April 30, 2007
Why I like Verizon's Fiber Strategy
Verizon has taken a beating for biting the bullet and investing in running fiber to the home (FTTH). But I think it's a smart move in the long run.
YES, it is more expensive once you have to get out the backhoes and start digging trenches to run fiber optic cable, but you only do it once and you have the real-world capability to go up to GigE speeds or faster to the home.
The alternative is to try to squeeze every last bit out of copper with multiple flavors of DSL, but that seems to be a more complex game of trying to pick winners and losers from the latest chip sets and dealing with the oh-so-many quirks of running copper at high speeds, based upon distance from the CO and what other "noise" is introduced into the copper.
Stick in fiber and you have a strict baseline of your infrastructure unbound by distance from the CO. It's clean, it isn't affected by electromagnetic noise.
Cable companies aren't dumb. They also have physical infrastructure (coax) able to support speeds of at least 100 Mbps plus phone (which at 100 Mbps or faster, is a noise and QoS issue, not a bandwidth issue) and video.
Trying to deliver video and "high-speed" broadband (depending on how you define that animal) over a last-mile copper network sounds like a lot more headaches than it's worth in the long run. Especially since cable companies can drop in new head-end equipment, rearrange some of their frequencies on their existing coax plant, and put some boxes on the customer end to get faster speeds.
(YES, it is a hassle to upgrade all of that stuff across the cable plant, but it beats the heck out of digging trenches).
I suspect the more interesting question to look at about 5 years down the road is exactly how much speed you can squeeze out of coax when compared to fiber. There's some UWB (ultrawideband) "magic" that could be applicable to cable plant that could (in theory) boost them up to GigE rates... which would be good enough unless you're running an Internet3 cluster in your basement....in which case you should be running fiber anyways.
Posted by dmohney at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2007
Unified Communication - OK, I'm (almost) a believer
Between Dialogic, Microsoft, Acme Packet, and the folks at Mitel, I've become convinced that unified communication (UC)is something more than some good words and Powerpoint.
Dialogic thinks that the driving force in selling their boards and appliances into the Enterprise space over the next couple of years is UC. At their Boston press briefing, they had Microsoft present a vision based upon the migration off of TDM into hybrid networks. Once you have IP in the network, you're half way to UC.
Acme Packet's Seamus Hourihan (VP Marketing and Product Management) pointed out to me if you're spending all that money for new IP communication infrastructure just to save a few bucks, it doesn't make sense. IP communications is not a "black phone" replacement, but enables enhanced collaboration, white boarding, and all kinds of other bells and whistles.
Finally, I'm looking over the Mitel purchase of Inter-Tel and seeing them drop the UC phrase as the first phrase when they start rattling off company strengths.
Posted by dmohney at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2007
Wild Wild World of Wireless
If you want a headache, think about all the new flavors of wireless technologies in the pipeline and coming to a neighborhood near you.
Wireless USB - Available, well, now, almost. Vendors are shipping devices in small quantities, but you should see a real pickup in the technology by the fall. Right now, it's a wire-replacement, but people are trying to figure out ways to graft mesh networking on top of it so you can have your HDVideo and view it (in the next room, next floor) too. Yes, 480 Mbps up to 10 meters, 110 Mbps for longer distances that I can't remember....
802.11n - Not to be officially finalized until March 2009, according to the latest timeline over at the IEEE, but vendors are determined to put out pre-N, draft-N, and N devices without it. Good news is, when it finally does arrive, it will have better security and speed. Bad news is everyone will have to upgrade to "True N" to take advantage of all the whistles. Will likely be used for both in-home and last mile access.
WiMAX - Clearwire and Sprint are deploying networks across North America and it should be interesting to see what Sprint does in coupling WiMAX with its cellular network. I suspect the biggest use of this tech might be in automobiles to download video for cross country road trips.
LTE - Long Term Evolution. There's talk about doing up to 120 Mbps (or faster) over cellular frequencies and technologies. Are you drooling yet? We're talking some serious bandwidth in the palm of your hand - speeds that are faster than most cable and DSL providers deliver today by a factor of 10x. (Comparison: Verizon FIOS 35 Mbps, some rare cable companies 50 Mbps).
