American Airline's PR faux pas

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.

Being a great moderator

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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.

Off the record..means on the tecord

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.

Computer clouds are rolling in (again)

What’s old is new again; Cloud computing (a.k.a. grid computing, utility computing, computing on-demand) which was talked about nearly ten years ago, is once again the horizon (pun intentional).One of the December cover stories of BusinessWeek did an in-depth series of cloud computing and spelled out several lofty initiatives that IBM and Google have underway. It appears Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon are quickly following suit to tap into a potential goldmine for data storage and access services.

Google is betting that cloud computing will support a 300-year plan to make everything – and possibly everyone – online and searchable.Recently, Google teamed with IBM to bring cloud computing into academia with a six university pilot program.An increasing number of businesses are looking at cloud computing as a foundation for their business processes.Gartner Group picked cloud computing as one of its Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008, noting that companies must evaluate the positive impact of SaaS and web platforms that provide “access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through ‘cloud computing’ environments.”We’d like to respectfully add online databases to this list as well.

Last week our client, LongJump, made an announcement that put them at the forefront of startups offering online databases on-demand.LongJump announced its powerful new “cloud database service” that presents several potential advantages for a web startup. LongJump’s DaaS is a fully managed infrastructure and administered relational database architecture that includes: SAS 70 Type II data protection compliance, enterprise-level security, flexible access and control, real-time mirrored database replication, and 99.999% application uptime.

In spite of announcing in the throes of CES, LongJump’s DaaS announcement was able to rise above the noise and land in some prominent publications, news venues and blogs. Here’s a brief snapshot of some of those news stories:

TechCrunch

eWeek

ZDNet

Web Worker Daily

VentureBeat

Network World

DMNews

TMCNet

ComputerWorld UK

Is email really cool again?

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New York Times Saul Hansel posted a provocative piece around the concept of Inbox 2.0, which has since set off quite a buzz happening online and in social media channels.  We’re delighted to see a renewed interest in email. Most recently, the Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney and Vauhini Vara wrote an excellent article titled, “Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?”

Several startups are also emerging that are each taking different approaches aimed at bringing relief to the ongoing email overload madness. The evolving landscape includes a wide array of options, ranging from spot solutions to content-based email solutions to comprehensive email management solutions.

Our client, Deva Hazarika, the founder & CEO of ClearContext, has a great blog focused around the subject of email. He posted an insightful piece titled, “Inbox 2.0: Email as a Social Networking Platform,” that highlights some interesting bloggers’ viewpoints that were part of this firestorm.

Summarizing some of Deva’s key points:
1) The real value of using the information within email lies not in the prioritization itself, but in doing interesting things with that information. Combining all of that data within the context of email, and paying attention to what people are actually DOING in the client, provides the ability do things with email that are a lot more intelligent than simply displaying a message or finding out who your most important contacts are.
2) Intelligently using that information to make the entire email experience more powerful and productive for people. And done right, it will also make people's experience with any email/contact based site or application more powerful, because it will be driven from a set of rich profiles full of deep context, not just a list of names.

ClearContext aims to bring help to the endless deluge of inbound messages and interruptions consuming in-boxes is taxing employees’ resources and reducing time they can devote to priority work. Studies show that email overload causes people to work anywhere from one to two extra hours a day. Email overload coupled with multi-tasking, constant interruptions and ad-hoc projects are drastically impacting workers’ effectiveness and productivity loss to the tune of up to $1 billion (yes, with a ‘b”) dollars annually for knowledge-focused companies having 50,000 or more workers. ClearContext’s IMS 4.0 helps users save an hour or more a day (260 hours annually) with smart, automated features to gain a much better handle on their daily email management. For fans of GTD, IMS does everything that the “Getting Things Done (GTD) Outlook Add-on” can do and then a lot more.

Quality over quantity

Valleywag, one of our favorite reads here at Ignite, had an interesting post today titled, “Wired editor in Snit over unsolicited emails.” The post points to Chris Anderson’s “outing” of 329 PR people who took aim at the Editor-in-chief, pitching him on their clients’ products or services. Boy, did his own blog post set off a firestorm of great debate, as evidenced by the comments too numerous for yours truly to finish reading. (I feel bad for any non-PR person who got accidentally ensnared in this public flogging.) Whenever I see the title ‘editor-in-chief’ or ‘publisher’ on ANY of our lists that we are building, I immediately cross them out and remind our staff that those titles should not be there. (period)!! (Actually, there are a few exceptions here but these are typically with smaller publications or newsletters that are usually focused in vertical market sectors.  In these cases, the editor-in-chief is indeed the go-to-guy or go-to-gal. ;-)  I, for one, would welcome PR folk applying the basics here. Among the two camps, I fall on the side of supporting Chris for getting fed up with the hundreds of PR people and PR firms that do not bother to do the basic quality control when it comes to promoting or trying to interest reporters. Herein, lays the key --- the operative word being “reporter” not editor-in-chief. There is a big difference and if a PR person doesn’t know this, doesn’t get it, or doesn’t care, well then I guess they continue to face public lambasting.

