Flack's Revenge

4 "Present Shock" Trends - and What they Mean for PR

2013-05-15T11:59:35-04:00

I interviewed author Doug Rushkoff in March ago regarding his book, Present Shock.

In the book, Doug discusses trends that effect how we live, communicate and soak up and produce info and culture. One of the most startling relates to something he calls Narrative Collapse, i.e. we are living eternally in the present and thus losing the ability to understand complex stories. My interview with Doug focused on what Narrative Collapse means for marketers.

More recently I wrote about how the events and news coverage around the Boston Marathon bombing sounded a lot like some of the realities described in Present Shock. I thought it would be a good time to revisit Doug’s book and get his take on implications of other aspects of Present Shock for marketers and the PR field.

I interviewed him again, and list my questions and his answers under each trend outlined in the book, along with a brief explanation.

it is heady and complex stuff, and hard to do justice to in a brief post, so I suggest that you go out and get his book.

1. Digiphrenia

Digiphrenia is the confusion that results when we divide our attention between the digital world and the real live here-and-now. In this chapter, Doug also discusses recognizing chronos vs. kairos; i.e. chronological time vs. opportunistic timing:

Q: How do we leverage kairos? You advocate taking breaks from the digital world - yet how can a busy reporter or PR person do this without missing something important?

A: Most simply, we have to recognize that not all times are the same. It sounds so crazy and outlandish, I totally get this. But there are better times for some things than others. Monday isn't the same as Wednesday. We kind of get this. A party on Monday night is going to be different than a party on Saturday night. But we don't apply it in our operations and communications, except in the most rudimentary way, like timing things to the news cycle or the work week.

Most companies seem to think of time as generic, and that growth should move smoothly upward no matter what. Markets and audiences can't expand and contract. They have to grow steadily. Well, nothing in nature does that. And humans - particularly networked humans - are moving into increasingly natural relationships to one another. Unlike a mass media world, where we all are timed to the same central clocks and programming, people are now engaging in a lateral fashion, and getting their timing collectively as a culture.

We should begin to respect "timing" over "time." That's what the book teaches people how to do. What's the best time to tell dad you crashed the car? It has nothing to do with the time on the clock. It's more about timing: after he's had his drink, but before he has opened the bills.

On an individual level, this means respecting that you can't be always on. You can be a great, always-on journalist or PR person or Twitter watcher for a few hours. But then you really do get to take time off. That's how the crews on submarines do it. They take shifts off when they are really *off*. That's because when they are on they need to be really on. If we attempt to do our jobs all the time, we end up not doing them very well.

On a company level, it means understanding the timing of your market, consumers, employees and investors. You can't email them calls to action every day, like The Gap does. People grow immune. You have to time these things, http://twitter.com/#!/AllthingsIC that's all. And the way to recognize what's the best time is by appreciating the ebbs and flows of your market.

2. Overwinding

Overwinding means temporal compression… it is what happens when we attempt to ”squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It’s the effort to make the ‘now’ responsible for the sorts of effects that take real time to occur – just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will…. run longer than it can.”

Q: Should we run to temporal compression or run from it? Should we feed into overwinding by continuing to urge consumers to Act Now? How do we “spring load appropriately”?

A: What I try to teach in the book is just that. Answering how to spring load appropriately in a single paragraph would be overwinding. Some things really do take more than six seconds to convey. It's really that simple. The way to spring load appropriately is to be able to tell the difference between what should be jammed into tiny time frames, and what needs time to unfold. "Act now" has become increasingly irrelevant in a culture that's always on. We know it's still going to be there. You can't make us feel any more pressured than we do. We don't believe you.

The alternative - the welcome alternative - is for companies and brands to be available to us in *our* time. And you don't figure this out through big data analysis of your consumers, but by becoming a living member of their culture. Your company, your brand, becomes the medium not the message. You are the bed of culture on which we people do what we do.

The other trick to getting out of overwinding is not to be slaves to your shareholders. They really are the enemy of living or operating on appropriate time scales. The smart public companies are going private for a reason.

3. Fractalnoia

Rushkoff explains that fractals “offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systmes while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock – a syndrome we’ll call Fractalnoia.”

Q: How can we use fractals to understand the media landscape? How do we get on the rising wave of the next hot topic? Does screech (i.e. noise from the instant feedback of social media) make online reputation management impossible?

