POV

No, I'm not talking about Point of View, I'm talking about Post Olympic Viewing. As Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt get their medals through airport security, the rest of us are getting used to life without the Olympics. NBC has returned to showing crappy game shows. Newspapers here in the US are relieved that the Democratic National Convention is in full swing. Though, let's face it, it's hard to switch from pure entertainment to speeches urging us to solve the world's problems. What the lack of Olympics shows is:

1. How good these Olympics were. Whatever your views on China and its human rights records you have to admit they put on a stunning event and one that will be almost impossible to follow.

2. The end of the Olympics has created a vacuum into which a smart company or politician would launch themselves. However, it needs to be someone or something very smart. Anything average will be viewed as either blatant publicity seeking or perhaps even worse be ignored altogether. On that basis Obama would appear to have a great opportunity.

Apple does the best PR

OK, so my little survey is far from statistically accurate but when asked: "who does the best PR?" Apple got over half the votes. 55% to be precise. Indeed the rest (Dell, IBM, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft) were bunched pretty tightly with only a few votes separating them. Now these results could be interpreted several ways:

1. You could argue that Apple is doing a great job with its PR. I struggle to agree with that. I think they've launched a great product that is getting tons of attention and their PR is therefore very visible. I wouldn't say they have done bad PR but I equally wouldn't say it has been great.

2. You could argue that this quick poll shows that people don't really differentiate PR form other marketing forms. In other words the brands doing the most marketing get noticed the most whether it is through PR, advertising, sponsorship etc. Sadly I think there is some truth to this. Even PR people (who voted on this) judge these things at a very superficial level.

3. It could be that this poll doesn't reflect who has done great PR but rather who has received the least negative PR. I firmly believe that we are in an era where people are more aware of negative PR than they are of positive PR. Indeed I've seen research for a client that proved this point. If this applies here it would suggest that Apple has received almost no bad PR in recent weeks. Aside form the concerns about Jobs health that surfaced I'd say that was true. Indeed given the potential for poor reviews of the iPhone thanks to its horrid battery life it could be argued they have very skillfully avoided bad press. Put another way, do a quick test and ask yourself what news you remember around any of the big companies right now. I can almost guarantee you can recall more negatives than positives.

In reality, the answer lies in a mix of all of the above. That sounds like a cop out I know but I think it is true. Apple has maximized the opportunities you get when you have a great consumer product (I think the iPhone is spectacular apart from its battery life issue). I also think it has managed to avoid bad press and commentary and instead get people focused on tips and tricks to solve the poor battery life issue (if you don't believe me here just go online and see how many people have put up blog entries with ways to save your iPhone from dying). I also believe that this shows that when a company gets its overall marketing to be tightly integrated then people pay attention.

Phelps beats most of the world

I was just reading the Live Text coverage of the Olympics on BBC.co.uk (which incidentally is a great read of you like British humor). Someone made the point that if Phelps were a country he would be fourth in the overall medal table. That puts one person ahead of almost all the developed nations in the world. Some of the world's smaller nations will no doubt start scouting their local swimming pools looking for their own Phelps.

BBC will text you a reminder to watch Phelps win again

The BBC has introduced a clever system to help boost its Olympics ratings. It seems (potential) viewers can sign up to get a couple of text messages a day reminding them that a certain event is about to be shown on TV (such as Phelps going for another gold medal). You could see this idea being applied to a whole range of things. For example radio stations could text you to tune in when a certain song is about to be played. Equally, your favorite sports team could send you a text message when they score and provide information on where you can watch or listen to the game. Businesses could text you when a certain item goes on sale. The list is really quite endless and I wonder if there isn't a business here for someone to create a site called 'Reach Me'. On the site you would sign up for things that you would like to get messages about. I'd suggest that this site go beyond text messages and use a range of other ways to get hold of you. As I say the list could be anything from sports news to product availability. There are some technologies that touch on this space from people like Varolii but they seem to focus more on the company selling than the person who is receiving or buying.

