Subject: Cool Down this 4th of July with Tasty Treats from Baskin Robbins

Hi,

I hope you're doing well today! Please post this information on your blog, and let me know if you have any questions.

No Fourth of July celebration is complete without ice cream and cake! What better way to add fun and flavor to a July 4th fireworks celebration or backyard BBQ than with a delicious ice cream cake? Starting at just $9.99, Baskin-Robbins has an ice cream cake to please every palate and every budget. Stop in at one of your Chicagoland Baskin-Robbins locations and try one today!

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like more information.
Have a great holiday weekend!

Lindsay Scully
Paramount Public Relations, Inc.
www.paramountpr.com

Further, what is the news here? That they have ice cream cakes starting at $9.99? So what? I'm also based in Colorado, so the "Chicagoland Baskin-Robbins" bit is a bit odd. Am I in their blogger database as living in Chicago?

So what do you think? Sloppy, lazy PR without any effort put into motivating the blogger to take the desired action, or am I just too judgmental today?

It's not a terrible ad for industry insiders, but still, a bit of a surprise. Check out where it leads:

streambankllc.com/engagements/firedog.html

As the site explains:

• Brand Strength
• Number 2 market position
• Multi-service offering under one brand
• National footprint with coverage of over 80% of the US population
• Market-leading customer satisfaction scores
• Generated over $272 million of sales in F2008
• Achieved 28% revenue growth and more than doubled EBT in F2008 vs. F2007


• Current Offerings
• PC Services - PC repair services, new computer set-up, remote service plans, and networking support
• Repair In Home/Depot - In-home TV repair, warranty/OEM repair services, and service depot
• Home Theater & Audio Services - Flat Panel installation, surround sound/ home audio, TV Projector mounting, custom A/V solutions


• Future Potential
• Significant opportunity for growth within the $26 billion consumer electronics services market
• Unlimited brand potential to go beyond consumer electronics

Really, rather interesting. If they're doing so well, though, with $272 million in sales in 2008, why are they in bankruptcy in the first place?

You interested in the company? It's not too late to bid! You can learn more about the auction here: Firedog Intangible Asset Sale.

As you should be aware, the last few days have seen a surprisingly controversial election for the role of President of Iran, with moderate candidate Mirhossein Mousavi believing that he had a substantial lead over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The poll results were dramatic: Ahmadinejad got 62% of the popular vote, while Mousavi only got 33%.

If the election wasn't rigged.

Meanwhile, flash to the social media types who are crowing about how CNN apparently wasn't aggressively covering the growing story and how that just demonstrates yet again how mainstream news sources just don't get it. (For a few examples, see Robert Scoble's piece on how "Twitter kicked CNN's butt", or Daniel Terdiman's piece about the "#cnnfail" Twitter hashtag, or Marshall Kirkpatrick saying "CNN should check Twitter for news about Iran").

The problem is that all of these self-appointed pundits are missing that CNN isn't the entirety of the mainstream media and that all the other sources were right on top of the story. This was a CNN failure, if it was anything, not a failure of mainstream media.

To demonstrate this point, check out this graph from Google News on who had this story, when:

In this graph, A = ABC News, B = Wall Street Journal, C = New York Times, D = The Washington Post, E = Dar Al Hyat, an Arabic-language news outlet, F= Reuters, G = BBC News, H = PRESS TV, and so on. More importantly, though, notice how many outlets were following this growing story as it transpired: On June 12, almost 2000 stories were filed in various news media.

This is "missing the story"?

I'm a bit of a social media snob too, so I get the zeal to show those old-school journalists how they're missing the boat, but in this case, it just isn't true.

Finally, the seconds count down and ...

Whoo hoo! Imagine a digital version of settlers in their wagons rushing across the plains to stake down their prime real estate. Um, kind of. A click on the "Continue" button and:

What the hell? Seven seconds have elapsed and someone's already nailed "DaveTaylor" (and "dave" and "taylor" and "dave.taylor") custom URLs? I surmise someone had a name reserved for them, somehow.

Ah well, I have another one that I commonly use, "d1taylor", so that's what I try instead:

Success!

