The Spin Cycle, 8/6

A round-up of recent happenings and commentary in the world of public relations, marketing, and whatever else I find relevant.

Olympian Ratings: Why should NBC care that the Twitter-verse is up in arms over its tape-delayed Olympic coverage, when so many more people are watching than previous games? Frankly, I don't have a good answer. I'm as tired of people bitching about the Olympics on Twitter as NBC is. Grow up, people. Ratings and ad revenue are the name of the game, and social media hasn't changed that yet.

Apple's Bad Turn: I haven't seen this new Apple ad campaign, but it sounds terrible and undermining of Apple's brand, as the writer notes. Talk about messing with a good thing.

Five Brands That Use Instagram Well: This blog notwithstanding, the web is increasingly visual, and those of us who don't necessarily think in pictures and graphics need to get with the program. This is a good demonstration of how brands can use Instagram.

Source: imediaconnection.com via Jonathan on Pinterest

The Spin Cycle, 7/9

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

Twitter and LinkedIn Split Up: Believe me, my friends, Twitter is doing you a favor by no longer letting your cross-post your tweets onto LinkedIn. Sure, some of what you post on Twitter is relevant to a professional networking site. But a lot of it isn't, and it annoys your LinkedIn connections.

GM and Facebook Might Get Back Together: Am I missing something here? Yes, I realize that GM's announcement that it was ditching Facebook ads was blamed in part for Facebook's lackluster IPO. But is GM really such a trendsetter that it alone can arrest Facebook's slide? The larger problem for Facebook is if companies like GM discover they can get just as much value by utilizing free content on Facebook. Then what does the social network do?

NBC Tells Its Friends It's Dumping Ann Curry: In a rather cynical take on PR, Adele Cehrs praises NBC for minimizing the damage of pushing Ann Curry off The Today Show by allowing rumors about her departure and stories blaming her for the show's ratings tumble to leak out.

NBC made the news regarding Curry’s removal work to its benefit by using the trickle effect. The trickle effect is a strategy in which information is released in small doses over time to reduce the overall backlash of a negative announcement.

Certainly, the slow, steady divulgence of information, done deliberately, is a good strategy for preparing publics, internal and external, for bad news. But leaking information designed to portray a single, identifiable individual in a bad light is downright mean, not to mention unethical. I'm not naive in thinking it's not done a lot. But it isn't the kind of public relations I want to practice.

The Spin Cycle, 7/2

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

Dewey Beats Truman: The erroneous reporting by Fox and CNN that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the Affordable Care Act has provoked a justifiable backlash about media chest-pounding over getting scoops, particularly when said scoop is now measured by mere seconds:

But worrying about being first on reporting something that is handed to you and everyone else? By 24 seconds? To borrow the Gail Collinsism, I think I speak for everyone when I say, it's really not important.

Worse than that, it's dangerous. The health care decision is a complicated piece of business. It's worth taking the time required to fully understand it before reporting on it. It's that rush to be first or almost first that leads to world-class mistakes like CNN and Fox News made this morning, when they reported the health care law had been overturned.

Twitter Does Mobile Right: Twitter says most of its ad revenues comes from its mobile platform, in contrast to rival Facebook which has struggled to offer users a compelling mobile experience, let alone generate significant ad revenues there. The simplicity of Twitter no doubt sets a lower bar for creating a good mobile experience, but unlike Facebook, I find using Twitter's mobile interface to be more user-friendly than its web platform.

I Don't Like You Like That: The great Brian Solis reminds marketers that a "like" on Facebook is not a license to drown your followers in boring content. It's not an "opt-in":

The difference between Like and other direct response triggers is that the Like is an act of fleeting value that must be earned over and over again. Often, it’s an “in the moment” action that expresses affinity, interest, alignment, and sometimes endorsement. And as an expression, Likes are a form of social currency and their value goes up and down with each engagement.

In other words, you have to earn that "like" each and every time you post something on Facebook.

Bad for Hacks, Good for Flacks: An Australian publicist finds herself in hot water over an online article in which she notes that recent newspaper downsizing is good for the public relations industry. Know what? She's right. The only problem is she comes off as callous toward so many people losing their jobs, and her thoughts more properly belonged in a trade publication, or as a presentation at a PR conference. Know your audience.

The Spin Cycle, 6/11

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

Measure This: I haven't had time to sink my teeth into this, but measurement guru KDPaine presents a broad set of industry-wide standards for measuring traditional media. The woman knows her stuff, ladies and gentlemen.

You Liked What Now? The New York Times explains that your "likes" on Facebook can show up, unbeknownst to you, in ads for the product in question. Remember, it's the data, stupid.

