Winning Rules! - Marketing and Public Relations Ideas for Mobile App Developers

Why doesn't The Guardian write about more Android apps?

2011-11-09T11:45:00.000-06:00

Here's an interesting post in The Guardian's App Blog about why they review so many more apps for iOS than they do for Android.

Best and Worst App Icons

2011-10-27T14:47:00.002-05:00

Check out this nice slideshow on what works and doesn't when it comes to app icons:

http://www.cio.com/article/503569/iPhone_App_Logos_10_of_the_Best_and_Worst?page=1#slideshow

Marketing Report from Android Marketplace

2011-10-26T10:15:00.000-05:00

Here are some findings from a recent marketing report on the Android Marketplace:

Android  Market  developers  publish  most  apps  on  average (4.38  active  apps  per  active  publisher).  
37%  of  apps  have  been  deactivated  since  launch  of  the  store,  leaving  nearly  320,000  apps  available  for  download  for  users  of  Android  Market.   
In  September  2011,  Android  Market  added  a  record‐breaking  42,000  new  apps. 
At  the  end  of  September,  34%  of  active  apps  were  paid,  however,  this  month  that  figure  is  only  26%,  which  shows  that  developers  are  developing  more  free  content  than  before.     
Average  selling  price  in  Android  currently  equals  $3.18.   
Nearly  50%  of  newly  added  content  falls  into  four  top  categories:  Games,  Entertainment,  Personalization  and  Music  &  Audio.

The number of content in the games, entertainment, personalization and music & audio categories simply makes me think that one of the most important things that apps can bring to consumers is ways to make their phone very personal to them - the phone is both a diversion and a form of expression.

Readability of the Web and Press Releases

2011-09-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

I was reviewing a company's press release the other day and the first paragraph was like my momma's Friday casserole: everything included.

It took me awhile just to identify the main ingredients.

When it comes to writing for your website or a press release, this isn't middle school composition class. Try to make each point as quickly as possible. Your sentences should be short and positive. Your paragraphs should include as few of those short, positive sentences as possible.

If you are listing the features of your app, rather than jumbling a paragraph with descriptions of your features, try breaking them out of the sentence and into a bulleted list. People have trained themselves to scan copy for the information they are looking for. Bullets are much more scannable than blocks of text.

One website I wrote that provides an example of writing in short, readable bursts is www.ringomo.com.

Does your PR rep need to KNOW the media

2011-08-23T09:46:00.002-05:00

PR folk like to tout all the personal contacts they have in the media. I certainly do that when I'm approached about helping mobile software companies, because I've been working in this field for over a decade and happen to know some folks who write about mobile tech.

Those contacts are certainly useful sources, but they're not the most important asset a PR person should bring to the table. From my experience, there's so much turnover in the media and the amount of blogs that come and go that relationships I may have had last year are completely pointless this year.

If your news is newsworthy and targeted to their particular "beat" then there's a good chance they'll cover it whether they "know" your PR rep or not. When considering hiring a rep, just remember this winning rule: media relationships are nice, but their ability to communicate and strategize on your behalf is even more important.

12 Things to Remember When Pestering - Err - Pitching Bloggers

2011-08-17T14:42:00.000-05:00

I saw this post on Ragan.com and thought I'd re-post. Once upon a time, a blogger liked my approach to blogger relations so much that it spurred a blog post on the topic. I should try to find a link to it sometime. In the meantime, enjoy this one...I thought it hit the highlights of the craft quite nicely...

12 things to remember when you pitch to bloggers

Pestering bloggers—it's a PR rep's time-honored tradition. A client has something to announce or show off, and PR reps go out of their way to get attention of bloggers. But what's the best way to approach them?

At the recent PR Summit in San Francisco, the following four bloggers and I tried to answer that very question.

Ryan Singel (Wired.com)
Jolie O'Dell (Venturebeat)
Beth Spotswood (SFGate, Huffington Post, and CBS)
Michael Leifer (Guerrilla PR)

Here are 12 tips and arguments that came up during the discussion:

1. Keep it short and sweet. Far too many email pitches have endless copy. Ryan Singel was really impressed with a particular five-line pitch. It's OK if you have more information. Just send it once the blogger expresses interest.

2. Avoid ALL CAPS, jargon, and the term "press release" in the subject line. All the bloggers said they delete any emails that have "press release" in the subject line. Plus they get annoyed with all caps and industry jargon.

3. Personal is best, but bloggers will accept mass-mailed requests. Bloggers definitely appreciate the personal approach where the PR rep knows the bloggers, what they cover, and what they're interested in. Though they understand the problems with "spray and pray," they are still receptive to mass-mailed requests, provided they're on target.

4. Getting on a blogger's radar is a win. Just because someone wrote about your competitor, that doesn't mean they want to write about you right away. In most cases they won't, but it's still really valuable to get a competitive product on a blogger's radar. Even though it's not published right away, you need to count that as a win for your client.

5. "Me too" or "not me too" comments on blogs. The bloggers showed annoyance for people who left "me too" comments on a blog post, a.k.a. a comment that says, "Oh, we do that too" with a link to the business. They find the practice annoying, and I agree that blatant self-promotional without additional insight is irritating. But I believe if someone is writing about a competitor in your space and you don't leave a comment, it's a missed opportunity. Realize that anyone that reads that post is pre-qualified to being interested in that subject. Take advantage of that real estate, and place yourself in the conversation.

6. Don't call. Seriously, don't call. Once again, all the journalists agreed that they hated when PR reps call to make a pitch. Their biggest pet peeve is the call to ask if they received the email they sent. One PR rep, Ken Shuman from Trulia, asked, "Why are bloggers so allergic to phone calls? You call us when you need something."

Ryan Singel responded, "You're right; it's not fair."

7. Urgent requests are OK, but use them sparingly. Bloggers are receptive to urgent requests and respond to words like "Urgent," "Quick Fix," or "Time Sensitive" in the subject line. But be judicious of your urgent announcements and requests. Bloggers admitted that some PR reps took liberal advantage of the urgent requests and as a result been filed under "cry wolf" reps for which all future requests are ignored.

8. If a blogger writes your story, a "thank you" is enough. Don't do anything overly effusive as that will break ethics policies at the outlet. A generous gift, even a fruit basket, and then the blogger feels like they're doing you a favor, and that's not their job.

9. Media requests can come from anyone. The bloggers don't care if it comes from a PR person or an executive of the company.

10. Email is the preferred means of communication—but not always. On this panel there was a lot of disagreement as to whether you should use Facebook, Twitter, or some other social avenue to pitch a journalist. All the bloggers argued that PR pros should not invade their social space and should stick to email, although that decision should be made on an individual basis.

In my interviews with people on how they manage their social networks is that each person has a very clear definition—which stays in his or her own head—as to what each social network should and shouldn't be used for. If you cross that individual's unknown line as to what's right or wrong, then you will definitely offend and possibly get unfriended. Tread carefully in social spheres.

Some are more responsive in the social space. I do know of cases where Twitter is the preferred form of communication. For example, members of the IT security industry have embraced Twitter and appreciate using the microblogging platform over email, explained Matt Hixson, formerly of Tripwire, an IT security company. A message sent to a security journalist via email might take days to get a response. That same request sent via Twitter will probably get a response in minutes.

11. Follow up emails are OK. Bloggers admit that they do sometimes miss emails that they're interested in, but it doesn't happen often. They will accept a follow up email, but if they don't respond, then accept that as a "no." Bloggers don't have time to reply to every email with, "I'm not interested."

12. Act like a journalist if you want to talk to a journalist. Marketing-speak definitely doesn't win journalists over. If you write and talk like a journalist, then you'll be read by a journalist.

David Spark is a journalist, producer, speaker and owner of the custom publishing and social media firm Spark Media Solutions . A version of this article originally ran on his blog, Spark Minute as a report for Interntainment Media.

Social Media Rules

2011-08-12T16:24:00.000-05:00

In high school, I really wanted to be cool. I swerved from Hawaiian shirts with Jams, ala Fast Times at Ridgemont High, to preppy with boat shoes, argyle sweaters and feathered hair. Swerving from trend-to-trend in an effort to be “cool” didn’t work for me in high school (ask just about anybody in the Shawnee Heights class of ’85!), and it doesn’t work any better for many companies trying desperately to build a cool and culturally relevant brand via social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Don’t get me wrong – having a Facebook “Page” can be a very effective communication tool if a substantial number of your customers spend time there. Probably for most mobile app developers, a huge chunk of your customers are on those sites every day. Even more importantly, though, is that you’re willing to put the time, creativity and energy into feeding your Page with enough useful information that will cause customers to make use of it and, better, to share it with their friends.

But, even if they do, will your Facebook Page inspire your customers to click on your links and download your apps? Will the friends they shared your Page with become avid customers of yours? Only if sprinkled liberally with pixy dust!

Most people hear “social media” and think they must do it because it’s the “cool thing to do.” If you think creating a Facebook Page or Twitter account and blasting out ditties about the latest specials you are offering on your apps is going to bring you fame and fortune and earn you a Featured spot in the iTunes App Store, you’re missing the point.

The key word in “social media” is “social!” Your Facebook page is an extension of your relationship you have with John and Jane Q. Customer. It provides you a chance to listen as well as talk back.

One of my clients is the brains behind GoodReader, the phenomenal document viewer for iPhones and iPads. I help them manage their Facebook page by keeping the app’s fans abreast of new features coming out and responding to their “wish lists” of new features that they post to our Wall. It’s amazing how many times we see posts that begin, “GoodReader is amazing! If only it…” and what follows “it” is always something different.

GoodReader’s Facebook page gives us the opportunity to fine-tune our brand message, adapt the app based on feedback from its biggest fans, and sometimes tell them why certain wishes can’t and won’t come true (like why there will likely never be a GoodReader for Android).

Getting to know your customer and responding to them is an essential aspect of your social media strategy. My friend and web marketing consultant, Mark Murnahan (check out his blog at www.awebguy.com), says that “customer modeling” is invaluable to being successful with a social media strategy.

“Customer modeling involves creativity, analytic thinking, and data,” Mark says. “If you do not have the data to tell you who, what, where, when, how, and why people will respond to your marketing, you need to create it. Without knowing how to reach the right people with the right information, you may as well skip all the rest, because your time and money will largely be wasted. Worse yet, it can damage your brand value.”

Take the time to find out who among your customers are on social media, what they would want from you, and how they would respond to it. Then, and only then, are you ready to put on your pink IZOD, flip up your collar, don your Ray-Ban shades, and be the cool kid with a Facebook page.

Success with Android

2011-08-10T13:27:00.000-05:00

There was a webinar today on successfully marketing Android apps in the Android Marketplace, and here are some of the highlights:

Put your best text above the fold (before where people have the option to click for more info) in the marketplace, especially if you have any review snippets
Include screen shots with text if not localized
Put the information on "what's new" at the top of your description for existing users
Your promo graphic should tell users what the app does
Icons are very important when shoppers are comparing competition
Ratings - ask users to rate app after they have used it, take them to rating page from inside app

Bloggers love video (video will be part of press release)
Google wants tablet apps
Include a link to feedback alternative (perhaps link to facebook)

Small Icons - Big Impact

2011-07-15T16:19:00.000-05:00

A slide from a presentation Apple used at one of its conferences was forwarded to me and the first thing I noticed on the screen of the iPad they were displaying was GoodReader's icon. It's distinctive green color and recognizable "file and eye" mark tells anyone that sees it that it stands for GoodReader.

For many consumers out there, the tiny app icon is the first design element they'll encounter when looking around for apps to buy. In fact, if it's not a good one, it may be the only thing they EVER experience about your app.

Make sure your app icon is distinctive, clever, and gives a good indication of what they might discover when they click on it in the App Store. If it's your first impression, that tiny icon better be able to deliver - big time!

MobilePRWire - a new newswire for multiple platforms

2011-05-31T11:29:00.000-05:00

I got a note from Chris Caso that his company, CR Digital Designs, has launched a new press release distribution platform for mobile tech news. Check it out at www.MobilePRWire.com. They're currently working on building their list of media agencies that pick up their news. While it's not fully established yet, the nice advantage of it over PRMac is that it offers channels for both iOS and Android.

