Andrew Lark

Congrats to The Southwest Team...

Angela and the crew at Southwest Airlines launched their second blog this week - Nuts About Southwest. It comes close on the heals of the Adopt A Pilot blog which provides a voice for this neat community initiative. Congratulations gang!

The Lark Group provided a helping hand on both projects - but all the credit goes to Angela for having the drive and enthusiasm to get the project off the ground. (And the crew at RD2!)

The blog is getting plenty of attention and feedback. I know Southwest is going to listen to the feedback so keep it coming.

Blog Mood...

Fascinating story in the latest New Scientist on measuring blog mood:

The software, called MoodViews, was created by Gilad Mishne and colleagues at Amsterdam University, The Netherlands. It tracks about 10 million blogs hosted by the US service LiveJournal.

The latest addition to Moodviews, a program called Moodsignals, tries to explain match these blogospheric mood swings to current events. It identifies emotional peaks by comparing recent label usage with records of previous use. When it finds a spike, the program picks out less commonly used words from relevant blog posts in an effort to identify the cause of the emotional change.

PRWeek Editor Gets Bloggin...

Keith O'Brien has entered the blogosphere. He emphasizes that this is his blog and not to be confused with his day job - but he will bring the same diligence to his posts. Some good thoughts and writing make it worth a read.

PR Attack Dogs...

From BusinessWeek...

Dezenhall Resources occupies a small niche within the public relations business that includes Sitrick & Co. in Los Angeles and Qorvis Communications in Washington. Kevin McCauley, editor of O'Dwyer's PR Report, a trade publication, regards Dezenhall as one of the most effective in his specialty, calling him "the pit bull of public relations."

Now The Media Are Optimizing For Google...

No surprises here. Rather than write what should be written, write what searches best... Lohr reveals all.

So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing. The software is a logical, sequential, left-brain reader, while humans are often right brain.

Panel At Software 2006

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours down at Software 2006, the highlight of which was a panel with Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek, Fred Vogelstein - of Fortune fame, Bruce Lowry from Novell (and creator of the Novell Open PR blog - still one of the view overtly PR corporate blogs out there). Thanks to Sabrina and Shannon of the Horn Group for pulling it all together. Couple of highlights for me:

• Sarah made the point that as a journalist you can no longer hide behind the medium. Blogging and the blog is about you as a writer - people attack you, not BusinessWeek. This really supports the notion that blogs, for the most part, build people as brands.
• Fred spoke to the evolution of publishing. Prior to the panel he told me how when interviewing for one of his first reporting gigs he as asked by a gnarly old editor what business he was getting into - he said, reporting - the editor pointed out he was in fact getting into the manufacturing business. During the panel Fred pointed to how content was once designed by how often the presses ran. Now everyone is a wire service. The question now is now how we publish, but whether we should or shouldn't.
• I also though Fred made some interesting points about magazines and papers as products. Do people buying a mag for 4,000 word, insightful story telling, peppered with analytics, really want 40 word snippets?
• Bruce is pioneering the pure PR blog. Novell's blog is all about getting the message and story out - and setting the story straight. Their CTO launched his blog last week. Bruce made some insightful comments about audience and community. They aren't writing the blog for the blogosphere - they are writing it for the Novell community - and to media and analysts that are part of that community. They are using the utility of blogging to publish once and communicate many times.

One of the interesting debates we had was to do with the social effects of blogging. Do blogs result in power shifting to individuals with information - or do they break down the silos? Are enterprises - or groups within them - not blogging in order to keep information to themselves (not just from the outside world, but from other internal people)? Ross Mayfield took the floor at that point. I agree with Ross that Wikis and Blogs are breaking down barriers inside organizations - they force transparency into processes and organizations like never before. They also alter the context of communications itself. Rather than information being transmitted, it is presented as an ongoing dialogue.

Until now, I don't think organizations have particularly good collective memories. Blogs and Wikis are changing that. They are like live recorders of the buzz, thinking and energy inside an enterprise. I joked that it's always interesting to sit with a CEO and a journalist from Fortune as that journalist starts flicking through notes several years old. Now companies have - via blogs, wikis, podcasts - the same opportunity to harness all that dialogue. There will be some exciting companies born around this opportunity.

Thanks again to my fellow panelists for a lively discussion and to Sabrina Horn and Shannon for pulling this together.

Other highlights:

• It was great to bump into Jean-Baptiste Su of La Tribune, whose partner Vanessa has opened a French restaurant in Saratoga - Gervais. And they will be opening early so we can enjoy good French cooking and Worldcup Footie games.
• As I was leaving, Tom Formenski was appropriately arriving. Traditional media attend conferences. New media blog types attend drinks - where the real dirt gets served!

PR SEO

A little tidbit I thought I'd share with you - unverified. If you have or haven't found this to be the case let me know...

