LB's Rambles

Satisfaction = Frustration?

Perhaps somebody can explain this one to me.

I see reports daily in virtually every newsletter I receive about dissatisfaction with Apple and/or Google. Google is too big. It's too ad-oriented. It's a giant out to crush competition. Apple makes great products, but the 3G iPhone is plagued with problems. They don't listen to - or talk to - their customers. And so on.

Now, according to the Bulldog Reporter, the University of Michigan's annual American Consumer Satisfaction Index gives Google and Apple at the top of its list for consumer satisfaction - Apple for the PC category, Google for search and portal. And with record-high scores. Top of the hill. King of the heap. A-number-one (as Frank Sinatra might have sung).

What's wrong with this picture?

The Importance of Transparency

Interesting session at the New Media Expo on Tactical Transparency: the value of getting personal in business. John C. Havens of Blog Talk Radio joined Shel Holtz to talk about something which I think is critical to communications today: the need for transparency in communication.

Holtz and Havens believe it is an organization's enlightened self-interest to be transparent far beyond what is merely reqired by the law. Obviously, you can't disclose everything - some things must remain secret. But you do have to be transparent in areas that are important to the various "stakeholder publics" that can make or break a company. Companies need to expose their leaders, employees, values, cultures, business practices and business strategy.

Transparency is not full disclosure, especially not in the legal sense. You can be transparent and have rules at the same time. It can be scary - but it can lead to authenticity.

One interesting note: it seems the CEO and the "official corporate spokesperson" show up in studies as the LEAST trusted (by the public) to be speaking for the company.

Havens makes a good point about transparency and negative comments. He quotes from the president of Bigelow Teas, who got caught in the midst of complaints, but said - I'd rather you yell at me to my face than behind my back - at least this way I can explain where I'm coming from.

As with most discussions about transparency, there was barely time to scratch the surface in an hour. Havens and Holtz have a book on the subject coming out in November. It should be an interesting read.

Crunching More Than the Numbers

The keynote at the New Media Expo today was George Wright, VP of Marketing and Sales for Blendtec - the company behind www.willitblend.com . The videos are hysterical, but there's a pretty good business story here as well.
Before Will It Blend, Wright says, they had major problems. The brand was unknown. Weak brand = weak sales.
Wright says he was new at the company. He walked in one day and found company founder and engineer Tom Dickson had been testing strange things, such as a 2x4 board, and testing to see if it would brak the blender. That's how it started.
Wright reminded the audience that the next runaway hit could be under their noses - and nobody was noticing because it was taken for granted, a kind of in-house oddity.

Being Social Outside a "Social Network"

Steve Baldwin of Didit makes some interesting points over on the Search Insider blog today, noting that "social media" embraces more than just the big networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. He points to forums - fora, sorry - that have been around since the early days of the internet and that continue to evolve into places where conversations about products and services are taking place every day. So, as a marketer, whether people are signing up as "fans" of your brand on Facebook, or visiting your page on MySpace, or talking about the brand on an industry-wide forum site, you need to be reaching all of them.

He's right.

“Forums” have been a means of two-way conversation well before the Web really got going, via usegroups and other earlier conversations. PR people - the good ones, anyway - have been counseling clients for a long time now about the need to think in terms of conversations rather than bullhorns. It can be done on “social network” sites such as Facebook just as effectively as on an established forum - but the smart marketer will be in both places.

Time to Retire?

My friend Serena Ehrlich over at Business Wire has sent a tweet pointing out a very funny post on Drew Kerr's PR Rock & Roll Blog, called "The Eight Most Overused Phrases in Public Relations."

Not only funny but right on target. And I think his suggestions for replacements are even funnier. Enjoy!

The Wisdom of Crowds

...and what a crowd it is: Peter Shankman reports that HARO membership has now passed 20,000.

You don't know HARO? Help A Reporter Out. www,helpareporter.com. It's a simple idea which began life as a Facebook mail list and - to put it mildly - has grown. I've mentioned it here before.

Simple idea: Reporter doing research for a story needs help, ideas, answers, experts, whatever. Everybody is an expert on something. Reporter posts a query. Shankman sends out three emails a day jammed with queries. Emails go to more than 20,000 people - PR people, but not exclusively; as noted, everybody is an expert on something. And the people who can answer the reporter's questions do so, on-topic on pain of being booted from the system.

