Day: July 7, 2003

 WorldCom is planning to launch a lobbying initiative to assist the company in it’s battles with Washington.  Interestingly many members of congress have returned the company’s contributions.  They certainly have a battle on their hands.

 The Huntsville Times reports that an Alabama school is seeking a PRO for $50K – $80K per annum.

 New York Times looks at blogging in the workplace. “But opening a pipeline to comments from employees can produce a torrent of information, essentially defeating the purpose of the tool. “You reach information glut very quickly,” Mr. Byrnes said.”

 Up2Speed offers some tips on optimizing your website for Google.

 Whilst Nike’s battles on free speech continue, Wired reports that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals  has ruled that “web loggers” (sic) can’t be held responsible for libel for  information they republish.

 Alan Weinkrantz And Company [Flash Warning] got a great hit on the AP about communicating on behalf of technology companies. 

It seems that what goes around, does actually come around.

Recently there have been a number of stories concerning over-zealous PR people working in the entertainment business, detailing how they are treating journalists in an appalling manner.

Gawker reports that B-list celebrities are now getting more air time because of a dearth of A-list celebs but also because magazines are unwilling to engage the aggressive publicists. More on this over at the UK Times.

Finally that business is making some sense to me!

Robert Loch over at up2speed has posted a response to my piece on Blog Relations… three chords and the truth and he disagrees with me:

“Tom also states that trying to pay for false promotion/buzz is a bad idea. Personally I disagree – placing advertising/marketing message on websites as editorial, and having it endorsed/advocated is a great idea – it is getting caught that’s the bad idea.”

Now respectfully, I have to point out this makes no sense to me.

The whole lesson from the Raging Cow episode, and the whole point of my post is that consumers aren’t stupid, you can’t fool all the people all the time. If you’re caught slipping a few bucks in return for “editorial” coverage, then that’s going to be a big negative for the medium (i.e. the blogger) and the message (i.e. the advertiser).

There’s nothing wrong with advertising on blogs but as soon as people can’t trust what they’re reading, well then blogging is no more than advertorial and we all know the value of that particular outlet.

As for it only being a problem when you get caught, well isn’t that the point? The Internet makes everything far more transparent. That’s how the Raging Cow issue arose.  They did get caught.

This isn’t the end of marketing.  It simply means that marketers need to think more carefully, need to innovate.  Throwing dollars at bloggers for surreptitious mentions isn’t exactly the brave new frontier of marketing thought is it?

Is it just me or does July 4 come around faster every year?  Must be getting old.

Phil Gomes is pulling the shutters on his personal PR blog and instead is focusing his energies into a new blog for his firm G2B Group.  The new blog is at http://www.g2bgroup.com/blog/ and there are some interesting thoughts on RSS and how it relates to the growing excess of information we’re all faced with every day.