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

Your brand just gave me the finger

I admit it: I'm prone to road rage. If another driver cuts me off, or tailgates me, etc., I get mad. I curse. I give them a dirty look. And if I'm in a particularly foul mood I might even treat them to a one-finger salute.

Three things keep me in check: one, the fear that the other driver is even more unhinged than I am. Two, if my kids are in the car, and I'm trying to set a good example. (I'm also more cognizant of the lunatic factor when carrying such precious cargo.) And three, the parking pass that dangles from my rearview mirror, clearly identifying my employer.

Just because you're not on the clock doesn't mean you're not representing your employer. I thought of this today when I noticed the car behind me driving recklessly, and when it passed me I saw that the car bore the name of a restaurant and catering company.

Now, that doesn't mean I won't ever eat there, but my esteem for the company slipped just a notch. Do they hire reckless employees, or just employees who don't care about their employer's image?

It's the same minefield we enter every time we post a controversial opinion on Facebook or Twitter, or make a provocative statement. (Which I do from time to time.) I'm quick to note these opinions are mine and solely mine, but readers may link these opinions to my employer whether I want them to or not -- maybe without them even being consciously aware of it.

Which isn't to say that we have to limit our online lives to pictures of our pets and kids. But every once in a while we need to remind ourselves that we never know who might be watching, and maybe we want to ease up on the gas pedal just a little bit.

That's not just a metaphor. Slow the hell down, would you?

The Spin Cycle, 7/30

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

Mine, Mine, Mine: This writer lays out 13 reasons why PR folks should be in charge of social media. (Presumably instead of the marketing side.) They are all compelling, but perhaps because I work in a totally integrated department, I find this question tiresome. It's born of insecurity, as the author clearly shows with reason 13:


We understand that the PR label may not exist in a few years, but we’re not sitting around waiting for the axe to fall.


It's good to stay relevant. But it's bad to look desperate.

SEO is A-OK: A refreshing reminder about the importance of search-engine optimization to public relations. My favorite part:

When there is lack of accountability for measurement or assigning value to a piece of content in the way of views, site referrals, downloads or even shares, it’s easy to see SEO slip through the cracks. We’ve found that when clients release content that’s accountable to results, they’ll see the value that SEO brings and the need to incorporate it throughout the process.

Fried Chicken, Half-Baked PR: A good account of Chick-fil-A's deceitful response to its president's comments opposing gay marriage. But my own opinion is that the big-city mayors' efforts to thwart the restaurant chain from opening locations will garner Chick-fil-A sympathy. It's one thing for consumers to boycott a business if they find its owner's political views distasteful. It's a whole other matter for government to use its power to punish a legitimate business that does not appear to actually practice discrimination against any group. That is simply wrong.

The Spin Cycle, 7/23

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

Talkin' 'bout my generation: Cathryn Sloan pokes a hornet's nest by writing that every social media manager should be under 25. Let it go, my fellow Gen-Xers. Someday she'll be looking over her shoulder, too.

Getting a bad reputation: Another lesson from Penn State is that nothing stays hidden forever, despite our best efforts. It's the dark side of what I was told by the person who gave me my first job in PR: Sometimes your greatest achievements in public relations are what doesn't happen, the stories that don't get reported.

Video's the thing: We shouldn't need to be reminded of the power of video to tell our stories, but those of us lookingto invest more resources into video appreciate the affirmation.

Speaking of videos, here's a cool one from where I work.

Makes me want to eat mor chikin

Chick-Fil-A, or at least the local franchises here in Pittsburgh, do an excellent job of engaging followers on Facebook, and the picture below is a good example:

As every Chick-Fil-A junkie knows, the restaurant is closed Sundays, owing to its founding family's strongly held religious beliefs. Some customers find it endearing, others frustrating, which the graphic addresses. The company turns this simple fact of its business into an inside joke that it encourages its customers to share with one another. It also speaks to the shared experience of every frustrated Chick-Fil-A devotee who ever drove past one of its restaurants in vain on the Lord's Day.

Of course, by posting this, I open myself to teasing by friends who already think I'm obsessed with Chick-Fil-A. But the brands that inspire that kind of devotion are precisely the ones that, if they do it right, can reap the greatest returns from social media, because they are kind of brands that people want to talk about it, that people want to engage with even if there is no immediate benefit. (Like a coupon, for example.) My hat goes off to the folks who get it right.

The Spin Cycle, 6/4

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.
Quite a slow week for me blogging, because it was a busy week for everything else. Let's see if I can't do better this week. In the meantime, here's The Spin Cycle:

Infographics are your friend: Why don't PR people embrace infographics more readily, or am I only speaking for myself? Perhaps because many of us started out as writers and are overconfident in our ability to tell stories with words. But we are often surrounded by talented graphic artists. Think outside the paragraph, people.

