I thought about American Airline’s recent PR blunder the other day. The airline company took a pre-emptive strike and boldly announced they will now be charging customers a $15 surcharge for transporting each piece of luggage for their trip. Well that piece of news made the headlines on tv, radio, print and online, and needless to say, it was not well received. Travelers are already being hit with airport fees, additional security fees and rising ticket prices, the $15 per bag charge is hardly trivial, especially if you’re taking your family on vacation. Yet the reality is that prices everywhere are rising due to runaway gas prices. It’s typical for manufacturers and suppliers to pass the costs on to consumers; and lately, rising costs across the board are the norm these days. Clearly, the amount of fuel airlines require to operate their planes is skyrocketing and consumers are well aware of this fact. As consumers, we would have expected to see and pay for higher ticket prices. Are other airlines likely to follow American’s move? I doubt it. What they will do and what American should have done is build the additional fee into the price of the ticket. That move would have been far more palatable with the public. I’m unsure what type of PR advise American was given or whether they decided to decline it; now, their efforts to find new ways to boost revenues may have backfired. It will be interesting to see if they reverse their decision and how it takes them.

Twitter and the world of micro-blogging is in its early days and we believe will become an influential messaging tool that will gain broad user and business adoption. It’s power is in its ability to tap into and push short snippets of information into the public ether. As we mentioned in an early post, titled How to Get Your Twitter On, there are a bevy of new, useful Web 2.0 tools tailored around support the growing world of Twitterers, which is about 1 million.

Here are a few more uber cool tools that we wanted to highlight.
Summize: is a newly launched start-up that enables real-time Twitter searches that let you get a temperature check on what people are tweeting related to a particular topic. I was recently trying to find the latest information on the Florida brush fire that was rapidly moving toward my mom’s house in Malabar. I tried to manually find more information about the fire in Twitter, but trying Summize I pulled up a rich list of updates. Here’s more results we found on the big Santa Cruz County fire that broke out yesterday, which is just a stone’s throw away from Silicon Valley. For Marketing & PR folks out there monitoring perceptions about a technology, product or company, check out Summize Labs which is a nifty feature that gives you an interesting real-time Twitter sentiment ranging from great to wretched.

Here’s a cool new service for music called: Blip. Launched by San Francisco-based parent company Fuzz, the Blip service lets users search and hear song tracks and also share them with friends via Twitter. It’s nice to see other startups innovating to enable Twitter to become more able to share rich media. Blip has a simple UI. Trying out the service, I was finally able to find the song in the recent Kia commercial that I like (Can’t Get It Right Today – Joe Purdy).

The next major mobile opportunity is already bubbling below the surface and will be a user shift from SMS to mobile IM. RCR Wireless wrote a recent piece on the changing landscape and the challenges it will create for carriers that will see their once growing SMS revenues decline as users begin to adopt mobile IM instead. According to the Radicati Group, the installed base of online IM fans is already 1.2 billion and is pegged to grow to 1.9 billion over the next four years. However, mobile IM also offers an expanded horizon of revenue opportunities for carriers to put together attractive service offerings that incorporate social networking, communities, blogging, and interactivity with other mobile media.

Currently, mobile IM is used by only 8% of mobile consumers worldwide, according to TNS Global Telecoms. Undoubtedly, mobile IM (MIM) will leave SMS in the dust and for good reason: its free, its faster and the availability and emergence of powerful, cross-platform tools such as those from mobile communications innovator Geodesic* are porting popular desktop-based messaging and communication functionality to the mobile phone. (Currently about 15% of iPhone users use Geodesic’s Mundu IM universal iPhone edition tool.)

While the mobile landscape change is well underway, it bodes well for the ecosystem: mobile communications service providers that are pioneering enhanced tools for users; carriers once they figure out new business models that will be successful and appeal to users; and users who will be the ultimate winners as they will have bigger, better, faster ways to create, consume and communicate with their own network of friends and family.

(Full disclosure: Geodesic is a client of Ignite PR.)

