November 2007
Tony Perkins is, literally and figuratively, AlwaysOn. He's the person who started the AlwaysOn web site for tech insiders in 2002 - and he's always ready to dish out opinions and insight on what's happening in business today. Tony founded Red Herring magazine in 1993 and published the book "The Internet Bubble" in 1999, which accurately predicted the troubles that would soon hit the industry.
Tony recently spoke with Schwartz about trends for 2008, including topics as social media, green tech and investment opportunities. Hear it here.
Posted by John Moran on November 30, 2007 at 2:36 PM
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Press releases take a lot of heat. Considering that over time, these standard tools of the PR world have proven themselves pretty effective, it's amusing that they continue to be the butt of jokes and constant redesign.
Back in the heyday of the dot-com bubble, you'd see releases loudly touting "paradigm shifts" and "robust, scalable architectures." We've tried to get away from a lot of this overblown writing, but it still gets through.
The latest debate is over the "Social Media News Release." SHIFT Communications has taken the lead on this concept, putting out a template for others to use. Today Search Engine Watch took the template to task for not really accomplishing its goal and Brian Solis fired back.
The problem is, we're debating the wrong issue. The problem isn't the format, its the content of the information we're putting out and determining the true goal for that information. Frankly, unless you're a major corporation like Disney, GM or HP, no one really cares that you just hired a new CEO. You may write a release and put in on your Web site, but do you really need to send it over BusinessWire? And does it really need to be three pages long?
No, we need to learn from bloggers and change our style. We need to start talking conversationally in our tone and attributing information to individuals. We need to write compelling stories, not just make announcements. This takes talent and skill, something many PR firms have in spades.
The most interesting news release I've seen recently comes from Google when it announced Android. What's that? You didn't see the release?
Right, there was none. They put out a blog posting on it. But, this is no less a news release than one formatted in the traditional manner and put on BuseinessWire. It's just a different way to get out information--one that is truly part of the conversation, not trying to push itself into it.
And the best part? It actually worked. Not because it was a blog post, but because it gave people information they wanted in a tone and format that made sense.
In fact, it included this paragraph, which you would normally find in any old press release (though, in the first person):
Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications -- all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation. We have developed Android in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile. Through deep partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, we hope to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform. We think the result will ultimately be a better and faster pace for innovation that will give mobile customers unforeseen applications and capabilities.
Yes, I know what you're saying--Google can get away with a lot more than any small company. And you're right, no Wall Street Journal reporter is eagerly reading every corporate blog looking for tidbits of information. But, we can learn a little more about writing for bloggers here, since the tone of the "release" was truly conversational. This wasn't written from high on a mountain top, but from a person with a voice. You can feel it in the very first sentence: "Despite all of the very interesting speculation over the last few months, we're not announcing a Gphone." In fact, it IS from a person, it's attributed to Andy Rubin.
The bottom line: a release should become indistinguishable from everything around it, not because it looks different, but because the content makes sense and tells a real story.
Tags:
Google,
news release,
press release,
Search Engine Watch,
SHIFT,
SMNR
Posted by Chuck Tanowitz on November 28, 2007 at 7:23 PM
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The evolution of social media and technology is constantly causing companies and people to try new approaches and tactics to take advantage of and react to technology advancements.
Sometimes this can cause people to head down some very strange and impractical paths. This isn't unusual. It has happened throughout human history.
For example, I am reading a great book on naval warfare in WWI (Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie). To deal with the new submarine threat, the British Admiralty tried a number of initiatives.
One that has caused me great amusement was allegedly proposed by Admiral Sir Frederick Inglefield. He not only proposed the idea - he received authorization for it.
The idea was to train seagulls to block the lenses of German periscopes with seagull droppings. (Google it if you don't believe me). Eventually the program was dumped. The admiralty tried a number of ideas before they settled on something more practical...depth charges.
There are a number of lessons to be learned here. The most important one for us as PR and marketing practitioners is to keep our eye on the end goal and not get distracted and pursue something tangential.