The basic press release is $18, or you can add an image and pay $25.

How to Pitch via Twitter

2011-05-11T16:24:00.000-05:00

I've been at this PR pitching business for 12 years now and I'm still working on getting my pitch down as tiny as possible. The best pitch is one that captures their imagination in as few words as possible.

If you want to pitch to someone via Twitter, you don't have much choice! You only get 140 characters to make your best impression. I've been told by some that you shouldn't pitch via Twitter and that most journalists don't like it. I think for those that don't use Twitter a lot, that's probably true -- but some are die-hard Twitter users and I think most of them are open to being pitched via Twitter. In fact, they're probably quite comfortable with it by now.

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question! But if you do "Twitpitch," here are some general guidelines:

Be sure yourTwitter profile is complete. If they get pitched by you, they'll likely want to know more about you before they give your pitch any credence. Also, be sure to include your URL in your profile.
Speaking of which, include a URL in your tweet. You'll want to be sure to use your pitch to drive traffic to a web site or blog post that provides much greater detail on your company, product or story idea than you could include in your 140 character Twitpitch. You'll also want your URL to take up as few characters as possible, so be sure to run it through a shortener like http://bit.ly.
Just like with email pitching, don't be an annoying spammer. Don't pitch the same ideas or stories multiple times, and don't send pitches about irrelevant topics to what the writer/blogger normally covers.
Engage in conversation. Twitter provides a great way to dialogue with someone -- but don't make it a one-way conversation. Don't use Twitter to simply broadcast your messages, but look for ways to engage those who follow you on Twitter as well.

Apple still dominates in app market, despite Android growth, report says

2011-05-05T11:28:00.001-05:00

Apple is still full of its juicy sweetness when it comes to market dominance in the smartphone app business.

Apple is projected to rake in $2.91 billion selling apps in 2011, a 63.4% increase from the $1.78 billion earned last year from the App Store, according to a report from research firm IHS Screen Digest. But it is Google's Android market that appears primed for explosive growth this year -- predicted to jump almost 300% compared with last year, to $425 million.

But where there's a winner, there's a loser, and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion is expected to lose its second-place spot in app revenues to Android this year.

The overall app market -- which includes Apple, Google and RIM among others -- will see a 77.7% jump to $3.8 billion this year, IHS said, and in three years' time, that figure is expected to double to $8.3 billion.

Read the full article.

webOS gets a promo code system

2011-04-28T14:36:00.000-05:00

Promo codes have made setting up reviewers with iPhone apps a snap. But if a reviewer wants to try a webOS or Android app, it gets complicated. For webOS, I ended up reimbursing reviewers via PayPal. Yuck. Android isn't much better as I have to send them a apk file for the application they wish to install. Better, but not great.

I just heard today that there is a new promo code system for the webOS that grants up to 1,000 promo codes per build! Woot! That's far superior than the 50 codes Apple grants which expire after 28 days.

Here's an article on it over at MobileCrunch.

According to the article, the big downside is the location of the redeem field -- right on the buy screen. Buyers see that there is a possibility of entering a promo code to get the app for free and wonder why they don't have a promo code. They leave the screen to go investigate and may never make it back! I agree with the writer -- move the field to some inconspicuous location in the store.

There hasn't been a lot of development action for webOS lately -- at least not among my clients. I really hope webOS can get cooking again under HP. It's still my favorite smartphone platform.

Using Storify to tell your app's story

2011-04-27T14:46:00.001-05:00

Storify has opened up for a public beta and I just used it to publish my first story: "Using the iPhone Inbox as a Self-Reminder System".

Storify is another step in self-publishing your own stories -- connecting with people through social media and by-passing traditional media channels.

With Storify, you can consolidate a variety of resources about a story to help readers contextualize it. Storify will aggregate almost everything into your story: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

I found it to be extremely easy to use, but they were short on instructions. I felt like I was pretty much on my own to figure out how to format a story. I had to click on Preview a number of times to make sure the formatting was right. It was super easy, though, to drag and drop information into your story. You'll see in the story I published that I dragged and dropped a YouTube video about MailTones right at the end of the story.

It integrates wonderfully with Twitter. Sometimes a story will have so many Tweets that it can be hard to put them into perspective. With Storify, you can drag and drop relevant tweets into your story to put them into their proper context within the story.

I'm just learning how to use it and will be creating more context-rich stories to really put it through its paces. I'd be interested in learning how you use it to promote your business or apps! Share!

3 New Ways to Get Your App Noticed

2011-03-25T07:31:00.000-05:00

GigaOM's JKontheRun blog posted on 3 new ways to get your app noticed. We all know the struggle of standing out in a crowd of, literally, millions of apps. The three tangible ways the article refers to are Appolicious, which helps people discover apps by using what they call "social graphs" plus an algorithmic search and recommendation engine, Appsfire, which personalizes apps in an app stream like Pandora has done for music, and Appboy, which now lets users "check in" when they open an app to let their friends know about the apps they like and use -- Foursquare style.

Robert Scoble, in response to the post, said, "You forgot the most important way: to get Apple to feature your app. That gets you more users than anything any of these other sites can do. Now, all is NOT lost, though, because if you get everyone else to feature your app, and get some bloggers to say it’s the best thing since sliced bread, then the chances that Apple will feature it go way up."

The problem is there aren't that many featured spots Apple or Google can deliver, but he's right that if your app gets publicized on some top blogs, the gangs at Apple or Google will likely notice it and it will improve your odds of getting featured. But smart developers can't necessarily just bank on this hope -- because there's no guarantees and even if you get featured, it's a short lived spike you'll experience. Smart developers should try a number of avenues to reaching potential users, including Appolicious, Appsfire and Appboy -- and don't forget YouTube videos.

Meet the Android Millionaires

2011-03-24T11:43:00.000-05:00

Electric Pig posted a good article with some tips on how to succeed as a developer of Android apps.

1. Make it great

It might sound simple, but quality really matters in the Android market. A dearth of second-rate apps means the great ones really stand out. Android owners will give everything from simple games to handy utilities and even swift iOS ports the time of day, so long as they’re worth the asking price. Make it great, price it sensibly and you’ll see there are greater opportunities for cut-through than in other mobile markets.

2. Sell it in the Android Market

Many Android developers still hawk their wares outside Google’s official Android Market, but that’s a mistake. Recent security scares, and an enormous pace of growth mean the Android Market’s being seen as the only trusted destination. Improvements by Google that let users discover apps more easily will help you out too, and it’s no longer a race to the bottom. Price your app sensibly, and as long as it conforms to point 1 above, you’ll be on the right track.

3. Don’t be cynical

Being motivated by profit isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just don’t try to cash in too obviously. There are already several I Am Rich apps on the Android Market going for anywhere between $99 and $199, none of which appear to have sold any at all. Don’t be that guy, create something worthwhile and have faith in your customers. If you build it, they will come… and pay.

4. Invest in Android now

“Android was always an afterthought,” Will Moore tells us. “The business world wanted iOS; Once an app had been made for iOS, we often made it work for Android too, but it wasn’t the starting point for any project.” As these high achievers indicate however, that’s about to change forever. “Sadly, Android is still seen as the domain of geeks, but I don’t think it will be long before this changes. With Android appearing in everything from fridges to cars, as well as mobiles, the world will be using Android without even knowing it…Android is on the tipping point of big brand adoption.”

Getting Your App Reviewed

2011-03-02T14:13:00.000-06:00

Mobile Orchard published a nice post by Jim Bernard on how to get your app published. It's worth a read, and lines up with my own experience. Here's a quick summary, but go over and view the full article:

1. Provide complete information. Every email, website, video should include basic information such as the app name, your contact information, company name, and link to the app store page.
2. Start with a great description. Lead your inquiry letter with a precise description of what your application does, what segment it belongs in (games, productivity, etc.) and why it is unique or interesting.
3. Include promotion code. Reviewers want a promotion code with your request for coverage.
4. Make a great video. A short video that shows your application in action is perhaps one of your best selling tools.
5. Put your best app forward. If you canʼt take time to polish your application, why should a reviewer take time to provide feedback and encouragement?

Think Global

2011-03-02T13:39:00.000-06:00

Other than Winning Rules for smartphone app developers, I write a column for TK Magazine (which I founded and published until a year or so ago) -- also called Winning Rules. That column just focuses on winning rules for small business owners, since TK is Topeka's business magazine. The Spring 2011 issue is out! My column is on page 60 and the rule this time is "Think Global!". I tell the story of Amy Rose Herrick and how she dreamed beyond the borders of Topeka and just opened a branch of her financial planning company in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. What a view she has! The column ends with a Mark Twain quote she had painted on her bedroom wall:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Charlie Sheen publicist quits

2011-03-01T14:59:00.000-06:00

In the category of "You couldn't pay me enough", the poor sap who served as Charlie Sheen publicist has politely quit.

I'm so glad to have decent human beings for clients. Then again, if you sign up to be a Hollywood publicist, you've got to be prepared to handle narcissistic lunatics like Sheen.

I've not been sure whether I pity his father or his publicist more. I probably lean to the publicist because Martin Sheen has to take some responsibility for the brat he raised. Then again, the publicist can (and has) quit! Martin is kind of stuck with the kid to a certain degree.

Combining Keywords in App Store Descriptions

2011-02-28T09:05:00.000-06:00

Someone asked on a developer's forum the following question:

"Does anyone know if the App store successfully combines keywords? For instance, if I have these keywords: "project, tracking, widgets" and someone searches for "Project tracking" will my App appear? Should I be wasting space with: project, tracking, project tracking, widgets?"

I was glad to see the question and hoped someone would answer because it's one that I wasn't sure about myself. Fortunately, someone answered. Elia Freeman replied:

"You do not need spaces and it does combine keywords. Project,tracking will show your app in searches for project, tracking and project tracking. It will not, however, show your keyword if the search term is project track. I also wanted to comment that Apple uses the app name for searches also, splitting it up into keywords automatically. So the name Gobble for Project Tracking, excluding any other keywords, would find you for Gobble, project, tracking, project tracking and any other combination of those three words."

Playing Nice with Reporters

2011-02-22T16:24:00.000-06:00

Way back when I was learning the ropes of PR, my ninny of a boss said we shouldn't care about what reporters think in response to our incessant "nagging" -- they, after all, don't pay our bills. Fortunately I ignored her and treated the journalists that I dealt with as if they were, in fact, my paying clients. I sought to give them the information they wanted -- when and how they wanted it. And before long I was getting calls from other PR agencies trying to recruit me because local journalists told them I was among the best at media relations.

So here are some tips to dealing with your friends on the other side of the Internet:

Respect their beat. Research what kind of stories the reporter typically covers and either tailor your "pitch" appropriately to their beat or don't bother them at all.
Help build the story with compelling media. App developers, that means screen shots, app icons and links to videos demonstrating how your apps work in the real world. Which leads to #3...
Keep attachments to a bare minimum. Set up a Media page on your website and include links to press releases, images and videos that they can access when they want them rather than clogging up their inbox with files they may not want or need.
Speaking of media, print media will have different requirements than online media. That little low-res screen shot on your website may reproduce fine in a blog but will be very grainy when published in a glossy magazine. If you're contacting print media, be prepared to have higher res images available.
Don't forget to include your contact info. I forgot this important little 4-line section at the end of one email and was on the receiving end of a scolding because the reporter had to figure out how to get in touch with me.

A nice day for referrals

2011-02-07T13:13:00.000-06:00

Ok, I'm going to brag. I hate to do it because it's not my way...but is it really bragging if I'm just reposting the comments of others?

I got this nice referral comment from Joel Evans: I can speak to Kevin's approach as a PR person since I was on the receiving end as the Chief Geek and founder of Geek.com, and now a blogger at ZDNet. He definitely has a unique way about him and has gotten myself and many others to cover apps that we never thought we would.

