Droid Charge: Discharged

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Amy Poehler (seated)

I've been out of the blogging saddle for about a week now. Geesh. This has been the biggest sabbatical I've taken since I began penning prose on these pages back in April 2005.

Placido Domingo

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Well, I had a good excuse. My #2 son had his college graduation last week -- a full four-day extravaganza including the dorm move. Two down, one to go.

But what a fab week! Honorary doctorate degrees bestowed upon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Placido Domingo, Dr. David Satcher, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other such luminaries! Placido Domingo even broke into an Ginsburg-infused aria for the sitting Justice, herself a huge opera fan.

(l. to r. sons #3, 2 & 1 + BW)

The day before, Boston College alum Amy Poehler had a chance to share her pearls of wisdom with the new Crimson-infused graduates. Here's a link to her speech.

While all this was going on, my plan to extricate myself from the grid for a few days was made much easier by a dumb decision to finally abandon my Blackberry -- with its new OS's one-too-many clicks, uncaught exceptions and too many many unreadable websites. I opted for the new Droid Charge from Verizon Wireless.

My go-to site on such matters, The Business Insider, prompted this rash decision with its breathless headline "Get Verizon's Fastest Android Phone From Amazon For $100 Off" and story. I took the bait.


Huge Mistake.

Samsung Droid Charge for Verizon Wireless

Not only is the Droid Charge fatally flawed, but the second-tier tech support folks at VZW admitted as much to me. During the first evening's dinner with my son and his roommates and their families, I sat next to a Droid-using doctor who encouraged me to purchase a Griffin stylus to compensate for the myriad mistakes my clumsy fingers make on the touch screen keyboard.

At 9am the next day, I found one at the Verizon store. I now had a brand new Droid running 4G LTE, a full battery, a new stylus, and the sun was shining. Life was good. By 10:30am, the battery had died! Huh?

Verizon tech support advised me to download one of the "task killer" apps from the Droid's "Market" section. This way I could manually kill those unnecessary pre-loaded apps like VZ Navigator and Media Hub, which the tech told me "will drain a phone's battery in no time." Sounded good, except that those superfluous apps kept reappearing after the phone came out of lock mode...every two minutes.

I called again. The new tech support guy said that the task killer app is "very bad" for the phone. I should remove it and use the pre-installed app manager instead. Okayyyy. That done, the battery seems to last a tad longer, i.e., like three hours instead of two. Now how do I get my email to automatically refresh?

The third tech explained that Droid email is far inferior to Blackberry's, which has and will continue to have the "gold standard" for smartphone email. Moreover, emails sent are not instantly received. They can lag for five minutes or more. So much for real-time communications. Finally, I learned that some emails I sent were never received (nor synced with my laptop email). Groan.

But back to the battery drain issue. I finally had a level-two tech who whispered in my ear that I should "root" the Droid Charge, thus expunging any unwanted pre-loaded, battery-draining bloatware. "It's not all that simple, and it will void the warranty, but you'll find the battery will last longer." Basically, he explained, that Verizon pre-loaded all this crap on the phone, which inherently conflicts with Droid's native operating system. This drains the battery, but also causes the phone to spontaneously re-boot. (Ahh, that explains that dumb Droid sound I hear in the middle of the night.)

The re-booting also re-sets my settings, which rendered my Internet access obsolete. I arrived home and called tech support one last time to outline the growing number of problems I've had with the phone -- from short battery life to sporadic Internet access to faulty email. Did I mention that the Droid market versions of my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn mobile apps lost half their usability? No UberSocial? Or that the much-touted tethering and wireless router modes do not work with Macs.

The final level-two tech support asked me to hold several times so she could "consult" on the issues. She was literally clueless. She finally advised me to return the phone and get a new one or a different make. Really? I asked her whether others have complained and she had some canned answer like I personally am not aware. Hmmm. That's exactly what the other two techs said when I asked them the same question.

Thank you, Amazon for accepting the return for a full refund, no questions asked. I retrieved my BB Bold from the kitchen drawer and reactivated it. It soon experienced an uncaught exception freezing the device for some five minutes. The BB tech said the only remedy is a clean wipe of the phone back to factory settings, which means that all my third-party apps will also be wiped.

To make matters worse, Apple announced today that it will unveil everything BUT...the new iPhone 5 at an event on June 6.