A: Lots of big questions - all best answered with an hour of work reading this chapter! What I try to do in the book is convince people in all sorts of industries to learn how to see the patterns underlying what they do: the landscapes instead of the subjects. So yeah, that means learning how to see the media less in terms of its subjects than its shape - the "standing wave" that actually carries the various subjects and stories that come to us. If you want to put something out there, it's a bit like joining a game of jump rope. You have to learn how to see the patterns and the underlying rhythms.

The screech of instantaneous feedback doesn't make reputation management impossible; it merely changes your high leverage point. You can't go at it as a form of crisis control. Your reputation isn't some external aspect of brand that you manage independently. It is tied to who you are and what you do.

The great PR people have always known this. I've spent time with Howard Rubinstein, the original crisis manager, and he always said that you have to change the story by changing the story - not just by changing the way it's told.

Q: “Just doing all the right things” sounds a lot like the same old social media transparency ethos / advice – we are assuming here that we have good and ethical clients, all who want their slice of attention.

A: Now the "just doing all the right things" advice is a bit old, I admit. But I was the one who started saying it back in the mid-90s with my then-controversial book "Get Back in the Box." I argued that social media would generate transparency and that this transparency would require a return to basic competency. And it was laughed at! This was the era of Jack Welch's General Electric, when Harvard Business School was advising people to sell any productive assets and become more like banks. The idea was that competencies required labor, and labor costs money. And that you can make more money simply lending money than selling real things.

While that might be true, we can't all be banks. The landscape becomes too crowded and then the banks fail. Oh wait - that happened.

So instead we can choose to become deeply competent. Deeply so. But that requires finding and building your culture. It's more than just doing right things. It's doing them in such a way that you attract the best employees, who then attract the best consumers, and so on. It's not easy. It takes more than reading an article to figure out.

Q: Is it a fool’s errand to try to stay ahead of the curve, monitor social media and media, and use this info for planning?

It depends what you are using social media for. It's a fool's errand if you're using it to figure out what you're supposed to be doing. That's reactive and stupid. It's not a fool's errand to use it to learn the rhythms and patterns underlying the culture you mean to serve and be a part of.

And of course you need to have representatives throughout the social media space, because it's become the default public complaint desk.

4. Apocalypto

Rushkoff calls “a belief in the imminent shift of humanity into a different and unrecognizable form” apocalypto.

Q: This chapter contains great advice, for example “find the sweet spot between storage and flow.” Can you please expand on these ideas?

A: Yeah. A lot of this chapter recaps the call for balance throughout the book. The way out of present shock involves balancing between various poles. Like the need for immediacy and the need for relevancy. Without balance, it's easy to skid - like you're on ice. That's because we don't have the temporal bearings we used to have. Everything becomes a doomsday scenario. We don't take into account all the governing factors along the way. We just spin out into panic.

At the same time, we can't just wave our arms at the change we're undergoing and expect it all to just go away. We have to engage with our enterprises in new ways. But retaining traction requires we make sense, orient ourselves, learn our culture, and do so in real time. This sense-making doesn't happen on the balance sheet, or in the big data. It happens in the real world.

What Happens when Social and Traditional Media Worlds Collide

2013-05-03T11:37:16-04:00

The Boston Marathon incident and aftermath vividly showed the interplay that can happen between social and traditional media, and what happens when these worlds collide.

We saw a frenetic manhunt that pitted citizen sleuths vs. journalists and made the latter look slow; and media misfires that gummed up the works for everyone from law enforcement to Wall Street (in the case of the hacked Twitter AP account, which led to fake news and tumbling stocks). A number of articles called Twitter "the new CNN."

While this was not the first high profile news event of the social media age, it seems to have been a watershed. The NY Times wrote:

It is America’s first fully interactive national tragedy of the social media age..The Boston Marathon bombings quickly turned into an Internet mystery that sent a horde of amateur sleuths surging onto the Web in a search for clues to the suspects’ identity...

Just when that we have gotten used to the relative roles of traditional vs. online media, the new rules no longer seem to apply. Times columnists Nick Bilton questioned the wisdom of crowds, and David Carr pointed out how the incident tarnished CNN, the bastion of 24-hour breaking news.

Maureen Dowd wrote a piece about how everything is, basically, getting shot to Hell

Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell...

the Boston Marathon bombings exposed a new phase in our experience of what David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: “the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective.”

The unfolding terror,,,, “found the ecosystem of information in a strange and unstable state... If there ever was a dividing line between cyberspace and what we used to call ‘the real world,’ it vanished last week.”