NBC's 'Live Coverage' of the Olympics isn't that.. Live

NBC reportedly paid a $1 Billion for the rights to show the Olympics in the US. I guess when you have paid that much you don't want people to feel like they are watching a re-run and instead want them to feel they are watching it as it happens. Sadly, given the time difference with Beijing, this means many of the events would drop out of prime time if shown live. NBC's answer is to say the event is live, as they did with Phelps 200m butterfly event, even though the event happened hours ago and you can easily find out who won by surfing the web. Indeed by the time Phelps dived into the pool for the 200m race on NBC, he was already warming up for his next race, a team relay (which he also won). Given how good the NBC.com coverage of the Olympics is, I know they are web savvy. So why don't they just admit that their coverage isn't really live or at the very least not try and pretend it is? As it is I now find myself checking bbc.co.uk in the evenings to see the results of things that NBC keeps saying is 'coming up live in the next hour.' Come on NBC. In a world where people use the Internet as much as they do their TV you really need a better solution than to try and pretend your coverage is live.

Thinventory

Welcome to the era of what I'd like to call 'Thinventory.' This is an era where retailers are so scared that the economy is going to leave them with unsold products on their hands that they would rather carry too little stock than too much. It is also the era where even hot products like the iPhone are deliberately understocked. It is of course the smart way to run a retail business - match inventory to demand. For the shopper it is frustrating when they are using traditional retail outlets but almost invisible when they are shopping online. The smart retail operations are the ones that can blend this online shopping with the traditional environment and have the product you want shipped to your home overnight. This problem is particularly troublesome for sellers of say shoes and clothes, where the same product comes in multiple sizes. Carrying enough of every size is expensive and risky but if they can provide a thin level of inventory in each store and then hold a further amount at a central store to either replenish store stocks or service customers online they will likely do better than having every store hold all the stock.

Pandora rocks

I only just came across Pandora, a web site that essentially allows you to create your own radio stations. You input the name of an artist or song that you like. It plays an appropriate track and then follows it with other similar music. If you don't like a track you can skip to the next (it only allows six tracks to be skipped per hour). If you really like a track you can bookmark it and of course buy it on iTunes with one click. Pandora is of course perfect for the iPhone, except for the fact that it drains the pathetic battery this device houses. If like me you hadn't heard of this site, you should try it. I was instantly puzzled how they are dealing with the royalty issues, to which Sean Garrett at 463 immediately said they are in DC dealing with that very issue right now... Hopefully they will be allowed to continue to offer the service.

Supply and Demand Economics

It would seem that supply and demand economics rule. For years the valuation of commodities have been driven by this, while the valuation of companies have clung to various guiding metrics such as PE ratios or multiples of EBITDA. All this seems to have changed as the stock markets around the world essentially ignore all multiples and focus instead on whether there is actually someone willing to buy a company's stock. Classically it has been quite normal for businesses to to have PE ratios of between 10 and 20 and yet right now there are hundreds of companies with PE ratios of 5 and below. Many of these companies are small cap stocks which investors fear because of their liquidity. Ironically though many of these businesses are better run than large companies because a) the managers have some meaningful stock interest in the business and b) because these same managers are closer to the real customers and therefore simply run their businesses better.

Sadly for small business owners this shift to supply and demand valuations is unlikely to change anytime soon. This has broader implications than simply unrealistically low share prices for businesses. The ability of many companies to carry out acquisitions is tied to their valuations. When they are highly valued, companies can use paper (stock) as a means of buying other companies, either by issuing stock to the shareholders of the company they want to buy, or by getting investors to buy a new issue of equity, the proceeds of which can then be used for the acquisition. When stock prices plummet so do the possibilities for these companies to do any buying. As a result, the supply and demand economics then starts to impact the value of private companies. In the PR world there were quite a number of deals done last year based on high multiples. These prices would simply not get paid today unless there ended up being an auction. I therefore confidently predict that the market for acquisitions will become very quiet in the next year. This isn't because there aren't companies for sale or companies looking to buy. It is simply because until the valuations of public companies start to rise, a key currency (new shares) will not be available for purchases. At the same time, the better companies will likely defer sales until conditions improve.

