Friday's Video Views

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Brian Solis Talks Old and New Media

I don't entirely subscribe to the notion that traditional media is somehow irrelevant. After all, doesn't the Twittersphere light up with RT fever when The Times or one of journalism's mainstays posts a well-reported story? Still, Solis is right in describing the shift that must occur within news orgs for them to prosper in this new media ecosystem. It is a cultural thing. Can "top down" media inculcate their rank and file to fully engage the social graph? The jury is out.




Places

Here's Facebook Places explained via the DigitalBuzz blog.




Check-in, Check-out

And just when you thought Facebook's FourSquare wannabe might have eluded the privacy police, the s**t hit the fan. Fortunately we have Peter Shankman to school us on how to avoid being "checked in" by others on Facebook's "Places."



Bloopers from Google (and I don't mean Wave)

From TechCrunch TV: "Google has produced dozens of slick demo videos. From Buzz, to Chrome OS to Voice Actions, if there was a product launch, you bet Google has slapped together a two-minute walkthrough video with some nifty animation, a stark-white dimensionless backdrop and, of course, high res product images interspersed throughout."




Google's New Frenemy: Verizon

Yesterday, Google wowed the digital cognoscenti by bowing free calls in North America and dirt cheap calls overseas via GMail. Here's the company's video to promote Google's new boffo service via the Blogger blog



Scoble's Curatorial Powers Revealed

Robert Scoble (aka @scobleizer) talks about how he approaches online curation (via Howard Rheingold)




Penguins, butterfly

And if life gets overly complicated, catch this homemade video that caught fire last week.




Words

There's something about this closing video montage that surprises, delights, and inspires. From Everynone (in collaboration with WNYC's Radiolab & NPR).


WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

Social Media Overload

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(Wordle via http://www.delicious.com/PeterHimler)

Isn't it time to consider a one-day moratorium on the use of the term "social media" (and its myriad derivations)? I mean what could possibly happen? (See answers below.)

1. Many Twitter feeds slow to a crawl
2. SxSW Conference cancelled
3. Jeff Pulver comes off his road trip
4. Gary Vaynerchuk's new Sirius Radio show folds
5. Technorati has a third fewer blogs to index
6. Zappos starts accepting coupon codes
7. PR and digital marketing firms' new business proposals shrink
8. Mashable and TechCrunch forced to merge
9. Pepsi buys a :30 spot on 2011 Super Bowl telecast
10. @aplusk and @ladygaga return to their day and night jobs (mercifully)

Robo Pitch

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From today's Twittersphere:

TechCrunch's @robinwauters PR pitches I hate: "You have probably already seen the news that blah blah. As you're drafting your coverage of the news, blah blah blah."

TheNextWeb's @alex I actually did see the news, and passed. Pitches like that mean I made the right call. Comes across as very arrogant, too.

Ad Age's @Aerocles Hey PR Pros - RT @alex @robinwauters I like pitches from real people. Hey Alex, this is Jim from company X, can I send you what we're up to?

David Teicher, Alex Wilhelm and Robin Wauters' tweeted frustrations with some PR peeps struck at the heart of what has ailed the PR profession for as long as I can remember: hollow-sounding, often misinformed, canned story pitches.

Joe Ciarallo, a friend in the biz who, like me, straddles the editorial and PR sides of the media relations equation, has a term for these inauthentic PR come-ons. He calls them "robo pitches."

This persistent problem has caused some journalists on the receiving end of these mass-produced pitch letters to go over the deep-end in outing the PRpetrators. What's worse: the pitches not only sound inhuman, but they're easily identifiable as having been sent to every other (competitive) journalist on the beat.

Take GMail. If you edit and re-paste your PRose into another email (for another reporter), the edited words arrive in a different font color. If you use one of the automated database companies to disseminate your pitch letters, the return address can be traced back to the sending service. And then of course there's the use of "BCC" - a dead giveaway.

I don't have a definitive cure for this intractable problem that sometimes sadly prevents reasonable story ideas from seeing the light of day. A little more senior supervision over the editorial output by less-seasoned members of an agency or corporate PR department might help. But then again, maybe it's hiring pros who understand and can creatively emulate in their communication these two words: Get Real.

