Smalltalk with James Robertson

Never mind the swirling culture war aspects of the Duck Dynasty kerfuffle - there's a far simpler failure here, and it's of PR. Exactly which people at A&E were surprised by the GQ interview? Who wasn't smart enough to imagine what kinds of questions GQ would ask (pageviews!), and what kind of answers Phil would have for them? When you decide to make money off of what you see as the foilbles of people who aren't like you, you have to understand the full package you are paying for.

Tags: stupidity

Microsoft has the latest "how to look stupid in public" example. If you run a contest like that one, you simply have to be prepared to lose a few....

Update: Microsoft quickly figured out what a problem this was, and - to their credit - dealt with it.

Technorati Tags: windows phone

A while back, Airbnb (a "rent your home to strangers" service) had a nasty incident where some grifters took advantage of a user of the system and robbed her blind. I read about that on TechCrunch - and they asked Airbnb what they were going to do for the customer. When he got an equivocal answer, he said the understandable thing: they weren't guaranteeing any compensation at all. To which Graham responded:

The story Arrington wrote yesterday about Airbnb not offering to help was bullshit. He asked a company spokesman what Airbnb was doing to help her. The spokesman, who’d been told by their lawyers that he couldn’t go into detail about that because of the precedent said “I can’t comment on that.” So Arrington, in typical Arrington fashion said “Well, unless you tell me I’m going to write that you’re not willing to do anything for her.” And he did. Really not cool. I’ve talked to the Airbnb guys and they are already doing everything they could be doing to help this woman.

Well. I can only assume that Graham hasn't even heard of PR. When something bad happens to a customer, and the PR staff are only willing to come back with blather, what the heck does he expect?

Callie Oettinger has a nice take on the flaws that are inherent in the traditional PR/Marketing model: it's all designed to sell to the wrong audience. She's writing about books here, but the same thing applies in software:

Traditional media outlets have never covered even a dime in the dollar of books published each year. Everyone wants in, but there’s not enough room. And even though specific genres have never received equal coverage from traditional media outlets—military, science-fiction, and romance come to mind—many of the publishers and authors of these books continue traditional pitching, hoping something will stick. Why? Because that’s what’s always been done.

Very true. Consider software now - do "decision makers" actually evaluate the tools that developers or end users use? Of course not. Heck, most of them don't even look at such stuff - they have staff for that. Sure, at high levels, with truly expensive software, the golfing relationship between the (insert vendor here) and the CEO matters. For everything else? What matters is whether your product's value proposition reaches the right audience: the users.

Go back to books again. Pre-internet, all you had were book reviews from prestigious outlets (like the NY Times), and the advice of local booksellers, who had some notion as to what was coming out, and what might appeal to you given your tastes. Now? Now there's Amazon recommendations, book lists on blogs (I've picked up a ton of stuff based on posts from Glenn Reynolds, for instance) - and so on. The problem with the traditional outlets is that they are at least one step removed from the real audience.

Which takes me back to software - the "decision makers" are also removed from the actual use, and their only point of evaluation is price - it's the only thing they have. If you sell on that basis, and can undercut everyone else, then sure - bypass the users, and get into the race to the bottom. If that's not where you sell, then you really, really want to be active where the actual users live - because it's the only way you have to stand out from the crowd.

Technorati Tags: marketing

You have to wonder at what passes for wisdom in the modern PR and marketing space. Consider this post, from David Meerman Scott - where he promotes the viral videos (and associated book) from Kevin Nalty.

Sure, the videos have been seen a lot, but here's the more interesting question: do they serve a useful marketing purpose? Do they help promote any product or service? Or do they just help promote the author of the videos?

The answer to that set of questions is pretty simple if you take the time to watch any of the videos. They're pretty well done, and they are pretty funny. Do they help attract any customers? Not really. Do they help make any product or service stand out? Not so much, no. So beyond promoting the author of the videos (and book), do they achieve any business purpose?

No, not really.

This is one of the things that drives me nuts about catch phrases like "no one cares about your product". It's true in one sense - prospective customers care about the problems your product can solve, not about the product per se. That doesn't mean that they don't want to hear about the product though - it means that they want to hear about how your product can help them solve their problems. Which gets me back to the whole viral video thing - how do any of the videos Scott linked to do that?

Technorati Tags: marketing

It's awkward when the CEO has no clue what's going on in a company. Consider Yahoo's Carol Bartz, talking about Apple's iAd platform:

“That’s going to fall apart for them,” she said to Reuters, apparently referring to reports that the perfection-obsessed tech giant would involve itself in the creative part of ads on its service. “Advertisers are not going to have that type of control over them. Apple wants total control over those ads.”

Why, it's so terrible that Yahoo has been buying ads on the service. Oops. I expect the Yahoo PR flacks to have a few extra bottles of wine on hand this weekend :)

Between the antenna issue and the proximity sensor problem, Apple needs to come out and talk about the new iPhone - and it looks like they plan to say something:

Apple on Wednesday invited select press to a special press conference to be held this Friday in California. Apple would only say that the press conference would be regarding the iPhone 4.

I don't know whether the antenna problem has bitten me or not, but the proximity sensor thing is a real problem. I was on a call yesterday, and my ear kept pressing buttons - had to go to the speaker setting. If that's not addressable in software, then I think Apple will be staring down the barrel of a recall.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPhone

Apple is busy giving itself a larger PR problem in addition to the Consumer Reports story - they're deleting forum threads that link to it:

It's hard to imagine what Apple hopes to gain by doing this. Instead of having one negative news story, now we have two: not only did Consumer Reports come out and say they don't recommend the iPhone 4, but now Apple seems to be trying to prevent people from talking about it on their support board.

Like tuaw, I wouldn't be writing about this (and jacking up search results for the topic by a small amount) if Apple had just ignored the story, or - better yet - confessed that there was, in fact, a problem. Instead, they've created a mountain where formerly there was a molehill.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPhone, marketing

Maybe that's not their reason for existing, but boy - it's what they do best:

The saga continues. A reader forwarded us this note he got from AT&T, simply stating that his iPhone 4 preorder had been cancelled, for no apparent reason. And he's not the only one.

Follow the link for an image showing the cancellation notice. There are a few hard foreign policy issues about which it's common to say (about one party or the other) that "they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity". Well, when it comes to having positive PR, that pretty much defines AT&T. IT's as if they see the possibility, and run. Fast.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

Giorgio Galante has released the contents of the email he sent to AT&T's CEO, along with the audio for the awesomely stupid response he got back. A company with a clue would have had something resembling a response by now, but I guess that's not AT&T.

Looks like they did recognize how bad this looked. Engadget reports that ATT has apologized to Galante:

Giorgio tells us that he's received a sincere apology from an AT&T senior VP, who took responsibility for the mixup. Apparently the cease and desist warning came about due to bad reading of AT&T internal policy -- Giorgio was told the rep who made the call is "not having the best of days today" -- and AT&T tells us it's reviewing its procedures to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Still - I wonder how awesome the next chat between Jobs and Stephenson will be?

Technorati Tags: stupidity, att, iPhone