Of course companies can still be bought for cash. Here again there is a problem. The global credit crunch has made it harder for companies to raise debt. At the same time, shareholders who, in good times, encouraged businesses to gear up are now demanding that debt be paid down. As a result, companies are hanging on to cash or ignoring the potential of their banking facilities, thus again taking a currency (a very real one) off the table for acquisitions.

You could describe this as the perfect storm for small companies looking to do deals. I would suggest that this storm may be with us for while. Then again I'm British so I'm used to bad weather.

The arguments for social media

Marta Kagen has put up a pretty compelling presentation with facts and arguments to support the rise of social media. It is well put together and visually very attractive. There are no really new facts in here but it is good to have a presentation that brings everything to one place. Marta takes a poke at advertising but pretty much avoids traditional print media. I'd love to see her put this presentation up as a wiki and make it something others can add to over time.

PR for dummies?

Nicholas Carr who has in the past questioned with some success the value of technology, has again scored a bit of a stir, this time by exploring the impact the Internet is having on the way we think and our ability to concentrate. His article “Is the Internet making us stupid?” is published in Atlantic Magazine. The article uses a mix of anecdotes and new research on the topic and makes a good case. In essence he argues that our brains are adapting to the way the Internet serves up information, making us less interested in long articles and books. His point was well made when I noticed I was skimming through the article…

If we assume Carr is correct, then his point has some important implications for those of us involved with managing perceptions of companies, organizations and individuals. At its simplest level it reinforces the view that information needs to be disseminated in bite size chunks. People will no longer read two page news stories and sadly they will no longer read two page news analyses. Instead they want their information one paragraph at a time. This brings in to question the most basic of PR tools, the press release. The press release has been questioned in recent years. Carr’s article potentially buries the notion of a long press release and calls on companies to create one paragraph news announcements that in turn link to other documents that provide the extended detail.

If you follow this ‘bite sizing’ of communication to its logical conclusion with other PR tools you soon start to see a very different world. What you realize is that companies will soon avoid trying to communicate anything complex and instead find ways of breaking the information down into a series of announcements that people can absorb. Indeed, some companies may find themselves saying remarkably little and instead focusing on get snippets of bad news about their competitors on the Internet.

Aside from testing the ability of PR people to tell stories in seconds rather than minutes, we are also being challenged to create ways for people to get their information that are more rewarding. The very act of web surfing has become tiresome. High speed internet connections, coupled with great search tools mean we get our information on demand. Put another way, there are fewer and fewer gaps between information, giving us less time to think and make sense of the content. The companies that can somehow reverse this trend and allow us time to really absorb information, rather than have it wash over us, will ultimately win. To do this we need to think not simply about the content but also the tools we use to get information across. This is something the advertising industry has already been working on for decades. Indeed they are masters of dealing with short attention spans. I would therefore encourage all PROs to take a long look at the tools this industry uses and see if there are ways PR can be adapted to a SASW (short attention span world). I’d give you some of my own thoughts but I suspect most of you have stopped reading by now and have moved on to another blog…

iPhone - what price the hype?

Trying to buy an iPhone in Silicon Valley means calling around to find out which Apple stores have them and then going and standing in line. Oh and before you try it, the Apple Store on the Apple campus doesn't actually sell iPhones (I struggle with the logic of that). This approach to selling products is not terribly customer friendly. If they simply wanted to sell as many as they could they would sell the phone online and then allow you to visit an AT&T store to get it activated. Of course they don't sell them online, as again this would be a tad customer friendly which Apple tends not to be. Instead, Apple values hype and the prestige that a mix of product shortage and funky distribution brings. At one level this is terribly smart. By making it hard to get, the have made the iPhone even more desirable. Yet once again it shows how a brand can get caught up with being 'cool' rather than customer centric. Apple could create a system that keeps you informed on shipments and lets you pre-order like they did when the iPod came out but they have decided not to do that this time. In essence they are saying we want queues of people outside our stores and we don't care if this is annoying for people. What is more they have made PR mileage out of this by having camera crews interviewing those waiting in line.