Friday's Video Views

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From Wall Street to Silicon Alley

How Two Wall Street Kids Created A FAST Growing Tech Startup. (via
@theBusinessInsider




Torch-erous

Between Google's Android and Apple's iPhone, the folks at RIM, home to the beleagured Blackberry, certainly have their work cut out for them to hang on to their dwindling share of the smart phone market. Here's the company's hopeful salvation for the touch-screen set. (via @mashable




Freakin' Movie Trailer

We've all seen the movie trailer for The Social Network, and its YouTube and Twitter trailer trash-up spin-offs. But who knew, other than Guy Kawasaki, that "Freakonomics" was headed to the big screen? Here's its trailer (via @AllTop):




Soap with Your Twitter?

Sometimes the jousting between Facebook, Google, Twitter and FourSquare seems like a long drawn-out soap opera. TechCrunch noticed as well and offered up a LG's YouTube series the "Young and Connected." Here's one clip. More here.




Conan TBS Promo

As if that soap opera wasn't enough, here's the culmination of a little late night soap opera that captured our hearts last year.




Mac Guy Jail Broken

While we're talking late night talk, here's a clip featuring the "Mac Guy" Justin Long on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" showing off his "jail broken" iPhone. I guess Long is not up for any new Apple ad executions anytime soon.




Gizmodo airchecks

And who among us PR peeps hasn't sat in an edit suite compiling "best of" client TV news clips? I guess the allure and gratification of TV coverage remains strong, even for one of the pioneers in the gadget blog space.




Lady Java

Finally, as Oracle sues Google for the latter's use of Java, Lady Gaga should sue the peeps behind Lady Java for this video:

College Rankings Game

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A week or so ago, Forbes pre-empted the release of U.S. News' annual college rankings guide by anointing Williams College, a small liberal arts college in Williamstown, MA, as the numero uno college in the nation.

Now if only my hometown baseball team, owned by one of Williams' more celebrated (and recently deceased) alumni, could retain its first place ranking, all will be well in the world. But, I digress.

Today, the recognized leader in the college rankings game has issued its report and we can expect it to generate a decent share of headlines, along with lots of hand-wringing and high-fiving among those charged with gaming their university's position on the list.

Did I use the verb gaming to describe what colleges do to bolster their standing in U.S. News & World Report's annual college ranking bible?

In a report today, Inside Higher Ed revealed some tweaks in the vaunted methodology used by U.S. News. Specifically, U.S. News "lessened the emphasis on" and "broadened the inputs" for the much-criticized 'reputational' calculation.

The reputational portion now accounts for "22.5 percent of institutional scores for 'national' colleges and universities, down from 25 percent." This reflects the "ratings of college presidents" (15 percent) and "a national survey of college guidance counselors" (7.5 percent) from "the country's best public high schools."

In meeting with dozens of university administrators over the years, I'm always amazed by how much emphasis is placed on improving their standing in this one publication. They see it as the holy grail when it comes to courting prospective students (and their parents), while cultivating alumni (and their checkbooks). Many specialty PR firms and academic consultants claim to have the ability to influence the survey's outcome, and institutions will pay dearly for these "insights."

"Many colleges spend large sums of money sending materials to other presidents to try to influence them, and last year, Inside Higher Ed documented that some presidents appear to give unreasonably low rankings to their competitors and in some cases to all colleges but their own."

But the world has changed. I'm no longer convinced that it's worth devoting resources to gaming this one survey given the way in which influence works today, let alone the cacophonous media landscape.

In our socially connected world where young people increasingly turn to their friends and a myriad other information sources to inform their life decisions, the importance of a single, admittedly well-branded college rankings guide will likely decrease over time.

Resources like Unigo, a former client whose socially enabled digital platform aggregates college-specific content exclusively from college students themselves -- bypassing admissions and administrative-speak -- provides prospective applicants a much more authentic view of university life.

Will the U.S News rankings continue to create headlines? Yes. Will the ascendant colleges and universities continue to merchandise and publicize their standings to their constituents? You bet.

Can university administrators continue to correlate their institution's ranking in these guides with an increase in applications and/or alumni donations? I'm not so sure.

Friday's Video Views

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The Really Big Apple

A tour of the world's largest Apple Store, newly opened in London (via @alltop)




Wanna Work at Twitter?

