THIS PAGE IS AN ARCHIVE. GO TO THE HOMEPAGE TO FIND OUT WHAT TO DO NEXT.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. arch emisou panton
	Phil's Blogservations Monday, July 29, 2002 Posted by philgomes 7:45 PM The Hype Machine's Other Half: After rightly lambasting the Henry Blodgetts and Mary Meekers of the world, a lot of people turn to point the finger at stercoraceous, over-funded companies and their PR firms for inflating the so-called "dot-com bubble." Well and good, since they certainly played their part, and to a substantial degree. However, few consider the complicity of the media—trade, business, consumer, national, and so on—in what was to become the greatest pyramid scheme of all time. I now offer this article from someone who says he all-but-predicted the "New Economy's" collapse. This writer claims that he would've had the opportunity to publish his related thoughts in The New York Times had his editors not allegedly accused him of "misreading the landscape," spiking the story on those grounds. Something about not seeing the "triumph" of "new media" over "old media." Asked "what does it all mean?" by his editors, this writer was offered the opportunity to armchair quarterback the purchase of Time Warner by AOL. He viewed it as a situation whereby an overvalued company with few strong assets—save for its massive-but-tepidly-growing subscriber base—used its stratospherically inflated stock to purchase a company with real assets before an inevitable crash occurred. (Remember that this was around the time when people honestly thought that Yahoo! was considering the purchase of Disney.) If this is indeed true, it's a incredibly disturbing example of the mass hallucination that Americans suffered during those heady times. Of course, as SRI CEO Dr. Curt Carlson once told me, "perspective gives you a hundred extra IQ points." Still, if this was what was going on in newsrooms everywhere, it's a scary thing indeed for both media relations pros and media consumers. Friday, July 26, 2002 Posted by philgomes 11:47 AM Clunker Quote Of The Week: I explosively spit my coffee onto my screen when I read the following quote in this article about AMD's launch of a 64-bit desktop CPU. "Just because it's there, we think people are going to use it," said Mark de Frere, AMD's Athlon brand manager. Excuse me? Remember when that company called "DigiScents" was going to revolutionize the PC experience by offering a form of USB-connected smell-o-vision? Silicon Valley history is rife with stories of technologies that couldn't find a place in the home or enterprise. Don't get me wrong—my "Beavis" computer happily runs a 750MHz Athlon and I've been very impressed. I'm a big AMD fan, really. But a lot about their woes can be explained by this quote, methinks. Monday, July 22, 2002 Posted by philgomes 7:26 PM Postings Resume: With apologies to Thin Lizzy, "The blog is back in town (the blog is back in town)...." Our inaugural post-vacation item comes from Ford Kanzler, whom I met during my work with Hitachi Semiconductor. It articulates something that beleaguered PR folks have been saying for some time: COMDEX is pretty useless. I will say, though, that we did it right when I was working with Adaptec. The company chose not to go on the show floor. Instead, it rented a nearby room in one of the hallways that jut out from the main concourse. Meetings were appointment only—primarily customers, media, and analysts—with rare exeptions, like when Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow crashed the suite. (Great story, by the way.) The advantage was that our spokespeople could focus on delivering the message to the right people, rather than dealing with everyone who happened to stop by the booth. Why have your RAID product manager go into his spiel when all the drop-in guy wanted was a free flashing bouncy-ball? Friday, July 05, 2002 Posted by philgomes 8:44 PM Blogservations Takes A Break: I'm taking a break from technology, PR, and blogging for the next two weeks. Time to go get my "creative carbo-load": take a vacation, get some traveling in, play more music, etc., etc., etc. Posts will likely resume around July 22 or so. Thursday, July 04, 2002 Posted by philgomes 2:27 AM Phil Finds Hidden Meaning In His Profession: So, I was screwing around with anagrams again. My cousin Paul "Zag Urinal Zip" Grazzini and I got back from "Dollar Day" at the Oakland A's. (Dollar admission and hot dogs. Can't beat it, even though our seats turned out to be in the "Family Section"—no beer allowed! The whole section laughed at us as we sheepishly slunk away to imbibe our suds somewhere else. I tellya...When you can't drink beer at a ballgame on Independence