700 MHz (Licensed) - This spectrum translates to freed-up TV channels between 52-69. QUALCOMM has tapped into one "channel" to implement MediaFLO aka Verizon Wireless's TV capability on a nationwide basis. Speculators sitting on a good chunk of it waiting for the spectrum to "clear" after the U.S. transitions to DTV in 2009. Another good chunk is scheduled to go up for auction in the next few months and they'll be a battle royale over the licenses.
TV Whitespaces - Anyone familiar with TV before cable knows that a (NTSC) TV only pulls in about a dozen or so channels between channels 2-69. As noted above, channels 52-69 are going away (being sold).
This leaves 2-51. And you can still only pull in a dozen channels. The rest of the channels, for various RF engineering reasons are not used or "whitespaces."
The FCC is working on a final ruling this fall to allow the UNLICENSED use of TV Whitespaces for broadband and there's a coalition of tech companies pushing hard for it to take place soon. Usage will likely be Wi-Fi-esque, except with better range and datarates... so both in-house and last-mile are possible/potential.
Posted by dmohney at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)
Psst - Your PR firm doesn't read VON Magazine!
Got a call from one "name" PR firm and an an e-mail from another firm asking all about what was going on with the June issue of VON Magazine.
The "Name" PR firm wanted to know more about the deadlines for the June edition and did we accept vendor-written articles.
The e-mail was asking about opportunities for two (2) clients about all the "interesting things" we were covering.
*sigh*
We have run half page ads in the last few editions of VON Magazine clearly stating that we DO NOT ACCEPT vendor-written material. It's also on our website.
We have an editorial calendar on-line here There's a column that says "Editorial Deadline" in it. For June, had anyone bothered to read it, the deadline was April 10th.
Now, I don't expect PR firms to worship and memorize every page of VON Magazine, but if they're going to pitch their clients to us, they should at least browse our website for a couple of clues before they pick up the phone or e-mail us.
"Oh no, we can't read all the magazines out there, there are too many of them---" cry the PR flacks.
If you are billing your customers thousands of dollars per month to promote them, how can you afford not to do your homework?
Posted by dmohney at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2007
Ambulance Chasing PR!
"Look! RIM and Blackberry have an outage! Let's exploit it for our gain!"
Does that sound like a PR strategy or a quick way to generate a couple of hits off of someone else's misery? Look at this recent pitch...
"As enterprises and service providers roll out new video, voice and data services and applications, they are relying more heavily on Gigabit and 10 Gig Ethernet. A breakdown in performance or interoperability can have far reaching effects -- as recently demonstrated by the failure with Blackberry."
The e-mail goes on to suggest a conversation with a testing firm because -- harumph-harumph -- Blackberry didn't do enough testing so we'd like you to tell you how testing would avoid such a scenario to avoid being like Blackberry.
Is this a good idea?
It strikes me as taking advantage of someone else's misfortune, rather than trying to make a case upon the merits of one's own products and value proposition.
Posted by dmohney at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2007
Left out of an article? Why? - Ask your PR/Marketing staff
Every month or so, I get an e-mail that basically says:
"Why weren't we in this article? We should be in this article! We are the leader in [fill-in-the-blank] and we exhibit with VON. We should have been included!!!"
For variety, people sometimes drop hints that they know Jeff Pulver from Way Back When (Please, don't play that game; I was at his first VoIP event in the Puck Building in NYC, if memory serves, followed by the first "official" VON event at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco...where I rode into town sharing a cab with Peggy Miles, met William Mutual for the first time, and ate one fine fine piece of salmon at lunch).
When I get these sort of letters, my general response goes something like this--
1) Have you directed this question to your PR staff (internal or external)? We have the VON Magazine editorial calendar on-line. If nobody queries us, how do/should we know you are interested in contributing?
2) Are you sending out press releases on a regular basis?
3) Have you tried to brief one of our editors in the past year?
The sheer number of exhibitors at VON events (between 500 to 600 spread out among multiple events, depending upon location, mergers/acquisitions, etc.) make it unreasonable for any contributor to VON Magazine to sort through exhibit lists each time they want to start work on an article.