For those of you who have not tried Twitter yet, we’d highly recommend it. Twitter is a way to tap into another world literally of real-time, ongoing communication by thousands of people who are busy tweeting away. You can choose to follow real-time tweets (short written notes) from a select group of friends, interesting people, or the public at large. Just as important, you can engage in the conversation or add your own two cents– whatever those might be. Whether it’s breaking news or real-life drama unfolding, or frankly mundane everyday things affecting people (”Stuck in traffic due to major accident on 101. Traffic at a stand still.”) After diving into a world of twitters and tweets, we found it to be a highly informative and an influential, dynamic communication tool. The nice thing about Twittering is that brevity rules. Your tweets are limited to just 140 characters, so keep it short and sweet. Tara Anderson of Citizen Agency and HorsePigCow blog wrote an exceptional primer titled, “Tweeting for Companies 101.” It’s a how to guide on the world of Twitter and tweets, highlighting many of the cool new tools one can use to become more Twitter proficient. Check it out here: http://www.horsepigcow.com/2008/04/21/tweeting-for-companies-101/

We believe the practice of Twittering is going to grow like wildfire so you might as well figure out how to get your Twitter on sooner than later.

Yet another interesting post and chart by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine about the metamorphosis of the media and its changing role and influence over “news.” With all of the various internet tools to access information and push “news,” stories of interest are indeed no longer confined to traditional newsrooms (whether those be TV, radio or newspaper or print publications). Through the internet, people have vast access to tools such as Twitter and Digg and YouTube, online search, comments from readers and friends, links, video, podcasts, etc., where they can create or consume news and certainly be part of the conversation. Undoubtedly bloggers have had the biggest impact in being able to create news and inform readers faster and more dynamically than traditional media. With mobile broadband networks and more powerful smartphones making strong, rapid inroads in the U.S., new tools and services are being readied to enable people to capture and broadcast events and developing news as they themselves witness it. The rise of citizen journalism is certain to be an up-and-coming key element that will be incorporated into today’s new press-sphere of choices for news creation.

Here are a few cool new web 2.0 tools that we’ve been recently using and wanted to share with you.

Snurl: used for shortening unnecessary (and annoying), ultra-long url addresses. You just paste the cumbersome ulr address in snurl & voila! Snurl gives you an easy-to-use compact url that you can share with bloggers or the media. http://www.snurl.com

Twhirl: was recently bought up by Seesmic, an up & coming online video streaming site. Twhirl is a great Twitter client. What makes Twhirl even more powerful is that it can be used with competing Twitter services like Pownce and Jaiku. Twirl also embeds snurl, which is extremely helpful because Twittering services max out at 140 characters.
http://twhirl.org

Perl: Okay, we really don’t use this and it’s not a cool web service. Just our attempts to be witty here. Perl is actually a dynamic programming language derived mostly from C language and predominantly used for Unix-based operating systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl

Lots of stuff coming out of CTIA this week. These two items caught our attention that bode well for the growing adoption of 3G-enabled smartphones in the US. Gizmodo reports that the AT&T Mobility CEO spilled the beans related to Apple, noting to expect a 3G iPhone in months.
http://gizmodo.com/375314/straight-from-att-mobility-ceos-mouth-3g-iphone-in-months-and-299-vu

The second piece came on the heels of RIM announcing projected growth for its smartphones in the US is taking off like wildfire. Citigroup estimates that the smartphone market will grow 50% to 60% annually in the next few years. It also estimates that smartphones will account for 22% of the handset market next year, almost triple its 8.5% share in 2006.
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/01/smartphones-soaring-good-news-for-apple-rim-nokia.html

It’s welcome news to our ears that the US market is moving away from dumb phones as an increasing number of consumers open up their wallets to join the bandwagon of using supercharged smartphones.

Here’s one more recent study comScore issued last week regarding the blazing trail of mobile broadband growth. http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2099

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine wrote an excellent post today about Wal-mart’s recent bad PR move. In the recent legal suit Wal-mart won against a former employee, who now has brain damage due to an auto accident, Jarvis’ perspective is right on point with respect to Wal-mart’s doozey of a move here. This is a case that underscores how sometimes company management should disregard their lawyers’ advice and seriously weigh the cost/benefits of an action that has all the promise of a PR calamity–all for a few dollars. As the world’s leading retailer, Wal-mart earns around 11.25 billion in profits. You’d think that this is a company that can afford to forgo persecuting a former employee, dragging her to court, and taking the only funds she won in the accident lawsuit that was earmarked to care for her. A big whopping $275,000. (They originally asked for almost twice as much but the judge decided against their request.)