Day Eve, then the terrorists have already won.) Anyway... I told him about my "subliminal stud" anagram experiments from July 2. He had to find out for himself so, when we got home, we started messing around with this anagram generator. We keyed in a whole bunch of names with hilarious result. Before I left for the night, I decided to key in "public relations". Wouldn't you know, I got "social blueprint." I probably write more on this at another time, but it is a very interesting concept to kick around, especially in this age when a lot of the portal-based media we consume is PR masquerading as news content. Tuesday, July 02, 2002 Posted by philgomes 7:15 PM "Yes? You In The Back? You Have A Question?": I received this email today from someone who read my ExpertPR piece on weblogs. You claim that PR pros will ignore blogs "at their peril." But can you give me an instance of where you have used your blog savvy to the benefit of a client, no matter how indirect? As with any new medium, approaching blogs from a PR standpoint is best done conservatively until everyone—journalist, flack, and blogger alike—has some perspective on this "new-thing-but-not-really" phenomenon. For now, I maintain The best way to get covered within the blogging community is to get into the news sources bloggers read and rely on. (Or, at the most proactive, have a question that sincerely expresses a question that is of interest to the blog's readers, like this Blogservations reader has done.) For example, one of my agency's clients was covered in Scientific American and EETimes at the time of launch. As a result, it became the subject of a Slashdot conversation...twice! This then percolated through to several other blogs. All that exposure and we neither bothered Slashdot's editors, nor attempted to submit the link through the blog's story submission system. The Web outlets for national/metro daily papers, science magazines, major trades, broadcasting companies, and other media properties that we've all heard of seem are the most blog-referenced sources. So, at the end of the day, one's PR strategy and execution does not change too much. Depending on the nature of your announcement or the newsworthiness of your company, you'd try to reach out to those publications anyway, right? (To paraphrase Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, "PR isn't rocket science, it's brain surgery!" Seriously. People really do over-think this kind of thing sometimes. There's probably someone out there demanding a "seamlessly integrated blog strategy" out of their PR person.) I find that it's not so much an issue of PR "action" as it is "strongly advised inaction." I know that some companies have actually approached their respective PR folks with "That post from 'sausage69' doesn't reflect our positioning quite right. Send him an email and get him seeing our side of the story." (I so wish I was kidding.) Of course, doing so would only invite widespread, virally disseminated, and perpetually archived ridicule. Posted by philgomes 1:24 PM Subliminal Stud: I just found out that my name is an anagram for "She Go Limp." Sweet. Then again, it's also an anagram for "Glimpse Ho," "Mop His Leg," and "Simple Hog." Posted by philgomes 1:05 AM Online Registration And Blogs: "Everyone Loses": J.D. Lasica has written a story about a topic that was originally broached to me by MIT Media Lab's Cameron Marlow: the effect of registration-based online news sites on the blogging community. Generally speaking, I tend not to mind giving personal information like my name, email, and ZIP code in order to get access to a news site's content. Of course, it's all fake. Fabricated. Total hogwash. And the email address is a disposable Hotmail account. But, people shouldn't expect to get something for free. If they're not paying for access (like The Wall Street Journal's site), then minor and easily faked demographic information is a fairly small price to pay. Privacy watchdogs will bristle at this—the inch from which The Man will take his mile—but if that smidgen of personal data is what convinces the site's advertisers to give it the money it needs to continue providing my reading enjoyment, then so be it. Slashdot editor Michael Sims offers a particularly thoughtful, realistic viewpoint: So everyone loses. The newspaper doesn't get the readership. Slashdot readers write complaints instead of [writing commentary about] the story. And finally, everyone ends up reading the story in a comment posted on our site instead of the original site. Translated: The news organization's page-views, site traffic and, ultimately, advertising revenue suffers. HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.