Is it, as Chris is suggesting, laziness by lots of PR folks? I know that, like reporters, PR people are also typically under the gun but, quite frankly, it takes a minimal amount of time to prune out any odd titles (copy editor, publisher, and editor-in-chief). I can understand why, in this age of email overload, there is an even bigger backlash at this type of spamming practice. I guess this quality (and perhaps basic training) or lack thereof is essentially up to each agency to either put in place or disregard.

The NYT’s weighs in on this today as well.

How frothy can it get?

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The WSJ posted

a great piece today

about Silicon Valley’s unique barometers for predicting a bubble burst.

The article accurately points to key indicators that were abundant during the dot.com era. Silly names, ridiculous company services (like this

one

highlighted in TechCrunch’s complimentary post titled “

Bubble Indicators

.”), recycled dot.com ideas that flopped, and over funding in saturated sectors.

There are still several more indicators that have yet to surface, including:

• Absence of office space

• Extremely tight housing/rental market in and around Silicon Valley/SF

• Job-seeking nomads descending in droves into Silicon Valley/SF

• Entry-level candidates demanding company perks typically reserved for senior staff or management

• Excessive burn rates by startups on marketing

Thankfully, the dot.com/stock market meltdown resulted in tighter controls and public skepticism that largely prevents companies that have zero revenues from going IPO en mass.

A perusal of TechCrunch’s company archives show that since around mid-2005 about 1,800 startups have been profiled. It would be interesting to find out the percentage of these that are actually making money.Further, many more startups exist that weren’t able to make the cut into TechCrunch, so we clearly have a lot of fledgling companies looking to gain traction, user adoption, and revenues or that are hoping to be acquired by a deep pocketed, white knight.

Why full disclosure with PR makes sense

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Today my colleague and I were discussing the importance of clients being upfront with their PR team about issues or internal weaknesses that they’d prefer didn’t exist or that they presume aren’t relevant to PR. It is not wise for companies to undertake “partial disclosure” with their PR team. Inevitably the company’s “issue or deficiency” is bound to surface publicly, and it may not be a pretty scene when it does. Or it may simply and quietly drive away customers. We’ve seen this bad habit enough to recognize it is not an isolated situation by any means, and I’m sure happens with regularity at large companies just as it happens with the startups. Here are more reasons why full disclosure with your PR firm is the best approach:

• PR firms can be like your legal counselor.By undertaking full disclosure with your PR, they have all the pieces on the table, whether those are good, bad, or (yes) ugly, but they can help you put a more effective long term strategy together. This strategy will help the company navigate what should have been the avoidable!

• When your PR team knows straight up all of the company’s potholes and otherwise, they are in a much better position to counsel the client on the pros and cons. PR can give you the possible fallout: if you do x, then y might happen, etc.That way, the company can make better decisions on how to proceed --- or not. So, for instance, don’t oversell your product/service prematurely. Why? Well, when reporters and people begin to try your product, guess what? They probably won’t come back---ever, or anytime soon.When a company publicly launches but the product wasn’t ready for prime-time, they cannot have a “do-over.”

• Rather than have your PR team unknowingly communicating hyperbole on a product, feature or benefit, if the PR team is truly “in the know,” they can adjust their emphasis on that benefit or feature that really doesn’t live up to the claim. Or, PR can tone down promoting a company’s position or approach vis-à-vis the competition, when in actuality; the company’s claim might be viewed as duplicitous by the press or blogger community.

• If a product or service is really buggy or essentially vaporware, companies need to realize that this type of smoke-and-mirrors strategy is not likely to succeed for a sustainable period, so they should resist prematurely marketing a product or service that isn’t ready for prime time. They’ll be spending their resources more effectively, and they will gain more credibility with the public for releasing quality products/services when they are ready to go to market.

While this all sounds reasonable, we often see an overconfidence on the part of entrepreneurs that they won’t get called out publicly for this nonchalant approach.Then when something does surface, they call in PR asking for help.