Of course I fully expect that Apple will find people to be very patient and very few customers will give up and buy a Samsung or Palm product instead but I do question the logic here in terms of the long term customer relationships. By making the customer suffer to get their products in ways that could be avoided they are weakening the bond with those customers. That will mean that when someone does come out with an iPhone beater (which admittedly no one has yet but I am sure they will) then Apple will find a whole group of people ready and willing to jump to that brand.

I should note that I love the iPhone. I loved the first iteration and I love this version even more. I have some minor gripes with the keyboard and with the fact that you can't sort emails by sender but the other functions of this device are so impressive that I can live with these draw backs. Guess I'd better call the Apple store and see how long the line is.

The service factor just became a whole lot more important

As the economy continues to struggle forward I was reminded today on two occasions how easy it is for a company to lose customers through poor service. The first came when a technician came to 'fix' our washing machine at home which is all of six months old. He left after an hour saying he needed a part to be shipped and would return in 10 days!!! Now he could have handled this well but he laughed when asked if he could perhaps come back sooner given we have three young kids and rather need a machine. So lesson one here was don't buy a Whirlpool Duet washing machine and expect it to last and lesson number two was you can expect lousy service when it does break.

My second encounter with poor service was with WalMart. I want to buy my son a Star Wars chess set. Searching online I noticed WalMart has them in 'Limited stores' but not online (odd I know). I called our local store with the WalMart product number in hand. First they put me through to Toys where the first person I talked to had no clue what I was talking about. The second person said I needed to talk to customer service and that he'd put me through. After three rings the line went dead and I was cut off... I called back and asked for customer service. This time the lady asked me for the product number (she actually did this twice) and then put me on hold for twenty minutes, after which I hung up and gave up. My son will have to wait I decided.

In both cases I could have come away feeling people were doing their best and I would have been OK with the outcome. Yet in both cases I encountered people that never once put themselves in the shoes of the customer. Doing this in times when the economy is doing well isn't good but you may survive. Doing this when times are tough is asking for trouble. Customers will walk away and never come back. For PROs this is something to consider. You will quite often be dealing with less than good news in the next year BUT you can make the experience of dealing with that news a whole lot better if you for a moment put yourself in the shoes of the person you are dealing with and imagine how they may react. Think customer service.

America - a developing nation?

Silicon Valley is an odd part of America. For a start most of the people you tend to meet are transplants from either some other corner of the world or some other part of America. So when you live here you tend to get distorted view of what America is really like. I recently got a good chance to observe 'real' America. Not by visiting another part of it but by leaving it for a while. In the last month I did a trip to Europe and witnessed first hand how the Europeans view America. I think it would be fair to say that America is no longer viewed the way it was when I lived there. America used to be a super power with money to throw at any problem. America used to be a place where everyone had a great standard of living. America used to have people that travelled to Europe for a vacation. Instead, America is a place where the banking industry is in turmoil and the economy is 'challenged.' It is the place where people have suddenly realized that SUVs are a dumb idea for most average motorists. It is a place where tourists now go carrying an extra suitcase so they can restock their wardrobes at a fraction of the cost they would at home. Put simply America has become a place that is cheap to visit and yet has pretty impressive infrastructure. Indeed America is perhaps the first highly sophisticated third world country in the eyes of many. It seems hard to imagine that America has become this in such a short space of time. Ten years ago, the economy here was flying and Wall Street was in charge. Today Wall Street is in hiding and the economy is hardly firing on all cylinders. Indeed if it weren't for the weak dollar then the US economy would likely be in a recession of some magnitude. As it is it is prompting people to buy product and services from here as if this were China or India. Only yesterday VW announced it is to open a manufacturing plant in Tennessee. It did this it was said, because of the weak dollar. All I can say is that they obviously assume America is set to have a weak dollar for some time to come as they are spending $1 Billion on this plant. So I return to my observation that America is perhaps becoming a new class of country. It is clearly 'developed' and yet thanks to a weak dollar is now competing for jobs and contracts shoulder to shoulder with the developing nations. Ten years ago, such a thought would have been impossible to imagine.