Friday's Video Views

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Bye Bye Black-berry

I finally did it. After Business Insider tipped me off to Amazon's discount on the Droid Charge for Verizon, I took the bait. Why Droid over the promised iPhone 5 coming this fall? As a GMail, GTalk, GCal, Google Maps, Google Voice and Chrome user, it just made sense.

Goodbye to my Blackberry. RIMM, I'm sorry to say, your OS was plagued by too many problems including unresponsive trackballs, slow-loading and mostly unreadable web pages, and a new interface O/S 6.0 that required one too many clicks to get to my desired app. Did I mention the relative paucity of cool apps compared to i/OS and Droid?

So it seems appropriate for this week's opening video to show the first day's keynote from the much buzzed-about Google i/o developer conference in the Valley. He's Hugo Barra, director of Android Product Management. Other videos from the conference are posted here.




What LinkedIn's IPO Portends for Facebook

The other big buzz going down this week came from the first of what will now inevitably be a rash of IPOs from the elite in the social media space. LinkedIn's (low struck?) initial share price more than doubled after a frenzied day of trading. Here's TheDeal.com's clip with Lou Kerner, managing director, private shares group, Wedbush Securities Inc., on what this portends for the prospects of Facebook and others.




Startup Without a Video? Shame!

The Scobleizer visits with TransVideo srtudios to talk about the importance of video for startups (and everyone else) in helping to tell your story.




A New Apple-Google Battleground

As if Apple and Google didn't have enough on their hands battling one another for the minds (and money) of mobile users everywhere, Google is now taking the fight to the laptop with its Google Chromebook. Here's the Apple-like spot that Ad Age's media maven Simon Dumenco turned us on to this week.




Google Sachs

If you purchased Google's stock in its first year as a public company, you'd be counting your blessings today. This week, the search, ad, power, mobile, media, netbook, et. al. conglonerate conglomerate Google Advisor as a means to help consumers better navigate and compare the offerinbgs in one's personal financial decisionmaking maze.




The Cap 'n Gown Badge

What would Friday's Videos View be without an appearance by the king of the location game. Here's Dennis Crowley speaking at the Syracuse University graduation commencement. (via Mashable)





Dynamite

He's baaaaaack! This time in celluloid! (via SocialTimes.)

Glossing Over the News Release

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At yesterday's PCNY lunch, I sat next to BusinessWire's Christine Corey. "How's business?" I wondered. "As good as ever," she replied.

For those who follow this space, you may have noticed my last post in which I decried Vocus for inaccurately tagging me in its media database as a tech reporter. Suddenly, scores of irrelevant (to me) news releases of dubious news value are flooding my inbox daily.

Moreover, Vocus, unlike its prime competitor in the automated news release distribution space, Cision, offers no easy mechanism to secure removal from its database or even a way to self-modify one's editorial beat. One can only request to unsubscribe to the individual sender, i.e., "If you would rather not receive future communications from [company's lazy PR person], let us know by clicking here." I thus tweeted an appeal this morning to @vocuschairman to have my name removed. Let's see if he's listening.

But back to the point of this post. Hearing how well BusinessWire, and presumably its competitors Marketwire and PR Newswire, are doing, I began to understand why media relations pros are finding it harder than ever before to stand out in the tsunami of mostly superfluous emailed news releases to journalists. The news release trade is simply booming...to the detriment of those trying to break through.

Lavinthal (US Weekly), Bergamotto (Lucky), Langston (Fitness), Blitzer (Beauty Blitz), Pinson (NBC 4 Thread NY)

The beauty/fashion journalists who sat on yesterday's Publicity Club on New York panel (like the many before them), maintained that email is the preferred mode of engagement. All admitted receiving hundreds of emailed PR pleas a day of which only a very few subject lines prompt a click through. Most, they agreed, are misguided. (Concise, accurate and grounded subject lines remain key.)

Someone in the audience asked about following up. The panelists concurred that following up is not verboten, but wait a week or two. Some appreciated a gentle email reminder since viable story ideas often get lost in the mire. (No phone calls, please.) If the reminder also falls on deaf ears, it's time to move on. Reporters from other beats, like tech, bristle at the notion of the follow up. "You mean my email doesn't work?"

Lori Bergamotto, style contributor to Lucky Magazine and a frequent guest on the morning and daytime talk shows, gave props to the PR peeps who follow her on Twitter. She cited one enterprising pro who quickly fulfilled her urgent tweeted appeal for a shaded lip moisturizer. It wound up being featured on a network morning show. She and others have used Twitter's friend/follower mechanism to build strong relationships with her PR sources.