Besides, this sort of thinking leads down a slippery slope of placing importance upon talking to you based upon the square footage of exhibit space -- something that I don't track/don't want to track/don't desire to track.
Think about it: if you've got a 10x10 booth and your competitor is shelling out for a 10x20, I should be talking to the guy with the 10x20 booth first, riiight? You may have a more interesting story, but...
Bottom line #1: Exhibiting at a VON Event does not guarantee you ink in VON Magazine.
Bottom line #2: Your PR/marketing people should be proactive in understanding our editorial processes, calendar, and deadlines. If they haven't articulated a strategy and process to get you in print...
Posted by dmohney at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2007
Dialogic's Baseball Bat - More Video Apps, Please
Dialogic has a baseball bat and they aren't afraid to use it.
At the Dialogic Analyst event in Boston yesterday, CEO Nick Jensen was keen to emphasize that while Dialogic doesn't do applications development, U.S. developers better get into the video applications game or they'll get left out/left behind by more aggressive developers in Asia Pacific (APAC) and Europe.
Dialogic figures to sell a ton of hardware to service providers and enterprises over the next two years with mobile video doing the "driving," but the apps have to be there once the hardware is in place. Both China and India - the largest growth markets in the world - are going to roll out 3G networks, so there's a big opportunity; China is expected to turn on its 3G network before the 2008 Bejing Olympics.
Jensen also expressed a frustration with the current state-of-the-art with mobile video calling in the U.S., noting that you can't swap calls between any of the networks -- unlike in Europe and APAC.
The big name of the game for Dialogic in the next couple of years is IP, as the world moves away from TDM into hybrid networks, with video and wireless driving the move into IP on the carrier side and unified communication doing the same in the enterprise space.
And if you're watching the M&A scoreboard, Dialogic is shopping for some complementary technology pieces moving forward.
Posted by dmohney at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)
Title Change...
I've decided to rename/retitle the blog to reflect that I'm going to start throwing in some stuff about IP Communications as well as PR "stuff."
Posted by dmohney at 03:34 PM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2007
Fenway Park here I come...
Tomorrow, I'm going to be a guest at Dialogic's Press/Analyst's briefing in Boston.
Among the highlights, I'll get to walk around Fenway Park and hit some balls, according to the agenda.
It'll be a nice change of pace from the typical gogogo of a trade show and provide some quality time rather than the typical 30 minute/gotta go/back-to-back meetings.
Part of the unspoken agenda at this event is the building of RELATIONSHIPS between Dialogic and media and analysts. You can't build a relationship or corporate image in a one-off 30 minute briefing. Sure, there's going to be a number of presentations on Thursday evening and Friday, but today's news is perishable.
Relationships and corporate image are priceless.
Best event I ever ended upon was a 24 hour whirlwind tour of ArianeSpace's launch site in French Guiana. Participants had to rendezvous in Paris the evening before, take the Air France 7 hour direct flight to Cayenne, get loaded into a bus for the whirlwind tour of the launch center, dinner, hotel, bed. Up early in the morning to drive out to see the launch pads for the Ariane 4 and 5, assembly buildings. Rush back to the hotel for lunch and pack up. Get on the bus with the token stop at some shack by the side of the road to pick up rum, then back on the plane for a 7 hour flight back.
Did I mention the yellow fever vaccination and the anti-malarials?
Still, it was was pretty breathtaking...
Posted by dmohney at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2007
Too many wires, not enough time
Wire services are, for the most part, overrated.
At last count, there were at least a half dozen "wire services" that want to be my friend and that's about a half dozen too many.
I like wire services that directly e-mail press releases to an e-mail address. Period. None of this "log in and manage your account" or "customize your e-mail" or "We have signed you up and all you have to do is ..." junk.
PRNewswire and BusinessWire have mastered the direct e-mail trick without breaking a sweat. They are Good.
I have given up on even trying to review the daily press release summaries that wires put out because there's too much noise, too many releases that have no/little relevance to the news we cover, and too many people that game the system with multiple key word listings. Can't blame 'em for trying.