And yesterday in an iPhone developers forum, somebody was asking for leads on good PR freelancers and Ken Ballenger simply said: Kevin's Talon PR is awesome!

Thanks for the kind words of both Joel and Ken. I try hard to provide a good service both for my clients and those who I want to cover my clients in their news coverage or blog posts. It's a nice relationship when I can help connect those who cover mobile apps with good information from those who produce them.

Mobile app puts a university campus in your hand

2011-02-07T12:51:00.000-06:00

From Ragan.com:

“We all foresaw mobile technology really beginning to run the world,” Bucy says. Unlike other universities, he says, Texas Tech’s app isn’t managed by the IT department. “We want this to be run by the students, because it’s an app for the students,” says Bucy, himself a graduate student.

Buy iPad, Cancel Newspaper

2010-12-15T08:45:00.000-06:00

Interesting post at Fortune about a survey by Missouri School of Journalism's survey of 1,609 iPad owners:

Using the iPad to follow breaking news reports and current events is the most popular use for the device, with 84.4% of respondents saying this is one of their main uses.
More than three quarters (78.6%) of the users spent at least 30 minutes during a typical day consuming news on their iPad.
Nearly half (48.9%) of the respondents said they spent an hour or more during a typical day consuming news on their iPad.
Among the 931 respondents who indicated that they currently subscribe to print newspapers, there is a statistically significant, moderately strong, positive correlation between iPad news consumption and the likelihood of canceling their print subscriptions. (emphasis ours)
For example, more than half (58.1%) of the respondents who subscribe to printed newspapers and use their iPad at least an hour a day for news said they are very likely to cancel their print subscriptions within the next six months.
More than three out of 10 (30.6%) respondents indicated that they do not subscribe to printed newspapers, with another one out of 10 (10.7%) saying that they had already canceled their subscriptions to printed newspapers and switched to reading digital newspapers on their iPad.

Wow...as if the Internet wasn't the first nail in the coffin of the newspaper industry (print edition), but tablets like the iPad give us even less reason to flip through big floppy print pages. It's been tough going for awhile...what kind of business model can be successful when you charge for printed content but give away the same content online for free?

The demand for content is out there in high numbers, but the willingness to pay for something so readily available for free puts newspapers in a precarious position.

Will we have to stop calling them "online newspaper"? If most people read their news online or on tablets, they may need to rename their industry.

Beware of Business After Basketball

2010-12-14T14:34:00.001-06:00

Last week, after a long day of work followed by being a taxi cab service for the kids followed by me spending an hour in my role as assistant coach to a basketball team of 9 year olds -- I held a conference call with prospective clients in Singapore. Don't, repeat, don't, ever do that.

I was not sharp. I was dull.

My throat got dry and I couldn't talk.

And they no longer reply to my emails. It doesn't matter that I have proven results (it's MY client that was positioned in the top 5 selling iPad apps of 2010, along with Apple's 3 apps and Angry Birds, thank you very much) -- but I was raspy and not overly articulate and that probably sealed my doom.

This is where international business gets tricky for me. I've got clients in the UK and Russia, but they're lovely people who never want to talk on the phone so email is grand. For those who like conference calls, it's going to require me to somehow live a full life during the day and still somehow present myself as credible when they want to talk at their 10 in the morning and my 9 at night.

And I won't forget the bottled water next time either! I'm going to avoid the situation though because, let's face it, I'm not a night person. Don't judge me when I'm braindead after yelling at 9 year olds who can't make a simple unguarded layup for Pete's sake!

Probably one of my favorite commercials ever...

2010-12-01T23:33:00.003-06:00

So clever and well done. Good use of a classic tune to tie it together with the point of their ad. Kudos!

Thou Shalt Not Facebook

2010-11-17T14:14:00.001-06:00

Thought this was interesting.

"The Rev. Cedric Miller says much of his recent marital counseling has included infidelity stemming from the social-network website."

Probably online porn is another problem for his parisoners. I can see where Facebook is a problem -- mostly because people get sucked into it and it slowly eats away their life. But also I'm sure old flames are rekindled so to speak. I've found old friends on Facebook that I haven't seen for 20 years -- but no ex-girlfriends.

I liked the comment following the news post: "Facebook doesn't cause adultery - People cause adultery."

Why blog?

2010-11-16T13:51:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I get in a blogging funk. Heck, just look at how often I've been posting to this thing! Sometimes I blog in a flurry, and then I ignore it for awhile. Sometimes I wonder why bother -- is there anybody out there?

Well, of course there are. Last night someone responded to a critique of the movie Happy Feet I wrote years ago on another of my blogs (a blog I haven't posted to since 2007!). That one little movie review occasionally inspires people to pop in to tell me how moronic my views were. And it proves that people do find you and are listening!

Today I saw this nice post on reasons to post -- even IF no one is listening to you. Here are my favorites:

1. Search engine benefits. This may be the most obvious business benefit of blogging. Search engines give preference to websites that have fresh, relevant content. HubSpot research shows that sites with blogs get 55 percent more traffic than sites without blogs—even if there are no readers!

3. Infinite search life. A few weeks ago I received a call from a potential new customer in the Middle East looking to me as a possible marketing consultant. I had to wonder how in the world they found me! Turns out they were looking for somebody who could help explain where the future of social media was going, and when they entered this into Google, a blog post I wrote a year ago popped up! Your content keeps working for you month after month!

8. PR. Blog posts have the opportunity for massive reach. When one of my posts gets picked up by an aggregation service, my message has a chance to be heard by hundreds of thousands of people. That opportunity would not occur with a press release or status update.

Making Money with Mobile Apps

2010-11-12T16:12:00.001-06:00

Computerworld has a good article on the challenges and how-tos of making money with mobile apps. Since so much of my business is helping mobile app developers make money of them (by getting as much publicity as possible for their apps), I thought I would share this great article on my blog.

It is useful in that it discusses the three models of making money (monetizing) mobile apps: freemium (giving away a less functional version to entice people to pony up for a more feature-rich version); service-and-subscription model (providing a reader for instance, then selling the content on a montly basis); ad-funded model (free version with ads, or pay for a version that is ad-free); pay-for-product (sold!).

The article mainly lacks in how you actually make your app stand out in such a crowded marketplace. What advertising to use, what forms of social media, how to maximize PR (news and reviews), etc.

From the PR perspective, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter of others asking writers to do the same thing I'm asking them to do -- namely, write about my clients' apps. So I'm getting as much as I can and then helping companies to distinguish themselves in the app store with keywords, well-written copy, and managing social media.

Counting ticks on Twitter

2010-11-04T10:06:00.000-05:00

I've said it before, but I'm not much into Twitter. It's a huge deal and shouldn't be ignored as part of a marketing communications strategy, but I've always wondered how much impact a tweet I make might have.

Let's say I have 1,000 followers. If I tweet something, not all of those thousand people will see it. It will likely scroll off their main Twitter page before they see it and how many dig deeper than the first page -- especially if they follow a large number of people? Of those who see it, a chunk of them won't care about it, and of those who may care about it, not many will probably click on a link to explore further.

In an article I saw on Ragan, Katie Paine said "how many of your followers really respond to anything you put out there? I figure it's only 10 or 20 out of the 330,000 people I allegedly 'reach' according to most influence analyzers."

To be effective, you not only need to increase your followers to increase your odds, but you also have to build a base of "quality" followers to target with your tweets. Be sure you are including your Twitter address on your website, forum posts and anywhere else where people who are most interested in what you have to say are hanging out.

BookLover - Great App for Bibliophiles

2010-09-27T20:29:00.001-05:00

How Real Are Your Facebook Fans?

2010-09-25T08:55:00.000-05:00

There are businesses that help your small business set up a Facebook Fan Page and then invite everyone they know to become a fan of it. I get these requests from two different such companies all the time -- inviting me to "like" a company that has hired them to do just that. But I've never heard of the companies, and sometimes those companies are local retailers in far distant lands!

It never hurts to have too many fans, but if you're judging the success of your fan page by the number of people who like your page and those people don't REALLY like your page (and therefore don't engage you at all or could possibly become a customer) then what's the point?

I'd rather target who I'm inviting -- get real fans who will engage you on your Facebook page and share with others that they really like it. Judge your page more on active users and posts rather than purely on number of fans.

Does Twitter Make Your Business "Cool"?

2010-07-29T15:00:00.001-05:00

Scobleizer posted a piece on the tale of two motorbike racers. One is atop the rankings, but the other has a better brand and embraces the idea of engaging people via Twitter. He even puts his Twitter page on his cycle. So who gets the fan love? Not the top ranked racer.

So Scoble poses the question: does adding Twitter to a brand make it cooler?

He thinks it does:

1. It sends a signal to the world that you want to hear from your customers.
2. It sends a signal to the world that you’ll use the latest technology to communicate with them. Many of whom are no longer using email.
3. It lets you feature your customers. The pictures on Lorenzo's bike are his fans on Twitter. Win-win.
4. It gives your team a way to communicate in one stream all the photos and stuff.
5. It lets you bridge audiences around the world. Look at how he mixes Spanish and English together on Tweets.

SEO Your Press Release

2010-07-28T13:37:00.000-05:00

I sent out a press release a couple weeks ago and a blogger friend of mine shot back a note and suggested an alternative headline that he thought would have been more direct. "Yes," I replied, "but the search engines would have yawned at that one."

Press releases are now written for an online audience of news searchers, rather than just for journalists. Each press release needs to be crafted with the headline and body written to attract attention and click-throughs.

Here's a good article on it from BusinessWired.

"When you are talking about search engines and your press release, optimizing headlines means incorporating your most important keywords. Keywords being the words or phrases you’d like to rank well for in search engines. This is not a simple task, as your headline should also be compelling to your target audience and convey the content of the release.

Since search engines heavily factor page titles when determining rankings, optimizing the headline is the single most important task within press release optimization."

Finding the Right Blog

2010-07-05T11:19:00.001-05:00

In my PR biz of publicizing mobile software developers, I discovered early on the high value of finding and developing relationships with bloggers who have a high-level interest in mobile tech. They're not journalists in the traditional sense, but the good ones have a niche following of people who would be a good audience for my clients.

Sometimes, the most popular blogs are really difficult to crack. They hear from PR people all the time -- and what makes me different than all those others? I need to do more than keep sending product news to them. I have to be a resource for them. I need to follow what they're interested in writing about, and engage them in dialogue about it even if it has absolutely nothing to do with any of my clients. If they response and find me a "wise ol' owl" who is fun and useful to talk to, I may have made a new friend in the blogger business and can become a trusted source.

How do you find good blogs? Start by searching your topic keyword(s) at Google Blog Search and Technorati. You may also want to add BlogPulse to that list for fun. Build a list of blogs, then look at each one to see if they have their own favorite blogs listed out for you!

Microblogs, such as Twitter, can be researched at TweetScan and Topsy. BlackBerry users can have Twitter hits on their keywords sent to their mobiles using an app called Twitterlerts.

If you want to follow what's being said about your company or brand in the social media sphere, try searching at SocialMention which will also pick up news from Twitter and blogs.

No To Arts District - Dot Com

2010-06-24T21:59:00.001-05:00

I'm watching the 10:00 news the other night with my wife and there's a story on an effort to turn Topeka's somewhat dilapidated yet promising North Topeka business area into a cool arts district. I'm all for that! It's like it's own little downtown and I love the entrepreneurship of North Topeka, and I think those old buildings would lend themselves nicely to an artsy area.

The news announcer told us of their website, www.notoartsdistrict.com, and pronounced it NoTo (sounds like Toto) Arts District - Dot Com. My wife looks up from her laptop and sees it spelled out on the screen and says "no to Arts district?"

Chalk this one up to another really unfortunate choice of a URL. Yes, a campaign for something that, if read the way it is spelled, sounds as if it is against it.

Which reminds me of an old email I received a long time ago featuring really bad website names. I know it's getting ever more difficult to find good domain names -- trust me, I have to do this pretty often -- but SERIOUSLY folks, if you think it could have a double meaning that would make you and your organization look foolish, don't go there!