Google + a minus? Bashing Google + is nearly as trendy as bashing the Facebook IPO, but what struck me about this post was how many Google + users never make a second post. How about Facebook and Twitter? How many dip their toes in the water and then decide not to go for a swim? I'm also perplexed by Google's refusal to share number it claims demonstrate a high degree of engagement among users. Transparency, transparency, transparency.

Goldman Sachs discovers Twitter: Speaking of transparency, Goldman Sachs is giving it a shot in the interest of repairing its battered image. Remember, guys, it's not pulling back the curtain that matters. It's what people see as the curtain falls away that matters. You don't communicate out of a problem you behaved your way into.

The Spin Cycle, 5/28

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

Is Facebook advertising overrated, or is GM dumb? People are still parsing GM's decision to drop advertising from Facebook, and it's an interesting story about the power of brands. Facebook may have a shaky reputation this week, but the fact that many people reflexively dismissed GM's decision demonstrates how strong Facebook's brand is, and how weak GM's continues to be.

Is GM dumb, part 2: I might have grouped this item into the same broad category as the item above, until this jumped out at me: Ford has more than 1.5 million “likes” on its Facebook page, vs. fewer than 400,000 for GM. The problem is that a lot of PR and advertising measurement experts regard a "like" as a poor measure of engagement, and even harder to quantify is how a "like" translates into sales. Everything we do as strategic communicators is supposed to help our organizations or clients meet their business objectives. That's the ultimate measure by which we should judge the efforts of GM, or Ford, or any other company on Facebook or in any other medium.

Google + is down, Pinterest is up: It seems almost too easy to beat up on Google +, but it's too much fun to resist. Google keeps trying to tell people that numbers lie and its dismal user stats don't show the private circle sharing going on beneath the surface. (That sounds dirty.) That's great, but it doesn't diminish my frustration when I go on the network and find the same two people always posting stuff. Pinterest is zooming ahead of it, and maybe it's time for Google, without abandoning Google + as an alternative to Facebook, emphasize its true niche, which is an intra-organizational networking and conferencing tool.

Never forget: What struck me about this collection of letters to and from brothers who fought on separate fronts in World War II was the letter from Bob Dininger's friend to Bob's parents, describing his death at Okinawa:

I won't attempt to say that he died for the American way of life, freedom, etc. and these things that are written about by people who don't do the fighting and thus don't know what they're talking about. What I will say is that he died bravely, and quickly, which is the best way for a soldier to die, if he has to die at all.

Enjoy your day off.

Greed. for lack of a better word, is good

"The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperate they want it." Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street"

It was hard not to think of the great film Wall Street this week with news that Facebook "stumbled out of the gate" as one scribe referred to its stock losing value after its stratospheric IPO. Critics of modern capitalism often note that a company's true value, the worth of the goods or services it produces, is often disconnected from its value as an investment to real-world Gordon Gekkos.

But those of us in the business of perception understood what Gekko was talking about when he noted that perception becomes reality, and people respond accordingly. Nothing about Facebook itself -- the social networking site, that is -- is different now than it was before the IPO. As far as I know they haven't launched one of their notorious redesigns or changed their privacy policy, or anything that impacts the user. Sure, some analysts tried to pin Facebook's slide on diminished ad revenues, failure to generate ads on its mobile products, or news that GM planned to drop paid ads from Facebook. But the true culprits appear to be an excessive number of shares issued by Facebook, along with possible misdeeds by its underwriters and bungling by NASDAQ.

Some critics felt Facebook was overvalued from the get-go, and looked at its meager first-day returns as a natural correction. Facebook is as dominant a social network as it was last week, but perhaps no one wants to buy into the illusion that it can remain that way forever.

How Much is Enough?
Wall Street — MOVIECLIPS.com

The Spin Cycle, 5/21

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

I apologize to those of you looking for The Spin Cycle yesterday. I've decided to run it on Mondays from now on. Without further adieu...

Guinness QR code: Guiness finds an innovative way to use QR codes (though the promotion appears to have expired, since the code took me to an unused domain) but the question remains: Are QR codes worth the effort? And how many people, by the time they've downed two or three pints, are going to care where the code on the side of the glass takes them?

App Power: New research shows that a substantial number of smartphone users who download a retailer-branded app visit the store more often or buy more products from it. Good news for retailers looking to stand up to Amazon. I'm a frequent Amazon customer who nonetheless is underwhelmed by its mobile app. Maybe instead of whining about Amazon's "unfair" business practices, retailers can figure how to exploit this weakness.

