Your Weekend Viewing

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Gmail Intervention

The inimitable Ben Parr of Mashable brings our attention to Gmail's retro video encouraging viewers to stage "an email intervention." I mean we all have friends who languish on AOL, Yahoo! and even HotMail. While it probably doesn't mean much to my wife and her friends, the digerati clearly are bothered by the continued use of those once ubiquitous (but now anachronistic?) email domains. Will they heed Gmail's call to bully them out of existence? It's a nasty world out there.




iPhone versus Blackberry

I, like many others, are growing tired of my Blackberry, and the lack of innovation therein. Sure, it's email remains tops, even as Android and i/OS continue to gnaw away RIM's market share lunch. The Times today popped out this video comparing the two. As for me, let's see whether the new iPhones expected to bow in late August, will provide a sufficient incentive for me to finally make the switch. (@NYTimes via Crackberry)




iPad 2 for Everyone

Here's the new family-friendly TV spot for the iPad2. (via mashable)




Awesome A/R

Whenever TechCrunch uses the adjective "awesome" in one of its headlines, it grabs my attention. And to hear it in association with the inventors of code division multiple access, i.e., CDMA for short (think VZW and Sprint), it really draws my attention. I used to represent Qualcomm in the days when company CEO Irwin Jacobs campaigned to convince the world that his standard was the standard. And I'll never forget riding with him in a taxi to CNBC's New York studios. When we arrived, I grabbed my wallet and realized I only had a single dollar bill in it. "Irwin, would you mind terribly picking up the fare?"

This particular video clip shows a new dimension to Qualcomm, and it's in the augmented reality space. Teaming with Mattel's Rock Em Sock Em game, we witness a demo on an Android phone of an A/R app that's pretty cool, albeit in the fighting realm. The news? "Qualcomm's Awesome Augmented Reality SDK Now Available For iOS" (via @grg / TechCrunch)




For the Ginger Baker in All of Us

This may not be augmented reality in the strictest mobile context, but this little drummer boy certainly augments reality. (via TechCrunch




The Internet According to MTV (circa 1995)

Love this trip down memory lane....




Web Metrics Wonk

My very analytical friend Marshall Sponder aka @webmetricsguru, whose new book Social Media Analytics bows next month, introduces us to a Twitter search tool call FollowerWonk that lets you search for people, places and interests via their Twitter profiles. Here's his demo of the tool.




The Apple Store Challenge

AKA "The Cult of the Apple Store." With big Apple news this week that Apple will Shake Shack New York's cavernous Grand Central Terminal, here's one fellow at the Apple Store in Soho who decided to test the retailer's patience. (via Laughing Squid, H/T Guy Kawasaki and AllTop.

Night at the Roxy

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NYC's New High Line Skating Rink

OK I'll date myself with this one, and diverge from the usual PR fare found on these pages. (Hey. It's a summer Friday. Cut me some slack.)

My nostalgic inspiration comes from a piece in today's New York Post that reported on the opening yesterday of a new retro roller rink that resides below the city's fab and irresistibly alluring High Line.

It was the early eighties  and my girlfriend at the time, a senior at Princeton who later became a physician -- still unmarried I might add -- heard that this entertainment publicist landed a couple of VIP tickets to the grand re-opening of the Roxy Roller Rink.  I really had no desire to use them, but my more exuberant star-struck raven-haired girlfriend (relentlessly) insisted.

Site of the former Roxy Roller Rink

We arrived at the club on the far west end of West 18th Street in the then rough & tumble Chelsea neighborhood. Using my best Studio 54 attitude, I grabbed my girlfriend's hand and we made our way through the throngs of aspirants to the harried man with the clipboard.  He found my name and we were duly anointed as cool.

Right way the dark and cavernous club enveloped us with a throbbing disco beat and hordes of Ziggy Stardust wannabes. Above the din and glitter, my girlfriend dragged me to the skate dispensary. Huh? No way! I don't think I've worn a pair of roller skates since donning those plastic ones when I was 4 or 5 years old. She glared at me. I relented.