Here's the list:

1. "Who Represents" is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is www.whorepresents.com
2 . Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com
3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net
4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com
5. There's the Italian Power Generator company, www.powergenitalia.com
6. And don't forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales ,
www ...molestationnursery.com
7. If you're looking for IP computer software, there's always
www.ipanywhere.com
8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is www.cummingfirst.com
9. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site,
www.speedofart.com

Shortening Long Links for Twitter Posts

2010-06-22T11:26:00.000-05:00

You want to tweet a link to a great article about Apple's new iOS 4, or a great app that you like, but out of 140 characters, the link itself takes up 100 of them. What do you do?

Let's say your tweetable link is http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/198758/goodreader_for_ipad_adds_vga_output_performance_boost.html.

Go to http://bit.ly/ and enter that URL in the URL Shortener, then click on "Shorten." The URL is shortened to http://bit.ly/dbhD2z.

Then when you hover over that shortened URL, it gives you the option to copy it to your clipboard, which you can then paste into your Twitter post.

A Big BP Person Caring for the Small People

2010-06-17T11:11:00.000-05:00

As if the oil spill hasn't been the biggest PR disaster any company has ever suffered, I saw on the news last night that the company’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, said: “People say that large oil companies don’t care about the small people. But we care. We care about the small people.”

Speaking as one such small person, "Wow, are you kidding me?"

The company's PR people, poor damned souls as they are, jumped out of the lake of fire they currently find themselves in long enough to blame it on a clumsy translation. I don't care if he's a Swede or not, "small people" is a universal term used by snobby elitists worldwide.

I imagine a sliver of their problem is that Brits and Swedes are communicating to people they have absolutely nothing in common with -- the small people of southern US. That's a huge communication gap to overcome. Then again, from what I've seen of response to the president's speech the other night about the matter, he and his plan for a panel and to "make them pay" didn't fare much better. They just want action down there. Spare us the panels and recriminations until AFTER the problem has been solved.

Fast websites rank higher among customers, Google

2010-06-14T10:25:00.001-05:00

One thing I've always recognized is the impatience of net surfers. I know it because I am one -- and have become even more impatient as the years and technology advances has brought us ever-faster loading times. What I used to tolerate in terms of page loading now will cause me to move on to another site if the one I aimed at is just a wee bit too slow to load.

I'm not alone. Here's a good read on the topic. In this article, it refers to an experiment conducted by Google in which they slowed down the delivery of search results. They found that increasing a page's loading time by less than half a second has a measurably negative impact on searchers. And, the author found, "the customer is highly, highly impatient. They scan a page like they scan a signpost as they're driving down a motorway. They hardly even read full sentences."

Which is why marketers who write the copy for their websites like they do an informational brochure -- heavy with graphics and large blocks of text -- are missing the opportunity. To take the article's author's metaphor a step further, it's like the highway department putting the "how to merge" section of the driver's manual on the sign next to the highway instead of the recognizable symbol for doing the same thing.

Fresh look at Perception Management

2010-06-12T16:58:00.000-05:00

My wife and I just had to run over to the church to do some promotional set-up for our VBS registration table. I was walking through the darkened halls and looked up at a wall-mounted brochure rack. For the first time I noticed the words on the sign above it: "Information to Educate." Really? It just looks like brochures to me, and I GUESS that's the point of brochures, right? To educate?

But what a dorky way to say it.

Which made me think what would happen if I were able to take my old-timer blinders off and see the place fresh for the first time. What would I REALLY see, and would I be impressed or not?

It's hard to see things through the eyes of a visitor, or in the case of a business, your customer. You see the same place so often that the signs on the walls and the rust on the railings just becomes part of the landscape.

Get a notepad out and just try to see things as if you'd never seen them before. Secret shop your own place and see what you discover. If you find it an impossible task, for some reason, ask an outsider to do the same thing.

We don't want to miss the obvious and glaring signs and dirt and grime and cobwebs and bad service that outsiders will notice and forever impact their perceptions.

Writing for the Web

2010-05-23T22:50:00.002-05:00

I'm often asked what distinguishes our web site design services from others. While I see some beautifully designed sites out there, they are usually designed by, well, designers. The copy on the site is usually provided to them by the client and is often the same kind of marketing material that would go in their printed brochures. My answer to them is that our web sites are written for the web, and we follow rules to make sure the site accomplishes its objectives in terms how people read a website and how search engines scan them.

The first thing you need to know is that online readers want their information quick -- they've trained themselves to scan pages for the content they're looking for. They pop from site to site and don't have the patience for reading long paragraphs of text on your site.

Your copy must be both written and organized in such a way to get the readers' attention fast and directing them to the information they want and will help them navigate your site easily.

Keep your sentences and paragraphs as brief as possible. Use headers to help the readers scan, and make them clever enough to compel them to read that section.Put some useful links in the body of your article that can help your reader find both the information they want or the product they want to buy. Like any convenience store, signs and good organization can help people have a rewarding experience -- and get them in and out of there as quickly as they'd like, while lingering long enough to do business with you.

If you link to outside pages, make sure those links open up another window so they're not actually leaving your site! Why on earth would you link somewhere else? Like I mentioned earlier, people are scanners and they want to find useful information. If your site is found to be a resource for useful information -- even if it lies outside the boundaries of your own site -- then people will come back to it.

And, lastly, look for the keywords you know your customers are searching for and be sure they are included a number of times in the body of the text, in headers and in meta tags.

One of the sites I wrote that I think works well is not one we designed at all. Check out www.ringomo.com. Not to brag or anything, but I really like the short bursts of useful text, interesting headers, and good use of links to direct you where you want to go for the right information.

Church Marketing

2010-05-18T09:47:00.000-05:00

I'm charged with "communications" at our church -- which entails both internal and external marketing. It's the most fun you can have in ministry, until you have to come up with a new logo that somehow encapsulates and represents both the old-time religion folks and the Millennials who don't care much about the institution of "church" but just want to get busy helping people.

This video has been around for awhile, but I watched it again last night and I just have to laugh every time I see it.

I've never understood how the collective Christian church, representing the Person who without a doubt was the greatest communicator who ever walked the planet, could be so lousy at communicating. Church Marketing Sucks! Which is, of course, why there is a great website by that very name!

Because of the new logo project I've been undertaking, I've searched the web to see what other churches have done with their logos and websites. Ugly stuff, let me tell you! Like any organization, a logo needs to reflect the organization's purpose and culture rather than being contrary to it. If the logos and websites I witnessed are reflective of their respective churches, then I would expect the churches to be very cookie-cutterish, emotionless, and unimaginative.

There were, however, some gems out there. Here are some of the churches that I think really stood out for their attractive websites and logos:

Calvary Church
Grace Community Church
Kingsfield Church
Stonebriar Community Church
The Crossings

A Touch of Luck?

2010-05-07T10:29:00.000-05:00

I was on the treadmill this morning and looked up to the TV screen on the wall of the gym in time to see an ESPN replay of a PGA golfer chipping out of a sand trap. The ball delicately dropped a few feet short of the hole and rolled forward until -- PLUNK -- a miracle shot worthy of an ESPN highlight.

I don't know who the golfer was, but he's obviously talented enough to use his sand wedge to make such a great shot -- but not talented enough to avoid the bunker in the first place. His shot was both skill and luck. Sometimes it takes a good mix of both to be successful. If it was pure skill, pro golfers would never be in the bunker, and every tough shot would end up in the hole. Skill gets them close, but luck takes them the rest of the way.

When I'm launching a new app for, say, the iPad, the techniques may be similar as I'm reaching out to many of the same writers. Some of these campaigns are crazy successful (check out GoodReader -- STILL the #2 best-selling iPad app in the iTunes App Store after several weeks) while other campaigns are successful but maybe not what I'd hoped (boffo!). The difference may be timing, message, or the product itself, but some of it is just the level of luck -- hitting the right shot with the wind just-so and a squirrel that brushes the ball with his fluffy tail to cause the ball to drop in the hole.

We can't count on luck, so we must learn and practice the best techniques to get us as close to the cup as we can get (and perhaps a dash of luck will give us a highlight of our own).

Advertising in the good times and bad

2010-05-06T22:41:00.001-05:00

There's nothing like impeccable timing to start a business. I launched TK Magazine, for example, almost 4 years ago, and 1 year into it the economy began to fall apart. It's been a rough few years, mostly because the magazine is advertiser supported and companies slooooowed their advertising down or stopped it altogether.

There's the old story of Post vs Kelloggs from the days of the Great Depression. When the economy crashed and burned, Post pulled the reins on its advertising to save cash, while Kelloggs continued advertising -- realizing that it needed to continue pushing its message out there to the market. Going into the Great Depression, Kelloggs and Post each owned about the same percentage of the overall cereal market, but after the recovery, Kelloggs was so far out in front that to this day Post is still a Kelloggs wannabe.

It's been a BIT easier to sell ads as of late, but I admire those small business owners who realized that if they disappeared during the bad times, customers would be drawn to competitors who didn't and they may not be able to win them back during the good times.

“The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.” –Thomas Jefferson

Masterful Media Relations

2010-04-29T21:55:00.001-05:00

Way back when I had just left the restaurant industry and got hired on with my first (and only) PR agency (that's not my own), I learned from the worst about media relations. My old boss got everything wrong when it came to developing relationships with the people who can make or break our efforts on behalf of clients. The line she used that really sticks with me is "Screw the media -- they don't pay us." Even a PR neophyte knew that was a stupid attitude, and only deepens the negative attitude many in the media have toward PR people.

I ignored the boss's advice. Within a year of starting that job, bigger agencies were calling me to set up interviews. How did they know anything about me? They asked journalists in Dallas who the best media relations people were and my name kept coming up. Some of those opportunities seemed pretty good, but I decided I'd rather enter the world of the gainfully self-employed. After all, if a complete nonsensical ninny could make a living at this business, I could reverse engineer everything she practiced and be more successful.

While my old agency had a revolving door of clients, often leaving after the first six months, I've got three clients that have been with me for 9-10 years now. Am I bragging? Ehhhh...maybe a little.

Back to media relations, I really enjoyed this article that compares media relations to dating.

#1 is my favorite:
1. The best pickup line is a basic introduction
Are your legs tired? You know, because you’ve been running through my mind since you walked into this place. That’s an example of a bad pickup line in dating circles. You know what the most effective pickup line is? Hello, my name is [insert your name].
The same goes for media relations. A fancy opening line, no matter how clever you think it is, will only result in a reporter rolling their eyes at you. Introduce yourself professionally, let them know who you are and why you’re calling and you’ll get things off on the right foot. Don’t use a cheesy pickup line when introducing yourself to a journalist.

One time I pitched a CNET reporter on an app called LobsterTunes in a manner that was probably too cute by half. But with an app called LobsterTunes, what's a PR guy to do? She called me on it and said she might have been more interested if I'd left off the cheesy intro. Now I leave the cheese for after I've gotten to know a journalist better and they can tell by the clever pitch that I've got my tongue planted firmly in my cheek. It's like the kind of jokes you can tell your old buddies that wouldn't have told them when you first met them.

That said, you don't want to come off as dry. You can be clever without being cheesy. I appreciate cleverness, but just make sure your pitch doesn't peg the cheese-meter.

10 Dos and Don’ts for Brands on Twitter

2010-04-28T00:23:00.001-05:00

From Mashable:

Interesting tips for using Twitter to support, promote and defend your brand. Click to the post for the details on each, but here are the 10 headers...

1. Don't be a showoff
2. Use proper grammar and spelling
3. Don't get too personal
4. Don't auto-Tweet
5. Don't leave air in the conversation
6. Don't overtweet
7. Do shout out to those who tweet about you
8. Do monitor keywords and competitors
9. Do make an informative profile
10. Do fish where the fish are

To me, the most interesting AND most painful as a PR guy is #1: "Give Twitter users your features and benefits. Let them know about special deals. Don’t post links to your latest press release, promote articles written by your CEO or make extravagant claims. A good rule of thumb to determine whether a tweet is user-friendly or brand vanity is to ask yourself, “If I didn’t work here, would I care about this?” If you’re not sure, ask a brutally honest friend who doesn’t work at your company."