Is Social Media Killing the News Industry? Yes, many people get their news from social media, though often that news originates with a traditional news outlet. Of course, social media and news media need not be mutually exclusive. The traditional media failed to adequately adapt its business model to the web when it was first developed. Will they make the same mistake when it comes to social media? And speaking of business model, the real question is whether social media, which also relies on advertising for its revenues, will leech dwindling ad dollars away from traditional media.

Share this on Facebook

I was going to save this thoughtful critique in Forbes of Facebook's advertising model for The Spin Cycle, but given Facebook's massive IPO this afternoon, it seemed particularly pertinent.

Us PR/marketing types are still figuring out how to measure the impact of social media. Hell, some of us are still figuring out the best way to measure the impact of traditional media, so it's no surprise that there is fierce debate over the value of a "like" (which conventional wisdom now says is not terribly valuable) versus a "share" (which conventional wisdom now says is the coin of the realm):

Lazerow’s company helps “advertisers succeed on Facebook and other major social networks” and claims to have developed a way of measuring social KPIs, or key performance indicators. According to Lazerow, data from his clients show that “every share on Facebook generates an average of $2.10 in incremental sales.”

Really? It’s hard enough to get exact numbers on conventional key word campaigns that are aimed at driving the purchase of specific products, since other factors can contribute to a boost in sales. And Facebook shares aren’t necessarily product focused. Indeed, because content on a company’s Facebook page strives to be “engaging” it’s often not about products at all. At best, shares of these posts help create a warm and fuzzy feeling about a company that, at some point in the future, might turn into a sale. (There’s that word again.)

For the sake of argument, let's postulate that there is a causal relationship between shares on Facebook and sales. Whether or not the content is product-centric is irrelevant; if it has built trust in the brand that spurs a consumer to action, then Facebook has done its job for the seller. The problem for Facebook is if this sharing comes from content on a brand's free Facebook page, as opposed to one of its paid ads. This free content is where GM plans to focus its Facebook efforts, the company announced this week.

The writer of the Forbes article does not take for granted that sharing has concrete value, and questions why it is desirable given that people's Facebook friends may be very different from themselves -- and thus not part of the brand's target audience. Many of us have assumed that sharing is a 21st century equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising, but the people we actually interact with in the real world may have a lot more in common with us than the people we are friends with on Facebook. I'm not quite that skeptical -- after all, our Facebook friends likely share at least some demographic similarities to us -- but it is an argument worth pondering. There are people I'm friends with on Facebook whose taste in restaurants, or music, or baby strollers I could care not one whit about.

The Spin Cycle

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

Pepsi Sees Dead Pop Stars: Pepsi's decision to launch a marketing campaign employing the image of the late Michael Jackson provoked a visceral reaction in critics, who observed that you can draw a line from Pepsi to Jackson's demise, given that his dependence on painkillers apparently started with the burns he received while filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984. I doubt many consumers will take the connection that far, but certainly the incident in which Jackson's hair caught on fire remains the strongest association between Pepsi and the King of Pop. To me, it's unseemly because Jackson, despite how much he profited from his talents, and his own responsibility for his behavior, was a man exploited from a young age by people who should have taken care of him, something that continued all his life -- and now unto death.

Apple Pays Less in Taxes than Warren Buffett's Secretary: Well, not really, but the House that Jobs Built has found legal ways to avoid paying ton billions in taxes, and the Flack thinks their response has been rather tone deaf. But unless they plan to change their behavior, or lobby for changes in the tax code -- which the Flack suggests might be in order -- how else are they supposed to respond? It may be time for people to finally come to terms with the fact that Apple, whatever its cultural cachet, is just like any other large corporation, doing what it can to maximize profit. We need to treat them no better, nor any worse, than any other corporation that does the same.

Coke and Pepsi Want to be Your Friend: The cola wars are moving to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, which to me raises a question: Do consumers really want to engage with every brand out there? I just want to drink soda. That's about where my desire for a relationship ends. I realize that if more and more live much of their lives on social media, a brand can't be invisible and survive for long. I find, however, that not long after I like a brand on Facebook, or follow it on Twitter, I end up regretting is soon after. Maybe it's just because no one has done it right yet.

The Purpose-Driven PR Agency: I'm wrapping up with this item about Edelman's new corporate responsibility practice as a follow-up to last week's item about Penn State hiring the PR giant to help it be more transparent in the wake of the Sandusky scandal. Maybe they hired the right guys after all. Time will tell.

Do you have an item for the Spin Cycle? Send me a reply or DM on Twitter to @jepotts.