Smaller wire firms insist upon "subscribers"/writers logging in and updating/filling out profiles. I just don't have the time for that overhead, especially when it's a half dozen different services. Worse is when they sign ya up without permission then expect you to update your profile... to a service you haven't asked for...
Once upon a time, I got a call from a wire service representative that said one of their customers was complaining they weren't getting enough coverage in VON Magazine. It was, shall we say a bizarre conversation, because:
1) Either the PR agency or the company should have been complaining.
2) We had run the company's press releases over the past six months.
3) One of the founders of the company had been profiled on the FRONT COVER within the last six months.
On the front cover of VON Magazine, and they are complaining?? Uh hum.
Turns out the wire service in agitation had been dumped by the PR firm and was telling big whoppers to both sides -- Yes, I called the PR firm working with the company and asked them "Hey, are your customers really concerned about how we cover them?" [Answer: No problems, loved the cover, you guys are doing good by them].
Now the PR firm is putting all of their customers on BusinessWire and living happily ever after.
Posted by dmohney at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2007
A day at VON
People wonder why I look so dog-eared during the day at VON, so I wanted to share a "typical" day at a trade show for a reporter/editor, based upon my schedule of Tuesday, March 20.
6:30 AM - Get up, start the e-mail, have things download while in the shower. 57 e-mails before breakfast
7:30 AM - Press/Analyst Briefing with Sylantro
8:30 AM - Go back to room, process/sort e-mail. Watch another 20 download.
Between 9 and 10 AM - Go watch keynote speech with Jeff Pulver and others. Take pictures.
11:00 AM - Meeting with BroadSoft
11:30 AM - Meeting with GenBand; can't talk to me yet, something "big" in the works. Turned out GenBand was buying Tekelec's switching bits.
12:00 - Briefing lunch with Aculab
1:00 PM - Meet with Surf Communications.
1:30 PM - Meet with Covad
2:00 PM - Meet with Owera
2:30 PM - Meet with NexTone
3:00 PM - Meet with someone else I can't remember
3:20 PM - Run back to room, download another 22 e-mails.
4:00 PM - Meet with Packet8
4:35 PM - Run back to room, start processing more e-mail.
5:45 PM - Moderate "SIP vs IMS: Are there distinctions?" Watch two of the panelists square off. Wish I had a ring so I could see them mano-a-mano rather than BulletPoint-v-BulletPoint. Room is packed, despite the late hour
6:50 PM - Thank the panelists, shake hand, run over to Hyatt St. Clare for dinner media event.
8:50 PM - Leave dinner, go back to room. Download 47 more e-mails. Get FOCUS e-newsletter prepped to go.
10:40 PM - Curse the person who sent a 1 MB PDF file, clogging up the other e-mails.
11:35 PM - Put FOCUS newsletter "to bed" for publication in morning. Go to bed. Have dreams of 1U form factor devices spitting out PDFs...
Posted by dmohney at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
The Same Names - Someone is doing something right
Going through the last couple of layouts for VON Magazine, I've begun to notice some companies appear in print more often than others.
Why is that?
The outsider might attribute it to sloth (not) or money spent with the magazine (NOT).
From the inside, it's a bit different. VON Magazine has four "steady" editors that contribute pieces every month, a rotating set of writers for hardware, security, and testing, and a couple of columnists; call it nine people that regularly contribute to the magazine.
I see the same names and companies across multiple pieces, so what this means is the PR mechanisms -- internal and external -- promoting these companies have done an effective job in at least one of two areas.
1) Monitoring and being pro-active on the editorial calendar: They read and review the latest version of the VON Magazine editorial calendar. They understand they need to approach the writer well in advance of a piece (60-70 days) and they understand the editorial deadline for contribution is on the 10th of the month.
2) Approaching/establishing relationships with more than one writer. PR is a MARKET. Writers are your customers. Your story, your people, your experiences, your customer successes are your product.
Ya gotta sell the product to your (media) customers.
A lot of people Don't Get It. They label under the misconception that writers are just sitting around with nothing to do and the writer needs to contact them. (Where in reality, writers get all kinds of pitches every day, have to work every day to pay the bills, etc...)