When I have a good press release, I want to at least link to it. There are journalists and bloggers that follow me. So what do we do? From #3: "Keep your conversations warm but professional; it’s what users expect from a brand ambassador, and anything else comes off as creepy."

Twitter is a place for conversations, not broadcasting. And if you're going to converse, who wants to converse with someone jargonizing in PR-speak? When I tweet announcements, I keep them casual and fun. I also like to use it for breaking or leaking the news. Twitter followers like getting exclusives! Who doesn't?

No more Ning

2010-04-26T16:41:00.000-05:00

As I've mentioned before, I administer a couple of Ning social networks. The value proposition was that you could, for free, set-up your own social network. It's great for clubs, churches, networking associations, etc. to provide a Facebook-like experience for those who share a common affinity around the organization or interest.

This was the promise on which oodles of groups started their Ning networks and got people to sign up, upload pictures, blog posts, calendar items and all sorts of other content.

But now Ning is going to press the Delete key on your Ning if you don't pony up!

From their website:

"We recently made the decision to focus 100 percent of the company on enhancing the features and services we offer to paying Network Creators. As part of this change, we'll be phasing out our free service. We will announce further details about Ning's product roadmap and different pricing options on May 4, 2010."

I'm not naive enough to think that businesses don't need to re-think their business model from time-to-time, especially if you're not making money. But when you're entire business model has been based on a free social network, and you get people to spend hours of their time building and maintaining their Ning site, you shouldn't just hit Delete on them. It's a broken promise. I'm not here to tell Ning how to do their business (ok, I've done it before with the spam thing, so I might as well do it again) but it doesn't seem like a good thing to build your business on a promise and then back out on it. It's bait and switch, and the bait now smells pretty fishy. Sorry, terrible pun!

Judging books by their covers

2010-04-20T09:01:00.000-05:00

I was perusing the bookshelves of Target the other night and wandered past the "Young Adult" section. "Did the lights go out?" I ask myself. No, it's just that pretty much every book for teens and "young adults" are black. I know they're into vampires big time, and you can't really have a happy, cheerful color on the covers of books about vampires -- but not all those books are about vampires.

The content of the book doesn't matter if the cover doesn't appeal to the target audience. Obviously book publishers have discovered young adults have an affinity for black.

Regardless of what "content" is in your "book" (the product you sell, if you're not getting the metaphor), is your cover designed to reach your target audience?

Now if I were publishing a popular book for young adults, and knowing that everyone else's book would hardly be distinguishable from each other, I'd make mine in red.

The need to SEO your press release

2010-04-07T12:28:00.000-05:00

If you don't understand how to write a good SEOed press release, the result will be either a press release that isn’t optimized at all or one that’s over-optimized and difficult to read. Have you ever read a press release with too much emphasis on trying to impress search engines? Hello Mr. Press Release Writer! Your news still needs to be understood by PEOPLE! Don't obsess over cramming keywords in every paragraph of your press release. Instead, do research on which keywords are effective and use the effectively where it doesn't sacrifice readability. A good press release should be easy-to-read that also just happens to be optimized for search engines.

Google has a keyword tool that you can use to analyze your website to determine keywords that may attract the most attention.

Many newswires, such as PRWeb, will let you embed links back to your site -- and if they're well placed and turn keywords into anchor links that take the reader to relevant pages on your site, then your press release expands its ability to not only drive traffic to your site, but help educate readers by steering them to the right places for more information.

The value of public relations

2010-04-06T23:34:00.000-05:00

Toronto-based MDC Partners has announced it has acquired a majority interest in Sloane & Company, a New York-based public relations firm. Miles Nadal, MDC chairman, has said he's willing to spend up to $100 million on agency and personnel acquisitions in the coming months! Hey Miles! Over here in Topeka is a great boutique agency specializing in the booming mobile app business!

Here's his quote that I'd like to splash around today:

"We believe that most of the innovative initiatives happening in marketing communications today are happening within the public relations arena," Nadal said in a statement. "Clients are under enormous pressure to deliver measurable results in a shorter and shorter time frame. Smaller entrepreneurial firms that are empowered to think differently, have the ability to do brilliant work and want to share the wealth, are the best partners for us."

For all of the negative flack the PR biz gets, especially from our friends in the media who have to put up with cold-pitches and poorly aimed emails from PR people who don't do their homework, it is true that the best results and the greatest innovation comes from within the PR disciplines. Engaging publics through social media is much more a function of the PR form of strategic communication than other forms of marketing communication.

Since I started Talon 12 years ago, it's amazing how many times I've had to reinvent what I do. With technology and consumer changes, the task of the PR force is to recognize how to leverage those new technologies to reach those new consumers and influence them favorably toward the organizations we represent.

This is what Winning Rules is all about. Let me know if you discover any of those "innovative initiatives" Nadal talks about so we can explore them together.

Topeka This!

2010-04-01T05:51:00.000-05:00

The ultimate kick-back for re-naming Topeka after Google for the month of March, Google renames itself Topeka for... (presumably April Fools Day?)

Well played gentlemen!

From Google's, er, I mean, Topeka's blog post this morning:

As our lawyers remind us, branded product names can achieve such popularity as to risk losing their trademark status (see cellophane, zippers, trampolines, et al). So we hope all of you will do your best to remember our new name’s proper usage:

Getting Insight into Facebook

2010-03-29T17:34:00.001-05:00

I serve as Admin over several Facebook Fan Pages -- one for my business, one for my church, and a few for clients. Lately I've been getting emails from Facebook reporting on how much traffic and other activity each Page gets:

Fans this week
Wall Posts, Comments, and Likes this week
Visits to your page this week

After each item, it gives you the comparable number from the previous week. Thank you Facebook! I love it.

Another tool that is often overlooked is Facebook Insights. For a Page Admin, you'll find it in the left column of your page. Under Insights, click on See All to get more detailed reports on your page's activity.

From the Facebook Help definition, "Facebook Insights measures user exposure, actions, and behavior relating to your Social Ads and Facebook Page. By understanding activity and performance, fans and ad respondents, and trends and comparisons, you are better equipped to improve your business on Facebook and elsewhere. Insights is a free service for all Facebook Pages and Social Ads."

I recently read that there are more than 1.4M Facebook Pages, including 700,000 small businesses. There are just too many users to ignore unless you're convinced that your audience isn't on Facebook for some reason. But even if you think your audience is too old for Facebook, I just checked the Insights for my church Facebook page and for a church that is trending younger (certainly under 50), 34% are over 45 and 16% are over 55.

The useful data that Facebook provides lets you know whether you or being effective in reaching your target audience with your Page and any ads that point to it. Don't ignore this information!

Annoying Ning

2010-03-25T22:13:00.001-05:00

I administer a couple different Ning social networks (which is a create-your-own network service). Ning offers nice features for groups to have their own social networking, such as pictures, video, blogs, chat, etc.

BUT BEWARE!

Anyone who is a member of your Ning can submit blog posts. You can control which ones get published if you're the admin, but it doesn't stop spammers from auto-sending loads of crap. I had to create a rule in my Outlook inbox that if the subject line says I "have a Ning blog post to approve" the email automatically goes to my junk folder. That folder had received about 60 of those emails today!

When I checked my Ning, I had 150+ first name members with gmail addresses. I deleted them all and reported them for spam, then changed my settings so that I have to approve all new members.

Ning needs to give the admin the ability to limit who can post to the blogs. I looked and there's only an option to moderate posts or not.

SEOing Press Releases

2010-03-24T10:54:00.000-05:00

I've been a customer of PRWeb for years -- back when I first met the founder in his tiny Dallas office and tried to talk him into letting me do his PR. Back then, he didn't have a budget and I didn't have a clue. I remember he had one small server on the floor of his office. Now David is no longer with the company -- it was purchased by Vocus a few years ago.

PRWeb does a really good job, I think, of helping you to create press releases that are search engine optimized. You build-in hyperlinks, categorize your news, insert keywords (or at least you did...recently I haven't spotted that field) and pictures, and can change the name of the URL to include 2 keywords that might help to attract more search engine attention.

Regardless of the wire service you use, if any, your press releases should be written with search engines in mind. Most of the time, your news will be read online.

Benefits of an SEOed press release include:

Improved search engine ranking
Publicity in online media
Increased website traffic
Leads and sales!

When using PRWeb, I should say that you can pay them extra to get help with making sure all of the features you qualify for (based on the package you acquire) are used. I'd be happy to help as well, having done hundreds of them over the years.

In fact, check out our MobilityNewswire website. This site pulls in our PRWeb RSS feeds from press releases we set up for our mobile software development clients.

Pay to Play Journalism

2010-03-19T12:46:00.000-05:00

A CNET writer that I work with from time to time sent me a link to a Wired article on the topic of "pay to play" review sites. The sites mentioned in the article, AppCraver and TheIphoneAppReview, both have sent me replies when I've pitched apps to them for review that I could get my app reviewed or expedited for a fee. This practice of editorial for a fee is common in mainstream media in other countries, but in the US we like to think that there is a firm line between editorial and advertising coverage.

I don't pay for reviews or any other kind of coverage because the practice is damaging to the credibility of the editorial review process which makes PR so much more, well, credible, than display advertising. The benefits of PR is that the perceived value of the information is so much higher because of the implied 3rd party endorsement of the journalist who is not compensated by the subject of the article. Simply put, rewarding this kind of media with revenue to get them to write a review will encourage this kind of "advertorial" business to flourish and, as a result, water down the advantage my service offers over other types of marketing communications.

Especially egregious is when these reviews don't disclose that they've been compensated for the article so the reader can judge for themselves whether or not the writing was biased in favor of the subject.

The line between advertising and editorial is one that gets blurred now in every form of media. Until recently, I published my city's business magazine and of course those who spent money advertising in the magazine wanted to be our quoted experts in the feature articles.

So how is a website or other form of media supposed to generate revenue? I personally think having ads and editorial that happen to feature the same companies just isn't the same kind of crime as making them pay for editorial coverage. Sure, all things being equal, if someone I worked with as an advertiser in the magazine happened to be a great source for an article, I saw no harm in quoting them because I knew them and their expertise couldn't be questioned just because they also placed a display ad somewhere in the magazine.

But the "pay to play" practice where payment for editorial coverage is required is bad for my business and the journalism business because it reduces the credibility of both. Everyone knows that websites and other media are supported by advertising, so the media company should clearly state its policy on the line between journalism and advertising and let the consumer judge the veracity of their content.

The End of Publishing?

2010-03-17T10:53:00.001-05:00

Check out this very clever video that demonstrates how much we may be misunderstanding the upcoming generation and how it speaks to the publishing industry in the era of the Nook, Kindle and iPad.

Getting noticed on the web

2010-03-12T20:30:00.001-06:00

I've spent a bit of time over the past few days looking at church websites. Man, they're bad! Of course, that's why there's a website called Church Marketing Sucks! As the communication team leader at my church (charged with internal and external publicity), I want our church website to look good, offer usable content, and be easily found by people looking for a church home. Unfortunately, our website comes with a subscription-based church management system that offers a really grand "behind the curtain" online community for members -- and while better than most church websites, ours still sucks.

We're going to take matters into our own hands and develop our own website that looks much better, is written for the web, and is search engine optimized.

When you put together a great looking website, how do you get people to find it? If you're looking for local traffic, you can advertise it to your local market in the newspaper, on Facebook or Google, or on radio or TV (if that makes sense to your kind of business). Don't forget the obvious: put it on your business cards, stationery and brochures!

There are important steps you need to take that will pay off in much bigger results for building your web traffic. Include target keywords and phrases that your prospects would be using to find you online. If you don't overwhelm your pages with meaningless words, the prominent use of keywords will make the page more appealing to the search engines and more meaningful to potential customers.

Carefully evaluate the benefits of online advertising (banners and pay-per-click). The nice thing is you can tell pretty easily if your investment is paying off and then adjust your budget to those ads that get the best results.