Done. Now you can click on facebook.com/d1taylor to find me.

Now, does anyone care?

(FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -06/03/2009) - When your passengers sleep as you drive, do you feel lonely? Mio, one of the leading makers of PNDs (Portable Navigation Devices), has insightfully launched its first comprehensive range of PNDs with built-in TV tuners - Mio Moov V500 and V700 range at Computex Taipei 2009 today. Featuring 4.7" and 7" widescreens respectively, the two devices are expected to bring a new vision to the world of navigation.

You can see what they're thinking by this product shot:

Um, please, Federal Trade Commission, do not let this product be sold in the United States any time soon. It's bad enough when people are screwing around on their cellphones while driving at night, do we really want to encourage them to watch TV while driving so that they're not "lonely because their passengers are asleep?"

The mind boggles.

Jeez.

It's Tropicana orange juice and you've probably seen it (well, the old packaging, on the left) in the local supermarket. Tropicana, it turns out, is a division of Pepsi Corporation (NYSE:PEP) (just as Minute Maid is a division of Coca-Cola Corporation (NYSE:KO), but you knew this, right?) and a few months ago it had a remarkable misstep with its packaging design...

If you do have a chance to get the packaging on the right, buy it and save it. It's a collector's item.

Turns out that in January of 2009 Tropicana introduced the new package design as part of a $35mil advertising and branding campaign, with the theme "Squeeze it's a natural", created by Peter Arnell. Within weeks loyal customers were complaining about the new package, saying that they missed the orange-and-straw graphic of the original. By the end of February The New York Times was reporting that Tropicana had changed its mind and was going back to the earlier packaging.

And über-designer Arnell's explanation? "emotionally, it's still very, very difficult to, and it still remains difficult, for everyone to grasp the importance of the [packaging] change because it's so dramatic." Uh, um, yeah, okay Peter.

That's old news, really. I mean, four months in Internet time is like five years in academia, right? :-)

What's interesting is to go back and really think about what transpired, why, and what it implies in terms of the ceaseless vox populi drumbeat of the Internet.

Let's be candid. A tiny but vocal minority of customers didn't like the new packaging. But so what? Does that really matter in this modern age? Would people really stop buying a product simply because the packaging changed?

Surprise! Yes they would: AdAge reported that "After its package redesign, sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22, costing the brand tens of millions of dollars."

That's where it becomes important and where it's a story worth thinking about carefully. By changing the packaging of a commodity beverage product, Pepsi lost tens of millions of dollars. This isn't a brand new package with a poor design either (consumers will often forgive poor package design if the product's good and if the design improves over time), but a strong existing brand (Tropicana sees over $300mil in annual OJ sales).

Unlike the earlier debacle with New Coke, there was no reformulation or change in the product itself. Just the picture on the carton.

I love this quote from a FastCompany article on the subject:

"Sometimes you land in a great place, and sometimes you don't. And when you don't, you need to find a better place. Fast," Pepsi's CMO, David Burwick conceded. At the end of the table, one of his lieutenants could barely conceal a snicker. "Words like 'tweak' are in order," he said. "Or beyond 'tweak.'"

If you're involved in the visual design and layout of your company's Web site, marketing collateral or packaging, this should all make you take a deep breath and feel, perhaps, just a tiny bit anxious. Customers really are that fickle, really are paying attention, really are that brand disloyal.

Next time you think about a redesign, it'd be smart to keep that in mind.

The Apple/Bandai Pippin

"With around 30 million devices on the market -- 17 million iPhones and 13 million iPod Touches -- and access to thousands of games at their slightest whim, consumers are buying and playing games by the tens of millions."

When I counted, I have 45 games on my own iPhone, of which about 20% were paid, a number of which cost $9.99. I figure a total investment of perhaps $50 for games on my iPhone. I am probably not a typical iPhone user (yeah, I admit it) but still, if you just do the math, there are tens of millions of games being downloaded, representing tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions.

Remember, that's in less than a year: the iPhone App Store only went live in July of 2008, so it's been around for less than a year.

