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	Phil's Blogservations Thursday, January 29, 2004 Posted by philgomes 12:38 PM The Empty Promise Syndrome The Empty Promise Syndrome PR uber-blogger Tom Murphy is the PR Manager at Cape Clear. He fields a lot of pitches from PR agencies who want his business. While sympathetic, he feels that a number of these pitches suffer from a fatal flaw: However, one bugbear I have with some of these pitches is the empty promise syndrome. With little or no knowledge of my business, many of these pitch e-mails promise business coverage, national coverage etc. There's this long-running idea in traditional PR circles that a PR program has failed unless you've achieved business or national press. That's a complete fallacy. Here's why: Agencies pursue business and national press — and clients push them toward it — for the sake of their respective egos, whether the company is really ready to make that step or not. Ask, "Does the business-press-reading audience really need to hear our story yet? Are we ready to tug that tiger's tail?" Trade media readers specify and qualify products. In most cases, they have strong purchasing authority. Right there, your PR program has the basics of ROI and can hardly be said to have "failed." Now, if the product in question carries a very high price tag, any PO gets kicked up to the executive suite and probably the CFO's office. That's when business press helps: If the prospect's corner offices haven't heard of your company, they may select a bigger or more established vendor, irrespective of your product's economic or technical merits. I heard one story that a big PR firm pitched one of the biggest software companies in the U.S. by showing up to the meeting with a six-foot-high poster of the company's CEO Photoshopped into a fake BusinessWeek cover. The firm actually got the business, since the empty gesture stroked the egos of the executive suite. Sure, when you're a publicly traded software firm, business press is very important. But to promise the cover of BusinessWeek was just silly. Okay...I'll be honest with you... It was over two million dollars "silly" in terms of the PR budget at stake, yes, but that was already a few years ago and it hasn't happened yet. In sum, PR still has a long way to go in order to get credibility with the companies it seeks to represent and the influencers that it seeks to influence. | Wednesday, January 28, 2004 Posted by philgomes 3:57 PM Call For Interesting Case Studies Call For Interesting Case Studies I'm gearing up for doing my co-lecturing gig at San Francisco State University. Typically, this is the time when I do a refresh on the research and course content that I'm responsible for. PR and, especially, media pros are encouraged to contact me with any case studies that you think the students can learn from. I recommend that you strip out client names and such. Of primary interest are case studies with a regulatory or legal angle, since media law is a part of the course. Of course, if an outside case study is used, credit will be given where due. | Tuesday, January 27, 2004 Posted by philgomes 2:32 PM James Carville, Gollum, And A Children's Book James Carville, Gollum, And A Children's Book My mother mentioned to me the other day that she thinks James Carville kind of looks like Gollum from The Lord Of The Rings. Check it out... Here's Carville: "Votes are our preciousssss...." Now, Gollum: "We're Right! They're Wrong!" Personally, I think he looks more like the lead Cenobite from Hellraiser: "You opened the ballot box! We came!" Weird, huh? Anyway... I bring this up 'cause I found out from PR Bop that Carville is apparently coming out with, of all things, a children's book. It would be kind of funny if some doting mom accidentally picked this one up for her kid instead: Well... At least the kid wouldn't get his or her lunch money stolen anymore. | Posted by philgomes 11:07 AM Three-And-A-Half Bellagios Of Ringtones Three-And-A-Half Bellagios Of Ringtones Formerly with SG Cowan and now with Crimson Ventures, Drew Peck was the first person I had heard who had suggested that the "Bellagio" could be an economic unit unto itself. Thinking that the word "billion" lost its power in the popular imagination, he believed that the nine-zero magnitude was best visualized by picturing the billion-dollar Vegas hotel (or several copies thereof) instead. His example at the time — about two or three years ago at The Churchill Club — was Cisco's reported $2.3 billion in post-bust back inventory. Imagine how hard you'd have to work to unload 2.3 Bellagios on someone! In that spirit, consider that people spent about 3.5 Bellagios on cellphone ringtones! Reuters News Service, 14 January 2004 - Sales of mobile phone ringtones, those tinny song recordings programmed into millions of cellphones around the world, jumped 40% in the past year to $3.5 billion, according to a study released yesterday. Source: Reuters by way of ITWeb. | Monday, January 26, 2004 Posted by philgomes 9:12 PM MyDoom Virus Attacks! MyDoom Virus Attacks! Yup... Some miscreant has decided to unleash yet another pathogen into our delicate digital ecosystem. My inbox(es) have been positively overrun today with the MyDoom virus. Apparently, this one is a mass mailer worm that will attempt to hit the controversial SCO Group with junk data on Feb. 1. VirusShield tells me there are no viruses here. It ain't me, folks! Now, I know that SCO is a pretty easy target these days, what with their anti-Linux sabre-rattling. But this stunt doesn't do anyone any favors. I really hope that no one in the open source community is behind this. As to open source... I had a GOOBiE a couple of weekends ago. ("GOOBiE" was a term some of us used with Hitachi Semiconductor. It meant "Good Out-Of-Box Experience.") Mandrake Linux 9.2 gave me a GOOBiE. I took an old workstation and turned it into a public access kiosk, such that visitors could always have a place to check email or surf the Web without needing to go into my laptop. Here's the kiosk: Altogether, very smooth installation. Found all of the hardware without any trouble. The machine is a 550MHz Pentium with 384MB of PC100 SDRAM. Pokey by today's standards, for sure, but it appears to run about as quickly as my WinXP laptop with 1.8GHz and 512MB of DDR SDRAM. I'm sure there will be more updates to follow. | Posted by philgomes 4:10 PM Empathic PCs? "I'm Sorry, User philgomes. Your Heartrate Is Too High To Be Sending Email" I'm actually not sure that I want my PC to know how I'm feeling. I'm even less sure that I want it relaying that information to others. From Gizmodo: Aided by tiny sensors and transmitters called a PAL (Personal Assistance Link) your machine (with your permission) will become an anthroscope ? an investigator of your up-to-the-moment vital signs, says Sandia project manager Peter Merkle. It will monitor your perspiration and heartbeat, read your facial expressions and head motions, analyze your voice tones, and correlate these to keep you informed with a running account of how you are feeling ? something you may be ignoring ? instead of waiting passively for your factual questions. It also will transmit this information to others in your group so that everyone can work together more effectively. Controlling one's emotions in a professional setting is one of the most important skills that we learn. Again, not sure if it's something I'd want to share with my colleagues in most cases, at least at the biofeedback/biometric level. | Posted by philgomes 11:54 AM Back In Action Postings Resume There is no longer a blog at g2bgroup.com. We've changed the name of the firm to Dryden Marketing Group and the G2Blog didn't survive as part of the changeover. This blog here at my personal web site will not only cover public relations matters, but also other aspects of my life. "All work and no play," as they say. Old G2Blog postings have been archived, as well as editions of the email newsletter Tapeout. Stay tuned for more (and more regular) updates. | 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's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes. This site has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Clicking on a link doesn't automatically send a 1/2-cent donation to UNICEF. You can't buy, sell, auction, swap, find a date, win friends, influence people, cross the chasm, or decode the human genome using this site. You won't get free email. You won't win a free video game console. This site will not end world hunger, foster peace in the Middle East, help you smell better, teach you how to swing dance, or move the global economy from petroleum to hydrogen fuels. You'll learn a lot about this site's master, though, which amounts to a haphazard collection of strange and useless facts that pretty much won't help you at all.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This is the blog of Phil Gomes, SVP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes.com View my page on PROpenMic 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.