The medium is still the message

Some drowsy, end-of-the-day thoughts on a Nielson survey of consumers worldwide: What struck me about this survey is that a greater percentage of respondents said they trust information found on "owned media" such as company web sites than in paid advertising. So think about it: People are more likely to believe what they read on the Coca-Cola web site, for example, than what they see and hear on Coke's TV commercials -- even though the source of the information is exactly the same, Coca-Cola.

Not surprising that the media influences the reliability of the message. As the survey also shows, trust varies depending on the type of paid advertising, whether print or broadcast, or even by type of print, magazing or newspaper. Nonetheless, it should remind us, even in the age of social media, that our actual web sites are very important. Remember when people were talking about whether they could use a Facebook page to replace their web site? Facebook's constant tinkering and fluctuating privacy controls put that talk to a rest, and I always thought the issue was overblown.

I suspect one of the reasons that companies' web sites fare better than their paid ads is that the smart organizations use their web sites not just to sell but to tell a story, and to share their values -- or better yet, show those values in action. I found myself coming back to the concept of brand journalism: using the tools at your disposal (in this case, your web site) to provide your audience with value that is independent of your product or service but which builds trust in your brand.

Utility is an important concept. People can't really use advertising, per se, but they use the Internet all the time. They use it to buy shoes and schedule dinner reservations. They use to download music and surreptitiously watch the NCAA tournament at work. So even if they have conditioned themselves to be skeptical of what they read online, the medium has inherent usefulness, while much of paid advertising is found in media that are purely for entertainment. (Note the Nielson survey shows that trust in online advertising is growing.)

So utility is another key to building an effective web site. Is it useful to your audience, not just the content but the experience? One of the things that my university web team has done over the past few months has been to simplify the online form that prospective students use to request information. We're tracking submissions, before and after, and thus far the results are promising.

Bottom line, audiences are increasingly likely, simply by default, to find your web site credible. What are you doing to enhance that credibility and cultivate it to grow your brand?

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.

Why all the haters?

Figures I decide to join Instagram the day Facebook buys it. Of course, it was the publicity from the Facebook sale that prompted me to finally try it after hearing so many raves and seeing all those sepia-toned photos on Facebook.

I would never place any bets on a company's goodwill or its business sense, but I suspect Instagram will do just fine under Facebook. (Talk about predictions sure to go wrong.) More and more people will learn about it, and it's going to make people want to share more and more photos on Facebook. That's reason enough for Facebook to want to see it prosper.

“My responsibility is to teach the organization something they’re not willing to learn"

From www.briansolis.com

Everything new is old again

I've paid far too little attention to the recent Facebook changes, given that I'm not only a regular Facebook user but a PR/marketing professional. Like a lot of people, I'm annoyed by what often appears to be change for change's sake on the part of the Facebook.

Then again, I'm not Facebook's customer, and neither is any other individual user -- just like I'm not the customer of the traditional media I consume, like The New York Times. Facebook's customers are its advertisers, and the people like you and me who use it to post pictures of our kids and let their friends know that they are watching Dancing with the Stars are the product. Facebook is selling our attention to its advertisers. Social media may seem revolutionary, but its business model -- Farmville aside -- is not really so different.

So as my boss astutely hypothesized, each of Facebook's changes, however grating to users, are likely done with an eye to increasing the site's value to advertisers. Sure, some are meant to enhance the user experience, particularly in the face of fierce competition from Google +. Facebook can't afford to lose us, but let's face it: most of us aren't walking away, at least not yet. We've simply invested too much time poking each other.

May I have your attention?

I mentioned recently that I'm reading The Idea Writers which is a guide for advertising copywriters in the digital age but which is applicable to any kind of content creation. Case in point:

"today, as a copywriter or other brand creativity maestro, you're not just making something that will compete with other brands and other messages created by brands. You're making something to compete with every other piece of content, every other media experience that a person has during her waking hours."

Years ago I did some freelance writing for an excellent magazine editor named Robert Mendelson, who at the time was the editor of Pitt Magazine. (Today he's the editor of Carnegie Mellon Today.) Robert told me that Pitt Magazine wasn't competing with other alumni magazines. (Most people only get one, anyway.) Instead, it was competing with everything thing else that Pitt alumni had to read, everything that arrived every day in their mail box. So it better be a damn good magazine that anyone would want to read, whether or not they knew the first thing about the University of Pittsburgh. Now that I supervise the publication of the alumni magazine at Robert Morris, I've adopted that same attitude.