A Little Birdie Told Me They Like Your Product: Since it's become hip to bash Facebook advertising, it's only logical that someone decides Twitter is the logical alternative. One thing that makes sense -- people seem to go on Twitter for a broader range of purposes, making it more likely they will engage with a product.

Mad Men Season Five Finale: Just because...

It's the data, stupid

There's an old saying about playing poker: If you look around the table and can't tell who the sucker is, then it's probably you.

This seems appropriate as we consider Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the other free-of-charge diversions that we have on our smartphones -- at least if that smartphone happens to be an iPhone or Android, as David Carr notes in his rumination on Instagram and its recent acquisition by Facebook. Carr wonders how any of these companies are going to turn a profit as they need to invest more and more of their energies into mobile, given how fleeting our attention is on our devices and how little ad space there is.

As an aside, and as one of the commentators on his post notes, Carr may not quite understand the appearl of Instagram, nor how people use it. But the broader question he poses is a legitimate one: How can free social media applications, even those that are immensely popular, survive if they can't rely on advertising, the traditional business model for low-cost or no-cost content providers?

Part of the answer, of course, is that the traditional business model for media companies is dying, as the New York Times so aptly demonstrates with its online subscription system. The challenge that traditional media companies like the Times face in exacting sufficient advertising revenues from online content also afflicts social media like Twitter -- with a crucial difference being the legacy and infrastructure costs borne by old media, which must continue to produce its own content, as opposed to sites like Twitter and Facebook, which need only provide a platform.

As this article from last week's Wall Street Journal makes clear, Facebook, its sanctioned apps, and other mobile apps are not just interested in putting ads in front of you: They are trying to glean as much data about you as possible in order to customize those ads to the highest degree possible, thus making it more likely that they will grab your attention.

A professor at Robert Morris University, where I work, researches the use of nanoparticles to treat cancer. The idea is that instead of using chemotherapy, which attacks the entire body in order to destroy cancerous cells, the nanoparticles can be injected into the body and guide themselves directly to the tumor, delivering the cancer medicine without damaging the rest of the body.


Traditional advertsing, on television, radio, and in print newspapers, is like chemotherapy. What advertisers will be able to do with the data they can glean from the information all of us share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it, is like nanotechnology. A lot more efficient and not nearly as messy.

Now, there a host of legal and ethical question raised by this, which the Wall Street Journal tackles in its article. And even the most gargantuan of social networks needs to find a way to generate outside revenues to survive, since, as the mainstream news media has discovered, once you give something away to people online, it's not easy to get them to pay for it later on.
But to evaluate social media's prospects on mobile platforms simply in terms of the amount of physical space available to place an ad seems, I'm sorry to say, hopelessly outdated. Facebook and the like are not giving away anything. They are selling a very valuable commodity.

We have met the suckers, and they are us.

Is cool overrated?

I'm digging out from under some old emails to myself, including this article from the Daily Beast about the symbiotic relationship developing between Twitter and big-name news organizations. But this is what really piqued my interest:

He [Twitter co-founder Biz Stone] is diplomatic when I ask whether Facebook’s moment has passed. “People could say, ‘Facebook’s not cool anymore. I think the Facebook guys would say, ‘Great, we’re not a fad anymore, we’re part of people’s lives.’ I don’t know that you want to be cool. That’s just a burden.”

I think Stone's analysis is dead-on, and I think that is where Facebook is heading. That's why it has that make-Facebook-your-homepage-feature, and why it has introduced a slew of tools to try to be the one-stop social networking stop. It's the same play that Google has made, trying to marry search with email with cloud computing, and why Google is so desperate to find a social networking tool to compete with Facebook.

Look at Apple. For a long time, it was the cool brand -- and headed toward oblivion. Yes, Apple is still cool, but that isn't what put it back on top again. A lot of Apple's success has to do with creating an indispensible device, the iPod, which has no real rivals when it comes to downloading and playing digital music. Certainly, paring down its personal computer product line, and enhancing the design of the Mac hardware and simplicity of the Mac OS, have played a big role. But I'm convinced that Mac's market share is growing because people fell in love with their iPods and iPhones, and figure they might as well own a computer as elegant and easy-to-use as these devices. The iPod has always had a cool factor, but that only carried it so far.

From this blog to Gibbs' ears

In my previous post, I wondered whether any politician or office-seeker had opted to hold a live Twitter chat, perhaps in lieu of a press conference. Well, just last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs answered a couple of questions that came to him via Twitter, though not during his regular White House briefing. Check out the results at the Nation.

I'd like to see Gibbs open a briefing by doing this. But perhaps he doesn't want to make the White House press corps seem even more marginalized than they already do.

Ashton, is that really you?