As for the lowly news release, it's extremely rare that an unsolicited (mass-emailed) news release landing in a reporter's email box will result in editorial coverage from that reporter -- even if it is the right reporter for the story. No reporter wants to be among the many.

On the other hand, I did notice something today that I haven't seen very often. A reporter for one of the world's most influential tech websites (someone with 17K+ followers on Twitter) tweeted a link to a...BusinessWire-issued news release. Oh well. Long live the news release!

Photo: Peter Himler using a Canon PowerShot SX20 IS

Thermogenic Energy & The PR Pro

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I've decided to take this blog in a new editorial direction. At least that's the assessment of Vocus, which recently anointed me as a tech if you believe the PR pitch themes that have suddenly suffocated my inbox.

Here are those that arrived over the last 24 hours (and their formats):

Photon Control Launches New Line of Temperature Measurement Tools Specifically Designed For The Power Industry
(Unsolicited PDF news release attached)

Siemon’s High Speed 40+Gb/s Cabling Selected for Extreme Networks 96 Port 40G Ethernet Demo
(Unsolicited docx news release attached)

Forkfly social platform announces new daily deal service: Superfly
(Rich-formatted news release pasted in body of email)

Certiport Selected as Exclusive Provider of New Autodesk Certification
(YouTube-posed video news release pasted in body of email)

CSCO: Downgraded at Canaccord; Comps, Execution Risk Cited; A ‘Shoe to Drop’
(Unsolicited PDF analyst report attached)

Article offered: How Telephone Expenses Management could save UK Plc £1bn now
(Plain-formatted email pitch letter from the UK with no links)

Enkitec Launches Enkitec University for Hands-On Oracle Exadata Training
(Plain-formatted pitch letter with links in body of email)

Weidenhammer brings Edupoint’s GENESIS™ & GENESEA™ to market in 24 new states
(Rich-media formatted news release pasted into the email with unsolicited PDF file attached)

Smart Phone and Tablet PC Demand Drives Wide-Viewing Angle Display
Technologies, led by IPS and FFS
(Rich-formatted news release and color info-graphics pasted into the body of the email)

Bonavitas Introduces The First Truly Thermogenic Energy Drink
(Plain-formatted news release in body of email)

Now I'm not a malicious kind of guy who revels in publicly exposing the PRpetrators of these misguided press releases. I believe I've done my duty by outing the industry and its vendors' shortcomings over some six years of penning prose for these pages. Still, I continue to be mystified by PR professionals who blindly blast out news releases or pitch letters without first checking out where they're being sent.

I mean who doesn't know by now that it's a mistake to put all one's faith in the veracity of a Vocus or Cision media database to identify the exact right journalist? A quick peruse down the right column of the New York Times's "Bits" blog will tell you that tech reporters come in many varied flavors.

Net net: human intervention is required when vetting media targets. More importantly, human news judgment is required before deciding to pull the trigger on a news release. Even if I were a tech scribe, I'm not sure any of the above would get my editorial juices flowing.

UPDATE 5/23 - Vocus PR explains company policy:

Thanks Peter –

I did see your blog article and wanted to follow up with you. First and foremost I apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing.

We have removed your contact information from our database.

We at Vocus actively and strongly discourage our clients from sending pitches and press releases to journalists, reporters or bloggers without first researching to ensure the topic is relevant for the recipient. However, there are some PR professionals who send press releases without establishing relationships or doing the necessary research.

Because of this, we do have a Journalist hotline. The information is listed on our website and is as follows:

877-402-5262 or via email at JournalistHotline@vocus.com.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Cassie


Cassandra Z. Péan
Public Relations Manager
Vocus Inc.

Relieved to be off the tech reporter list. Now wouldn't it be nice if those using Vocus's service actually did a bit more research before hitting the send-spam button?

NYC: Tech Incubator

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Now this is becoming a regular gig. I was one of the fortunate few (800 +/-) who landed a seat at the monthly New York Tech Meetup. For those who haven't attended one of these events, I strongly recommend joining this vibrant community of 17,300 that was formed in 2004 and I believe today is the largest of all the Meetup community organizations.