Dowd's column made me think of a topic I covered recently, when I spoke with authour Douglass Rushkoff about his new book Present Shock (see the this post, which features the interview).

So, what does this all mean abiout the state and future of news? How should companies and their brands respond? I spoke with Douglas Rushkoff again recently to get his thoughts, and will be posting the interview soon.

RTFC - Reading your Way to Tech PR Success

2013-05-01T11:57:36-04:00

Before I got into tech PR, much earlier in my career, I worked in technical support.

Back then, we had a saying for customers that did not want to take the time to try to figure things out for themselves - it was "RTFM!" which means Read the F--ng Manual (of course, we never said this to them).

Flash forward, and similar words of wisdom can and should apply to tech PR people.

Actually, reading was always good advice for us; after I joined the profession in the late 90's, and started climbing the ranks into management, I remember that we always implored the teams to pick up the publications and actually read them. That was the best way to get smart about the magazines and the topics they covered (this may seen like common sense, sadly many continue to rely on databases of media contacts and preferences rather than read in detail their content).

It is worth repeating, and updating today, because the noise has only grown in the tech world, and all the interruptions from social media - and fragmentation of traditional media - make it all too easy to lose focus and skim the surface.

There aren't many freshly printed publications to pick up these days, lovingly thumb through and smell the freshly pritnted, glossy pages - but there sure is a lot of reading we can and should be doing.

So, why not resolve to RTFC (Read the F--ng Content) to be a better tech PR person?

This means:

Read the publications, print and online, get to know their sections, editors and news appetities

Read the articles that feature clients and their competitors - don't just skim, but read, and try to understand what it all means in terms of positioning, reporter biases, message penetration, etc.

Read the gorpy client side stuff - yes dig deep into their white papers, decks, etc. - you will get invaluable product and company knowledge (but don't just "drink the Kool Aid" - apply your own critical thinking and square what you are learning with what you already understand).

Read to improve your writing - see my previous post on this

RTFC done right means carving out quality, uninterrupted time, perhaps on your commute to work or in the off hours - and does not mean ignoring short form content, such as social media chatter; continuie to tune into and read what influencers are saying on Twitter for example - you will learn more about how they see trends, the competitive landscape, and your clients or company.

Turning the Web Din into a Vibrant Content Marketplace with Content Curation

2013-04-19T12:00:34-04:00

My monthly Content Marketing column, which ran today, offers content curation tips that are based on how the pros do it (meanling professional online publishers and news sites).

The appeal of curation for content and social media marketers is obvious; after all, why take the time to come up with original ideas or create all content from scratch when you can simply riff off (or rip off) what is already out there? As the theory goes, you can up your posting frequency and perhaps even quality if you incorporate third party content into the mix.

That is the theory; however doing it well can be fiendishly difficult. The professional sites wrestle with all kinds of issues related to appropriate editorial practices, and the ethics of exploiting the work of others.

How much can you excerpt before curation becomes stealing? Do you change headlines, or leave them intact? And what about the tug of war between keeping people on your site vs. the obligation some feel to send traffic back to the original source's site (since, let's face it, the curator is generally not paying for the content)?

I discussed these issues in my post about overcoming content curation challenges. That post also covered a group that some journalists formed to spell out codes of ethical blogging and aggregation, headed by AdAge writer Simon Dumenco. (I met Simon at a NY content marketing event; he explained the difference between aggregation and curation; my post You Say Aggregtion,I say Curation discusses others' views on this).

Sadly, many curate do in a way that just creates more noise; I for one, am growing weary of of all those automatically-generated newsletters that clog Twitter and try to pass as clever curation.

The best curators filter Web noise and guide people to the best content. They have a keen eye for what really is interesting, informative and aligned with an audience. They often provide an expert's view, adding value and not just mindlessly echoing content for their own gain.

Grandmaster Flash: Is Magnus Carlsen a Media Darling or Manipulator?

2013-04-10T10:21:29-04:00

In a story this week, The New York Times called out a "shrewd": and "carefully constructed" marketing campaign by 22 year old chess phenom Magnus Carlsen and his "handlers":
Chess has its superstars, but.. there is no one like Carlsen, of Norway, who..remains the first world No. 1 from a Western country since Bobby Fischer.
Carlsen sits at the center of a campaign carefully constructed by him and his handlers to use his intelligence, looks and nimble news-media-charming skills to increase his profile outside the sport, as if he were a tennis or golf star. Not since the days of Fischer, Kasparov and Karpov has a player managed to move so deftly beyond the world of chess into the world at large.

