I should state up front that I like Apples and the iPhone, yet hate Apple users. With a passion. And I’m not alone, do read the comments – I particularly like that Apples have a “write book” function, apparently.
Anyway, the Pre has just launched and there have been reports that the Apple iPhone is finally in for a fight.And I do hope so. Because of my hatred of the users I desperately wanted this, and past flops such as the BlackBerry Storm, etc. to be good so I could have an alternative.
So… In several reports leading up to the launch the Pre had been dubbed “the iPhone killer”.
The BBC did a round up of US reviews entitled “Palm Pre can challenge iPhone”. The New York Times cited the Pre as:
“The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it’s the iPhone remixed.”
And the Wall Street Journal stating, after a 2 week review period:
“I consider the Pre to be potentially the strongest rival to the iPhone to date”
But, looking at media coverage in general, the numbers don’t give much hope for the Pre. Instead, journalists and bloggers simply aren’t writing about it (well, as much as the iPhone) and, depite a slow rise in coverage over the past month it is not making a dint into the iPhone’s column inches.
This is best seen on Silobreaker – here. Sadly you cannot embed the graph.
iPhone killer? I doubt it. Good enough to tempt iPhone refuseniks? Here’s hoping.
I’ve been playing around with Wolfram, the new computational search engine that’s getting a lot of hype on Twitter and from the established Media.
As Cellan-Jones’ piece on Radio 4 highlighted, there are a lot of things that it does badly. Even if it does know that 88mph means the speed that Marty McFly’s Delorian will go Back To The Future.
But there are other search engines, Google aside, that are really getting my interest. Twitter primarily.
Yesterday saw Charlie Brooker write a piece on the BNP election video. An awful piece of editing and dogma, the BNP stands for British values – yes of course they do, they just happen to be a subset of the British population – read the article, very poignant. And the comments are too, and I particularly loved Kimpatsu’s retort to someone’s suggestion that the BNP aren’t bad and people are tribal:
“@XML5000: We’re also primed to eat, but I can deny myself high-glucose and fried foods by willpower. We are not the sum of our genes; we can rise above it to be more noble. If you really want to be tribal on a genetic level, you should be directly related to everyone you call your tribe. (Kinship altruism.) That you now regard your tribe as a whole island of people shows that the notion can be hijacked to larger groups. Next group: the whole world is my tribe, for I judge people not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.
I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere before…”
But, naturally, I wanted to see just how bad this video was and either cower in fear or laugh out loud. And the result was both. But… I couldn’t find it. Not via Google. Not via YouTube’s search engine. But I could via Twitter.
It only works as a zeitgeist search, and only when you have a few extra seconds, but if that’s what you need and have it works brilliantly.
You have to love Twitter. I’ve been playing around with it for the past few months for a campaign analysis tool.
Traditionally I’ve used services such as Press Index, Durrants and Romeike. I’ve also banged my head against a desk when a client used NMI – an awful press tracker that only monitored a third of the key titles that they wanted coverage in (but they wouldn’t change).
But there has been something missing in the traditional monitoring services. What’s the effect of having individual items of coverage. Does anyone, outside of the sites paid by advertisers to fill space, actually want to talk about the technology?
So, enter Twitter, like Technorati, is proving a nice way of cheking this. A good example is a one off pitch that I did yesterday to Pocket-Lint. A nice story and nice piece of technology that has already had over 120 tweets and 100 google results.
There are a handful of companies starting to do social media monitoring and do it well. The best I’ve seen is Montage, a Bristol based company that is also running PRBristol, a blog for the South West media. Definitely worth checking out.
How on earth are local publications struggling for advertising revenue when they have such strong investigative stories. Two great headlines from recent editions of local rags include:
How did these get written up? “‘Ere, I been down to my local pond and there’s a big fish that’s dead there. I think you should tell your readers about it. I poked it with a stick and it didn’t move or nuffin’”
A year or two back Pandora was taken away from us in the UK. At the time I wrote that there are very few entities in the universe that are more powerful than a hoard of geeks armed with a handful of programming languages and an uncanny ability to find a back door. In this case an IP proxy address.
The sentiment is still true and getting stronger. The number of web applications is brilliant and my personal favourite is currently Google Maps. It allows you to add so much depth to a story tracking where things happen and monitoring trends and changes.
A great example of this comes from The Business Insider. In the piece Nicolas Carlson tracks the many job losses from US newspapers in the first four months of 2009 using the free Google Maps tool and the resulting image, well, to use an awful cliche it’s worth a thousand words.
The image, tracking the 8862+ layoffs and buyouts from US newspapers can be seen here.
There is much debate about the future of the press. News breaks throughout the day and the web now enables it to be covered and read as it happens.
It also allows an international view to be reached with the NY Times, BBC, Guardian and Al Jazeera all feeding into my RSS feed.
So, it was good to hear Warren Buffet on CNBC yesterday morning.
“If Mr Guttenberg had come up with the internet instead of movable type back in the late 15th century, and for 400 years we’d used the internet for news … and I came along one day and said I have this wonderful idea. We are going to chop down some trees in Canada and ship them to a paper mill, which will cost us a fortune to run through and deliver newsprint. And then we’ll ship that down to some newspaper and we’ll have a whole bunch of people staying up all night writing up things and then we’ll send a bunch of kids out the next day all over town delivering this thing and we are going to really wipe out the internet with this. It ain’t going to happen”
Buffet, the world’s second richest man, The Wall St Journal also quoted him as saying “the one area he won’t touch these days is the newspaper industry”. But he isn’t the first to suggest that print is doomed. The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridge, said back in 2007 that the publication would probably go online only.