And use a blog and social media (Twitter and Facebook are no-brainers for many kinds of businesses) to connect with and keep in touch with customers -- and remind them about you and your website.

Google, Kansas

2010-03-02T14:40:00.003-06:00

Over at my Kevin in the Kan blog, I've been writing about my hometown's efforts to woo Google to select it as a test site for its high-speed fiber optic network (which would bring surfing speeds of 100x faster than what most people have now).

I thought I would mention it here too because of how viral this grassroots effort has become. It is really a grand lesson in the power of social media and word of mouth (and how a community can work together WITH its government toward a common goal).

The latest PR move is when the mayor proclaimed that during the month of March, Topeka shall hereby be known as Google, Kansas. A silly move to attract Google's attention? Perhaps. That's what some are saying, but it's getting noticed! Here is some of the press attention Topeka (err...Google) has picked up:

CNBC
Wall Street Journal
BusinessWeek
CNN (I like this one a lot...good job Mayor Bunten)
Christian Science Monitor
San Jose Mercury
The Week
The Register (UK)
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
San Francisco Business Times
Washington Post
Computerworld/Networkworld
Kansas City Star
CNET
National Post
Associated Press
Examiner.com
Barron's
Connected Planet
Newser
Los Angeles Times
Digital Trends
VentureBeat
TMCnet
NBC Bay Area
TechCrunch
PC World

The local effort has been pretty much exclusively through Facebook and other social media, plus local get-togethers. Check out the ThinkBigTopeka site for more info on the campaign.

Funny video

2010-02-26T11:28:00.000-06:00

Enjoy this video of a dialogue between a hapless PR fellow and a blogger who covers social media, just not B2B. So funny.

If you're offended by the F-word, it is used frequently. I stopped using it as part of my day-to-day vocabulary when I was 17, and don't normally like to hear it in a professional setting especially. But, ok, it's kind of funny in this case.

Increasing Twitter Followers

2010-02-24T08:49:00.001-06:00

When it comes to social media, everything has its place:

Facebook is MOSTLY for my personal friends, acquaintances, and a bunch of people that I know somewhat. In retrospect, I wish I would have limited it only to people that I really know, instead of the 450+ people that I'm sure I've met at some point.

LinkedIn is where I prefer to network professionally, and I have this blog connected to it so that anyone following me on LinkedIn can easily see my thoughts on any given day. I've joined a number of business groups on LinkedIn and have made some good connections there.

Twitter is the odd one I was never sure what to do with. I'm not one of those who wants to tweet when I go to the bathroom or have a bologna sandwich, or how cool so-and-so was on such-and-such awards show last night. I pretty much use it to tweet about successful media placements for my PR clients so that more people can discover how awesome they are, and of course that will hopefully make me look like a good PR guy that others will want to use. In order for that approach to be a success, I need followers!

To increase the number of followers, I've been finding people who tweet about topics I tweet about -- mobile technology -- and begin following them. I often get followed back, and people discover me on those Twitter pages and begin following me because they too like learning about mobile apps.

I have heard that around 30% of the people you follow will follow you back.

I just downloaded something new to help me greatly expand my number of followers. It's called Twitter Adder, and it is supposed to help me manage Twitter followers, auto follow, and auto unfollow. I'll let you know how it goes!

Doesn't Google Buzz just sound like a great PR thing?

2010-02-16T08:41:00.000-06:00

I signed up for Google Buzz -- because what PR guy doesn't like anything that has the word "buzz" in it.

Buzz turns my Gmail into another social networking opportunity. Woo hoo! Just what I needed. Here it is in a nutshell:

* Automatic friends lists (friends are added automatically who you have emailed on Gmail)
* "Rich fast sharing" combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed, and it includes full-sized photo browsing
* Public and private sharing (swap between family and friends)
* Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like Facebook might, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all Buzz thread content, like the photo viewer we mentioned above)
* "Recommended Buzz" puts friend-of-friend content into your stream, even if you're not acquainted. Recommendations learn over time with your feedback.

But, much to Google's chagrine, the "buzz" has been mostly bad. I've heard from several of my friends who have nixed it after a brief trial run.

This article highlights some of the most notable negatives:

Buzz seemed to have a mind of its own, picking names in your email inbox , and selecting them randomly for you to follow in your "Buzz" network.

"Thanks Google Buzz, I'm automatically following 3 ex-girlfriends. #fail," wrote Tony Pitluga of Pittsburgh in a tweet that was widely re-tweeted last week.

Another problem users discovered is that Google makes public everything you do in Buzz in its search engine, unless you set the privacy settings ahead of time.

Can Buzz bounce back? Google announced some improvements and should get credit for reacting quickly -- but as for me, I'll turn it off. I have Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and that's enough social networking for me. Why add one more?

Don't be a pain in the Wave

2010-02-15T22:07:00.001-06:00

I've been looking at Google Wave as a PR tool. Wave was introduced last year as a way to streamline communications into a single "wave" - it streams email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management into one platform.

What can you do on a wave? Your friends or colleagues can hold discussions, share files, chat, or comment on any of your post on any forum.

For PR pros, Wave changes the game. Anybody can contribute to the story with links, wikis, pictures, etc. BuzzMachine summarized it nicely here: "It combines the notions of a process as people add and subtract and update; it has the benefit of a wiki – a snapshot of current knowledge; it can be live; it can feed a blog page with the latest; it can feed Twitter with updates; it is itself the collaborative tool that lets participants question each other."

What I like is that Wave may return PR agents to communication agents versus just emailers of information. They can employ creative and engaging communication with anyone who joins the wave to get the word out about company news.

So leave it to PR people to already start getting a bad rap with a new technology tool. In my research, I found Jennifer Leggio's post highlighting some low-lights of how PR people have been violating the rules of engagement via social media:

1. Adding a journalist / blogger on Facebook and entering into a trusted network only to blatantly pitch said journalist / blogger on his or her “wall”
2. Spam @ messaging a journalist / blogger on Twitter multiple times to get them to review / write about your news or technology
3. Commenting on unrelated FriendFeed posts to try and get the writer’s attention

In a related post, Jason Perlow noted an early violation of Wave "PR Protocol" (if there's not such a thing, there soon will be). A pomegranate juice company I'd never heard of added him to their Wave -- you're not opted in, you're forced in.

Jason said: "As if using and trying to get used to Google Wave was bad enough, the PR agencies and marketing firms of the world have decided to start taking advantage of us, because we’re a captive audience and if they’ve ever contacted us in the past via e-mail on GMail, they now have a full contact database of people to torture by Google Wave if they were able to get an invite onto the system."

PR friends, Google Wave has a lot of potential for us, but let's respect the space of those influencers we want to connect with. Let's not be a pain in the wave and enlarge the credibility chasm our industry has with many in the media.

I'm back

2010-02-13T13:55:00.003-06:00

Wow...I really ignored the Winning Rules blog didn't I? Since I last posted, I published 2 more years of TK Magazine and just recently divested myself from the magazine publishing business. I still own and operate The Business Center, which is Topeka's executive suites and virtual officing center.

But my true loves and main interests (in biz anyway) are still TalonPR and Talon Communications Group; the former offers public relations and social media support for mobile software developers while the latter offers graphic design, web marketing and public relations for any kind of business or non-profit.

I've been doing my personal blogging over at KevinintheKan.com, where I dump whatever random thoughts that cross my mind on the ills of our country and my state.

Back to WinningRules, though, I want to return to highlighting the "Winning Rules" and best practices of Web communications and marketing. There's already good blogs out there that cover it, of course, but hey, this is what I know so hopefully you'll find practical info here you can use in your own business.

Subscribe to this feed and please share your own thoughts.

Breaking News Backstab

2007-07-18T22:46:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Zaleski, the director of The PR Collective, a nationwide consortium of boutique PR agencies (to which I belong) has started a new blog called SpinisIn. It's all about the "PR lifestyle."

I particularly enjoyed his entry entitled the Breaking News Backstab, about the times in which his big PR events were eradicated by breaking news stories, such as the Pope dying right before his big event at Dodger stadium. Give it a read and enjoy.

How corporations should deal with blogs

2007-07-11T08:49:00.001-05:00

Recalling the story of how Sony blew it with bloggers when one such blogger discovered secretly installed Sony software on his PC (and then discovered that it was transmitting his music selections to Sony over the internet), this OpinionJournal column gives some pointers for how corporations should deal with bloggers.

Firing bad customers

2007-07-09T23:35:00.000-05:00

We know about the cost of obtaining good customers, but what about the cost of keeping bad ones? Sometimes the best thing for business is (perish the thought!) firing customers that cost you more than they're worth. Awhile back I heard about how FedEx would send notices to costly customers that they were no longer going to be doing business with them, and (going one step further) pointed them to the nearest UPS store location. So they got rid of people who were drains on their business and dumped them on the competition. Brilliant!

Today I read in ComputerWorld where Sprint is firing customers.

The First Wiki Novel

2007-02-08T10:03:00.001-06:00

From ComputingUnplugged:

Publisher launches Wiki novel
British publisher Penguin has launched a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to "wiki" software, the technology behind Web encyclopedia Wikipedia. The novel, "A Million Penguins," went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts. Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a "believable fictional voice."

What is a wiki? According to TechTarget.com:

A wiki (sometimes spelled "Wiki") is a server program that allows users to collaborate in forming the content of a Web site. With a wiki, any user can edit the site content, including other users' contributions, using a regular Web browser. Basically, a wiki Web site operates on a principle of collaborative trust.

The best known wiki is Wikipedia.org, an online encyclopedia in which anyone can contribute or edit content.

The idea of publishing a story with a wiki is certainly novel (sorry, couldn't resist). It will be interesting to watch how the story changes as the contributors create plot twists. Is that a story destined to go nowhere because a huge committee is involved in writing it?

Wikis hold great promise for practical business applications, from collaborating on projects to developing policy and procedure manuals to enabling users of a technology product have some control and input into the formation of a users guide.

The second rule of kayaking

2007-02-01T13:10:00.000-06:00

As a kayaker, this ditty that I received from Merge Gupta-Sunderji caught my attention. It's also makes a great point about good communication:

The second rule of ocean kayaking
Just a couple of months ago, I went ocean kayaking for the very first time. Not only was the experience thrilling, but I got an unexpected lesson in the importance of communication.
As my husband and I climbed into our two-person kayak, the instructor gave us the simple instructions. "Just two rules," he said. "Get a rhythm going, and verbalize your intentions to your partner at all times." "Piece of cake," I thought as I climbed into the front seat. And I was right, until we stopped for a snorkeling break a couple of miles from shore. My spouse, with the best of intentions, turned around to grab my snorkeling pack from behind him. Except ... he didn’t tell me what he was planning to do! If you’ve ever kayaked, you know what happened next. One moment I was staring at the blue sky, and the next moment I was treading water and looking at the underside of orange polyethylene. When the kayak tipped, everything -- people, snorkeling gear, sunscreen and sunglasses -- was now in the ocean. I spluttered my way to the top. "You’re supposed to communicate your intentions," I reproached my husband. "I thought you knew," came his chagrined answer.
Do you sometimes assume that people can read your mind? That your employees know what results you expect of them, that your co-workers will meet your unstated deadlines, that your supervisor will magically understand why you had to leave early? Whether it’s your employees, your co-workers, or even your significant other, don’t get so caught up in the rhythm of what works well that you forget to communicate your plans and rationales. Instead, remember the second rule of ocean kayaking: verbalize your intentions.

Merge Gupta-Sunderji helps turn managers into leaders. Through engaging keynotes and workshops, she gives people specific and practical tools to achieve leadership and communication success. Contact her at www.mergespeaks.com or 403-605-4756. I saw her speak at a IABC conference. She's very engaging and informative...so much so that I actually signed up for an e-newsletter (something I typically avoid).

Game du Jour

2007-01-02T22:59:00.000-06:00

Ah...the Internet. Filled with great information and tools to increase our productivity, right? No, it is the biggest productivity killer ever invented--but it's so darn wonderful we can't get enough of it.