Ten requirements for working at Twitter (via Flavorpill)

Meet the Class Of Twitter HQ from TwitterHQ on Vimeo.

digg's digs

digg founder Kevin Rose gives AllThingsD digital doyenne Kara Swisher a tour of his company's digs.




Adam Curry and Tabitha Soren, where are you?

Introducing MTV's first ever Twitter jockey (via @mashable)




Twitter Trailer Trash

First Facebook, then YouTube, and now Twitter. The film trailer trail gets longer. (via @Mashable)




Re-Calibration

In our never-ending quest to become the first to discover and share the latest and greatest apps and gadgets, we often lose site of what's important in life. Hopefully this last video montage will help us regain our footing.

Elyse Porterfield: HOPA

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Dry Erase Girl

PR peeps, it's really not about social channels, is it? After all, anyone can set up a Facebook fan page and Twitter feed or upload a piece of video on YouTube. It's really all about a good yarn, i.e., one whose narrative resonates.

As our industry struggles to compete with other marketing disciplines for clients' rapidly growing spend online and in social circles, agencies are fixated on finding talent that profess proficiency in Facebook, Foursquare, Digg, Twitter, etc.

Is it really the knowledge of digital and social channels that drive a story's ability to capture eyeballs and generate buzz? Hasn't it always come down to whether the piece of content itself can surprise, delight, inspire and create empathy? And if so, shouldn't agencies re-focus on acquiring talent that possess rich and vivid imaginations and story-telling abilities versus Facebook pages and Twitter feeds?

In this blog's never-ending quest to pinpoint the secret sauce for creating compelling content, especially video that goes viral, today we're treated to the insights of a pair of hoaxsters who appear to have cracked the code. Yesterday, the "Like," "Share" and "Forward" buttons went in overdrive with a pictorial narrative featuring an attractive young woman who displayed sequential messages on dry erase boards to quit her job and, to the audience's delight, diss her boss in the process.

TechCrunch outed this clever hoax here, and in so doing talked with one of the Resig brothers who perpetrated the buzz as a means to draw attention to the site The Chive:

"John Resig: 'We came up with a hoax that was completely relatable. It wasn’t spread by TechCrunch and Reddit. It was spread by Facebook and inter-office email. Everyone wants to quit their jobs like this.'"

Here's more of the backstory from TechCrunch:

"All they had to do was post the images of Porterfield holding the dry erase board on The Chive at around 4:30 am this morning, and College Humor re-posted, followed shortly by TechCrunch. Resig says they targeted us because his publicist said that they should try for a TechCrunch write-up (Nice work guys). When asked if this was done purely to garner traffic and get media attention, Resig responded,

“We didn’t do this for the media. I’d did it almost to prove to myself that I had it in me, to make something go viral at 4:30 in the morning before the world wakes up. You get a pure thrill of watching your site go from 15,000 uniques to 440,000 uniques in a single hour, watching yourself sucker every site from a-z who didn’t do their backstory.”

And it worked by striking "a personal chord...that people wanted to share...” to the tune of 238k Facebook shares and 31k Tweets.

Resig went on to describe the point I tried to make at the top of this post: creativity is key:

"People, particularly journalists, underestimate America’s appetite for a good story. This story wasn’t primarily done to see how many people in the mainstream media we could hoodwink (though that was fun), it wasn’t done for the publicity, money, nor was it a slapdash reaction to some JetBlue clown; it was done purely for the entertainment of the people first and foremost. The purpose of the hoax was to entertain and inspire, not to inform, so what difference does it make if the story has a single ounce of truth?"

Of course, we in the PR biz are saddled with a mandate to both tell the truth and inform, which shouldn't preclude our ability to "entertain and inspire." Right?

Just Blame the Agency

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HP Ousted CEO Mark Hurd

OMG! "Hewlett Took a P.R. Firm’s Advice in the Hurd Case" blares the headline on the business pages of today's New York Times. No s**t, Sherlock! Of course, the company and its board sought counsel from an established public relations firm. To whom should they have turned? A priest?