We need to embrace and respond to changing technologies. Social media is changing the dynamic just as much as submarines did in World War I. But don't panic over new developments. That will only cause you to react in sub-optimal ways. You don't need to use and react to every social media tool that is created.
Clearly define your goals and then figure out the best way to achieve them. Ask yourself about the desired outcome. Determine the level of engagement and ask if it is sustainable in the long run. Otherwise, you may just end up training seagulls.
Tags:
common sense,
social media
Posted by Mark McClennan on November 14, 2007 at 10:46 AM
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The high-tech industry is booming again, and smart PR and advertising firms are growing thanks to creative campaigns using new social media technologies. I am paraphrasing Doug Scott, the executive director of branded content and entertainment at Ogilvy. He spoke Friday, November 9 at a breakfast in New York City hosted by AlwaysOn. I attended with a Schwartz colleague to get an update on AlwaysOn and its upcoming OnMedia conference, and found the event very informative.
Scott is in charge of introducing social media to existing Olgivy clients as well as finding new business that would rely on social media exclusively. Olgivy clients are very different than ours, most having big, defined consumer brands. He spoke about how many of these established brands are exploring social media tools to extend brands for their products.
What I found enlightening was Scott went way beyond talking about how the Internet levels the playing field for companies by giving them a direct route to consumers. That was a given; Scott is talking about how every company needs to capitalize on this with a unique program to deliver a brand essence to consumers. I will not go into detail about some of the campaigns he mentioned, since I am not sure if they are public, but suffice it to say he's working on some very interesting programs.
Following Scott, Anthony Noto, the Internet, entertainment, and cable analyst at Goldman Sachs spoke to a topic that is one of my current fascinations: Facebook. Noto predicts that Facebook will be a highly disruptive technology, much in the same way that Google has been. He believes that while Google disrupted the publishing model by eliminating the cost to create content that would generate traffic, Facebook will disrupt the content distribution model.
AlwaysOn is organizing what looks to be a pretty informative event in New York in late January: AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC. From what I heard at the breakfast, the January event likely will provide quality content and advice.
Tags:
AlwaysOn,
Facebook,
social media
Posted by Ross Levanto on November 12, 2007 at 12:57 PM
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Tabblo founder and former client Antonio Rodriguez recently pointed out on his blog that mainstream America still isn't using many of the Web 2.0 tools out there. He's right. Stand on any soccer field and watch the parents snapping away on their digital cameras, then ask them if they planned to share those with the team via Flickr or if they were going to put them on a Facebook site, and you'll get a lot of blank stares. Most just email a few shots to relatives, or use a legacy service like Shutterfly.
Recently I spoke with the founder of TownConnect.com--social networking technology for families, schools, teams, etc. He told me that he isn't bothering with Flickr integration since most of his targeted audience--suburbanites living in communities like mine--don't use it.
Mainstream America will get there and start using some of these tools. It's happening slowly, but it's probably going to change how we measure all this. Today links in and out of a site drive search and Technorati rankings. But that kind of measurement relies on an active community of users who participate as much as they read. As the mainstream takes over, people will probably read more than they participate.
Sure, we all have statistics and numbers about how many unique visitors are coming to a site, but those are neither audited nor shared. That leaves us with sampling sites like Compete and Alexa, but those have their own issues in that they don't get large enough samples from smaller blogs. So without reliable numbers, how will we know what's popular?
That's why I love our CAIT concept, which tells us that by looking beyond the Technorati 100 or Techmeme Leaderborard, we can still have a simple way to evaluate whether a blog is worth our time. Because as this area continues to grow, figuring out who is reading and listening to what is going to become increasingly difficult.
Tags:
mainstream America,
measurement,
site rankings,
tabblo,
techmeme,
technorati,
townconnect
Posted by Chuck Tanowitz on November 9, 2007 at 10:13 AM
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I had a chance to speak with Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the founders of reddit.com. It took them all of 16 months to take their social news site from inception in June 2005 to acquisition by Wired and Conde Nast in October 2006. Piece of cake, right? Not a chance. Ohanian, Huffman and two colleagues spent countless hours in a small Boston-area apartment working on reddit. Their recipe for success is timeless - "work really hard and respect your customers."