I read the story closely and could not find examples of the referenced campaign. I did find good reasons for the media and world at large to be taken by the star - his winning record, young age and good looks, for starters. I saw a star riding a wave of media popularity, and basking in its glow.

The reporter cites these things, yet attributes the extensive and glowing coverage to calculated marketing; the media, apparently, are hapless victims of the charm offensive (oxymoron alert).

Perhaps there was some marketing campaign - the reporter mentions sponsors, but,these often follow someone with telegenic appeal and a winning record. They are not generally part of a campaign designed to manipulate the media.

I think it is kind of funny and cynical to say that Carlsen and handlers are running a calculated marketing campaign, instead of owning the fact that reporters like to cover this star - why not admit the simple fact that Magnus Carlsen is a good story?

The NY Times has done this kind of unfair depiction of marketing and PR before; see my earlier stories:

NY Times Pans Assad Media Campaign - and the PR Profession

Absurd to call Samsung Customer Servcie Issue a "Tech PR Fail"

Got Earnings? Now You can Tweet it from the Rooftops

2013-04-04T10:47:21-04:00

Back in December, I wrote about how Netflix CEO Reed Hastings ran afoul of SEC Fair Disclosure rules by posting an update on Facebook about record viewing numbers.

There was much buzz about the SEC action at the time - previously the SEC said that public companies could use websites and even social media to announce information that was considered material, that is potentially stock price moving. So why was Reed Hastings in hot water?

The SEC fine print said that the method used to share material info must be public and a recognized conduit of stock information for investors - these were debatable points for Netflix, but many thought that the SEC was being too strict.

The NY Times and many other news outlets reported yesterday that the SEC has provided additional guidance that explains how companies can safely use social media to make these kinds of announcements: Here is an excerpt from the Times piece:

Now, the S.E.C. seems to be relaxing its stance.

After an investigation of several months, regulators said that companies could treat social media as legitimate outlets for communication, much like corporate Web sites or the agency’s own public filing system called Edgar. The catch is that corporations have to make clear which Twitter feeds or Facebook pages will serve as potential outlets for announcements.

It's the End of the Storytelling World as we Know it: My Interview with Doug Rushkoff

2013-03-28T12:43:33-04:00

I am a big fan of author Doug Rushkoff, and have read many of his books, starting with Media Virus back in the late 90s..

Doug has a knack for being the first to spot and describe things which in retrospect seem pretty obvious. In particular, he likes to hone in on topics related to media, information, technology, how they are changing, and what this means for our culture.

I met Doug at a NY Tech Meetup a couple of years ago, where he spoke about his book Program or be Programmed, He agreed to an interview, which I posted back then.

More recently I learned of Doug's new book Present Shock after seeing reviews of it it in the NY Times and WSJ. The title is an ironic twist on Alvin Toffler's classic Future Shock (classic Future, sounds like oxymoron, doesn't it?!).

Well, Doug has nailed it once again. His new book eloquently describes what happens when we are eternally stuck in the present, a social media, 24 hour cable news, sensory overload-driven Groundhog Day kind of reality. He says, essentially, that we are llosing the capacity to put things in context and take the time to smell the roses, so-to-speak.

One of the most dramatic conclusions relates to something Doug calls Narrative Collapse. In marketing and PR, one of the first things you hear is that "you need to tell a good story..." It is the mantra we repeat endlessly to clients and each other.

It seemed to me that this was something that should be explored further, and would be of interest to Flack's Revenge readers. So I asked Doug for another interview, and he agreed. Here it is:

You seem to soak up lots of pop culture as you observe and write about the impact of tech on society; the first chapter alone refers to scores of movies and TV shows, ranging from Mary Poppins, Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead on up through to Sopranos, Real Housewives, etc. - do you really watch all this stuff (either not such a bad gig or torture, depending on what you like)?

Well I don't watch it all at once, but I have been alive 50 years so there has been a lot of time. I saw Mary Poppins in the late 60's. Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head in the 80's, Sopranos in the 90's, and bit of reality TV over the past decade. You don't' have to watch every episode of every TV show to get a good sense of what they are about and how they work. You can't help but soak up pop culture if you are alive these days. But there's plenty of shows I've just missed completely. Or watched maybe one of, like CSI or something.
In light of Narrative Collapse, why bother with your book – are long form content creators doomed to irrelevancy?
No, just because we are transitioning from a culture based in narrative to one based in more open-ended styles of media doesn't mean long form content creators are doomed. I'm not looking so much at the length of experiences as the quality. A fantasy-role-playing game lasts a whole lot longer than a game of Monopoly. And it is still narrative - just not in the closed-ended Aristotelian way. It doesn't have a simple crisis and conclusion. It just keeps going.