NY Tech Meetup's Jessica Lawrence

As a member, you'll be kept apprised of the group's various activities, including its always sold-out monthly showcase for startups, and be able to tap the community's expertise through its active bulletin board. More importantly, for PR pros, you'll be in a position to help many ingenious New York tech startups gain the recognition they want and deserve. They may have VC money and legal advice, but it's PR and marketing acumen that's sorely needed from what I can tell.

The month's range of presenters included Hack NY winners ETSY.TV, which adapted for television (Boxee and Google TV) the popular, home-grown e-commerce site whose stated mission is "...to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers." Rather than my trying to describe it, watch their demo:

Ronnie's Fave Film: Elvis in Hawaii?

Next up was another Hack NY winner whose (anti-social?) application helps users identify those whose social profiles make them ripe for an ass-kicking. Aptly called "Come @ Me Bro," the developer uses one's taste in movies to determine the match-ups. As someone whose fave films are "Risky Business," "Ferris Bueller," and "It's A Wonderful Life," I (unfortunately) was one of three people in the audience selected whose taste in films deemed me fight-worthy. Go figure. (I thought it best not to raise my hand.)

The audience was then treated to a presentation by Uber, which just that morning had its New York coming out via a Jenna Wortham feature story in The New York Times. Uber has armed private car fleets with mobile technology that will allow them to quickly respond to a passenger in need of a ride. One text and the pre-registered (with credit card) passenger can tap one of the "300 cars in NYC" that Uber has thus far signed on.

It costs about 50 percent more than a standard cab fare, according to Charlie who I ran into in the lobby following the event. (The seed stage VC firm for which he works is one of the investors.) Hey, if you're stranded between taxi shifts, and late for a meeting, paying a little extra is probably worth it (except perhaps if you're Arrington).

Other startups I liked included:

Clique, an invitation-only, socially driven matchmaking service that brings out the "Gladwellian connector" instincts in all of us:

Bloomberg Gets Rez-Scored

RezScore, a free resume evaluation service that grades your CV and offers specific areas for improvement. (They ran my CV through the mill and it earned a respectable B+ -- not that I'm in the job market.)

Matchbook's Jason Schwartz

Jason Schwartz's Matchbook, which makes it easy to bookmark your fave restaurants, shops, etc. It's sort of like Yelp meets Evernote. It's available for download in the iTunes Store.

ShoutEm - As the world goes mobile, it will be extremely useful to have the means to easily create native apps for the iPhone and Android O/S without the sometimes arcane skill sets of a coder.

Finally, I liked the Hack of the Month - Bridg.me. How many times have you missed those conference calls on your calendar -- even if you set it up for a 15-minute advance alert? This app actually reaches out and connects me to my conference calls skedded on my Google Calendar app. Nice.

Hope to see you at the next NY Tech Meetup on June 7 (assuming the Personal Democracy Forum can clear out of Skirball in time). Andrew?

Friday's Video Views

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The World is Safer and BTW, Our Traffic Spiked

As the implications of Osama's sudden demise reverberated around the world, MSNBC.com Prez Charles Tillinghast chatted up the implications for his news site: "Sunday night was a very interesting night for online video viewing." (via Beet.TV)




Build Your Empire

Scroll down the right column of this blog, and you'll notice a banner to purchase "stock" in (a still undervalued) PETERH on Empire Avenue. For the cool kids, this new social network, which takes the concept of social self-aggrandizement to a whole new level, is ramping rapidly. Today Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang tweeted an image of the first "branded good" unlocked on the channel. What Empire Avenue contributes to mankind remains to be seen, though I must confess that the site does offer something primal to motivate its participants.




Cutting the Digital Cord

No, I'm not referring to your cable subscription, but rather your digital addiction. Daniel Sieberg, a prolific journalist who follows the tech space, has a new book out this week titled The Digital Diet. It's described as a "four-step plan to break your digital addiction" (to Empire Avenue?). Here's the accompanying video:




Does Twitter Drive TV Viewership?

Remember those compilation tapes of TV airchecks we PR peeps were/are so fond of producing to demonstrate our value to clients? Well, the practice isn't lost on the folks at Twitter who put together this video to demonstrate the lengths to which cable and broadcast TV programs are going to incite their viewers to tweet on their behalves. (via Twitter's YouTube page and Mashable.)




"Chart Shit"

Here's a fast-paced video from the design team at Bloomberg BusinessWeek that'll give you a sense of the work that goes into laying out this most influential business publication -- online and off.


BUSINESSWEEK: THE MOVIE SORT OF from bizweekgraphics on Vimeo.


