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	Phil's Blogservations Saturday, September 28, 2002 Posted by philgomes 11:17 PM Blame The Customer Sorry I've gone dark for so long. You know how it is... The same old controlled chaos with which every PR pro is familiar and, in a strange way, even learns to thrive upon. This story has some elements of one of my very big pet peeves: when a company blames its customers for product shortcomings. A Gartner research note claims that the security features in the Microsoft Pocket PC operating system—used in Toshiba and HP/Compaq handhelds—are insufficient and even a cause for alarm in enterprise settings. Microsoft's response? "Gartner mistakenly blames the Pocket PC for potential security breaches that are in reality related to insecure usage of desktop PCs." Now, this is actually kind of funny. Microsoft holds northward of a 90% market share in the desktop operating system market. In effect, they have responsibility to offer strong security throughout their product line, irrespective of the user's level of sophistication. But it's still the customer's fault. Not theirs. Riiiiight... Before all of this, Microsoft decided to go through its common "initiative" exercise—it created a focus on "trustworthy computing." Curiously, the Pocket PC operating system doesn't fall under this program. Anyway...Isn't this like an architect resolving to focus on "Non-Crumbling Buildings?" Or maybe an anesthesiologist starting a "No Waking During Surgery" initiative? "Well...It's the patient's fault. How in the hell was I supposed to know his body tolerance for the anesthetic was higher than average?" Remember when it sponsored "Scalability Day" to prove that NT was enterprise ready? That was pretty funny. Only Microsoft can get a whole bunch of people in a room and hold them hostage for hours until they walked out, eyes glazed, chanting "NT...NT...NT..." What if a PR firm ran around saying that it was now going to focus like a laser on making sure that there were no lies or half-truths in press releases and pitches? When we live in a world where people and corporations need to announce an initiative to do their jobs right, we got problems. Big ones. Friday, September 13, 2002 Posted by philgomes 8:50 PM "Yahoo? I Was Into Them Before They Got Into Broadband": I'm a big music fan. I have hundreds of CDs. I own four guitars and a bass. I go to concerts. I buy t-shirts. I read a lot of interviews with musicians. When a band comes out with a new album, it will often undertake a press tour to promote that album worldwide. All-too-often during the resulting interviews, a band will make negative comments about its early catalogue while promoting the current record. For example: I was watching VH1 a few weekends ago and I saw a brief interview with Scott Stapp, the lead singer of the incredibly sanctimonious quasi-Christian band Creed. He said that there were songs on the early records that he just could not listen to anymore and had to skip when listening to them on CD. As you might guess, there were no skip-worthy songs on the new record, as is always the case when musicians take this direction with their interviews. I've always thought that this common musician soundbite amounted to nothing more than a slap-in-the-face for a band's early fans. "Hey!" one might say. "I liked those songs! I still do! And now you're ashamed of them?" With this in mind, get a load of this Yahoo! executive during an AP interview regarding the recently announced Yahoo!/SBC broadband partnership: "We have been programming to the lowest common denominator until now," said Jim Brock, a Yahoo senior vice president who oversaw the project. "This is going to change the broadband landscape." Waitaminnit... I'm a relatively savvy computer user who is on a pokey dial-up at home. That makes me the "lowest common denominator!?" I like Yahoo! precisely because, for the most part, it loads quickly on my nibblenet connection and I'm always one click away from news, finance data, a disposable email address, and so on. Must Yahoo! diss the tastes of its early fans for the promise of DSL-wielding johnny-come-latelies? Do they think we like the moniker of "lowest common denominator," arguably the majority of their "eyeballs?" You see...Metallica always took the right route. During interviews related to their self-titled fifth album, singer/guitarist James Hetfield admitted that the first album Kill 'Em All was very "Judas-Priest-let's-just-go-rock-out." He quickly added, though, that he wasn't at all ashamed of it, since the record reflected what he and his bandmates were feeling at the time. When Yahoo! is rocking out in the dot-com world's 50,000-seat broadband arenas, I hope it doesn't forget those of