So presentist entertainment can collapse narrative by being as short as a YoutTube video, or by simply refusing to drive towards a single endpoint.
Don't we need stories and story frames to understand the world?
We need stories when we want to understand the world as a story. Many of us still want to believe God is coming to save us at the end, or that the world is going to end in a zombie apocalypse. In order to maintain the belief that there's a plan with a beginning, a middle and an end, then it sure helps to have a story.

If we are ready to believe that the world keeps going - that there could even be sustainable solutions to the world's problems rather than wars we win and bad people we vanquish, then we might want to look at forms of context that go beyond the simple story.
"You Need to Tell a Good Story" is one of the mantras of advertising and PR. Do these trends portend the decline of marketing as we know it?
Yeah. But anyone half-way intelligent in advertising has known this for a long while. I'm not saying anything new here. They all know that the creative storytelling in advertising works better for winning Cleos than selling products.

Brand mythologies were created to shield consumers from the realities of mass production. We don't want to know our cookies are made in horrible factories, so companies invent brand myths like Keebler Elves and the Snackwell's Cookie Man. Today, we care less about whether the cookies were made by elves in a hollow tree than what is really happening: are kids losing their fingers in a cookie machine? Is this made with corn syrup? Organic flour?

Marketers these days have to convince companies to tell the truth about their products and processes. And if they're not proud of those things, then they have to change them. It's very very simple, but very hard: companies have to actually do stuff that's worth talking about. Then people will Tweet it all over the place. What's worth talking about? These days, it's as simple as not being totally incompetent. Just find one little area in which the company is not completely screwing things up and hurting people, and then trumpet that achievement.

Does this mean we have to produce "Now-ist” content like much TV has become these days?

You don't "produce content" so much as help the company communicate its non-fiction, real creation of value. Surely the company is doing something for someone. It's asking for money for its stuff, right? How does buying from this company reflect my values? How does it extend my intention?

Tear Down that eHail Wall, Mr. Mayor!

2013-03-12T14:01:13-04:00

A judge just denied NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's quest to outlaw large sugary drinks here. Now I hear that Bloomberg has styrofoam cups in his crosshairs.

Since the Mayor has been such a great cheerleader for NY Tech, I thought I might humbly request, through this blog, that he shift his attention and the power of his office from the world of beverages back to something that is tech related, and also can improve the quality of life here: namely e-hailing.

There are some laws that apparently stand in the way of allowing these types of apps to hail Yellow Cabs in NYC. I recently visited Tel Aviv and San Francisco, and was blown away with how easy Uber makes it to hail a cab in these places - you can order one, see a map that shows the cab's location, its ETA, phone number, and let's you effortlessly pay (even calculating and adding tip).

Very cool! Do you agree? If so, please voice your opinion via Qwanz, the Opinion Graph (and client / NY tech company).

Launch Show Wrap

2013-03-08T12:53:06-05:00

I like to write about the booming tech sector in NY, which recently eclipsed Boston in terms of dollars behind VC-funded startups. However, a few days at Launch 2013 in San Francisco convinced me that NY has quite a ways to go to catch up to Silicon Valley; the event dwarfed anything similar that I had seen in in NY.

It was awesome, in terms of sheer scale, and the quality of attending companies and speakers. Fusion PR participated as a co-sponsor - our very own Victoria lined this up, after Jason Calcanis and his team asked us to help with media invitations, and to provide some PR "office hours" for demoing companies. As part of the deal, we secured a booth/tabletop exhibit that prominently displayed our logo. We also got a very nice mention on the big stage from the man himself (thanks Jason!).

Victoria and the team worked hard to ensure good media participation in the event; I entered the exhibit hall on Monday to see Victoria taking a KRON TV reporter around - see this link for the resulting news segment.

The show gave us the chance to catch up with existing clients and contacts and make new connections. Victoria and I took turns breaking away from the booth to sit in on a variety of panel discussions and demos in the auditorium. The main course was a series of demos by launching companies. Each gave their pitch followed by questions and critiques from the star panels, which included well-known VCs, entrepreneurs and influencers. Jason Calcanis moderated the sessions.

