July 5th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Then drop me a line, because I have a free, uh, non-medicinal treatment for you to try out. And boy is it fancy.
I’m helping out a colleague with a little online outreach for the REM-A-TEE anti-snore shirt (hey, I didn’t pick the name) and have a few shirts to give away in exchange for a review (positive or negative, obviously).
I snore about once a month, but haven’t done so since moving to Malta. Maybe it’s the warm Mediterranean air?
9 Comments »
July 5th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Via Kate, I read about how the Sci-Fi Channel invited a bunch of bloggers and digital journalists to Vancouver for a week of set tours and panels with casts and crews for the five shows that are shot locally.
“You expect to see cameras at these things, but to see all these people with their laptops open, blogging live from the events — it was a completely different use of media than I’ve ever seen,” said Dave Howe, Sci-fi Channel exec VP-general manager.
The only show I know anything about is Battlestar Galactica. We’re currently working our way through season three, so keep your fracking spoilers to yourselves, please.
In any case, I did some quick searches and turned up a bunch of reports from TV Squad, including a set tour report and a video of the cast and crew panel (Jamie Bamber may be a looker, but he’s got one poncy accent. That said, his accent work is excellent.).
The press tour was organized by New Media Strategies. One thing they could have done better was to create a little microsite that aggregates all of the blogger’s content–photos, audio, video, blog posts–in one place. That way readers of any one attending blogger could easily access the content created by the other attendees. If they did create one, they needed to make it more findable.
It’s been my experience that when marketing people put on events for bloggers, they think exclusively of the event itself, not about the (more important, because they last much longer) digital artifacts that live on afterward.
1 Comment »
June 1st, 2007, 2 Comments »
For the last few years, local (local to Vancouver, that is) PR guru (and, tangentially, our client) James Hoggan has been publishing weekly PR tips in the Vancouver Sun. They’re pretty elementary , but still useful reminders of what to do and what not to do in the thorny world of public relations.
As it turns out, they’ve got over two years worth of tips on their website. Here are a couple of samples:
If You Can’t Fix it, Don’t Ask About it – A critical step in any consultation comes in conceiving the questions that you put to your audience. If you start asking for feedback on issues that you can’t – or won’t – change, you are setting them up for disappointment and yourself up for a heap of grief. So, define the parameters carefully and whatever questions you ultimately ask, be prepared to treat the answers seriously.
Public Speaking: The Risks and Rewards of Winging It – Most people have been impressed at some point in their lives by a speaker who could be scintillating off the cuff, who just seemed to grab one great idea after the other out of the air. So it’s tempting, as a presenter, to want to emulate that style. And in rare cases it could be the right thing to do if you have easy command of the material and if the risks of an error are negligible. But if the stakes are high – and you’re not completely confident – work up a prepared text. Even if you memorize it and only refer to it for prompts, the discipline may save you from making a serious mistake.
That’s a big schwack of tidbits. Some are less useful than others (do we really need tips on ‘a winning wardrobe’?) but the majority are worth reading. Especially, as Glenn Kelman recently recommended, if you want to do your PR DIY-style.
2 Comments »
May 17th, 2007, 1 Comment »
On Capulet’s blog, I just wrote a longish review of PitchWire, a kind of pitch management site for publicists, and a (gulp) pitch solicitation service for, uh, influencers. I’m not sure about it, but ye of the PR and marketing persuasions might be interested.
Plus, you can get fancy badges like this:
I’m, uh, totally lying with that badge. I get enough pitches without asking for them, thanks.
1 Comment »
April 1st, 2007, 5 Comments »
A couple of weeks ago, a new video shot to the top of the ‘most viewed’ list on YouTube (boy, we’re a bit YouTube heavy around here, aren’t we?). It was ten seconds in length and was utterly benign. In other words, it was just like the other zillion young talking heads in front of a webcam. Why, then, did this young woman named Kallie (with a YouTube account called GreenTeaGirlie) garner 268,653 views (according to Utility Belt, who otherwise misses the point, the video got about 215,000 views in the first two days)?
View spam. Unethical marketers, presumably with green tea to promote, apparently used auto-refresh software and fake accounts to ratchet up the number of views and subscribers. As always happens, the YouTube community detected this bold and ill-advised deception, and piled in with a schwack of nasty comments. Here’s a quick sampling:
Viral marketing sucks. So why make the whole YouTube community go mad over this?
OMG OMG! You are like the Mostest AWESOMENEST ever! I am going to call all the TV stations and newspapers in my area and let them know of this AMAZING discovery!!
i hate you already.
You get the idea. Kallie replied with a pretty vague, denial-free follow-up. If she wasn’t, in fact, a marketing shill, I would have expected some moral indignation.
No one has owned up to this particular campaign. About ten days after the fiasco, Dragonwater Tea Co. registered the domain www.greenteagirlie.com. I suspect this is just opportunism. The folks behind this project are clearly dimwitted, but you’d hope they’d register associated domain names before launching.
The situation presents an interesting conundrum for the marketers behind the project. On the one hand, their original plan backfired gloriously. On the other hand, they have the attention of about 250,000 people, which doesn’t come cheap. Is there a way for them to come clean, apologize, save a little face and still come out ahead? Maybe they should post an apology video, and send free green tea to the first 10,000 YouTubers who comment on it? Or, as James suggested when we were chatting about this, they could use the opportunity to crowdsource their next marketing campaign so they don’t mess up again.
It’s a risky proposition, but if their product and company is new and relatively unknown, it might be worth the gamble. In the worst case scenario, they close up shop and re-launch with a newly-branded, squeaky clean green tea.
UPDATE: To complicate things further, Gary Gause from Dragonwater said they didn’t even register the domain. Somebody else registered it, and pointed it at www.dragonwater.com. How odd.
5 Comments »