us who crowded the dingy dial-up clubs in the early days. Thursday, September 12, 2002 Posted by philgomes 7:19 PM Event Marketing Goddess For Hire: Suzanne McIntosh is someone I met during my agency-side tenure with Adaptec. I worked most closely with her around Comdex '99, when she put together the most kick-ass, off-the-show-floor meeting area I've ever seen. An inspiring move, and I've since recommended to many clients that they can sometimes make the most out of a tradeshow by not having a presence on the show floor at all. (This, incidentally, was the same Comdex when Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow—sporting more hair than he ever had in the 1980s—crashed the Adaptec meeting area demanding EZ CD Creator assistance. A total...uhhhh...riot.) Anyway... "Mackie"—and you have not earned the stripes to call her that yet—is incredibly creative and vivacious. In other words, she would be a true asset to any marketing team. You can download her resume in PDF format from this site. Posted by philgomes 10:55 AM Like I Said Earlier... ...PR isn't hard, but it is terribly easy to make a mistake. When I was working with a very large company in the late 1990s, the press release schedule suffered from double-entry accounting—people on two continents were touching it and making changes, believing they were the ultimate authority on the document. As a result, version control was forked. We found out about the problem when a very, very important product was announced prematurely. Ooooops. Kind of hard to un-ring the bell, I guess. Wednesday, September 11, 2002 Posted by philgomes 1:29 PM EBE Lends Perspectives On Sept. 11: I can't say I agree with all of the contributions, but the excellent alternative weekly East Bay Express has outdone itself with its special editorial feature composed of a one-year-after observations about America since the Sept. 11 tragedy. Worth a read. I managed to get through a few of the articles during my morning BART commute. Posted by philgomes 11:29 AM Mandrake Linux Rules. I'll Say That For Free: Slashdot pointed me to this excellent interview with one of MandrakeSoft's co-founders. As longtime Blogservations readers know, I'm a huge fan of Mandrake Linux and I've been happily running v8.2 at home, primarily for graphics, writing, and Web authoring. Mandrake Linux v9.0 is coming out soon and I will happily pony up the dough as soon as it is available. Tuesday, September 10, 2002 Posted by philgomes 9:29 PM SF Chronicle Discusses "Strategic Placement": It's taken me a while to get to this one, but I think it's important to discuss. I haven't seen it on too many other blogs, so I assume that it got lost in the Labor Day weekend shuffle. A shame, 'cause it's an important topic that voracious media consumers and critical PR pros alike should discuss further. (I am wholly, unremittingly, without-a-doubt described as both.) Media watcher Dan Fost wrote an article about the PR/IR tool known as "strategic placement," or the practice of handing an embargoed story to very few esteemed media outlets in exchange for the potential of huge amounts of ink. This often has the effect of spurring smaller publications to use the outlets that carried the leaks as tip-sheets, creating even more coverage. (And, just as often, the company winds up pissing off those outlets it chose not to leak the news to.) The article focuses on media relations as it relates to financial markets, blockbuster M&A deals, and very, very large companies—three areas where I've had only a medium amount of experience. Nevertheless, I feel that the National Investor Relations Institute CEO Lou Thompson is right in pointing out that leaking a story exclusively to a national paper like The Wall Street Journal meets the letter, though not the spirit, of disclosure laws. I work in a very different arena: PR based on science, innovation, and solving important problems. SEC regulations don't apply—good taste and sound judgment still do. Have I given exclusives? Sure. Has any exclusive I've supplied one reporter ever destroyed a relationship with another? Not yet—and the possibility of same would make for quite a deterrent if I had some certainty that such would be the case. But here are the realities. In my PR world, an announcement ceases to be news once it crosses the wires. There are several journalists who will expect to be briefed or otherwise informed before such an announcement happens, agreeing to honor an embargo. (It's been over a year since I've worked with a publicly traded client.) Failure to do so puts the relationship in jeopardy after a certain number of times. Unless the announcement involves fabricating single-femtometer transistors, curing AIDS, or discovering the fate of your socks