John McEnroe and Vitas Gerulitas circa 1982

Tip-toeing on the carpet toward the roller derby-like oval rink with bowling alley-slickened wooden floors, I felt a sense of dread of what was to come. No fewer than three TV news crews lined the perimeter. I slowly dipped my unsteady foot into the spotlight and thrust myself forward. Hey. I am so cool! Once around. This is easy! My girlfriend yelled out, "Peter, there's Vitas Gerulitas over there being interviewed!" On the rink?  

Uh oh. I think I'm going too fast. Vitas is getting closer...too close. BOOM! The tennis pro hit the floor, followed by me, and the sound guy. Yikes. I made a feeble attempt at an apology, and quickly crawled out of the limelight. I prayed that this portion of the opening night coverage would not make it into Roxy's PR firm's clip book. 

Will I take a spin at the new High Line rink?  Doubtful. But I  definitely expect to admire it from high above.

In Praise of Rogue Tweets

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I'm not advocating for consumer-facing brands on Twitter to go rogue or anything, but what if they did, and it eventually paid off?

A day doesn't pass when some tasteless new Twitter-fueled gaffe emerges onto the media's radar and is quickly added to the annals of bad PR practices. This of course follows a viral and vengeful vendetta via the very medium in which the gaffe first appeared. The culprit invariably expresses contrition, and often is canned by the company holding the Twitterstrings.

The latest iteration of this scenario involves the now-departed Amy Winehouse. No, I'm not alluding to the questionable post by one PR person speaking his mind, but rather the so-called shameless promotional tweet by the UK-based rep for Microsoft's Zune who exhorts his followers to:

"Tweetbox360 Remember Amy Winehouse by downloading the ground-breaking 'Back to Black' over at Zune:social.zune.net/album/Amy-Wine..."

I suspect that this was simply a case of poor judgment by the junior (agency?) person in whose hands the company's Twitter account was entrusted. Still, I'd be curious to know whether the incendiary tweet, apart from generating notoriety (i.e., awareness), produced a spike in downloads of Ms. Winehouse's "Back to Black" album (on Zune no less).

In April, I wrote about bad public behavior and asked the question:

"What level of edginess or outrageousness is required to break through today's media clutter?"

Are some of these tasteless tweets consciously conceived to create controversy? After the initial pain produced by an outraged public, can they ultimately accrue positively to (languishing) brands? Does the ephemeral nature of Twitter, and the media in general, eventually eradicate the offending remark from the public's short-term memory banks?

Following that famous Kenneth Cole tweet in which he, or whomever tweeted on his behalf, exploited the bloody protests in Egypt to promote a shoe sale, a blogger for the Seattle PI postulated that this was actually a calculated gambit:

"In other words a marketer will take an action that’s less than kosher to get attention, which satisfies the first level of reach, then apologize for that action, which draws more attention, and then ride off the talk that’s generated from the entire episode. That’s what Kenneth Cole’s going through. Overall, he’s still got a good name and the Internet flamers who jump on him will, in some cases, make themselves look so bad it actually helps Cole."

In an age when the public has a greater tolerance than ever for truly tasteless tweeting, I gotta think that marketers everywhere are scheming for new ways to lower the bar to break through the clutter. Am I an advocate for such (mis)behavior? Let's just say: proceed at your own PR-ilous risk.

Your Weekend Video Viewing

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Since I missed Friday's deadline for pulling together this week's video clips, I will use the occasion to rename the weekly roundup. Here are the top clips for your weekend video viewing.

Google+

Google's stock price is soaring, and many believe it's due to the quick ramp (20M+ invite-only users) of Google's first (major) foray into social networking. Here's one of many clips on Google+. Personally, I'm digging it, but can't wait until Ping.fm allows me to tie it to my other social nets.




Dell, the Man

Other boffo earnings out this week came from Google-rival (on many fronts, especially mobile) Apple. The company released impossibly strong earnings. Embedded in the news was the fact that tablets -- the iPad -- is eating into laptop sales across the board. So what better time to catch up with Michael Dell of the PC company bearing his name? (via #DellCAP)




Skype Deal

The news has passed, but the implications are significant. Here's a fresh look inside Microsoft's acquisition of Skype. (via Megan Barnett at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference.). If the embed code doesn't pop below, watch the video clip


TV Talk Booking Insights for PR Pros

The club I run held a luncheon this week in New York featuring senior producers and talent bookers from five morning and daytime TV talk shows - Today, GMA, LIVE! With Regis & Kelly, Rachael Ray and the Wendy Williams Show. We had a sold crowd, and planned to livestream the panel. Murphy's Law raised its ugly head, and the stream didn't come off. Here are the rough videos from the five presenters. Edelman's Lisa Kovitz, a PCNY board member, moderates.

