PR Back Talk

2011 Trends Report Card, Part III

2012-01-16T08:53:00.002-05:00

Here's the final part of our report card: The rules for social media will continue to evolve -- rapidly. Our point: Companies are still learning how to navigate social media, which gives newbies the opportunity to jump in, and to learn from what others are doing well as well as from mistakes others have made. One challenge remains: staying ahead of the range of sites, which can rise and fall in popularity...like the once dominant Friendster. Google-Plus launched in 2011 after some...

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2011 Trends Report Card, Part II

2012-01-13T08:51:00.003-05:00

Here are more grades on some of the trends we predicted for 2011. 2011: The year of the app-based media subscriptionsPricing for app-based subscriptions were a big issue for publishers, but many now produce free apps that enable either per-issue (for a fee) access or free access for print subscribers. Some publishers have not figured things out, charging more on a per-electronic copy than for a per-print copy. Slowly more subscriptions are available on the iPad's Newsstand, ...

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2011 Trends Report Card, Part I

2012-01-12T18:51:00.000-05:00

Before we issue our annual list of trends and predictions of media and social media issues next week, we think will be relevant in 2012, here's our annual report card of how we did with our 2011 predictions. The Battle between the iPad & the iPad Killers The battle we predicted between the iPad and the "iPad Killers" did not turn out to be much of a battle, as most of the wannabe iPad Killers were quickly considered misfires. HP's TouchPad was launched and taken off the market...

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Johnson & Johnson Misdiagnosis of its Crisis

2011-11-11T08:49:00.003-05:00

Perhaps it depends on how you define "crisis," but there are more than 200 articles by the third day of the month about the concerns about Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo as well as a movement to boycott J&J. (Not every call for a boycott is a crisis -- on Facebook, there's a list to boycott those who boycott Arizona, so you can have counter-boycott boycotts.) In fact, this is a big crisis for a brand that last month ranked by Forbes as the most trusted brand in America. This is...

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Some Good YouTube Tips

2011-10-07T08:31:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post for those interested in YouTube tips. Check out Katherine Boehret's article, "Hidden Tools Find What You Want on YouTube." Among the tools she mentions is the Quick Key, which allows you to generate a URL that enables you to share the video from exactly where you want to share it...meaning you can spare friends the long, pointless introductions before they get to the LOL cats. Also check out "Tips on Taking Advantage of The YouTube Juggernaut."

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Amazon Validates Our Prediction about 2011: The battle between iPad and the iPad Killers

2011-10-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

With the announcement last week of the Kindle Fire, its color e-reader based on the Android platform, Amazon has validated our prediction that an important trend/story this year would be the battle between the iPad and the iPad Killers. (Check out: Birnbach Communications' Top Predictions for 2011, Part I.) In the wake of perceived and actual failures like RIM's PlayBook and H-P's TouchPad, the iPad competitors have not lived up to the "killer" designation. Which explains some of the...

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Fee, Fie, Foe -- 3 Lessons learned when companies mishandle how they communicate their new fees

2011-10-03T13:53:00.003-04:00

In the wake of Netflix's mishandling its new pricing structure and sub-brand (Qwikster, in case you misspelled it), Bank of America recently also blundered in announcing a new charge for debit card customers (check out the Time Magazine about it here and a Financial Times article here). With a US economy that continues to fluctuate wildly, and continued bad global economic news, it's probably a safe bet that more companies are going to look to raise prices and implement new charges to boost...

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The Need to Expand Beyond Traditional Channels

2011-09-26T12:03:00.000-04:00

The current Fast Company's special design theme offers up some interesting articles. Its article about the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum ("Mister Moggridge Has Mad Ambition") raises some interesting questions about the broad field of design. What I also find interesting was a quote about the nature of museums, from Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian's undersecretary for history, art, and culture -- and someone who understands how museums work: "Museums originally were founded...

