Day: July 14, 2003

We all know great PR involves careful planning, strong execution, strong management and sometimes a little luck.  But key to your success will be the ability of your spokesperson to rise to the media challenge.

The ongoing merger battle between Oracle and Peoplesoft is intriguing. I wrote about it before, but every day the battle gets hotter and hotter and in this particular battle both CEOs are providing exemplary PR service. Take this example:

First, Craig Conway, CEO at Peoplesoft came out with this gem about the proposed takeover:

“It’s like me asking if I could buy your dog so I can go out back and shoot it.” [Bloomberg]

To which the ever-quotable Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison responded in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News:

“I think at one point, `Craigey’ thought I was going to shoot his dog,” Ellison said. “If Craigey and Bear were standing next to each other and I had one bullet, trust me, it wouldn’t be for the dog.”

Fantastic!

 Trend Watch: Moblogging.  Moblogging is the art of posting blog entries from your cell phone, normally a camera phone, which enables you to post a photo along with the entry. It’s a relatively new merger of blogging and cell phones. They are getting very excited about it over at the Online Journalism Review.

 As a software company, Microsoft has been surprisingly slow out of the gates with the blog phenomenon. Although they have begun to promote blogging as part of some of their server products.  However, one area where Microsoft is leading the way is corporate blogging.  By my (ad hoc) estimates, Microsoft seem to have more bloggers than any other firm and they continue to get loads of ink.  Check out this story from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. For a good listing of Microsoft blogs check out Microsoft-Watch.