GMA's Patty Neger:



Regis & Kelly's Kelly Burkhard, Today's Angela LaGreca:



Wendy Williams' Rena Popp & Rachael Ray's Tommy Crudup:




NYC (in Video Games)

Finally, here's a clever compilation of New York City as its portrayed in video games. Enjoy.

(via Gothamist

"Raped by the Internet"

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"I feel like I have been robbed of everything, including my identity. I am not seeking fame or notoriety. I just want my life back."

Today's New York Daily News reports on one Hermon Raju's search for a crisis communications expert to help her get her life back. Ms. Raju is the 20-something woman who was captured on a cell phone video in a diva-driven dressing-down of a Metro North rail conductor.

Her vitriolic video went viral propelled mainly by this sound bite: "Excuse me, do you know what schools I've been to and how well-educated I am?" (She's an NYU alum.) The video not only captured the public's imagination, but also the attentions of Anderson Cooper, Yahoo! News, HuffPost, AOL, and Keith Olbermann on his Current TV show debut no less.

The News got its hands on her letter (RFP?) seeking PR counsel to help her "get her life back." Consumerist and others picked up on the piece. I just wonder if leaving well enough alone will prove the best path back to normalcy. Time (and a 24/7 news cycle) has the ability to erase or obscure even the most egregious public transgressions. This is especially true for the unknown and those who've accumulated a decent amount of reputation capital (Mr. Murdoch not included).

Without knowing the profession or professional aspirations of this young woman, she should recognize that these kinds of news-generating incidents -- in today's upside down celebrity culture -- can actually serve as springboards to fame...and fortune. On the extreme side of this postulation: Didn't Charlie Sheen just announce a new series? Or wasn't Casey Anthony offered a million dollars?

I'm not saying that this NYU grad should exploit the incident for her own aggrandizement, but stranger things have happened. Then again, maybe this IS her real intention.

Would you as a PR professional take on Ms. Raju as a client? And if so, how would you advise her?

Friday's Video Views

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What is Google in 2011?

On its blog this week, Google posted this video that attempts to capture its essence. Nicely done, I'd say.




Why I Hate Facebook

As if Facebook didn't have the Google juggernaut breathing down its neck with its boffo launch of Google+, a PR bi-product of a potentially competitive social network surfaces those who question Facebook's flaws. Here's a clever clip on showing ten things we hate about Facebook.




Mad Mobile Money

IAB's mobile chief predicts $1 billion in mobile ad sales THIS YEAR. (exclusive via Beet.TV)




Spotify

After what seems like the longest gestation period of any startup I know, social music site Spotify finally arrived on our shores via invitation only. Fortunately, I was tuned in to TheNextWeb's Twitterstream when TNW editor Zee Kane offered up a password. I signed on, registered and soon learned that I could share my iTunes' playlists with my Facebook friends, among other things. Neat. Now the big question: which is more of a time sync: Spotify or Turntable.fm? (via The Atlantic)




Visual.ly

For the infographics crowd, here's a newly launched company that focuses on nothing but. (via VideoCrunch)




On A Need-to-Know Basis

Here's a quirky (or is it edgy?) video clip of "the five things you need to know this week" (via @prnewser)




"Deathly Trailer...Not

If you haven't heard, Harry is back for the last time on celluloid. Here's a faux trailer remade to Rebecca Black's "Friday:"

The NY Tech Meetup: July Showcase

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I had a chance to take my #2 son to the July New York Tech Meetup. A recent college graduate who's accepted a job in investment banking for the tech sector out of San Francisco, he was surprised by the strong vibe in the room and the close-knit NYC tech community that coalesces each month around digital startups, coding and entrepreneurship.