This belief is also something that I’ve believed for several years now. Why would you pay for a magazine when you can get it and its entire archive online for free via advertising money. And why would you print something if you can avoid the cost of doing so. Simple maths really.
That’s not to say that magazines will die out. The Economist is doing brilliantly. E&T (a technology mag) is also very well read. Both have one thing in common – they write interesting articles with in depth analysis, not news. And that is something worth paying for.
A strong contender for the email that has most wasted my time this week has just landed in my inbox. And, yes, I do appreciate the irony of spending an extra 10 minutes writing about it.
The email, PR 3.0: The New Public Relations Toolkit, has probably been received by 10,000 people that even remotely work in the PR industry – a group that should probably be spammed to highlight how it feels – and highlights that only those adopting PR3.0 will see it through the recession.
Nicely, Thunderbird assumes this is a scam and will not let me download the whitepaper without clicking half a dozen boxes but eventually I find out that PR3.0 is an automated service to reach a sh*t load of people.
I agree that more people are reading blogs and getting news from Twitter but I also believe that people only trust a handful of sources. So instead I’d rather send out to 10 people that I know are influential and interested.
And besides, there are enough “paste a turgid release” websites with good SEO out there that you won’t need to do many of them to ensure it’s seen by the casual researcher looking for a company press release rather than an editorially credible and debullshitified piece of copy.
As a blogger I also know that most of the content I generate is led by one of two things. Lots of research or an interesting item or two from one or two sources. The best effect I’ve ever seen on Technorati listings has come not from direct outreach but from one well placed piece with the New Scientist.
PR3.0 – Nope, just spam 3 times as many people. I prefer PR1.0 – know people, target appropriately, use the medium that they like (twitter, email, phone) and come up with something that can be used; not just I have a crappy release but this is happening and ties in nicely with X, Y and Z to mean A, B and C.
Now please, bugger off, stop labeling it as anything other than mass spam and go back to basics if you want to make it through the recession.
PS – I should probably attribute the “paste a turgid release” – Chris Lee, ex Rainier PR
You have to love oxymorons. My school could rarely come up with one when pushed and went for lame examples such as ‘the bitter sweet pain of love’. I always preferred the term US intelligence.
Piss take aside, I’m slightly baffled by one story on the BBC’s News Beat about the US Army being worried that terrorists will use, “Twitter to plan and organise attacks”.
So, terrorists are going to use Twitter as their secretive messenger. This will be the same Twitter that allows everyone in the world to see the stories when they happen, then? The same Twitter that allows you to follow what certain people are writing?
If they are then the terrorists are quite dim. Even if you have a code, surely it cannot be that hard to break with the fleet of supercomputers at the disposal of the US armed forces. Can it?
Maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe there is a risk from Twitter. But there has to be easier methods of communication. Fair enough, new communications could be lost in the volume but the second you find one terrorist, surely you’d follow their friends and followers.
Fair enough, according to the BBC, Twitter only occupies one chapter, but this is the one catching the news agenda.
The chapter notes that reports of the LA earthquake in July last year appeared on the service before most news agencies got hold of it. It also notes that Twitter has been used to rally protests in the past, for example at US Republican National Convention in September.”
According to the BBC report, authorities in both the US and the UK are increasingly worried about the potential for terrorists to use the latest communication technologies including sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and gaming networks. All of which are open and identify those that are following particular people.
I recently started writing for the trade blog – sms text news. It’s for the industry rather than the man on the street but it’s giving me an insight into the trade that I’d forgotten. A recent call with a quite targetted weather service for mobiles has also had me thinking about the 10 rules for a successful campaign.
If you know nothing else here are the top 10 things you should know if you’re thinking of targetting the social media with a PR campaign:
If you decide to do it yourself / get an agency to do it the following should be remembered:
1) It’s a conversation – don’t post adverts by writing in comments / conversation spaces
2) Actually that one should be re-itterated
3) Do a tiny bit of homework and look at the members – Pick 10 members at random and Google them with the chosen activity. If less than 3 of them come up then it’s probably a less serious group.
4) Don’t be afraid to ask for advice – in fact it’s the best way to introduce yourself
5) Don’t forget Bebo
6) Do forget MySpace
7) Find blogs on the relevant subjects using Technorati Get involved in the comments – once again… comments are there to continue a discussion or ask a question not to advertise
9) Check out Digg.com for popular posters on a given subject
10) Once again… it’s all about conversation, conversation, conversation
I’d love to hear what other people think so do feel free to let me know.
Recovered from an aching 10k (yes a week, I know), spent far too long on the allotment and read Birdsong for the first time, can I admit that I only read it because of the James Bond book by Faulkes?
I should state up front that I like Apples and the iPhone, yet hate Apple users. With a passion. And I’m not alone, do read the comments – I particularly like that Apples have a “write book” function, apparently.
I’ve been playing around with 
There is much debate about the future of the press. News breaks throughout the day and the web now enables it to be covered and read as it happens.
You have to love oxymorons. My school could rarely come up with one when pushed and went for lame examples such as ‘the bitter sweet pain of love’. I always preferred the term US intelligence.
I recently started writing for the trade blog – sms text news. It’s for the industry rather than the man on the street but it’s giving me an insight into the trade that I’d forgotten. A recent call with a quite targetted weather service for mobiles has also had me thinking about the 10 rules for a successful campaign.
Get involved in the comments – once again… comments are there to continue a discussion or ask a question not to advertise