Big Oil's problem

For years when you listened to the news it would say Wall Street was up or down based on the performance of one or two big companies, or some new economic statistic such as inflation or employment. Right now the driver of Wall Street is the price of oil. As oil prices rise the market declines - even if Apple releases a new product! As someone who worries a great deal about climate issues, I'm conflicted on the oil issue. The dramatic rise in the price of oil is forcing people and businesses to change their habits which I see as a good thing. Indeed, it makes me wonder why some changes didn't happen sooner. For example I gather airlines which are feeling the pain of the rise in oil prices are taking all manner of steps to make their aircraft lighter - such as only filling the water in the bathrooms of their planes half full. The logic being that most planes land with at least half a tank of water and flying that weight of water around doesn't make sense.

The other side of the problem is that the rising cost of oil is hurting some businesses that can do little in the short term to reduce their pain. It is also hurting the consumer through rising food costs. For those on low or fixed incomes this is real pain. Now of course the oil companies coud agree to increase production to ease the supply and demand problem. This may result in a significant cut in the price of oil, especially since consumers and corporate behaviors are likely to remain as they are now. However, given we are dealing with oil, a product that is difficult, dangerous and expensive to extract - and which has a finite supply, there is really little incentive for them to do this. Big oil knows that in 50 years it will likely be out of business as we all move to alternative sources of energy. If they increase supply that 50 years may be reduced to 40 giving them even less time to re-invent themselves. In other words, I can see little incentive for Big Oil to change its current approach to supplying oil. To my mind, this current pain from rising oil prices will not go away any time soon. Therefore I would rather see governments focus on longer term solutions to this. I would encourage the oil businesses to invest in new forms of energy and even give them tax breaks for doing so. The sooner we can make the switch the better and if we know one thing about Big Oil it is that it is addicted to money.

HP deals with EDS

HP's announcement that is buying EDS has been received poorly by the markets. HP's stock is off 6% while IBM, the company who should be hurt by such a deal, has seen its stock rise. Many of the issues people have raised relate to the poor cultural fit plus the relatively poor margins and growth EDS has been generating in recent years. HP in return is arguing that EDS creates a platform for them to grow large parts of their existing business - an argument the market clearly isn't buying. To me this deal says more about Mark Hurd than it does about anything else. It is hard to argue that he has done a poor job since taking over the helm at HP. The business is stronger by almost every measure. I think he sees EDS as a business he can work similar magic on. I'm pretty sure he sees opportunities to improve the margins as he has at HP and get growth by selling in to his installed HP base. In other words, having done a pretty good job of turning HP around, he now needs something new to challenge him and his team. EDS could well prove a very smart deal. His board has to hope that while he focuses on EDS, someone else is paying equal attention to HP, because you can be certain that the likes of IBM and Sun will see this as a great chance to go after HP's customers.

Apple TV and YouTube challenge the norm

Years ago I sat in while a journalist interviewed Bill Gates. A PC was on the desk with Windows running. In most of the windows there were Microsoft applications but in one there was a TV show. I was spell bound. It was like I was watching TV for the first time. My awe struck state came crashing to earth moments later when Bill said: "We've finally been able to turn a $3000 machine into a $200 TV set." His point was clear. Who really needed to have a window on their computer that could show TV channels when in most homes there was already a device that did it much better at a much lower price.