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Nine Lessons from Netflix and the 'Half Apology"

2011-09-20T12:14:00.004-04:00

Until two months ago, Netflix offered one monthly fee of $7.99 to order videos by streaming and DVDs by mail. Then Netflix announced it would charge its customers $7.99 for a subscription to its streaming service and another $7.99for Netflix' mail-order service -- representing a 100 percent increase. Then, on Sunday, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix posted an explanation of sorts: "An Explanations and Some Reflections" only to cause more problems for Netflix. Hastings may have intended it to...

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Five Qualities of Innovation

2011-09-19T09:11:00.000-04:00

The New York Times' Steve Lohr wrote a nice article about Steve Jobs and innovation a couple of weeks back: Reaping the Rewards of Risk-Taking. In addition to all the usual points made about Jobs in just about every article about him after his resignation from Apple, Lohr's article makes the point that Jobs himself feels that getting fired from Apple, and finding new experiences -- like founding Pixar -- helped him when he returned to Apple. Lohr also referenced Jobs in a review of a new...

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The New York Times Looks at The Times' Business Coverage

2011-09-16T08:15:00.000-04:00

New York Times' ombudsman Arthur Brisbane raises interesting questions about coverage in his columns. One I meant to look at was a recent column, "Financial News for the Rest of Us," in which Brisbane looks at the impact of the growth of resources and digital space allocated to the Times' DealBook section. Edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin, 10-year-old DealBook, which started out as a newsletter that aggregated breaking mergers-and-aquisitions news, focuses on Wall Street issues, and in print...

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Notes from the FutureM Conference

2011-09-14T13:09:00.000-04:00

The FutureM conference in Boston yesterday featured an interesting panel on the Future of Advertising, featuring executives from DataXu, Mullen, Localytics, Digitas, Arnold and CampusLIVE. The panelists agreed that future of advertising will be measurable -- even as some said there are some things you can't measure. Yet. Though one panelist said that "Some things that are not yet measurable may soon be measurable -- and be developed by someone in this room." Currently what we...

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Redesigning Workplace

2011-09-14T12:11:00.000-04:00

Thanks to technology, the workplace has changed dramatically. A decade ago, you probably carried a huge brick of a cellphone and a heavy laptop. Today, you probably carry some combination of a smartphone, an MP3 player, a tablet and a laptop -- and all the accessories and chargers. While that may seem like a lot of devices to lug around, the fact is that they free us up to work and play anytime, anywhere. One of the technologies that interests me most -- videoconferencing -- was a solution...

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Adopting our workplace for how we work today

2011-09-13T12:39:00.000-04:00

On paper (for whoever still uses paper), it might seem unlikely that a Duke University English professor is a driving voice in how to approach and address the "bewildering pace of technological change." But Cathy Davidson is interested in more than essays and punctuation. As profiled in last month's Fast Company, Davidson is the "cofounder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), an international network of academics inspired by new technology,...

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10 Years Later

2011-09-09T08:47:00.053-04:00

Earlier this week, Bret Stephen in the Wall St. Journal published a 9/11 essay I liked: "9/11 and the Struggle for Meaning; An act of evil has been reduced, in our debased parlance, to a 'tragedy.'"Discussing the search for meaning in the tragic events of 9/11, Stephens wrote "there's something dangerous ...about 9/11 being reduced to a 'tragedy," noting Dangerous because we risk losing sight of what brought 9/11 about. Dangerous because nations should not send men to war in far-flung...

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Paul Gillin's Trouble with Klout & the need for a true measure of social media impact

2011-09-07T14:10:00.001-04:00

Paul Gillin, a columnist for BtoB magazine, has been at the forefront in terms of discussing metrics for social media. I recently came across a five-year-old column by him that spoke to the need of being able to measure social media impact, made the case that we need to define commonly assumed social media metrics -- like circulation or readership are for advertising and PR. Klout, a service that says it "measures influence based on your ability to drive action" online, is trying to...

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Two Worthwhile Articles about B2B and Social Media

2011-08-15T08:13:00.005-04:00

Every once in a while, we meet a prospective client who is unsure whether their company, always a B2B tech company, should engage in social media. Often, they tell us, their series customers aren't engaged in social media. However, according to Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff, "Parametric Technology Corp., a company that makes product development software, found in a survey that more than 80% of its customers were consuming social content. This helped persuade the corporate...