One of the biggest time killers of the Internet is searching the world wide web for "bargains." You pit our desire for a good deal with our penchant for friendly competition, and you get massive successes like eBay. First there was auction sites, and then later came "one deal a day" sites such as Woot.com.

For most "one deal a day" sites, you are in a rush to get in on the deal before supplies run out. There's a new one that will really kill your time--and supplies are unlimited.

Game du Jour offers one heavily discounted casual PC game per day. It starts at midnight and the deal lasts for 24 hours and then a new game is available. If you are into "casual games" and not necessarily the action-packed assassination and warfare games, this is a great site for you.

So what does this have to do with our favorite topic? Essentially, Game du Jour is a marketing company that helps software companies get a rush of sales of their product and increase brand awareness. They introduce your game to people that might not otherwise know about it. Considering how enormous the game development sector is, this kind of publicity can help to really boost awareness of that product and get gamers interested in the rest of your line.

Study: 2 of 5 bosses don't keep word

2007-01-02T10:55:00.000-06:00

The Office is a great show. I think it's just so funny because the boss is such a doofus...and yet many of us can relate to his character because of bosses we either have or have had.

Now there's a study that shows the impact of bosses truthfulness and its impact on those they supervise. "Nearly two of five bosses don't keep their word and more than a fourth bad mouth those they supervise to co-workers."

The result of bad managers are poor morale, bad communication, a rumor mill, a revolving door of incoming and outgoing personnel, etc.

Will it Blend? Great viral marketing

2006-12-20T21:41:00.000-06:00

Looking for another time waster on the Internet (other than this blog)?

Go have some fun at WillitBlend.com. The PR geniuses at Blendtec have produced a series of videos in which they blend a variety of everyday household items and answer the question I'm sure we've all asked ourselves: Will it blend?

Check out the iPod! And, in time for Christmas, see what happens when he tries to blend a couple Nutrackers!

This site is great fun...and a good example of how a business came up with a viral marketing approach that draws attention to their website, gets people to talk about it (like I'm doing now), and shows off the features of their product. Very, very savvy!

Now excuse me while I go buy a Blendtec blender!

Five Best Books on Public Relations

2006-11-25T09:56:00.000-06:00

OpinionJournal published Michael Kempner's list of five best PR books:

1. "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays (Liveright, 1928).

2. "American Hero" by Larry Beinhart (Pantheon, 1993).

3. "The Eloquent President" by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, 2005).

4. "Thank You for Smoking" by Christopher Buckley (Random House, 1994).

5. "All's Fair" by Mary Matalin and James Carville (Random House, 1994).

Other than "Propaganda," authored by the father of the public relations industry, the rest of the list are surprises. These are not your typical PR text books, and I'd never even heard of "The Eloquent President," a book about the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln. I'm a big Lincoln fan, so I don't know how I missed it, but I'm off to BN.com to pick it up.

Regarding "All's Fair," this is a terrific read. I'm proud to own a signed copy--signed by BOTH Matalin and Carville. They were the keynote speakers at the IABC conference in Washington DC in '95. If you haven't read it yet, go get it. It's fun for political junkies (like me) and PR pros (also like me). Enjoy!

PDA Users Suffer from Email Overload

2006-11-16T15:53:00.000-06:00

I love my Palm Treo, but do I think it makes me more productive? No. Isn't it SUPPOSED to make me more productive? Yes!

Well, a study put on by my beloved International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) found that 85% of the 1,700 business communication professionals interviewed had productivity issues thanks to email.

Sixty-two percent of respondents to the IABC survey said they receivetoo much e-mail, compared to 75 percent of PDA users. In addition, almosthalf of the respondents (44 percent) agreed that they send too much e-mail. In comparison, 56 percent of PDA users are guilty of sending too much e-mail.

I'm not sure that my Treo's email capability is what hurts my productivity...it's just always being available (as with any cell phone), and having it loaded with games that are too fun to pass up when I have some time to kill (ok, time that I COULD spend doing something more productive).

Oh well...productivity is highly overrated.

What Abe Lincoln can teach us about email

2006-11-08T10:36:00.000-06:00

Telecom expert Tom Wheeler says that Abraham Lincoln, the first U.S. president with access to the telegraph, developed a personal code of electronic communications that modern-day netizens would do well to adopt in their email habits.

Wheeler describes Lincoln's "T-mail" etiquette and the lessons we can learn from it, like:
Less is More - Whereas many saw the blank telegraph form as an invitation to an essay, Lincoln's telegrams were short and to the point. "Your long despatch of yesterday just received," Lincoln chided General George McClellan about a 10-page telegram sent in May 1863. Then the president required only three additional sentences to reply to the general's endless essay.

Responding to a long-winded message with only a few words is indeed a great way to train others how to use email.

Read about it here:

What Abraham Lincoln Taught Me about Email

RSS is killing blogging

2006-10-28T15:00:00.000-05:00

From ComputingUnplugged:

RSS is killing bloggingBefore RSS, Web surfers could just browse and google for news, opinions, and hacks. Since RSS feed readers became popular, only the highest volume blogs get personal syndication. Small bloggers are getting no RSS Traffic and minimal browsing traffic. RSS is killing bloggers, so bloggers ask, what can be done for us underdogs?"

Jason Calacanis of AOL and Engadget.com once stated that a secret of successful blogging is "fresh and frequent blog postings." So readers subscribe to only the most frequently updated and well known blogs RSS feeds leaving for-the-love-of-journalism-bloggers "under the syndication radar." Simply due to low posting volume, the vast majority of key bloggers get little to no readership. The founders of ZNITCH.com made it their mission to level the playing field and expose non-celebrity bloggers using what they call, "the opposite of RSS."

Mobile Etiquette

2006-10-16T16:29:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite mobile tech analysts is Gerry Purdy, now with Frost and Sullivan. Here are his tips on the new social etiquette required because of public use of mobile technologies:

Social Etiquette in Mobile

New mobile technologies create wonderful new capabilities, but they also create the need for new social dynamics. The most obvious benefit is the ability to make or receive a call wherever you are. This can be a lifesaver when you’ve arrived at the airport on a flight and want to know where your ride is. It reduces anxiety, and the person picking you up is relieved to know that you’ve arrived. All is good.

Now, take that same capability and put yourself in a restaurant or another quiet place, such as a church. Someone is trying to reach you, and the phone goes off and makes a loud noise. You’re embarrassed and others near you are bothered. The person calling doesn’t know that you’re in a quiet place, and it just deteriorates into a bad situation. Thus, new mobile technologies create new services that really benefit users, but they also create the requirement for a new “mobile etiquette” that we must develop so that the capabilities are utilized, but are only done so in the right social rules of etiquette.

Let’s review that restaurant situation again. Someone needs to reach you. It could be a nurse desperately needing to reach a doctor about a patient. Or it could be a family member that’s trying to reach you about an important matter. You know that it’s impolite to have your cell phone ring in quiet places, so you put your phone on vibrate mode. The person calling doesn’t know if you can talk or not, so they know that it’s best to send you an SMS text message asking if it’s OK to talk. You feel the phone vibrate, look at the screen, and text back that you’ll step outside so you can talk. Thus, using “mobile etiquette,” everyone’s needs are met and the new “must reach you now” capability is still able to be used.

Now, take a different situation that involves data. Often, it’s just not socially acceptable to bring your notebook PC into a meeting. The screen creates a barrier between you and the others in the meeting. You are clearly doing email while others are talking. What do you do in this situation? Pray of course! You walk into the meeting with your BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia e61, Motorola Q, or other similar device. You feel the phone vibrate and notice that you received an important email. You hold the phone under the table and pretend to “pray” while you “thumb” your reply. The same is true for SMS messages. As a result, some important topic can be addressed without bothering anyone in a meeting.

Just like with any other technologic advance, things taken to extreme are not positive. For example, if you tried to answer 40-50 email messages while you were in a meeting, others would know what you were doing and feel that the slight diversion to address something important had been violated by your not participating in the meeting.There are some times that you need to turn your cell phone off or not even look at the display if you feel it vibrating in your pocket. Every situation is different, and you have to adapt the new technology to the surrounding social setting.

There is a new network infrastructure under development, called IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), that will help most of us handle difficult social situations. IMS will provide “presence” and interactive messaging so that you can see if the person you’re calling is available to take a call or not. That alone will be a tremendous advance in the use of mobile phones.

My recommendation is simple: honor people’s privacy and use mobile technologies in ways that are socially acceptable. I’m glad that we have created wonderful new communications capabilities with cell phones, but a responsibility goes along with those capabilities, and that is to use them in a manner that is acceptable to most social situations.

Journalists surveyed on effective PR contact

2006-09-26T20:52:00.000-05:00

From the Publicity Insider (www.publicityinsider.com):

Unless you work in a newsroom every day, it is hard to gauge reporters' likes and dislikes when working with publicity seekers.

Thanks to public relations firm Bennett & Company's annual surveys, we can take the media's pulse. Here's some findings from their Annual Media Survey:

Email: Fifty-eight percent of all journalists surveyed preferred email as the main way to receive information, followed by wire service (15%), regular mail (13%), fax (10%), and telephone (4%).
In addition, 70 percent of journalists said that they read every e-mail they receive except for obvious spam. Bill's Note: Keep in mind these results are the media's preferences - not what gets the best results for the publicity seeker. When appropriate, the telephone's human connection is still a publicists' best friend.
Personalized Address: Fifty percent of the media polled said they respond more readily to a personalized address and 4 percent said that a general editor address will do. The remaining 46 percent did not have a preference. Many noted that while they do not have a preference, personalized communications reach them quicker.
Availability of Multimedia: Fifty-nine percent of media polled said that the availability of multimedia (photos, charts, graphs, audio and video) does enhance the chances of a story being used.
How important are weekend, night and cell numbers for contacts on news releases? Back in 1990, 44 percent of journalists said they were not necessary. Currently, 72 percent deem full contact info important.

CTIA Day II

2006-09-13T16:22:00.000-05:00

Had a few good meetings today... I really like Audible.com--though I remember that they were the ones that got slammed by the keynote speaker at a PalmSource Developer's Conference for their awful website. You can use Audible to put your podcasts, audio newscasts or audiobooks on your Java, Palm, Symbian, or Windows Mobile device. The company makes it very easy for you to have your favorite content downloaded to your device in minutes and purge your system of old content. Very cool.

Macroport is pretty cool. www.macro-port.com. They allow you to put content on a storage card, and the software on the card identifies what kind of device it has been inserted into and then automatically launches your content in the proper format. Users usually don't know what kind of operating system they have on their device, so this makes it irrelevant. If you publish content--examples I saw were promos of video games and trailers for upcoming movies--this eliminates the stupid factor when dealing mobile content.

JuiceCaster is one of my favorite things I've seen here so far. Juice Wireless now allows you to publish your pictures, text, videos to whatever website you have that enables HTML publishing. Then you can share it with a select group of people or with the public as a whole. The demo I saw was a video they took with their cellphone, uploaded to the juice account, then downloaded on another mobile device to be viewed, then also available on a personal blog. There are so many potential applications for this, but just for personal use it's a great way to share pics and videos with family and friends scattered all over the world. They say that JuiceCaster "connects the user's cell phone to their entire online life." See it at www.juicecaster.com. I dig it.

More to come later. I need to get to the airport.

CTIA news

2006-09-12T18:29:00.000-05:00

Today was my first full day at CTIA and it's been a fun rush of meetings...mostly with people I know, but I also took the time to check out a press conference and look for the smaller "what's new" people. Amazingly enough, according to their press releases they are all the "leaders" in their industries. Never heard of them, but I digress.