This of course was before the Internet took off and people decided they liked to spend a good portion of their previously allocated TV time surfing the Internet. Web based TV has been very slow in coming but thanks to YouTube efforts to bridge the gap between web surfer and TV watcher seem to be gaining pace. Enter the latest version of Apple TV which, along with all your iTunes and iPhoto content, has a YouTube option that allows you to search and select your favorite content. In effect this turns YouTube into another channel on your TV. Right now most of the content on YouTube is pretty grainy making it a poor relation in the channel stakes. My guess is that this will change. But it also occurs to me that if Apple can effectively turn YouTube into a TV channel, couldn't they also become a natural home for a host of other channels? I'm pretty sure someone could come up with an Internet alternative TV network. One that uses the functionality of the web as well as its obvious distribution benefits. How long before there is an Apple TV Guide?

Missed Opportunity for the BBC

The BBC recently overhauled its website. The sites looks a great deal better and has maintained its interactive nature with visitors able to send in comments on many of the stories. However, I can't help feeling it is an opportunity missed to do something really bold and unusual. For example I'd love it if they'd taken a leaf out of YouTube's book and made it so that when you clicked on a news item, it then automatically made additional suggestions. I'd also appreciate it becoming a truly customizable site. Right now you can customise the home page to some degree, but compared to sites like my.yahoo.com it is... weak. I'd also like to see them accept ratings from users on their content AND to admit to how many people are reading each story in same way as YouTube tracks the number of people that have viewed a clip. In other words I'm saying that I feel the BBC could have used the best features of a number of sites to upgrade its site. I would also LOVED to have seem them embrace blog or even rival content more. For example, they could have created links to host of additional sites for news and perspective. Of course that would have created a lot of work for them BUT it may have resulted in the BBC becoming a wonderful homepage. And let's face it, even in a world where we all use the Internet in a far more sophisticate way than we did even a year ago, we all still love our homepage.

e-petitions are they a resource for PR?

The UK equivalent of the White House, 10 Downing Street, has established an e-petition service enabling UK citizens to create petitions on pretty well anything. Currently over 7000 petitions are active and they cover a multitude of topics. It struck me that these petitions give a glimpse of the topics that are affecting a nation (which should be useful insight for consumer lead businesses). They also potentially create a vehicle to put items on the public agenda far more quickly and cost effectively than would have been the case before the Internet arrived. Of course, scanning the petitions is a pretty manual effort right now but the government has done a pretty good job of breaking down petitions currently active into sections.

Wal-Mart video archive

The WSJ today reported that a small video production company that for years recorded internal meetings and events on Wal-Mart's behalf. Having been dumped by its main customer, it has now decided to offer up the content to anyone who wants to have access. Provided they pay of course. It's apparently a treasure trove for historians and lawyers suing the company. For example one lawyer has paid $15000 to secure copies of video clips on the chance they may be useful in future cases. Wal-Mart not surprisingly is unhappy about this and is considering legal action. The maker of the tapes started working with Wal-Mart in the 1970s and claims he had no contract meaning he owns the content. It made me wonder if this will cause firms to quickly review their contracts to check whether the notes taken by PR staff in meetings become their legal property. We all know that clients tell PR staff information they need to do their jobs that they wouldn't like to see in places like the WSJ. If there is no contract or the contract is poorly written, who knows where that information will end up in time.

The Ms

For those seeking some light relief from the economy, here's a thought: The 20th Century was the era of innovation. we invented things like we've never done before. Machines of all manner were dremed up, we put men on the moon and we created cures for killer diseases. We also coined names for most of the decades that fitted in this period. We started with the roaring 20's and raced through every succeeding decade to the 90s. Indeed when someone says the 70s today we know they mean the 1970s. These descriptors have been huge for people marketing products. Indeed entire industries have evolved around these decades. This leaves us with a challenge as we start to roll through the 21st century. It simply doesn't work to say the twenty tens, or the twenty seventies for that matter. Any suggestions on this are welcome. Perhaps the naming of the decades and the celebration of them from a marketing perspective will forever be a 20th Century matter. Perhaps someone will coin a new way of branding the decades - The M20s? I know, it's not very good is it?