The piece went on to question the agency's credentials to handle such matters. Trust me, APCO is no fly-by-night agency. While Times SF-based technology reporters Ashlee Vance and Matt Richtel may not be as familiar with the firm, APCO certainly owns its share of pertinent credentials to advise HP's board. From The Times:

"According to a person briefed on the presentation, the representative from the APCO public relations firm even wrote a mock sensational newspaper article to demonstrate what would happen if news leaked. The specialist said the company would be better served by full disclosure, even though an investigation had produced no evidence of sexual misconduct."

Perhaps one of the Valley's myriad social media specialty boutiques would have been better equipped to advise the company? Doubtful.

Still, the decision to request Mr. Hurd's resignation may or may not have been the correct one. Would the story have had greater media legs and caused more pain to HP had Mr. Hurd stayed on to endure Gloria Allred's self-aggrandizing brand of reputation deconstruction? It's not an easy question to answer.

In crises, decisions are made based on the information available at the time. Every crisis is distinct. There is no set playbook. You go with what you know, even though, a different set of circumstances may manifest later. Oracle chief Larry Ellison, no stranger himself to corporate excess, weighed in on Mr. Hurd's side:

"What the expense fraud claims do reveal is an H.P. board desperately grasping at straws in trying to publicly explain the unexplainable; how a false sexual harassment claim and some petty expense report errors led to the loss of one of Silicon Valley’s best and most respected leaders."

While Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, "an expert in corporate governance and senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management, said Hewlett-Packard’s directors deserved credit."

"The company 'stands apart from other companies that have been scandalized in the headlines this year,' he said, referring to BP and several Wall Street firms. 'They made a courageous call.'"

The Business Insider's Henry Blodget, who himself lived through a forced resignation, provides his insightful take on the HP imbroglio today in which he concludes

"...the details leave big questions as to what really happened."

If the company had truly erred in its understanding of the allegations and went ahead to demand Mr. Hurd's resignation, maybe it should now consider reinstating him as CEO? Didn't the Obama Administration recently have the kahunas to admit that it had over-reacted to a trumped up (eg, patently false) report about one of its administrators?

Then again if the initial (and expected) Friday-issued bad news announcement had focused instead on the financial improprieties of Mr. Hurd's expense report, and not on the now dubious sexual harassment allegations, the mediasphere would not be in a frenzy to pick apart HP's (and its PR firm's) decision.

But again, you go with the cards you're dealt, and hope you prevail.

Friday's Video Views

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Got Milk with your Cookie?

As the Wall Street Journal looks into the complex and misunderstood world of how marketers track online behavior, here's a video about that piece of embedded computer code that enables such tracking. It features its inventor. (via @WSJ)




Sir Martin

While we're on the subject of The Journal's series on digital privacy, here's a clip featuring the WSJ's Alan Murray chatting up WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell:




The Early Bird Catches the Deal

Groupon, move over. Here are some insights into Early Bird, Twitter's entry into the online deal and coupon space (via TechCrunch TV's Evelyn Rusli)




NYC's Alphabet-land with Foursquare's Dennis Crowley

Walk around NYC's East Village with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley (via @wsj's Metropolis blog in its New York edition.)




The White House Puts Fox News in its Place

Bill O'Reilly on Fox News's ascension to the first row of the White House press briefing room. via @mediaite




Cinema Non-Verite: YouTube's Founding

YouTube's founding re-imagined a la "The Social Network" trailer. Via @mashable)

Control Nut

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Nearly five years ago, the head of one of the world's largest PR firms turned the communications world on its ear by (presciently) declaring that we've entered an age when companies have the capacity to "bypass the media" filter to deliver their messages directly to their constituents.

Journalists decried this seemingly pretentious idea as heresy -- an idea they believed would take "spin" to new and dangerous levels. After all, the news establishment has long served as the vital check and balance in our democratic society.

The agency chief elaborated on this meme in a post titled Slippery Slope:

"While the technology exists to go direct to the end user of information does not mean it is smart to make it the exclusive means of news dissemination."

Truth be told, if the influence and impact of real journalism were compromised or usurped by myriad partisan voices, wouldn't the public ultimately pay a hefty price? And wouldn't we witness a proliferation of tainted "news" and commentary with divisiveness and acrimony as its bi-product?