Cost to reporter: 0. Cost to PR or other expert: also 0.

That's the part that bothers PR Newswire's ProfNet (and their competitors, such as my old haunt Business Wire's ExpertSource). They have for-profit systems set up to link up journalists and PR people - for a fee on the PR side.

But there's plenty of room for both systems. And HARO is obviously working for everyone. 20,000 today...and growing. So a hat tip to Peter Shankman - who created the system and still keeps it going.

Surprising Video Trend

eMarketer has a report today on what I would call a fairly surprising trend in online video. It has long been a truism that viewers of online video prefer short clips - the kind you generally find on sites like YouTube. While some people do view longer clips, the advice usually given to people trying to get advertising or PR messages out online, for example, has been: keep it short, preferably under 4 minutes.

Maybe not so much. According to eMarketer, a couple of recent surveys indicate that viewers are anxious to watch longer videos - particularly TV shows - online, if/when they are available. Nearly half of all users told Harris Interactive that they felt the same way about movies.

eMarketer says that's good news for producers, fearful that their audiences might dwindle overall if more online viewing starts cutting into TV and movie watching. That doesn't seem to have happened.

eMarketer also says that a surprisingly large percentage of viewers realize "the money for longer programming has to come from somewhere." They seem willing to watch ads for long form videos - more so than they are for the short videos that make up such a large percentage of today's viewing. That's a new trend, to me - and I think an interesting one showing good possibilities as online video continues to mature.

What's Not to Like About Good Service?

Last week, my home Internet service had a bad stomach ache and refused to work.

So I picked up my phone and called Comcast, which agreed that the service wasn't working, and scheduled a tech for the next day.

OK. In the past, that would have been the end of it, at least until the tech showed up.

But this time, I also had Twitter, and it was still working. So I sent out a tweet, noting the problem.

A few minutes later, up popped a reply from Comcast's digital care manager, Frank Eliason. I gave him some info (again, via Twitter) and he was able to check further on my problem. And, when the tech was due, Frank stayed in touch until the problem was resolved.

I mention him because today's Daily Dog has an article about how Comcast and other companies are using social networking to reach out to clients. The Dog quotes an article in last Friday's New York Times which goes into greater depth - and has the usual obligatory warnings about how it all feels like "Big Brother is watching you."

Nonsense.

If good service is good customer relations - and it is, and if Comcast has always had what might be termed politely a less-than-perfect record for good service - as it has, then I fail to see anything wrong with their reaching out via Twitter and blogs to improve their service and their image. Hell, as a beneficiary of it last week, I think it's great. Thanks, Frank!

HAROs of Journalism

I've written here before about Peter Shankman's wildly successful service called HARO - Help a Reporter Out. What started out last fall as a small Facebook group has grown into a website and mail list with more than 15,000 people, and the number increases faster than I can possibly keep up with it.

It's a remarkably simple concept: there are two lists. One group, the journalists, submit queries when they're looking for experts on virtually any topic. The other, larger, group consists mostly (but not exclusively) of PR people - the experts who can answer the journalists' questions. Neither group pays a penny for the service.

I rehash all this because Shankman, who is a friend, has now scored a really great article from The Industry Standard. It details HARO's brief history - and the way that PR Newswire, which has made a great deal of money from its own expert source system called ProfNet, suddenly finds itself threatened by a free upstart. If you're interested in the birth, gestation and incredibly quick growth of a good idea, take a look at this story.

About Writing

There's a fascinating column in today's edition of the Bulldog Reporter's "Daily Dog" newsletter by Kim Perez, a freelance writer and PR consultant. She explains why she writes: because she loves writing. Yes, it's how she makes a living, and it's unbelievably hard work. But she loves it, and that's her main motivation.

As another professional writer, I understand what she's saying, and I agree with her completely. I too am fascinated and occasionally frustrated by people who seem to think that writing isn't really "work." Surely we must do something else as well.

Wrong on all counts. See what Kim Perez says, because she is saying it extremely well. And I would echo her advice to those who think they can just sit down and start writing: if you don't love it, and aren't willing to work at it - please don't bother.