My guess here is that their PR firm, Edleman, did in fact counsel Wal-mart against pursuing this legal suit, but this is also a huge assumption that Walmart and its team of lawyers even kept Edleman in the loop with their decision to pursue this suit. Wal-mart’s bad judgment to wring the few dollars from a physically and mentally-impaired, former employee is frankly outrageous. (By the way, Ms. Shank also lost her 18-year old son, a soldier, in the Iraq war.)

Evidently, the public outrage to the story of Debbie Shank now has come back to bite Wal-mart and they are back-peddling. After taking Ms. Shank to court in several rounds and more than 3 years to win the measly $275,000 award, the world’s biggest retailer is considering holding off on taking the money after all.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=4566641&page=1

My goodness, the long-term damage the company has done to itself, future sales and profits, and any remaining company goodwill— all with their focus on an extra dollar exemplifies cutting off your nose to spite your face. As Jarvis points out in his post, Wal-mart should have borrowed a page from Google’s corporate mantra of “don’t be evil.”

Over the weekend the blogsphere was on fire with the unfortunate story about a disaster of an interview between Sarah Lacy and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Train wreck seems to be how many have described it. We do feel for the interviewer and the public lambasting that she’s received. In case you missed it, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and Dave McClure of 500hats blog weigh in with good summaries.

One of the team at Ignite was the event chair at the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab’s (VLAB) February panel on Multi-Platform Social networks that featured a fantastic panel including representatives from RockYou, Social Media, Google’s OpenSocial, Bebo & Mogenthaler Venture Partners. The moderator of this panel was Jeremiah Owyang, Managing Director, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, and blogger of Web Strategist, who did an absolutely stellar job. The moderator came well prepared, was extremely knowledgeable about the space and very adeptly engaged the panel and audience of about 350 people with solid questions, interjecting humor from time to time. Jeremiah did a great thing that we haven’t seen too many moderators do; he took the extra step of surveying his readers in advance of the event on what they wanted to hear from these panelists. What a great move! In fact, Jeff Jarvis’ piece echoes the very recommendation that is part of Jeremiah’s standard practice.

For those of you out there planning to moderate a panel or do a one-on-one interview with an industry heavyweight, say Steve Jobs :-), take heart in Jeremiah’s best practices on how to be a great moderator. Earlier this year, Jeremiah wrote a comprehensive piece on this which should be a helpful best practices guide for moderating. www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/01/30/how-to-successfully-moderate-a-conference-panel-a-comprehensive-guide/

I ‘m sure by closely following his guidelines, one can avert the unfortunate situation that might have been prevented if the focus was more on the attendees and keeping their interests first and foremost at hand.

We always counsel our clients to be careful and conscientious about what they say to the press and when they say it. We believe it is never a good idea to share sensitive information with media and then hastily use “off the record” lingo–as if that is going to somehow keep the information from being shared. What we do counsel our clients about here is the following: always assume that with a reporter “off the record” means “ON the record.” Juicy tidbits of information are exactly what press seek in order to break a news story.

Today, Samantha Power, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a now-former scenior advisor to the Obama campaign, made deriding comments during an interview in London with The Scotsman, a Scottish newspaper. Prior to the press interview she had actually agreed that everything said during the interview could be printed.

In our opinion, it is unwise to divulge sensitive, confidential or questionable information and then quickly interject “oh that was off the record” during any interview. The use of this popular phrase hardly means that the reporter is under any obligation to agree to your unexpected request. In the case with Samantha Powers, the reporter did his job and ran with his piece and this started off a chain reaction leading to a big political bruhaha.

We recommend a simple rule of thumb to follow: if you do not want to see it in writing, then don’t share “off the record” comments with the press.