In other words, the competition for attention that we face as content creators didn't begin with the Internet or social media, though those things certainly intensified that competition, increased it geometrically. Each new medium threatens to steal the audience of the media that preceded it. The creatives who survive and thrive are those who refuse to be chained to any single discipline. In the 1950s, Disney was the first film studio to embrace television, because Walt Disney didn't see himself as being in the movie business; he saw himself as being in the entertainment business. Many newspapers have been flailing because they think they are in the newspaper business, and forget they are in the journalism business.

It's also worth noting that audience control over content didn't begin with the Internet -- it really began with the TV remote and the VCR. The remote control freed us from our own laziness at having to get up and walk to the TV to change the channel when we were bored with what we were watching. Not only did it impact advertisers, since we could avoid commercials, but the producers of TV programs could not longer take us for granted. They had to grab our interest and hold it if they wanted us to keep watching.

As for the VCR, it may be clumsy and primitive compared to a DVR, but remember how liberating it felt to be able to record a program when you were out, or watch one program and record another. I remember as a kid, the final episode of M*A*S*H aired the same night -- in 1983 -- as a Cub Scout banquet. The pack leaders had to promise everyone the event would end in time to get home to watch the show. Now, the only thing you have to worry about is reading a spoiler on Facebook or Twitter.

For those daunted by the jumbled and fragmented media landscape we face today as content creators, it's helpful to realize these changes are evolutionary, not necessarily revolutionary, in character. Sometimes, though, evolution takes a great leap forward. This is one of those times. 

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.

Checking you out when you check in

The New York Times recently explored the gap between businesses and consumers when it comes to the use of location-based social media services, which have been embraced by the former but largely ignored by the latter:

Data about a person’s physical location would be immensely valuable to marketers and retailers, say analysts. But sharing information about where you are can seem creepy or, worse, dangerous, as the Web site Please Rob Me showed earlier this year when it demonstrated how easy it would be for potential thieves to use social networks to find homes whose occupants were away.


Meanwhile, the upside of the transaction is unclear to many people, said Melissa Parrish, an analyst at Forrester Research. None of the efforts so far have reached the “sweet spot of coolness and utility” that will get people to share their data, she said. (link)

I have a few thoughts. Yes, the creepiness factor is one problem. I'm a fairly avid user of Foursquare, but I don't often link my activity there to Facebook and Twitter, because I don't necessarily want to share my location, particularly when I'm out with my family, with the whole world. Recently I vacationed at Disney World, where I checked in a few times. I soon had friend requests on Foursquare from total strangers. That's fine on Twitter, where I share little personal information and don't often use the location feature. On Foursquare it is off-putting.

Also, as the article notes, there doesn't appear to yet be enough value to checking in on Foursquare and its rivals. I actually think too few businesses are making use of Foursquare to offer specials and reward customer loyalty. Often, I only check in to see if such benefits are available, and the fewer I find, the less likely I become to make regular use of the service.

Finally, I think social media burnout may be at play. There's only so much time in the day to fiddle around with social media, even if it is to briefly check in somewhere with your mobile device. How many services can people keep up with? That may be where Facebook Places has an advantage over stand-alone services, since legions of people and organizations already use Facebook. (Though privacy concerns give people pause here.) To entice customers tired of keeping track of their profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., business and social media services are going to have to offer a real return on users' time -- besides the thrill of being mayor of the mall.*


*All that said, we are active on Foursquare at Robert Morris University, where I work, but alas we are ahead of our students at this point.

Things to do in public relations when you're dead

First the web was dead, then the phone call, and now the press release -- which, like cowards and Kenny from "South Park," has died a thousand deaths.

I think I've already covered the whole web-is-dead thing here. As far as phone calls go, technology is certainly making it easier to avoid them, and it gives us more options for communicating at our own convenience. But as Clive Thompson notes in declaring phone calls dead, those that we continue to make are becoming more meaningful. I urge the people who work for me to make phone calls and not simply wait for an email response when they are working on an important project -- especially one that is time sensitive. It's actually easier to talk to someone on complicated matters than to trade emails or texts. And there's never mistaking someone's tone when you are talking to them on the phone. No need, in other words, for emoticons.

As for the press release, well, that's also ground I've covered previously. The bigger question is, what's the obsession with declaring technology and communication channels dead? Two reasons, in my opinion. One, pronouncing a technology obsolete that many people still use extensively is an easy way to appear to be on the cutting edge. And if it turns out there's life in those old bones yet, well, you weren't wrong -- you were just ahead of your time.

I also think there's a certain amount of laziness at work. If something is outmoded, then you have an excuse not to invest time and resources in it. It's the same reason people dismiss new technologies as fads: It spares them the effort to learn how to use them. As often as not, it's wishful thinking.