Just as one example, game developer Gameloft offers almost 30 games in the App Store and tells Reuters that it's sold 2 million copies so far. Even at $0.99/game that's two million dollars in revenue. Not too bad.

AppleTV

The other piece of this puzzle is the AppleTV, rather a sleeper device. It's not a best seller, but that's because it remains somewhat of a one-trick pony. But what would it take for Apple to make it a digital video recorder (a DVR), slap a much bigger drive into it (the biggest you can get today is 160GB, but I'd want a 500GB drive, personally) and add Netflix, Hulu and/or Amazon video support in addition to the iTunes store, and you've got one heck of a great gizmo to hook up to your video sources.

AppleTV + iPhone Games = Apple PlayTV

What if this device could directly play iPhone games too? What if iPhone game developers were offered incentives to redo their graphics to support a larger HD display and resubmit them to the PlayTV store in addition to the iPhone store?

Imagine we can somehow put 'em together while retaining a focus on casual games that are primarily intended to last 10-15 minutes maximum (think of Tetris, Bejeweled, card games, simple strategy title, or something aimed at children) and you have one heck of a cool device and system, don't you?

Better yet, by focusing on the massive and growing casual game market, this leaves Apple able to sidestep competing with the hardcore gaming platform systems (e.g., the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony Playstation-3 and the Nintendo Wii) which, after all, are also essentially one-trick ponies too.

Gamers won't buy the PlayTV, but do we care? I would be delighted to have an all-in-one unit that offered all of the features and capabilities I list here, including a library of thousands upon thousands of fun, casual games, many of which were free and some of which were anywhere from $0.99 on up.

The market's proven. The companies are already writing the games. The software development kit (SDK) is in the developer community. And we all have TVs, most of which are now HD-capable.

Will Apple take the plunge? I hope so. I'd buy one.

Would you?

Most entertaining was my legal dispute with the litigious Tommy HIlfiger, but that's a story for another blog entry (or, better, a more amusing story to be told in person).

As a result I applied for and ultimately received a registered trademark (well, service mark) for the domain name intuitive.com. Yes, that should properly be written as "intuitive.com®".

A year or two ago as I watched Ask Dave Taylor.com really take off and become a popular, successful site, I decided I would seek to trademark the Ask Dave Taylor brand too.

This week I received notification from the US Patent and Trademark Office that I'd been awarded just that, and now if you look on the site you'll see that it's "Ask Dave Taylor®".

What I realized when looking at the legal documents from the USPTO is that precious few people - particularly in the entrepreneurial space - have seen a trademark award document...

This afternoon I realized that the reason I was enjoying using the new Seesmic Desktop was because it gave me the ability to create a new "friends" column that just showed tweets from a select few friends, rather than my full Twitter follow stream.

Here, let me show you what I mean:

Seesmic Desktop: leftmost column is "friends"

Why would the ability to earmark friends out of your twitterstream be useful? Because there are too many non-friends on the list, too much streaming past you ever minute or two that just isn't of interest from people who aren't interesting to me. Of course they're quite likely interesting to other people who find me uninteresting, but that's what should be the core of social media at its most fundamental, don't you think?

Hence The "un" Project.

What's the project? For me to reclaim my Twitter experience by unfollowing uninteresting people.

Easy enough, right? Well, maybe not. Seems to me that with the addition of more and more celebrities and with the average Twitter gamer having 30k or more followers now, perhaps everyone has lost the ability to unfollow others. :-) Or maybe Twitter is evolving and growing in a direction that just isn't congruent with my own interests in this particular real-time social media.

Be that as it may, I invite you to join the un Project and see how things change.

Oh, and here's how you unfollow someone:

Find a tweet from the person you're not interested in (and, again, there's nothing wrong with these people, they're just not interesting to me, that's all):

Click on their Twitter handle or name (in this case, it's "dujourmag") and you'll go to their Twitter profile page:

Click on the tiny little triangle adjacent to the word "Following" under their profile picture, and a little window opens up:

Now you can see how to proceed. Click on "Remove" and...

