Category: Public Relations

Marketing Profs reports on Edelman’s latest “scandal”. Apparently, they were involved in a Microsoft PR campaign where a number of high-profile bloggers received rather expensive laptops with the new Vista operating system installed. To review and write about.

While you may have some objections to giving away such expensive gear to journalists - why not just let them use if for a little while and then return it, which would be less complicated - there was full disclosure on many blogs. They told their readers from where they got the laptops, and that’s fine.

Let’s say Edelman and Microsoft even explicitly told bloggers to be open about where they got the laptops from. It would have been the right thing to do, and I believe both companies are smart enough to know and do that.

Even then, they would still have committed a big mistake. If you have the current history of online scandals, like Edelman do, and the reputation of Microsoft, you shouldn’t be doing things that are even remotely near something that could be criticized.

That lack of analysis is the real scandal.

This blog is hosted by DreamHost, and I think it will continue to be so even though DreamHost has had some technical problems lately.

Why? Because DreamHost is a great company! And so says a lot of other people on the net.

Why? Because they encourage you to be a loyal customer and to talk well about them.

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Recently I was in the market for a new digital camera. I did quite a bit of research during this summer, scanning forums, review sites, questioning friends and family.

You see, buying a camera with interchangeable lenses is not just about the camera. It’s about picking a brand you can stick with. Once you’ve invested in a few good lenses, switching to another brand becomes expensive as your old lenses won’t work with that brand.

I finally settled for a Nikon D50 with a few additional lenses, fully aware of the fact that it’s a model Nikon is replacing with an updated one in the near future (the D80 was just announced and rumors of a D60 was circulating). The price had been cut, so I thought it was a great deal.

View from The Temple of Heaven, shot with my new Nikon D50.

Reading various photography forums, one person quickly emerged as an authority on Nikon gear: Ken Rockwell. Ken has a great site, giving advice on everything from lenses and other equipment, to softer issues such as how to convince your wife an expensive camera is a great investment. What makes his writing different - and I suspect is also the reason for his popularity - is that he’s very direct in his recommendations, and sometimes offers controversial advice on equipment issues (read Color Management is for Wimps for an example of this). You almost never leave his site feeling unsure about what he thinks is the right choice.

Ken Rockwell has been a Nikon loyalist since the 80s. But he’s starting to soften a bit. The reason? Nikon’s ridiculous slowness when it comes to making new gear available. He’s written a lengthy piece on it, comparing Nikon to Canon and listing announcement and delivery dates for a lot of recent Nikon gear. Not a pretty list. Not only that, he’s now started to review Canon gear.

Canon doesn’t seem to have been slow catching this. Ken now seems to be receiving their gear for review, having posted comparison reviews with Nikon cameras. He also writes Canon-only reviews, like this one.

How many times will this be quoted in other forums? How many times will someone write that even Ken Rockwell is giving up on Nikon?

I hope Nikon is paying attention to this. The word-of-mouth warning bells are very much ringing for Nikon.

This is what you get when you apply “paid media” thinking to building relationships with bloggers:

Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their “opportunity,” specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they’ll pay only for positive mentions.

…

It’s better for a brand to get into a blog than to surround it as a banner or text ad, says Murphy.

(From BusinessWeek: Polluting the Blogosphere)

This is stupid in a number of ways:

1. It will make your customers disappointed. They’ll expect a great product but will receive something mediocre that wasn’t able to get a positive buzz by itself.
2. You’ll target the wrong blogs. The high-credibility blogs about your kind of product wouldn’t touch this for fear of losing their readers. Your product will end up being mentioned on smaller blogs without a specific focus. It will be search engine fodder at best.
3. Bloggers will talk bad about your products “off the record”; telling their friend the only reason they wrote positively about your product was to earn $5.

Your positive word-of-mouth will end up being negative word-of-mouth in the places where it matters; where friends talk to friends.

Now, did I say this was stupid?

Sergey Brin’s latest comment on China is certainly interesting. This is how he explained Google’s decision to launch a censored service at google.cn, reported by Times Online:

“We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference.”

And then he continues:

“Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense.”

This is something quite uncommon; a large corporation publicly discussing a change in position on a question where it has been heavily criticized but has yet to change its position.

We don’t know if this was planned or not. Maybe he just slipped, or maybe he launched a “test balloon” to gather reactions. Maybe he likes to chat about ethics.

It comes at an interesting time as China just decided to shut down access to the uncensored version of Google (as has been reported at numerous sites). Expect some media focus.

I still think they were right to launch in China. But it doesn’t mean it will be right under all circumstances. That’s why they should get some credit for continuing to evaluate their decisions. And for being open about it.

I’ve had a brief look at the newly launched Google Trends. While the ability to compare popluarity of searches is interesting, what really interests me the most as a PR professional is the ability to chart Google News data.

News and media analysis usually takes a lot of time and energy. Sure, you can buy that kind of job from companies specializing in it, but that costs money. Also, sometimes you need the results instantly or want to play a bit with the data because you haven’t really decided what you’re looking for (or even at). In that case you can’t ask someone else to do it.

If Google Trends could make this easier, that would be nice. Do they - or could they? Let’s look at an example.

In this Google Trends search I take a look at “apple” during 2006. You can see there are peaks in both search and news volume when Apple presented new Intel Macs in January, and when Apple unveiled software allowing Macs to run Windows XP (this coincides with Apple the music company suing Apple the white plastic company, but I suspect the software is the real reason for the increase in volume).

What does this tell us about the media coverage of Apple? Two things; that it peaked during those two or three events and that it lead to an increase in search. Not so surprising. And if you’re at all following Apple, you already knew that.

What if I wanted to know the quality of the media coverage, either from an Apple perspective (”I hope it was good!”) or from a competitor perspective (”I hope the reviews killed them” or maybe “what did the media say about feature so-and-so that I’m planning to rip off”)? I’d still have to do it all myself; media search, extensive reading, evaluating each item, marking keywords, putting together the charts and so on.

All this could be made easier if I was able to get the set of news stories behind the graph, assign keywords or values to each item, and then have that data fed back into the graph. That would make it possible to create a graph of positive and negative coverage as well as to identify what is causing it. Or evaluate it in any other way I want to.

The possibilities are endless. Google, please continue to improve this excellent product!