Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers? Life online

Silicon Valley confidential

Ged Carroll — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:35:00 GMT

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz like Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang is a former technology company CEO for whom history will be kinder than the media have been when all the stories come out about their time at the top. Unlike Yang, Schwartz isn't leaving history to chance, having launched a blog (and possibly a book later on) which promises to talk about the things he couldn't discuss in public prior to the Oracle acquisition. Just four posts in and it is already starting to make interesting reading, it has the promise to be more insightful and revealing than Robert X. Cringely's blog and book about the Valley.

Google Street View Best Streets Awards

Ged Carroll — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:26:00 GMT

Back in the day I worked on Yahoo!'s Finds of The Year awards to generate coverage about what you could discover (via Yahoo! products) on the 'net. It was nice to see Google take that PR idea in a new direction with the Google Street View Best Streets Awards - including a best fashion and foodie street respectively. I have only one criticism in that it needs a bit more visual 'bang', but then that would probably un-Googlely.

Films and the internet

Ged Carroll — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:41:00 GMT

The Oscars are over and fanbois like me have moved on already to the forthcoming Tron and Iron Man 2 films. The excitement about the trailers for these films neatly encapsulates the dilemma that the film industry has with the internet. On one hand it is a great way to reach cinema-going audiences, on the other hand piracy and scoops can blow the structured PR campaigns out of the water. They need to remember that it is the end of control, roll with it and you will get on much better. Enjoy the new Iron Man 2 trailer here.

Is the desktop web disappearing?

Ged Carroll — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:48:00 GMT

The Guardian has coverage of a Google speech describing the desktop as irrelevant in five years. I don't think so.

Is a Blackberry bad for PR agencies?

Ged Carroll — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:08:00 GMT

This was the first thing that went through my mind when I saw this research on how Blackberry devices add a further 10 working days of effort per year. Overservicing has been a perceived problem for agencies for as long as I have been in the industry and mobile technology exasperates it further. Should we bin the Blackberry and downgrade from iPhone to iPod? Discuss

Will the last avatar leaving please turn off the lights?

Ged Carroll — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:17:00 GMT

In a footnote on tech news site VentureBeat, it was announced that SecondLife-like metaverse There.com had finally thrown in the towel after seven years. Metaverses are great for conference calls and training but aren't particularly good as a social media and suck from a marketing perspective (apart from generating coverage in offline media - oh! the irony). Unfortunately, interest in metaverses haven't diminished, I recently spoke to someone involved in M&A consultancy for media companies who was sure that the future of local news media was a metaverse solution with local advertising.

Do PR firms make sense any more?

Ged Carroll — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:04:00 GMT

That's the question that an op-ed at The Huffington Post. I suggest the industry makes itself heard in this discussion.

The most powerful technology company in media

Ged Carroll — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:45:00 GMT

Media companies were recently asked at a roundtable who was the most powerful technology company in their sphere: Apple, Google and Microsoft for the Xbox platform. Who do you think is the most important technology company in media today?

Handling a crisis through openess

Ged Carroll — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:20:00 GMT

Palm is in a bad way. The only person that I know personally who bought a Pre regrets he did so and tweeted yesterday about how 'crap' the device was. But respect where it is due, yesterday's handling of their forthcoming financial results was handled sensibly to try and control market explanations. It is also interesting to see how internal communications were also written with an eye to an external audiences.

81 per cent of companies surveyed not sure if their social media activity is legal

Ged Carroll — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:06:00 GMT

This was the scary (if a little attention-seeking) result of research done by Tempero. But help is here if you want to know more as they have published an e-book.

We're all mobile now

Ged Carroll — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:19:00 GMT

One of the defining moments for me was picking up an early copy of Wired magazine called The Digital Citizen which talked about how the Internet and digital economy was affecting the average person. The cover art was a Norman Rockwell painting of a man standing up in a town hall meeting representing the 'everyman' of society. Looking at the corporate shot of Apple's bland looking COO Tim Cook beaming out of reports from his presentation at Goldman Sachs conference, I was reminded of that Norman Rockwell painting. Like the Jon Katz article which marked the age of the the netizen, Cook's proclaimation that Apple was a 'mobile device company' heralds the fact that we are all mobile now. Notebooks and laptops are the norm, more and more of use have 3G dongles and smartphones with a tremendous amount of computing power.

Brown government digital mire

Ged Carroll — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:03:00 GMT

The Guardian today reports on the criticism that the business select committee had of the broadband tax aspects of the Digital Britain plan and other reports in the blogosphere highlight how the government is trying to weasel its Digital Economy Bill through determined public opposition. The Digital Britain initiative is rapidly becoming a 21st century version of the Thatcher-era poll tax - government in spite of the people, rather than for the people. From the perspective of the PR industry, it poses a future challenge to introducing new digital streams of revenue; breaking down trust in digital media brands, restricting consumers access to next generation services and using techniques such as broadband throttling to adversely affect their online experience.

Resurrecting a brand from the dead

Ged Carroll — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:01:00 GMT

If you were a child of the 80s like me, one of the seminal moments of this decade was Back To The Future which was to product placement what Led Zepplin were to drum solos. You were introduced to brands like Calvin Klein underwear, JVC camcorders, Aiwa personal stereos and the DeLorean motor-car. Being a music addict at the time, I lusted after Aiwa's personal stereo range which were proto-iPods in terms of their product design coolness. Unfortunately Aiwa imploded as part of the Sony keiretsu and was last seen on cheap DVD | TV combos sold in ASDA - a terrible fate for a formerly great electronics brand.

My car-obsessed friends wanted a DeLorean motor car (preferably with an aftermarket flux capacitor installed); DeLorean had a slightly more glamorous fall from grace involving bankruptcy, suitcases of money and cocaine - if it wasn't true, you couldn't have made it up. One of them recently bought an old Audi Quattro because it had a digital dashboard that reminded him of 'the Back To The Future car'. Unlike Aiwa, the DeLorean brand is rising from the dead. The relaunched DeLorean Motor Company (backed by casino owner Steve Wynn) has relaunched itself with the aid of social media. Feel free to take a look here to see how they are using Facebook, Twitter and free wallpaper downloads to reignite interest in the brand.

Banks social media timebomb

Ged Carroll — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:43:00 GMT

Social Media Today has an article on how banks are using social media information to assess the creditworthiness of consumers, whilst they won't like it that was less of an issue than the anecdote attributed to an AVG spokesperson Roger Thompson who described how his credit card company used social media information for security questions. If the bank can do this, so can professional criminal organisations. It redefines what 'security' and authentication means, and is a potential reputation timebomb for consumer-orientated financial institutions. If this breaks expect to see the likes of Verisign and other authentication technology providers trying to ride the crisis coverage gravy-train.

BNP photo debacle

Ged Carroll — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:20:00 GMT

A number of years ago, tech PRs may remember the Everywhere Girl meme that The Inquirer made famous. The same stock photography picture of a female student in a beanie hat graced ads by Dell and Gateway at the same time and has been continued to be used in numerous marketing campaigns throughout the world - which bloggers take great joy in exposing. As part of its new policy to allow in members from black and minority ethic groups, the BNP had a profile page of a new black member. Unfortunately for them the photograph that they used was of Oscar Grant, an African American shot by police on the San Francisco BART system. The picture can be seen on the Wikipedia page, was originally released by the family after the shooting is copyrighted and unlicensed. This was discovered by the Lancaster Unity blog and is now making its way around the Labour-blogosphere.