Google has adopted a new algorithm that doesn't allow releases with headlines and subheads that include a combined word count of 30, to be posted on its site (You'd have to be nuts to write a press release headline with more than 30 words!).

And, apparently there is only a 50% success rate in a press release posting on Google if the headline is longer than 182 characters. Andy, there's more... there are other things that will cause GoogleNews to have problems picking up a press release, including the use characters in headline (including "&" or "-").

So there you go. I've been hunting for someone to help us - at LogLogic - with SEO PR. If you are able to demonstrate expertise in this area and want to help us (we're paying) - drop me a paragraph or two and lets chat.

Participatory Product Reviews...

One upon a time the only way you could get a product review was through a print rag or through an analyst firm. James pointed me at this review of Sun vs. Dell. This is an end-user giving a pretty technical view of performance and the like.

Reviews like this are all part of the participatory movement - they differ from the conventional recommendation found on Amazon in that they are far more authentic and detailed. In some respects the person doing the review is passing their intellectual property back into the community.

The Coke Side Of Life

Consistency and creativity are the two magic ingredients to any successful marketing message or tag-line. They go hand-in-hand. Think Nike's “Just Do It” or BMW's “Ultimate Driving Machine”. I've long argued that one of Coke's problems is that it hasn't maintained any diligence in its taglines - or at least to the same degree that they have in packaging.

The WSJ captures this today in reporting on Coke's new Ads. The inconsistency looks like this:

At what point do they get consistent? And does it matter when you've got that much money to sway opinion? I'd love to hear your thoughts. AdAdge had this to say:

The new work “understands that Coke trade dress -- the red color, the ribbon, the contour glass, the logos -- are magical icons with immeasurable power,” wrote Advertising Age's Bob Garfield. “It understands that the fizzing, bubbling sound of a soft-drink pour is one of the most fetching, evocative and appetizing sounds on earth.

So, I thought I'd take a quick look at how Coke is living the ”Coke Side Of Life“. Their site is pretty much a conventional corporate site and if I want to learn more it directs me to a press kit. Yawn. No wonder kids are switching to Pepsi. In fact, something called ”Make Every Drop Count“ figures more prominently. My Coke is even more confusing and certainly doesn't directly help bring this to life - take a look at the wallpapers. Nothing there.

Change is confusing enough. Poorly executed change is devastating. And here I was enjoying my Black Cherry Vanilla Diet Coke...

If your going to create a new tagline - which does amount to a value proposition - you'd better make sure your communities and customers can experience and live it. And for it to work, it has to be able to live freely across all your mediums, unencumbered by other slogans, taglines, ideas... Just look at Nike.

Tom Pirko, of consulting firm Bevmark said it all the the WSJ piece: ”Marketing magic cannot be re-created. It has to be created with an original thought that is breakthrough.“

As a complete aside, it's this kind of reporting that causes me to keep my print subscription. I totally missed this story online. But in the print edition, on the front page of the second section, it screamed at me. That's why the FT and WSJ thump onto my driveway each morning, and are accompanied by the NYTimes on weekends...

Should PR be about selling a product at the expense of the truth?

That's the question psed by the Gaurdianas it looks at Edelman (registration required, but worth it). Again, I think Richard's comments are being quite agressively misconstrued:

According to Edelman, we - the PR fraternity - don't have to worry about journos picking apart our press releases and checking our facts any more. We can counteract negative stories in the press simply by posting the real story on a blog.

What I think Richard meant - or at least what I heard - was that transparency is now available to us in real-time (rather than requiring mediators) - and that we can correct what the media chooses not to check, or correct. This is a pretty cynical piece - pretty much reflecting the tone between PR and Media: "No one has a monopoly on truth and nor should they. As we all know, the truth is relative - even in PR. And the truth is that PRs, just like the journalists who sit on the other side of that information superhighway, are obsessed not so much with The Truth as The Power." I suspect this is the case more for Media than PR - especially those on the Agency side.

Holmes has a good analysis of the piece:

But more to the point, Borkowski seems to completely misunderstand the blogosphere, which actually does the fact checking job the mainstream media has abandoned. It's far more difficult to get spin or deception into the blogosphere than it is to get it into the mainstream media. That's the attraction for someone like Edelman: a medium where everyone gets to ask his or her own questions and make up his or her own mind, rather than being fed a story that a journalist has decided is the absolute truth.

I grew up with the notion of the fouth estate firmly embeded in my mind. 20 years in PR has pretty much eroded any view of the media as 100% independent, 100% professional - think unwavering committment to truth. There are some exceptions - people you've got to respect. I've equally seen some horrors in th PR side.

What the "fifth estate" - the blogosphere - brings to the table is a balancing of these two competing forces by enabling immediate dialog and distribution of the stuff that matters. It shift power back in favor of the people that care to be informed.