after using the dryer, it will only get tepid pick-up on its own merits. (Trust me. Between PR Newswire and Business Wire, over 1,000 news releases were distributed today alone. Lexis/Nexis refuses to return an exact number for any amount higher than that.) In any case... If news releases are the primary sustaining element of your PR program, then you have a problem. With a modicum of creativity, this whole "strategic placement" issue—while still very important—becomes far less acute. (Only one of the above-hyperlinked placements was related to a news release, and it involved approaching a publication under embargo far in advance of the announcement.) And what about the media's demands? Consider the 2002 study by Vocus, wherein nearly one-quarter of the polled reporters indicated that the best way for email pitches to be considered more than "spam" is for the PR rep to offer an exclusive (PR News, "This Just In..."; April 29, 2002). Tough criteria, eh? How many truly compelling ideas for exclusives do you think you can cook up based on any one company? Dan Gillmor was right: "Public relations in the technology business must be an incredibly difficult job." Actually, it's not too hard. PR is not rocket science...It's just one of those things that's incredibly easy to screw up if you don't iterate, iterate, iterate your communications strategy. Thursday, September 05, 2002 Posted by philgomes 2:34 PM Palm Makes Good: Far too often, the media does not let the news of a company's customer service remedy to fly nearly as high as the coverage of what required said remedy in the first place. We won't make that mistake here at Blogservations. Nosireebub. Palm is offering to make amends with owners of the m130 handheld who felt hoodwinked by the fact that its color display does not offer as many colors as advertised. News.Com is carrying the story. This outlines a key element of crisis communications that was perhaps neglected here. Once news of a company's transgression has been distributed, the company must get out there fast with an acknowledgement of that mistake and the remedies that it will employ. Palm was arguably slow with both—about two weeks by News.Com's count. Still, I'm guessing that this wasn't a failing of the PR operation so much as an artifact of the company's financial situation. As I've said before, when you have huge coffers, it's a lot easier to set up a solid refund/return program. It'll still hurt, yes, but it won't be a huge problem. With a current P/E ratio of -5.4 (?) and a stock price that makes one debate "share-purchase-or-game-of-Star-Wars-Trilogy-at-the-arcade?" (Source: c|net), I'm wondering if the decision to delay the remedy was a financial one. As in "Can we really afford this?" Tuesday, September 03, 2002 Posted by philgomes 6:24 PM Why Your Writing Sucks: Is it perhaps because I haven't been able to post to this blog for almost two weeks? Thankfully, no. MarketingProfs is running an article on how advances in writing technology—from the pen to the typewriter to the word processor—have had an inversely proportional effect on the art of writing itself. There was a time, the authors argue, when the state of the technology meant that an extraordinary amount of care had to be applied to writing. Indeed, the writing tools were such that care and forethought were unavoidably built into the process. Screw up while typing, and you've got a lengthy night of re-typing ahead of you. Screw up while using longhand, and you've got a bunch of scribbles and other unsightly messes to contend with. The authors identify two principle problems that arise from the advent of modern word processing: 1) Your boss expects the writing process to be faster, and 2) you become reliant on spell-checking, grammar-checking, and—possibly the most evil feature ever—auto-correction. The authors of the MarketingProfs piece certainly aren't the first to bring this up. There's also an excellent, if less-than-coherent, rant on Slashgoth. Auto spell-checking on Word is killing off grammer [sic] and spelling skills. Over recent years I have noticed that, since I have been using Word, my language skills have been going down the pan. When it corrects the words that are sometimes mis-spelt [sic] like "teh" into "the"... Unfortunately, I don't think the author is making a joke. Email makes this problem worse. Years ago, one of my supervisors jumped all over a group of us because she thought our online correspondence was too informal. Well and good—lesson learned. She then proceeded to email the client about her "thots" regarding certain public relations "stratgies." I'm not kidding you. I wish I were. 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. 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