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Check out "Rate this Article" in Wired

2011-08-10T08:41:00.025-04:00

I really liked Chris Colin's article, "Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique." He makes the point that we now review the reviews we read. At the end of all Amazon's reviews, it says, "Help other customers find the most helpful reviews. Was this review helpful to you?" Many comment boards ask you to recommend or report abuse for others' comments. In one of the article's main points, Colin quotes Wired contributor Erik Davis as saying, We've started replacing...

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Check Out InformationWeek's "10 Lessons In IT Strategy From Ex-HP CIO Randy Mott"

2011-08-08T08:25:00.000-04:00

The July issue of InformationWeek offers interesting advice from ex-CIO at HP about tech development. While this blog generally looks at issues related to traditional and social media, there's still an interest in understanding our clients' customers, often CIOs within the organization. Check out the article, but here are some key lessons that can apply to communications functions as well as IT: The Revenue of IT: companies need to establish metrics for IT projects, and meet them, in...

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More Validation for Our Battle of Tech Titans Prediction

2011-08-03T10:54:00.008-04:00

Earlier this year, we predicted that a continuing story line in 2011 would be: The continuing battle among tech giants: Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Cisco vs. EMC vs. HP vs. Oracle vs. SAP. (See our blog post: Birnbach Communications' Top Predictions for 2011, The Top 12 Business & Technology Stories, Part IV.) The latest evidence came from Google's purchase of patents from IBM, which has been cast as "So, Is It Google & IBM vs. Oracle?" We think the clash of the tech...

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Looking back to Red Herring's Top 10 Trends of 2001

2011-08-02T08:59:00.001-04:00

Remember Red Herring? It was a hot must-read dot-com-era publication that did not fully survive that era. At least the print edition did not survive. An online version continues to operate. In cleaning out some old file drawers -- remember paper? -- I tossed out a lot of old clips. One I looked at on its way to the blue recycle bin was a "Top 10 Trends 2001" article from Red Herring. (Is it worth noting that Red Herring itself no longer hosts that page?) The pace of technology...

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Good Tips for Maintaining Online Privacy

2011-07-28T08:52:00.003-04:00

Ironically, News Corp., which is not currently known for appreciating privacy -- given the phone hacking scandal involving its now-shuttered News of the World tabloid -- has provided some good privacy tips in its Wall St. Journal. Here are some of the more important tips: Browse privately Disable those cookies Get privacy add-ons Tighten Facebook privacy Log off Check out the article for more details.

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Mid-Year Trend Update

2011-07-27T08:15:00.017-04:00

It's a bit early for our annual report card on our trends and predictions, but I wanted to take a look at one prediction: The battle between the iPad and the iPad Killers, the race for apps and the impact of tablet computing will be a main theme (you can find an extended discussion about this here). We were right about the battle of iPad and iPad Killers -- every new tablet reviewed this year has been reviewed in terms of the iPad. The conclusion: a lot of good tries, a lot of misses, and no...

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Apple Continues to Vallidate 2011 as the Year of the App Subscription

2011-07-25T12:02:00.002-04:00

Earlier this year, we predicted 2011 would be the Year of the App Subscription. By that we meant that publishers are going to need to figure out the mechanics of charging for app-based subscriptions. Regardless of whether or not they actually develop an app specifically for the iPad or a competing tablet platform, and whether or not they actually roll out a subscription fee for app-based access, what's clear is that 2011 will a make-or-break year in terms of how publishers and...

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3 Reasons for Small Businesses to Engage in Social Media

2011-07-22T09:43:00.003-04:00

According to Small Business Success Index, cited by Entrepreneur Magazine, small businesses reported the following results from being engaged in social media: 59 percent Identifying and attracting new customers 61 percent Developing a higher awareness of the business in a market 63 percent Staying engaged with customers Some pretty good reasons. They appeared in a sidebar to Chris Brogan's regular column in Entrepreneur.

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