As someone who has built a reasonable reputation working that very media filter, I still embraced the new tools and channels that would allow my clients to create and share their content directly and controllably with their varied publics. I did so with the confidence that they would not purposefully distort or mislead. And if they did, the newly empowered citizen media would certainly punish them. Right?

Yet today, I'm torn. Can we really count on private enterprise to be straight when advancing their agendas in inscrutable channels? And can the purported "self-correcting" ability of the blogosphere be relied on to ferret out and quash less-than-honest communiques, especially in a real-time atomized mediasphere?

There are countless examples of companies who've been outed for being disingenuous. But nowhere is this pernicious practice more prevalent than in politics. And nowhere are the public consequences greater.

Slate's John Dickerson

Writing in Slate, John Dickerson yesterday analyzed the comments, and the act of sanitizing them, on one Presidential aspirant's Facebook page. His piece titled "NOT Sarah Palin's Friends: The Facebook posts Palin doesn't want you to see," revealed -- not surprisingly -- the pains Ms. Palin's people went through to expunge all negative comments, leaving just the fawning remarks of this crafty (i.e., dishonest) politician's fans:

"It should not surprise you that the comments to posts she makes on her page are screened. For any high-profile politician, online comments are like town hall forums: Both appear to be spontaneous but are actually highly choreographed."

Dickerson goes on to elaborate on the dangers inherent in a world where anyone can propagate anything without serious challenge to its veracity. It also starkly contrasts with the efforts by the current administration to make government more open:

"Palin's Facebook page is a key tool in her public brand management. She has used it effectively to project her message, appear connected with voters, and bypass the traditional media (while simultaneously using it to rebroadcast her message)."

Wouldn't you think that someone seeking our nation's highest public office would have even greater standards for honest and forthrightness than, let's say, a for-profit company? Sadly no.

Newsweek Sale: Fame, Flame and Blame Game

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The snark has surfaced with yesterday's announcement that the Washington Post Co. has sold its once venerable newsweekly to the nonagenarian namesake of a once-venerable audio components company.

Here are some of the Twips (Twitter quips) that crossed my Blackberry yesterday:

@JeffJarvis Audio guy bought Newsweek? Maybe he'll convert it to 8-Track. Cassette? Quadrophonic? Walkman? Album?
about 15 hours ago via Echofon

@Howard Kurtz So...Is it too early to start a pool on who will be the new editor of Sidney Harman's Newsweek?
about 16 hours ago via UberTwitter

@r Horace Greeley? [RT @HowardKurtz] Is it too early to start a pool on who'll be new editor of Sidney Harman's Newsweek? [link: @jeffjarvis]

@J_Christopher Andy Rooney! RT @jeffjarvis: Does anyone care? Larry King? RT @HowardKurtz: Is it 2 early to start pool on who will be new Newsweek editor?
about 16 hours ago via TweetDeck

@JayRosen_NYU In all the coverage of the Newsweek sale, I didn't find a single idea about how to change it to make it workable. http://jr.ly/4kag Did you?
32 minutes ago via web

@carr2n Heard that Harman got Newsweek for $1 and couple of super sweet vintage Harman Kardon speakers w/awesome specs #Newsweek

@jackshafer RT @danmccleary Sidney Harman is 90. Maybe he thinks he is buying a Newsweek subscription.

@king_kaufman My idea for Newsweek's new owner, @jayrosen_nyu: Lay off half the staff, then flip it for $2.
26 minutes ago via Brizzly
about 18 hours ago via web

You get the picture. God bless Sidney Harmon, who turns 92 tomorrow. At least he's kept his sense of humor through the Twitter flaming. From The Times:

"Asked why he was taking on this challenge now, Mr. Harman replied, 'Because I think I should stop misspending my youth.'"

It's a shame that Newsweek's most erudite editor Jon Meacham will depart with the sale, though there's some relief in that we can still catch his musings on the tube.

As many vaunted print publications continue their struggles to find sustainable business models for our digital age, Newsweek is one that have just brought about its own demise. For years, it resisted the creation of a Newsweek-branded website.

In January 2007, I had a chance to ask Mark Whitaker, then VP, editor-in-chief, Washington Post/Newsweek New Ventures, about this and and the media landscape in general. Here's the audio clip.