That's the secret. It's kind of liberating, actually. Find people who just aren't interesting and give 'em the boot.

Spread the meme: The un Project to take back Twitter.

Like this one:

From: 118.50410.61@em.taitra.org.tw (MIC)
Subject: MIC news releases

I follow consumer electronics, so I get releases from Taiwan, China, Korea, and other Pacific Rim nations. Not a big deal.

But the subject line? it's almost a guarantee that no journalists or writers will even open up the email to see what's inside. Who is MIC? Why are they sending me more than one release? And, most importantly, why are they making it necessary for me to open the email to find out what's going on?

Of course, when I open it I find that the first release has the scintillating title of

Wireless DSL Router and IAD Shipments Continue to Play Key Role in Taiwan's DSL Industry in '09

Since I don't actually know what "IAD" stands for, I might not actually be exactly the right audience for this release anyway, but why not have a subject line like

MIC: DSL Router and IAD Shipment News

which would at least let us categorize things and have a sense of whether we'd want to learn more as we skim over our latest wave of releases.

So here's a homework assignment for PR people: look at the subject lines of your latest email press releases you're issuing on behalfo of your clients. Are they succinct, informative, and helpful to someone who gets 30-75 releases emailed to them every day?

The former makes tea. Really good tea. The latter? They make those ubiquitous rubber shoes with the holes punched in 'em, and a whole lot more.

As far as I know, Celestial Seasonings has zero presence in the social media world, but Crocs has George. George Smith, Jr., the head of its social media work (actually, I don't know his exact title).

A while ago George asked me if I was interested in receiving any of the new shoe lines that Crocs had introduced in the last few months and I said "yes". He sent them, shoes for my children as well as myself, I thanked him, and I also added the following postscript:

Now, tell me, George, what can I do for you/Crocs as a thank you for your generous gift of shoes to my family?

His response is one that modern public relations professionals should study and seek to emulate:

As far as doing something for me/Crocs - that's up to you. I didn't give you the shoes expecting anything in return. But if you feel there is a way that you can still be Dave Taylor and do something with us, let me know and we can work it out. Our objectives, for the most part, are really about showing everyone that we're not just that one shoe anymore. It's starting to tip toward that - so it's a good thing. Any way you feel you can help that is awesome! And if you need anything more from me to do that, just ask. But - don't feel obligated to do anything.

He continued with an interesting observation about a charity effort that the company is developing:

We do have our SolesUnited campaign that is about donating shoes to people in need domestically and worldwide. Still developing our rebranding of that - but if that's something you're interested in working on as well - that could work too.

Finally, a postscript of his own:

And seriously - don't worry about anything. I'd rather have you feel inspired with a great idea than me offering up the boring things I think of. And if you never get that inspiration - so be it, at least you have shoes.

I have to again compliment George and Crocs on this response. It's straightforward, candid, and professional.

To be frank, there is a nuanced and implied contract between companies that offer up products for review and the independent reviewers, one that can easily subtly bias the reviewer to be more positive about the product than they would if they'd spent their own money on it. I've written about it before, actually. See: Pay me to blog about your products, for example, so I won't readdress the point here.

I will simply say nice job.

Now I am consciously and experimentally following completely random people, upwards of 50-75/day, by letting the digital zeitgeist point me towards them. I find someone who is an interesting Twitterer and then scour the list of who they follow to see if I can find others who are also worth following. A click of the "Follow" button and blamo, I've added someone else to those I am following.

When I constrained myself to following friends, I never got a single auto-DM (a direct message to me from their Twitter account sent by a 'bot of some sort) and was blissfully ignorant of what others were complaining about. By spreading my net wider and having almost random follows I now understand what people have been kvetching about vis-a-vis the corruption of basic Twitter functionality.

What am I seeing? Here's a typical message (and yes, the names are not changed to protect the innocent. After all, there's no implied confidentiality for someone who doesn't know me sending me a DM marketing message that I did not solicit, is there?)

