Second Life.
As Sun’s Chief Researcher puts it, working in SL syncs with what Sun has been after in networking: communication, sharing and community-building.
This is indded a company to watch. In other news, as has been reported in the Hobson and Holtz Report, Schwarz has asked the SEC to approve of the use of blogs to satify Regulation FD requirements. Meaning, he’s seen blogs as doing the work of a press release. Aparently, Reg FD doesn’t recognize the Internet, let alone blogs. Sound familiar?
I suggested to a marketing and PR director that press releases belonged to the push era, and should be at least supplemented (if not replaced) by blogs, but she had never heard of such a preposterous idea, and filed it under "Hmmm, that’s interesting." I didn’t bother to even mention Second Life.
As Schwartz puts it, he was far less worried about what he was saying in his blog, than where he was saying it. Read his very thoughtful piece about the "anachronistic press release" and it gives us a glimpse of where communications whether it is for legal or news dissemination purposes is headed.
I believe, that the future of communications is going to be driven by a few people who may not even have Marketing and PR in their title. They live in this bubble, doing what they’ve always done, while their audiences, and even the media have moved on. Gotta give it to Jonathan Schwartz for pricking that bubble. Just for the record, even the once the staid old Beeb, rented an island for a show in Second Life, and at least one PR agency, Text100, has opened an office there as well. Not surprisingly, Text100 also has a blog.
YouTube news spreads fast
YouTube, being bought by Google has become a water-cooler conversation, and a bullet point in business presentations. How did this come to be? People who have barely been on YouTube are talking it up. Great piece by SG Entrepreneurs, on how the blogosphere, because of feedreaders, RSS, and new media consumption habits propelled this story.
Search is king in a exploding media world
IAB and PricerwaterhouseCoopers released results of a study on Internet advertising at the MIXX conference this week. The positive trend shows a huge jump in ad revenue (37% over the same period last year).
Quite predictably, Search leads all categories by a wide margin, accounting for 40% of advertiser spending, but that number is the same as last year.
Separately, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported earlier that the entertainment and media sector is growing at a rapid clip, with broadband access becoming more available. But the US is not leading here. Russia and Eastern Europe are growing at more than twice as fast, and Japan will overtake China in 3 years.
The message in all this: while search and online gives us a certain perspective of the advertising and marketing shift, it is part of a lager ecosystem of the entertainment and media world — a $1.8 trillion market in 2010 — that encompasses everything from IPTV, satellite radio, podcasting, and broadband video, and gaming. All of this is slowly but surely getting more connected, so we cannot think of online marketing as a single dimension.
‘Scissors’ by Discover card: do big ideas move the needle?
I occasionally give marketing people a quiz about taglines, and credit card lines may sound memorable, but are reallly confusing. I am a believer that taglines are a waste of time. Powerful ideas dont need taglines.
This ad for Discover, using scissors is based on a simple, very memorable idea. People are delighted to see an army of scissors marching into town and begin to feed them with credit cards they want to get rid of. The campaign is called ‘what if’ but it needs no tagline, for sure.
I’m no big fan of the 30-second TV commercial, and could argue why even this could be easily forgottten among the credit card clutter. The reason I single them out is because they allow us to think about whether advertisers spend too much of their resources on tag lines, and cool commercials. This alone will not make a brand more endearing. Check what’s happening to Apple’s reputation, in spite of its hyper cool advertising and branding. They are surely defending their core brand, but by suing podcasters, they are unraveling everything that their advertising has done.
On a mission to simplify
I’m on a mission to simplify. I want my hands-free to double up as earbuds for my MP3 player. I want my phone charger to also works as a laptop powercord, but with every gizmo, comes a power cord, or a docking station, and it’s time to simplify.
Mylo, which stands for ‘My life online’ is one device from Sony that seems to fit the bill. It will surely compete for beltspace among those who lug a phone, MP3 player, laptop and camera when on the road. It opens up the playing field for those interested in multi-media communications because it wraps wireless broadband around a device you could use to Skype, carry your music and podcasts, and of course, use for getting on the web. The smartphone on steroids? I like the sliding keyboard, with a QWERTY keypad. Also, as a longtime Sony user with a memory stick slot in my Vaio, I can see how easy it would be to save and transfer data from the Mylo.
On reducing cable clutter, there’s a solution from iGo. I particularly like the idea of being able to power a phone and a laptop with one cord. There’s an even cooler device, for using a phone to wirelessly project a presentation to any monitor in a room -via a Bluetoth link. It’s called the Pitch Duo. With all the latest travel restrictions, it’s one more reason to leave the laptop behind and simplify even more.
E. coli damage control
The E.coli outbreak had me looking an update from some authority, specifically the local company, or the growers. A simple Google search lead me to the FDA site, which has good coverage.
But at the United fresh fruit & vegetable assn site, there’s very little help. The only update on the home page as of Sept 21st is an area that is password protected! The next story is about an ‘action-packed week’ at Washington, but this is about produce policy, not E. coli! Oh, they have a ‘timely reports..’ but this page links to stories about an immigration rally and a grassroots group.
So it was quite a shock to see an Ad Age story, citing the UFFVA about a plan to advertise, as a way of addressing the issue. I would have thought some basic, clear statements should precede any form of advertising, considering the damage done.
Hoipolloireport 