This one is pretty cool, actually. A London-based company called Mobix announced peer-to-peer mobile video sharing called "Shoot 'n' Share" in which you can send videos to your friends from your mobile phone. You can send them to another phone, an email address, or a website, or you can send them to a cell phone from your online video storage website.

www.mobixinteractive.com

Bango has signed a mobile search marketing agreement with Yahoo!, and "will offer Yahoo search advertising products and services to mobile content providers, through the integration of Bango's platform and Yahoo's mobile marketing service. This also creates a one-stop solution that allows businesses to establish a mobile presence and billing capability, then create mobile search advertising campaigns on Yahoo to target users who are looking for products and services through their mobile devices."

www.bango.com

My favorite subject: taxes! Keep your filthy taxes off my wireless (and my Internet while you're at it). MyWireless.org launched a new ad campaign to shine a light on how state and local taxes and regulations "threaten to pull apart" the nation's successful wireless framework.

www.mywireless.org

CTIA IT Wireless & Entertainment

2006-09-06T14:19:00.000-05:00

I'll be traveling to CTIA next week in LA and will be blogging from the event. I'll report on social networking, mobile marketing and electronic communications that is cool and noteworthy--the greatest cutting edge stuff I've ever seen I'm sure.

I'll also have a photo SplashBlog set up so you can see pics as I'm moving around the show.

I've got great meetings set up and I'm excited about the stuff I'm going to see there.

Radio Shack fires off an email

2006-09-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

Well, another big case of the impersonal termination of employees via electronic means. Radio Shack sacked 400+ workers and alerted the immediately displaced workers via email. I wonder if the email message was colored pink?

I don't care if you personally alert people in advance that they may lose their jobs, and if they do it will be electronically, that doesn't make it an acceptable approach. It may not be personal to you (yeah, it's just business, got it), but it's personal to them. These are people who dedicate themselves personally to their job with your company and you owe it to each and every one for a supervisor at some level to personally be the bearer of bad news.

"Google" is NOT a Verb (lest ye be sued into oblivion)

2006-08-31T14:33:00.000-05:00

The lawyers for Google have something to earn a few fee dollars on now. I just saw a tidbit in Tidbits about how these wiley lawyers are all bunched up about the word "Google" being listed as a verb in the latest edition of Websters and have been sending out terse notes to media organizations that they had better not use the word as a verb.

This is the problem with being too successful and establishing your brand as a universal word for something like web-searching.

Poor Google...getting their company name in the dictionary. How sad for them.

Firing someone by Texting them

2006-08-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

I love text messages, especially since they're so easy to fire off with my Treo. "Fire off?" What an ironic choice of words considering the story I just read:

U r sckd: worker fired by text message

No matter how awful it is to can someone to their face (trust me, I know), let's not get so impersonal that firing someone with a text message ever becomes acceptable.

Blog Ads

2006-07-15T21:16:00.000-05:00

If you're interested in making money from your blog, you might want to read this bloggers' guide to advertising revenue for bloggers.

Is it true that bloggers don't like to make money? How provocative! I guess you'll need to read their paper to find out if it's true!

Bigg results with Digg hits

2006-07-15T21:05:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting post on Cybernet on the impact that a front page hit on Digg will have on your web traffic and RSS subscriptions.

Digg is a "user driven social content website." I've posted about it before, and I love it. Users pick the stories THEY think are important and "digg" them. The stories with the most diggs gets ranked the highest on the site.

My.yahoo also ranks stories, but according to the most popular (those that get the most click-throughs). I like the Digg model better, because just because I click on a headline doesn't mean I value the story. Once I get to the story, it may not live up to the headline and I wouldn't recommend others clicking into it like I did. Digg lets me tell others that I think the story is worth their time. And I digg it!

TK Magazine whirlwind

2006-07-09T22:06:00.000-05:00

It's been a crazy week and a half, and the whirlwind will continue this week.

See pictures of the TK Magazine launch party here.

We had nice press coverage by 13 and 27...you'll see pics of us being interviewed. Thanks so much to those stations, especially 27 and Nate Hill in particular for broadcasting live from our event.

On July 6th, we "made history" by presenting the first issue of TK Magazine to the Kansas Historical Society & Library. I'm a history buff, and one of the thrills of making a local magazine like TK is becoming a part of the historical record. Kansas history, in particular, is a hobby of mine. It's so colorful. Few states can boast of the rich history of Kansas--full of treasure seekers, trails (before we were flyover country, we were wagon-through country), gunfighters, and the whole 'bloody Kansas' thing that really got the Civil War going. Now, with a full color magazine for Topeka, our history of today can be recorded (literally) much more colorfully.

This week we are prepping for a big live broadcast with Majic 107.7 downtown. Our "TK Girls" will be downtown passing out free magazines while Lola's Cafe sells sandwiches and drinks for $1.07. This will happen on Wednesday. Hopefully we'll see you there.

I'll be getting back to posting about communications technologies and the like very soon.

TK Magazine

2006-06-29T21:40:00.000-05:00

We are 1 day away from the launch of TK Magazine! Our launch party is tomorrow night at Jul's. Our goal with TK is to provide Topeka with a classy magazine that showcases the business in the local business and lifestyle scene.

Our big unveiling of the cover (and we have a BIG cover printed up) will be at 6:45 p.m.

Go to the site and subscribe to our RSS feed so you can always get the latest business and community news.

Regulating the blogs

2006-06-21T08:53:00.000-05:00

Could the end of free blogging be near? Read this column.

The Internet is the newest and most free medium of communication, which can be used to check both government and the mainstream media. This means, of course, that the government is already looking to regulate it. If certain legislators have their way, the end of free blogging on the Internet will come sooner rather than later.

Better podcasting

2006-06-20T22:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah, yeah...it's been awhile since I've posted to the blog. I'm sure you're all dying out there.

A little magazine project kind of took over my life. See www.tkmagazine.com. It's a new lifestyle and business magazine for Topeka. I'll tell you more about it later.

But for now, here's a great piece on what makes a great podcast. I love podcasts...especially now that I received an iPod from my kids (read: my wife). Podcasts give you a great opportunity to connect with an audience on a personal level and communicate with audible learners. Oddly enough...that's not me. I remember more from what I read, but I still enjoy listening to very good podcasts (though I often couldn't tell you at the conclusion what it was about--funny how the brain works so differently).

Getting Fired for Email Abuse or Using Surveys for Big PR

2006-06-05T21:09:00.000-05:00

Here's a CNN story on how a third of companies surveyed have fired someone for violating email policy.

Proofpoint reported that employers are ever more concerned that outgoing e-mail could pose a risk to the company. As a result, many companies are hiring staff to read and analyze outbound e-mail. According to the study, 44 percent of major U.S. companies have hired employees to do so.

Blogs and Instant Messaging are also a concern to many employers. Seven percent reported that an employee was terminated for such a violation while 17 percent reported that an employee has been disciplined.

This is interesting, and something companies should think about. Do you have an email policy?

But, to me, the more interesting thing is that Proofpoint, a company that helps companies reduce email risks, used this survey that they sponsored to get big press coverage (a CNN story!) for their company! And surveys can be a very inexpensive way to create a story

PR rules for dealing with bloggers

2006-06-04T20:38:00.000-05:00

Different strokes for different folks, and that includes bloggers. Some will take any and all contact from PR people, some want contact only under specific conditions, while others don't want to hear from you at all.

Go here to read an interesting idea from Mobhappy on how PR pros can recognize the preferences of the blogger.

For the record, here is Mobhappy's own "policy":

1. Please make sure that the information is about mobile technology, or at a stretch, technology generally. Read the blog - is there a good chance we might publish it?
2. If you keep sending us rubbish, we won't read your pitches any more.
3. Keep it brief please, in the first instance. We can always ask for more info.
4. Don't use the comments section on our blogs to blatantly promote your or your client's products. It REALLY pisses us off. You have been warned.

Here is a blog post from awhile back that used ME, of all people, as an example of how to pitch to bloggers. It's amazing how many people who I know saw this post.

Search Engine Optimization

2006-05-26T10:30:00.000-05:00

Here are some nice tips on getting search engines to find your web site, thanks to Amy Campbell:

1. Use keyword-savvy "page titles," and strategic and proper metatagging on all pages.

2. Allow search-engine robots easy access throughout your site via text links, alt-tagged navigation icons, or a site map.

3. Register your URL with major search engines, directories and specialty sites, as well as select paid directories (such as Yahoo!).

4. Use strategic home page content (keywords in context in HTML text).

5. Use hyperlinks to further weight in-text keywords.

6. Encourage in-bound links from other relevant sites to your pages.

7. Add an integrated web log to your web site.

8. Add/update content frequently. (Write dammit!)

9. Avoid Flash-based opening home-page screens, improper metatag code, as well as any schemes meant to "trick" search engines.

10. Get a search-engine optimization audit for your web site.

Build a Better Blog

2006-05-26T10:22:00.000-05:00

I've got a link for anyone wanting to build a better blog. Why does your blog stink? Good question...here's a blog with good answers:

www.whymyblogstinks.com

It's a fairly new blog, but includes insightful tips on improving the smell of a stinky blog.

Mobile Marketing

2006-05-02T21:36:00.000-05:00

I love gadgets. I love marketing. You would think I'd be the ultimate expert on mobile marketing! I really need to get into it.

Here's a nice article on it.

Excerpt:

Mobile marketing should encompass more than just building brand awareness. It needs to be a robust part of the overall marketing strategy, helping companies to not only manage their overall brand message, but also to improve customer relationships, educate customers about products and solutions, and essentially give the company even greater control over its sales funnel.

Blogging and search engines

2006-04-29T14:11:00.000-05:00

It's no doubt that adding a blog to your business site is good for business--creating open lines of dialogue between you and your customers, especially when needing to generate buzz prior to a product launch, just makes sense.

A blog is also good for search engines. Not just good--terrific! Search engines love blogs!

If you want in-bound traffic from search engines to your site, you couldn't ask for a better way to achieve your goal than by adding a blog. Why?

Search engines favor relevant content, and blogs that are regularly updated with keywords commonly searched by surfers are ripe for the picking. If your blog is updated frequently and on a common theme or topic, it will find favor with the search engines.
Search engines like sites with incoming links--and links are what brings blogs alive and connects them to related content. Search engines give extra weight to links from sites focused on the same topic. Referrals from other blogs add credibility for your own blog in the eyes of the search engines.

There are plenty of reasons to start a business blog, and search engines are one of the best ones.

The Story Behind Digg

2006-04-23T23:38:00.000-05:00

Don't be a Johnny-come-lately when it comes to knowing about Digg and it's democratic approach to news. There WILL be imitators and anyone in PR and business communicators will need to know about it.

Here's the story.

Hold the press (releases)

2006-04-22T20:00:00.000-05:00

TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington spoke about likes and dislikes from PR folk. One stand-out suggestion: don't send him press releases. This is a common view from bloggers...they'd much rather have something quick, personal, and with good links.

Summary here.

Candor in Communication

2006-04-18T08:53:00.000-05:00

Read this dandy column on how refreshing candor would be in political communication.

It certainly goes against the grain, as PR folk, to NOT put the best spin on every piece of communication; yet, people long for authenticity. They're almost starved for it in this age when no one admits fault or that they don't know the answer to the question being asked.

Perhaps a dose of candor would go a long way toward building credibility with your audience!

Podcasting, MP3 Players Stealing Radio's Audience

2006-04-12T10:27:00.000-05:00

PodcastingNews reports:

Podcasting and MP3 players are stealing radio's audience, according to the latest figures from Bridge Ratings. According to Dave Van Dyke, President of Bridge Ratings, "By 2010, today's 94% penetration for terrestrial radio will have sunk to 85%."

27% of people 12-24 attribute their reduced use of radio to MP3 use; 22% attributed it to tired radio programming; 3% attributed it to podcast listening.

New RSS Services

2006-03-30T16:30:00.000-06:00

NewsGator has been busy! Here's the latest:

03-28 NewsGator Technologies, an RSS platform company, announced NewsGator Inbox 2.6. Previously known as NewsGator Outlook Edition, the new offering includes clippings synchronization with the NewsGator Online Web-based RSS aggregator, integration with FeedStation, NewsGator's podcatcher, and the ability to view Web pages while working offline.

03-28 NewsGator Technologies also announced FeedDemon 2.0. The new version of the company's desktop RSS aggregator for Windows adds seamless synchronization with the entire NewsGator Online platform, and improvements in usability and system performance.