Frankly, for an event that was held the day after the long July 4 weekend, I wasn't expecting a big turnout. I was wrong. The team at NYTM drew a full house to NYU's Skirball Center to hear from a handful of enthusiastic entrepreneurs proudly showcasing their creations. Moderator Nate Westheimer, NYTM chief Jessica Lawrence and NYTM Associate Brandon Diamond (who gave a shout out to his younger hacker brother in the audience), have the formula down pat, i.e., "No questions about biz models or revenue streams!"

Brett & Brent of Sonar.me

Every one of the ten tech companies that presented had some redeeming feature that earned them a place on the stage before this most discerning audience of 800 coders, students, VCs, lawyers, PR peeps and aspiring entrepreneurs.

The first company to present showed a location-driven app called Sonar.me that lets the user find and contact those with shared friends and interests who have checked in to the same venue. Hmmm. Neat idea for the physical networking crowd.

LocalBonus

I also liked LocalBonus, which attempts to capture in a single interface all those bonus points your credit card company offers with purchases from participating merchants. The good news: the developers have the credit card part of the equation down pat. The challenge: lining up merchants.  Didn't Foursquare yesterday tout that it now has signed up 500,000 businesses? I guess you gotta start somewhere.

The music-minded purveyors of VivaLaPlaylist has entered a space whose buzz of late has been dominated by two ascendant competitors: SoundCloud and Turntable.fm, which just today announced a fresh infusion of $5-10 million in cash giving it a $40 million valuation." Still, GigaOm proclaims that social music is booming, so presumably it's a big sandbox in which to play.

Watchlr Demo'd

The developers at Watchlr set out to tackle the issue of capturing digital videos for later viewing. So with this app, any video can be right-clicked to bring up a menu that will give the user the ability to save or share. It's all very intuitive. "Does it work with some of the less than savory video sites on the Web?" One pervert in the audience asked. "Not...yet."

Location and mobile increasingly dominate the digital conversation in the Alley and Valley. Taap.it brings the two together with an app that allows the user to find or sell goods and services locally in real-time. I raised my hand to ask about how the developers hope to avoid scam artists and sheisters. (Yelp, eBay, Amazon ratings?) But Nate's eyes didn't find me in the auditorium.

Ron Williams of SnapGoods and Knod.es

One of the more engaging platforms and presenters who was described on Twitter as "confident, authentic & funny" was Ron Williams for Snapgoods (now with Knod.es). Snapgoods is another Platform that allows one to find, sell or trade goods and services locally. Knode.es, a pivot, which was the more compelling piece, lets one take better advantage of his or her social network of friends and contacts.

Ron laid out the premise: we all have built these robust social networks with hundreds if not thousands of contacts/friends. Yet, we barely scratch the surface of their potential utility to our lives. He noted that after accepting a Facebook or LinkedIn friend, 80 percent of one's network is never contacted again, except perhaps for a birthday wish. So who is in your network anyway?

CityPockets' Cheryl Yeoh

How many daily deal sites do you subscribe to?  According to CityPockets' Cheryl Yeoh, there are some 4000 from which to choose (and that number's growing), which make it hard to remember all the deals you bought, let alone where the deals can be had.

CitPockets helps you organize this with maps, deal listings by expiration dates, and even the ability to sell your deal via a secondary market. If you believe, like Screenwerk's Greg Sterling does, that deal sites will continue to flourish, then having a single platform on which to store and sort them makes a hell of a lot of sense.  Nice work, Cheryl and team. 
  
After watching Bartek Wingwelski demo SkillSlate, a platform that seamlessly helps you find virtually any kind of professional service in any major U.S. city, I decided to give it a test run. I'm in need of a video producer who can webcast our July 21 PCNY lunch featuring TV producers/bookers.  I inputted some basic info, and within 24 hours I have two qualified leads.

The site scrapes listings from Craigs List, Yelp, CitySearch, Google Places and elsewhere, and then uses college-educated, digitally savvy "skill scouts" to surface prospects to fill the requestor's service need. What's more the service providers see one another's "bids," so the prices are most competitive.  Bartek cleverly brought out some breakdancers he found on Skillslate.



