Day: July 29, 2003

 Adele Ravella over at productmarketing.com has a good piece on removing marketing speech from your communications.  (Thanks to B2Blog for the link)

 Entrepreneur magazine – which has been promoting PR a lot recently – advises its readers to take PR seriously.

 The latest winner of the “Turkey voting for Christmas/Thanksgiving” award goes to Wally Roberts whose job was promoting and enhancing Barre’s (VT) central business district.  It’s reported that he has resigned after being quoted saying that Barre’s downtown was �dying slowly�.

I have been catching up on my e-mail and after my post yesterday on the I-PR anti-blog discussions, I see there were even more negative posts yesterday. 

I really don’t understand PR people’s problems with blogs.  Get over it.  If you don’t think they matter, ignore them.  There are loads of clients who will benefit from your ignorance. (The discussion has even descended into “well blogs are just a web page”).

But it’s not all bad news.  Along with you, who by reading this are already participating in the blog world, Larry Weber, the driving force behind what is now Weber Shandwick [FLASH Warning] thinks that there’s some gold in them there hills.

In an interview in the Boston Herald, Larry unveils his plans for providing marketing services built around the new tools and techniques for reaching and building relationships with audiences.

He (Weber) talked about “viral communication,” or using virtual communities to spread a message. “That’s what blogging is,” Weber added, referring to the Web’s proliferation of open but focused bulletin boards called Web logs, or simply blogs, that anyone can use to post a message. “You really can’t underestimate that,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a consolidation of marketing,” Weber said, as enterprises seek better ways to use technology to reach target audiences.

Amen to that Larry.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of the Star Wars Kid.   Ghyslain Raza from Quebec, used his high school’s video camera to capture him undertaking a mock Jedi fight.  The only problem was he left the video in the camera.  His schoolmates uploaded the video on the web and like everything else on this medium it took off on a life of it’s own.

Ghyslain’s efforts have been put to music, had Star Wars sound effects added etc. They’re actually very funny. (You can see a host of these and the original here). But now the fun must stop.

Mr. and Mrs. Raza are suing the families of four classmates they accuse of maliciously turning their son into an object of mockery by uploading the files for a cool $225,000.