I belong to a handful of groups on LinkedIn, and one of them currently features a raging debate over the ethics of ghost-tweeting. On one side are those who say that writing tweets for another person -- say, a politician or a CEO -- is no different than writing their speeches, or a quote for a press release. Others counter that Twitter is more like a broadcast medium -- your followers are not reading the speech, they are listening to it, and it's dishonest to have someone else tweet for you.

There's little doubt that ghost-tweeting violates the ethos of social media, which places a premium on authenticity, transparency and direct engagement. Tweets, blog posts or Facebook updates that sound canned or overly commercial alienate friends and followers, and ultimately are self-defeating.

But that doesn't mean that ghost-tweeting is unethical. To me, the question rests on two criteria. Are you trying to deceive an audience by writing someone else's tweets? And is it likely that the audience will be deceived? Here it may be hard for public relations practicioners to discern whether their actions are fooling their audience. We're a bit more savvy, and cynical, about communications practices that many lay people. (Though plenty of us understand less about social media than the average user, I'll give you that.) To me, for example, it's obvious that a lot of politicians aren't actually tweeting in their own names. I don't expect them to, though I would certainly take notice if they did. (Imagine instead of a news conference, a politician holding a live Twitter chat. Does anyone know of someone who has done this?) But is this obvious to everyone? I'm not sure.

Another question to consider is whether a person is tweeting as their own personality, or as their brand. We expect a greater degree of intimacy from the former, and would permit greater formality from someone tweeting as their brand. For example, I follow Ralph Macchio on Twitter, and it's clearly him Tweeting. It would be skeevy if he got someone to start tweeting for him about watching baseball or going to concerts with kids. But Donald Trump is tweeting as Donald Trump the brand, and I have no expectation that he's sitting down with his iPhone and posting updates.

Part of the issue lies with the ambigious nature of Twitter, which Steven Johnson has described as a living, breathing search engine. That makes it a lot more like a news aggegator, Google with a pulse, than a social network in the spirit of Facebook. It's a lot harder to hide on Facebook. You can't have meaningful interactions without revealing some of yourself, which is why some people have a personal profile and others have a more sanitized and guarded "professional" profile. The former is available only to a few close friends and intimate associates, while the other is a convenience that lets them do business on Facebook without giving away too much of themselves. Facebook has also addressed this dilemma with groups and fan pages. I don't necessarily expect personal interaction out of a fan page that I follow, so it doesn't matter much if someone other than the celebrity maintains it.

Twitter, however, is much more spare, which allows users greater freedom to decide how to use it, and leaves any unofficial code of conduct or unspoken rules open to greater interpretation. Ultimately, what that means is that not all ghost-tweets are created equal -- or equally ethical.

Next I'll show you my vinyl collection

Blogging seems positively quaint in the age of Twitter and Facebook, but Mike Sansone says that blogging should be the foundation of your social media outreach, and he makes a powerful argument:

I'm all for Twitter and Facebook... and Slideshare and Flickr and Foursquare too. They are fruits of the Social Media tree, extra rooms in our Social Media storehouse. We can really branch out and connect from those places. We can throw rice against a wall and see what sticks. Brainstorm. Even improve our findability.

But the foundation of what we do and think, what we believe, and the most important inventory we have online is that space we call "blog" and the content or conversations that live and endure there (link).

Now, he's overstating the case. Blogs are not indispensible, but for most organizations, a powerful web site is, and the point is still the same: Facebook and Twitter are great for sharing content, but not so great for creating content. I manage a blog for my employer, and it wouldn't get any traffic at all were it not for Twitter and Facebook. But neither of those outlets would let us tell some of the great stories we've produced on the blog. As for this blog, I get more comments on Facebook when I link to a post than I actually get on the blog, but that's fine. If my Facebook friends see that what I've posted is interesting enough for others to discuss, they will be more likely to click on the link.

If blogging is retro, then print is positively paleolithic, yet Joe Pulizzi thinks it's about to mount a comeback. I think he may be on to something. One of his most interesting points is that as fewer organizations rely on printed magazines and newsletters, those that remain are more likely to stand out and grab your attention. Print also is a way to reach people who aren't yet engaged to the point that they are friending you on Facebook, following your Twitter feed, or even opening your email newsletter. It's a way of waving your hands in front of their face to get their attention -- assuming you've created a good product. It's a conversation starter.

And let's not underestimate the visceral appeal of holding a magazine, book or newspaper in your hand. You don't have to be a Luddite to appreciate it. I'm an iPhone junkie, but on Saturdays, I refuse to use my Wall Street Journal app for fear of ruining the experience of reading the weekend edition when it arrives in the mail. Many colleges and universities have weighed the pros and cons of ditching their print alumni magazines in favor of all digital, and some that do end up regreting it. Maybe it's just tradition they are holding onto, but if it's done well, with detailed storytelling and fetching artwork, a magazine has few rivals when it comes to getting your message across.