Last, but certainly not least, the audience was wowed by the group from NYU's 3D labs, which has been painstakingly collaborating with NYU Medical School to create a remarkable 3D animation of the human body. "Bodies: The Exhibition," step aside! The video for BioDigital Human below speaks volumes about this remarkable accomplishment and its potential applications.

The Aggregated Press Release

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"These days PR is everything." Or so starts a post titled "Press Releases: Friend or Foe" on editorsweblog.org, a "publication of the World Editors Forum." The post goes on to talk about the value (or lack thereof) of the press release and a couple of new services that attempt to breathe new life into this much-maligned mechanism for media manipulation.

I've written quite a bit about the news release over the years, and remain supportive of its value for PR pros - not so much as a catalyst for coverage, but rather as a decent palette on which to frame the salient elements of a piece of news. Gone are the days when the news release had the capacity to motivate journalists to write a story. Most decry the lack of real news, and the fact that they are likely on the receiving end of a mass e-mail.

Then again, Google, which usually posts its news on its blogs, continues to draft news releases around its earnings, and those releases succeed in shaping coverage.

I happen to have a pedestrian interest in the editorsweblog piece. A few years back, I helped develop a media targeting tool that used a reporter's actual coverage (versus title or beat) to determine whether he or she "matched" the story pitch. My then co-developer built a search engine that surfaced reporters' names based on how well their cumulative body of work matched the search query (e.g., a news release, pitch letter, keywords).

After the media targeting tool for PR pros bowed, I pushed my co-developer to build the next iteration of the platform -- a mirror engine for journalists seeking real-time sources based on the aggregation of publicly accessible news releases. If a journalist needed resources on solar energy technology, the engine would scrape the names of the contacts from every news release in the system on the subject.

This engine was never built...or so I thought. Here's a bit from the story today:

"A new company, Noodls, is bucking that trend. It is the first online aggregator of press releases in "real time", and has nearly 9 million archived press releases. It does not wait for PR submissions (although PR reps can submit them), but runs a vertical search engine to gather archives in multiple languages."

Very cool. Not so much for its ability to help journalists do their jobs better, but more for putting PR firmly back in the reporter-PR equation. Here's another bit from the piece:

"Although journalists have relied on press releases for stories for about a century (a 1926 study of the New York Times concluded that up to 60% of the New York Times' stories came from PR), some question the integrity of "press release journalism". As the Internet has speeded the pace of breaking news, news organizations should pause to consider if press releases affect the quality of their stories."

It's no secret that when it comes to engaging reporters (versus bypassing reporters by creating and syndicating original content), the PR pro's role as a primary resource for timely information has been on the wane for years. There are just too many other credible channels reporters can tap to effectively do their jobs.

Hopefully, this new effort to pull reporters to useful, real-time content will help re-establish the PR pro's standing as a viable news source. As for elevating the quality of the news release itself, well that's a whole other--->

Friday's Video Views

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"Insane Demand" for Google+

The big news this week came from Google. (Next week we're promised "awesome" news from Facebook.) Here's a quick peek at Google+, Google's first full-throttle foray into social networking. (Some may argue that Buzz and Wave were, but I would disagree, at least in terms of the breadth and functionality of this new platform.) Judging from the early adoption and buzz by the cool kids, + the clamor to get an invite -- my #2 son told me today that new invitations were being shut down due to the "insane" demand - I'd say Google+ stands a good chance of thriving. (via Mashable)




Eye-Tracking

Attendees at the Kara & Walt Show at D9 got a glimpse of "the first eye-controlled laptop." (via @pkafka)

http://allthingsd.com/20110626/how-to-control-your-laptop-with-your-eyeballs-tobiis-d9-demo-video/?mod=tweet


A "Frothy" IPO Market

More with the always-quotable Kara Swisher who chatted with my buddy Andy Plesser for Beet.TV. This interview was captured on the eve of Zynga's $1B IPO filing, which came today. No surprise, according to Kara, since Zynga's bankers were "leaking more than the Titanic."




Pope Tweets

In late January 2010, it was reported on these pages that the Pope joined the Facebook generation. Now it seems, he has taken to Twitter, a platform my friend @zimbalist noted (on Twitter) that registered 200 million tweets/day as of June versus 65 million/day a year ago.




Justin Fallon

In conclusion....



Enjoy the long weekend!