pr

NEW YORK--Blogger and new-media publicist Brian Solis struck down one of the biggest marketing buzz terms of the past few years in a panel on Wednesday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo here.

"There is no 'viral marketing' per se," Solis said, referring to the marketing trend of creating a catchy online gimmick and hoping it will spread like the latest cat-does-something-funny video on YouTube. Rather, Solis explained, it's the people who make it viral. Getting a grip on online marketing is an ongoing strategy, he said. "This isn't a campaign. This is something … Read more

NEW YORK--In the press room at the Web 2.0 Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center here, there are a ton of fliers, stickers, and press kits lying around for us reporters and bloggers to peruse.

It's kind of hard for any one of them to stand out. Unless you're like collaboration software start-up Octopz, which we reviewed last year.

The company's strategy: Leave out some bright turquoise-and-green stuffed octopi, free for the taking. No corny company logos, no attached pitch, just a cute stuffed sea creature with a flash drive press kit tied around its … Read more

"The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist has more facts," said Jean-Paul Betb?ze, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research Department, Cr?dit Agricole S.A., in a panel at the Millken Institute's Global Conference 2008 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. True as this may be, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the overall vibe of the event: Yes, we can, was the prevailing sentiment, and the overwhelming majority of attendees would probably have outed themselves as fervent optimists, despite an abundance of fact-featuring PowerPoint slides supporting … Read more

If you're still wondering why the media world is getting turned on its head, consider the following anecdote.

A few years back, representatives from the Industry Standard, Wired, and Upside were invited to a public-relations gathering to talk about how they decide what to cover. After they finished their prepared remarks, a young woman in the audience stood up to ask a question.

"You talk a lot about tricks and tips on what we should do," she said. "But I've done all that and I still can't get you to cover my clients." … Read more

How should one measure the value of corporate PR against the coverage it subsequently engenders? A few years ago, that question never would have merited more than a moment's consideration. Here was the way things worked: Flacks sent out releases, the press decided what was important, and readers read what was deemed newsworthy. End of "story."

That's ancient history. During the course of any 24-hour news cycle, PR releases often rank higher on news aggregation pages like TechMeme than do professionally reported articles or blog items. I began noticing the shift about a year ago, and … Read more

For years I've assumed that Japan is not a big contributor to open source. My first real open source-related job was in embedded Linux, which saw plenty of big electronics OEMs using Linux (e.g., Sony, Matsushita, etc.), but not really doing anything in the way of contributing to open-source software.

It's perhaps time to rethink that notion.

I talked with Jesse Casman and Craig Oda of PageOne PR upon their return from Japan and got a very different picture on the Japanese open-source market. There's Takashi Iwai, for example, currently one of the top-10 contributors to the Linux kernel. And then there's Yukihiro ("Matz") Matsumoto, the chief designer of the Ruby programming language, of course. There's Plat'Home, the company that introduced Linux in Japan in 1993 (yes, 1993!), did a successful IPO in Japan in 2000, and currently ships microservers based on their own mix of Linux and BSD that fit in the palm of your hand. There's Turbolinux and Miracle Linux, as well.

But there's even more, more that I never would have guessed.… Read more

Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have his "Oscar Robertson" moment this week?

Bear with me on this one for a moment.

In case you missed it, Sunday's New York Times sports section carried a wonderful first-person retrospective piece by Robertson, one of the greatest basketball guards in the history of the game. But when he played at the University of Cincinnati in the late 1950s, Robertson was anything but a household name.

That changed after he lit up Madison Square Garden for 56 points in front of the New York media. Unfortunately, the post-game news conference was … Read more

Bruce Lowry, Novell's head of global public relations, will say 'Goodbye' to Novell this week to start with the Skoll Foundation as its communications director. I think the world of Bruce - he is an honorable, wonderful person who was a credit to Novell and will be an exceptional addition to the Skoll Foundation.

I wonder who will replace Bruce to tell Novell's story as credibly and consistently as Bruce did? I have perhaps been unduly harsh on Novell at times; to Bruce's credit, he has always responded in a constructive way that made me rethink my … Read more

Tim Leberecht, in a Matter/Anti-Matter blog post, asks whether Apple's "shock and awe" approach to product announcements is a dinosaur in a Web 2.0 world. I think there are a couple of other points worth making for perspective on this.

First, Apple has shifted dramatically from purely relying on big announcements at big events. It used to be, until just a few years ago, that Apple really only had two times each year that it made major hardware announcements: Macworld expos in San Francisco and New York. The developers conference was used for software announcements. … Read more