To get their take on reddit's future, the social news movement, competing with Digg and lessons from the trenches of the start-up community, listen to this Schwartz-cast.
Posted by John Moran on November 7, 2007 at 12:09 PM
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What excites PR people the most about Web 2.0 is that some of the social media companies that are hot can help us do our jobs. A red-letter date for the relationship between PR and Web 2.0 came earlier this year when Facebook let third-parties develop applications to extend Facebook's functionality.
On November 2, Forbes published a Q&A with the founder of RockYou, Jia Shen. RockYou offers a very interesting business model. The company creates these third-party applications that can be selected by Facebook or MySpace users to augment their memberships to those social networking sites. As a consequence, the applications attract more users and encourage social interaction. RockYou can then "monetize" the user base by selling advertising.
From my perspective, there is certainly potential for using RockYou-powered applications as part of coordinated marketing campaigns that would combine PR and social media to drive web traffic. We are thinking about those campaigns each and every day at Schwartz.
They are already starting to happen. If you are a Facebook user, you see Facebook applications that invite participation in contests or other collaborative experiences run by companies. By relying just on your own list of friends, an interesting contest spreads rapidly. If it does not catch on, the cost for developing and executing these contests is fairly low.
Bringing this idea very close to home, more and more reporters have Facebook accounts. My colleagues and I will occasionally post news from our clients as part of our Facebook status messages. It's a non-assuming way to alert the reporters and analysts on our friends' lists, and certainly the topics we post are relevant to the Web 2.0-savvy Facebook audience.
Facebook offers its own marketing vehicles, where companies can "rent" space to include small little applications on Facebook home pages that promote an offering or encourage interactivity. Beyond these sponsored opportunities, there are a number of unique ways to use the social networking sites to augment PR programs.
The key is to use these sites judiciously and transparently. As recently noted in Twitter conversations including Robert Scoble and others, what you place on Facebook can be read by all of your "friends," so everything one does is open to criticism.
Posted by Ross Levanto on November 3, 2007 at 2:39 PM
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By Carol McGarry, Schwartz EVP, who heads our wireless practice
Every good PR person is an advocate for their client. As I work with clients, I inevitably find that I am caught up in the excitement of bringing their innovation to market. I'm infected by the enthusiasm and determination of my clients. And when my clients run into business reversals, I share their disappointment.
So when I saw a recent article by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal, I felt compelled to write to him. This article was not about the latest cool gadget. He wrote about the domination of the wireless carriers here in the U.S. and their impact on innovation. He said:
A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.
His words struck a chord. I remembered Wildfire Communications, whose technology was one of the very first speech recognition interfaces, launched in 1994. It behaved like a human assistant by forwarding calls, announcing callers and all sorts of nifty and intuitive features for busy people. Guess which major carrier in the U.S. ended up buying that company? Nope, it was Orange, the innovative European provider. And my mobile phone's speech recognition is still less sophisticated than my Wildfire "assistant."
Seven years ago, a client who offers location technology articulated an exciting vision of services like this one. Imagine walking past your favorite store in your local mall and getting a message on your mobile phone telling you they're having a big sale and you get an additional 15 percent off every purchase. As a dedicated sales hound, I'd love to get a message like that (at no charge of course), but I don't get them now. My client had a software platform that would make it happen. So why don't we get messages like this on our phones now? Ask your service provider and I'll ask mine.
In Europe and Asia, consumers use their mobile phones to pay for various goods and services. Not here in the U.S. The list of innovative services that are not available to U.S. consumers is long, although the innovative technology to support them has already been created.
I've been involved in the wireless and telecom market for about 20 years now. I've worked with many clients here at the agency who've come up with fascinating innovations. Too many of those entrepreneurs did not succeed because the U.S. mobile providers have lagged so far behind the rest of the world in adopting innovation. Mossberg is right, it's time the industry changed its ways and opened itself up to true innovation.
Tags:
communications,
mossberg,
telecom,
wireless
Posted by Chuck Tanowitz on November 1, 2007 at 10:45 AM
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