Fly the Photo Coop

Frustrated with the limitations of iPhoto or Picasa? Don't want to spend all that money for Adobe Photoshop? Then perhaps you should take NYC-germinated Aviary for a spin. Here's a clip on the free photo-editing service from your friends at TechCrunch TV.




Emotion & Utility

Both Google and Apple took to television to debut new ad campaigns for the Chrome browser and iPad 2, respectively. Google took a poignant approach with its two spots (the second airing during "Glee"):





While Apple promoted the utility of its industry-dominant tablet:

Social Lip Service

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Who in our field hasn't advised their clients to increase their investment in monitoring what's being said about their products, services and issues in the social spheres? It's not just listening to the conversation, but the digitally smart companies have empowered so-called "social media representatives" to engage detractors, primarily for the purposes of distracting them from detracting.

How much latitude should a company give these internal (and increasingly external) teams when it comes to placating disgruntled customers?

In the last week two very influential blogs - TechCrunch and Cosumerist -- have called out companies who simply didn't follow through on the promise. The engagement apparently ended when the socially "empowered" reps requested contact information from the angry Twitterer or blogger for the presumed purposes of resolving the complaint.

It appears that many companies are giving social lip service to this increasingly vital aspect of public/customer relations. Perhaps they feel that the simple act of engaging a complainant in conversation can itself neutralize the issue? But what if the rant emanates from someone with more than 30,000 Twitter followers, or worse, the capacity to caustically elaborate on the pages of one of the world's most popular blogs?

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld

Last week TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld finally was so fed up with his AA flight that he whipped out his laptop (a Macbook or iPad 2 we presume) to pen a post lambasting the airline and its social media reps for their ineptitude.

"Oh, and @AmericanAir also managed to prove that it is an utterly toothless marketing arm of American which fails when it comes to providing actual customer service. I never thought I’d say this as a loyal American Airlines customer who has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles on American over the years, but it may now be worse than Delta."

His colleague Paul Carr followed up a few days later with a post titled "The Scandal Of Toothless Social Media Representatives Ends… Now" in which he took down the entire practice of social engagement:

"In fact Erick’s ‘rant’ was long overdue. American Airlines’ social media department does suck when it comes to providing actual customer service. But here’s the thing: so does everybody else’s."

He goes on to paint the entire practice as a house of cards solely designed to quash public-facing dissent:

"Across America, and the world, thousands upon thousands of people are current employed as “social media representatives” or “online brand ambassadors” or whatever title we’re giving to this army of 19-year-old, disaffected, invent-your-own-job-title millennials this week. In almost every case, those responsible for the Twitter accounts of giant companies have absolutely no access to customer accounts, nor are they in any way able to make the decisions required to resolve complaints.

Instead their job is simply to identify angry customers, publicly apologize and then promise to resolve the matter by DM. Nothing more. This despite the fact that for a growing number of customers, these @companyname or @companynamecares Twitter accounts represent the primary public face of multi-billion dollar brands."

I think Mr. Carr and Mr. Schonfeld make good points, as did Consumerist's Ben Popken when he picked up on the TC meme to say that the real goal of these social media reps is to take the nasty conversation offline:

"By asking the user to "direct message" the information, it takes the conversation out of public view. A decent percentage of those people will stop publicly tweeting. Either they forget/get too lazy to take that extra step, or they want to be honorable and give the company a chance without publicly bashing them, or they otherwise get sucked into dealing with the social media decoy."

It's not just a matter of giving a company's social media reps the "teeth" to compensate the complaining customer. It's also a question of whether this function can cost-effectively scale within the enterprise to engage literally every complainer on Twitter, Facebook or a blog. Shouldn't a company first assess the complainant's Klout before determining its course of engagement? As Mr. Carr observes:

"Erick and I are fortunate to have TechCrunch as a platform to draw attention to this scandalous waste of company resources and mass-deception of customers. The vast majority of people aren’t so lucky."

Yes, the vast majority of people do not have a platform like TechCrunch to air out their frustrations. On the other hand, history tells us that a single angry, no-name airline passenger with a camera phone has the capacity to bring a most reputable company to its knees.

Do all companies fall short in this area? Hardly. I personally experienced a make-good from a prominent auto manufacturer after I complained on the pages of this small blog. Even so, many companies today would clearly benefit by thinking longer and harder about what role their social media reps should play, let alone how to better identify individuals and incidents that have the potential to incur real reputational damage.