The panels did not hold back in giving very frank feedback. Robert Scoble seeemed to enjoy playing the Simon Cowell role. It was an interesting form of tough love - most of the criticism was constructive, and I thought spot on - but I sympathized with the demoing companies, as I know they had paid a lot for the privilege of this very public undressing.

Jason ran a very tight ship, it was a real classy event - he said that he would not put up with shenanigans (well, he used another word), and in fact ejected a company that was too edgy, shall we say (something to do with booth babes in camouflage).

Congrats to Launch 2013 winners, who are covered in this TheNextWeb story.

All in all, it was a great experience and conference. We thank Jason and his team for inviting Fusion PR to help.

Times Tussle Pits Tesla CEO & Fans vs. Journos

2013-02-21T18:31:15-05:00

I love reading the NY TImes, and sometimes check out its Sunday Auto section.

Being a PR guy - one with an affinity for tech and startups - I have been closely tracking the Tesla Motors story (you know, the one about the US-based manufacturer of electrical cars, that has gotten crazy amounts of funding and whose CEO - Elon Musk - previously cashed out at PayPal). There is a dealership in our local mall (yes they sell, or, more accurately, take orders in retail stores) and I have walked in and drooled over the beautiful machines.

When news broke last week about a negative review of the Tesla in the NY times - followed by Tesla Chairman & CEO Elon Musk's now infamous public rebuttal - I dug up my Sunday Times, read the review and fastened my seatbelt for a wild ride and interesting story for this blog.

Interesting, because it forces us to re-examine some commonly held assumptions about PR:

There is no Such Thing as Bad Publicity

I have never been a believer in this idea; please read the Times review, and let me know if you still do. For starters, I really got interested in the topic after seeing a thread on the NY Tech Meetup (NYTM) mailing list, which began with an email titled: Tesla will Lose this Publicity War.

The Times article describes a harrowing ride in sub zero weather by auto reviewer John Broder (I would love to have his job); and how the Tesla seemingly failed to live up to its specs in terms of distance between charges. Ultimately, the car had to (very delicately) be hauled onto a flatbed truck, leaving the reviewer stranded.

It is hard to see how Tesla - a company that already has gotten tons of positive PR and enjoyed great buzz - benefited from the piece.

Don't Pick Fights with Those Who Buy Ink by the Barrel

I cringed when I read Musk's rebuttal; my sympathies tend to lie with tech companies, as these are my clients. But his blog post broke a couple of basic rules of PR - the one above, sure (which I do believe in), and also the rule that says you should not find ways to prolong a crisis.

Elon Musk's rebuttal seemed thin skinned, and made the amazing charge that data pulled from the car afterwards proved that John Broder "worked very hard to force our car to stop running."

Broder responded with his own rebuttal to the Tesla blog post, as reported in Engadget.

The initial NYTM email generated dozens of responses, most of which at first seemed to line up against Tesla. Through the list, I learned of a number of other articles about the brouhaha, in Wired, Atlantic Wire, and Slate.

The last two in particular challenged Elon Musk's claims. It seemed clear that journalists and others were siding with the reviewer,

So Musk picked the wrong battled, prolonged a crisis,and that is the end of the story, right? Not so fast - read on.

There are Courts of Law and Courts of Media - and they Don't Play by the Same Rules

Reporters can weigh a set of facts and write an article that influences public opinion - yet they are not constrained by the same rules as a court of law is. However, It used to be that their words were more or less final; but not any more.

As the discussion progressed on the NYTM mailing list, many seemed to be willing to cut Tesla some slack.

I won't get into all the ins and outs of the technical arguments made by Musk, Broder, NYTMers, other media et al. You can read the stories and decide what you think.

My point is, that the crowd now has a voice, and many ways to be heard.

One of the last NYTM emails I saw cited a Silicon Beat article about how some Tesla owners have joined forces to recreate John Broder's now infamous road trip. The article said:

Tesla’s devout fans have suggested that “broder” become a verb, as in “to purposely or with willful ignorance run down the battery pack of an electric vehicle to the point that it no longer moves the vehicle.”

Oh, yea - you can follow their progress on Twitter: @teslaroadtrip progress

So, I ask - did Elon Musk break some basic rules of PR - or are he and Tesla fans tapping some of the new ruies? Was Musk's rebuttal s shrewd defense of the Tesla brand?

http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/02/15/convoy-of-model-s-owners-to-re-create-john-broders-infamous-teslaroadtrip/