@stephen_botkin

"Thanks for the Follow! Would You Like to Know How To Dramatically Increase Your Followers? http://bit.ly/LNb7x"

Now before I go further, let me say that I have two motivations for spreading my net wider: I would like to gain more followers and I have now verified experimentally that a meaningful percentage of people who you follow will indeed follow you back.

More importantly, I am very aware that there's a resource location problem with me having an incredibly narrow set of people I follow: I never stumble across new and serendipitous information or ideas.

It's a classic computer and information science problem, actually, and one I've been chewing on for many years in my various projects, including my time years ago as a research scientist at HP Labs.

If the above were the only marketing DM I'd seen, that would be one thing. I'd think "okay, it's cool to explore ways to monetize Twitter this way", but what's amazing is that I am seeing about 4-5% of the people I follow have a marketing auto-DM that they're sending me.

Here are a few more:

@WordPressRocks

"Thanks for the follow! Increase your Twitter following and make some extra $$! http://bit.ly/4pSb5"

@jcwinter

"Thanks for the follow! Check out my free traffic secrets unleashed ebook at my site! http://linkbee.com/unleash"

@stevepohlit

"Hello and Welcome! Thank you for the follow and I am likewise Free biz report @ http://b2cmarketing.biz"

@joey_smith

"Interested or New to Internet Marketing? Take a Look at this IM and Social Media Training Power Blog - http://bit.ly/1ZlvdP - love feedback!"

@furniturer

"Thanks for the follow! Earn $$$ With The Fastest Growing Site. http://bit.ly/x1yrP"

More seriously, is following someone an implied relationship wherein they can reasonably respond by pushing out some aggressive marketing material my way? Am I at fault for either a) following them or b) being surprised that they would push these marketing tweets out to me?

I believe this is a core dilemma of the social media age: what kind of relationship is implied when I follow you on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, subscribe to your RSS feed, or even bump into you on a location-aware iPhone app?

The story's really summed up in this sentence, that the Alliance's new "radio-ad campaign will combat the mistaken perception by many consumers that they already own an HD Radio."

That's an extraordinary problem to have, isn't it? Apparently the higher clarity, greater dynamic range digital "HD" radio is a baffling proposition to consumers, who either think that if their radio has a digital tuner they're set or that it's somehow related to satellite radio (Sirius/XM).

The metaphor that comes to mind is that it's like the rats organizing and having a rally as the ship they're on slowly swirls through the whirlpool and into the briny depths.

For better or worse, AM/FM works pretty well, it's cheap, pervasive and now that there are so, so many different alternatives for listening to music (for example, I have an 80GB iPod plugged into my car stereo so I have an enormous music library on the road and far more flexibility - and sound quality - than any on-air alternative) it doesn't need to be supplanted.

That's the core problem that Sirius/XM have been having for years too. It's just alien for the vast majority of consumers to think about paying for radio. I mean, it's just airwaves, right?

Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the HD Digital Radio Alliance explains that the ads are intended to make people go to the HD Radio.com Web site so that people will view HD station guides because, as she explains, "we know if listeners find a station they want to hear that is not on the AM or FM dial, they will buy a new radio."

Uh, no. If they realize that there's music that they want to hear but don't have access to on their radio dial, they'll create a playlist on their music player, plug their smartphone into their stereo and turn on Pandora or Slacker or otherwise sidestep the entire over-the-air infrastructure.

That's not the only place they're out of touch with reality, though. Alliance president Diane Warren explains that “In this economic environment, being able to receive all these extra stations around the country for free is immensely appealing.� Unfortunately Diane forgets that you have to buy new radios to get these additional channels, and the cheapest option is almost $100.

Then again, perhaps I'm wrong and lots of my friends and colleagues have their HD Digital Radio devices and are happily listening to all the additional high quality channels. Are you?

A DVD swapping service? Ah, well, those are harder to pull off than it might seem. The other attempts I've seen fail due to a mismatch of movie quality and gradual attrition.

Tim's response, which he's generously let me republish here:

Three reasons why it's different, three why it's better.

DIFFERENT

1. It's lending, not swapping or trading: that means it's about sharing stuff you like, not dumping stuff you hate. You get things back afterwards. Our early user research discovered that if you ask people to list things they want to swap, they basically just reveal 10% of their collection (ie the stuff they hate). Ask them what they're willing to lend, and they reveal 90%.

2. It's about friends, not strangers. Our research revealed that people need help getting used to borrowing and lending. Asking everyone to open their collections to the world right from the start doesn't work. We have built in little messages so you can say something directly to your friend when you lend to them or borrow from them. You can of course add (and silently remove) friends dynamically and individually; there have been previous systems of closed groups (eg students at x university) but these missed the point that you may not trust someone you've never met just because they study at the same college as you do.

Note: if you're thinking that sounds like Facebook, yup: we've also built a Facebook app, so you can invite FB friends and they can see your collection and learn about what you're watching and borrowing.

3. We've built technology to support pass-ons. This one is subtle and you only discover it after using the system a bit, but it's incredibly important. Suppose I lend Fight Club to my friend Michael . You're also my friend, but you don't know Michael at all. What happens when you ask to borrow the movie while Michael has it? In previous lending systems, he'd send it back to me, and I'd send it on to you. But we've set things up so that if you want it, Michael can send the movie onwards to you without even knowing you.

Here's how it works: you get an email saying please pass on the DVD. When you click on it, you download a printable letter-sized sheet that folds into a wrapper showing Michael's address. You simply put the DVD inside (in a clamshell or sleeve -- we're sending them out free to beta users later this month), and put a 43c stamp on it. (Or if you're a student on campus, a wage slave in a big office, or a resident of a big apartment building, you walk it round for free.)

Here's why this is a really big deal: fast-forward to when you have 50 friends who've each lent out five movies. Without pass-ons, once things start working, you're soon going to start feeling that you have an unpaid job dealing with returns and requests. With pass-ons, your 5 DVDs can circulate among your friends without you knowing or caring who has it (remember that you can always instantly excommunicate anyone, find where each of your DVDs is, and request an immediate return, and that your friends can't pass on your DVD to their friends). And from your perspective, the service begins to look like Netflix for free -- you receive a disk, print a wrapper, and pass it on. The only work you have to do is in connection with new movies that you're enjoying watching.

Also, think of the speed and environmental benefit. With rental-by-mail, each movie makes two journeys per viewing: out and then back to the warehouse. With us, it makes one journey -- twice as fast, half the environmental impact. Instead of going in to the center and out, our users' DVDs go round -- that's why we called it LendAround.

This will raise lots of questions in your mind (eg I don't have stamps, when will you start to print the postage on the wrapper?), and I'm happy to answer them. But we've taken a strategic decision that you only have 30 seconds to explain to potential users what you're doing, and so it doesn't make sense to shout about this now. What we'll do instead is gradually introduce people to the functionality we've built as they become first members and then active members.

BETTER

1. No credits, bucks or fake currency, and no fees. Other services worked by giving you credits for each item sent; some added a charge to you when you receive something, eg a 'mere' 79 cents fee for each swap. We think quasi- or real currencies reduce usage and promote abuse and attempts to game the system. Our focus is about encouraging people to be sociable and friendly.

2. No need for simultaneity. Some attempts at swapping have relied on bilaterality (ie you want to find someone who's got Fight Club and wants The Ten Commandments), or have created complex multilaterality, where they build a chain of people who can each pass an item around so that everyone gets their request. Such complexity reduces the probability of successful matches, and hence the number of 'transactions'.

3. Network, not personal requests. Once you invite some friends, you'll probably find I'm not the only person you know who has Fight Club. In other systems, requests are made directly from one user to another. What we do is different. When you request Fight Club, we can check to see who's got it, and make an intelligent decision about where to request it based on not only availability but also other factors like the reliability of the other person and outstanding balances of borrows and lends. The result is that while you make only one request, we can work in the background to find the smartest way to fulfil it. And if someone you know only buys Fight Club after you requested it, then your loan request can still go to them.

I know it's hard to convey the subtleties of all this in a 500-word post. But we're convinced that once a user signs up, there's a much higher probability of our being able to give them a reliable and useful service that they love.