Meanwhile, the more successful companies who do Get It -- the ones I keep seeing in the proofs every month -- understand that writers are their customers, have established relationships with them, and keep track of what their customers might be working on every month. They're doing a patient and successful job selling.
What have you done to sell your company today, mediawise?
Posted by dmohney at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2007
The Floundering PR Waif - STOP THE COLD CALLS!
"Well, I'm not pitching anything, but I want to find out what you think about IPTV...Do you think IPTV will be successful? ... Our firm is thinking about expanding their practice into IPTV..."
[Yes, IPTV will be successful, AT&T is deploying it to deliver video, along with firms around the globe... but that's not the point]
I hate cold calls, especially cold calls fishing for information on subjects when there are websites and The Google.
In lieu of e-mail or some time with The Google, the waif picks up the phone and starts making phone calls to editors, stumbling through a script and jotting down answers.
It wouldn't be so bad if he or she had done some basic homework, like read our magazine or visit our website, but that's NEVER the case.
Instead, they want an instant education on a cold call; in this particular case: Will IPTV be successful and what firms are worth watching in the space?
When I get a phone call from some waif out of college with a set of fishing questions -- and this has happened at least two or three times over the past month -- I'm disinclined to think very highly of either the PR firm or the individual making them.
I don't know if this is something to keep the interns busy, a bizarre hazing ritual, or an actual methodology to base/build future business plans. Unfortunately, this particular firm will likely find someone in the IPTV space that buys their pitch and suck money out of them for six months, gaining further education at the client's expense. (Big Law Firms also do this).
It's not like the firm couldn't have sent the kid to a VON or something, right? Heaven forbid that $3000 be invested in walking around at a trade show to gather information and maybe even stumble across a couple of potential clients.
It's times like these that I wish we could have selective billing on our inbound phone lines (Jeff Pulver, are you listening?) The minute I get one of these calls, I can press a button and hear...
Be more than happy to have a nice 10-20 minute chat under those circumstances, looking up things on The Google and reading them off on the phone...
I know a few PR firms that NEVER EVER let their waifs make unsupervised cold calls. The principals know better than to let the inexperienced loose without adult supervision and a little seasoning.
Posted by dmohney at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)
April 09, 2007
Stupid Embargo Tricks
I can sum this up in two parts--
1) If you can't trust a news outlet with an embargoed press release, why are you talking to them in the first place?
2) There's no such thing as a "verbal NDA." And NDA <> Embargo.
Given the total flow of e-mail per day I have, I don't like embargoed (i.e. press releases sent out a couple of days before they actually are "published") releases. I've seen companies send out releases, then turn around and say they have "retracted" them. Or they send out a release, don't even label it as embargoed, then turn around and say "Wait, we didn't want that information going out until next week."
There are some PR firms (ALWAYS PR firms, never actual company communications people) who e-mail "We'll send you the release, but I need to get you to say you'll honor the embargo." Not, "What is your embargo policy?" but it's a little game where you have to say the magic words "yes, we honor embargo" before they'll send out a press release that is going out in 24 hours anyways and nearly always turns out to be mundane. Or better yet, a venture capital funding announcement... do you know how much VC talk?
Thank you for the little game, because you've wasted my time and racked up some more billable hours for your firm. Sooo, I should reward this behavior, because...?
My other pet peeve here is the casual way that (typically young, barely out of college, ill-trained) PR people throw around the phrase "NDA" in "We can give you this under NDA until Tuesday." It's just so cool to use the phrase, like wearing all-black or smoking clove cigarettes.
NDA is short for Non Disclosure Agreement. I've read and signed a number of NDAs back in The Day. NDAs have nothing to do with embargos.
You SIGN a NDA when you want to protect company trade secrets. They are long legal documents that threaten onerous action should you violate them (i.e. blab about company trade secrets).
You DO NOT sign an embargo. An embargo, when applied to press releases, implies that an editor or writer will not disclose information in a press release until the date/time of the release comes up. So if a company has a press release it is putting out on Tuesday, it could send out an embargoed press release on Monday with the reasonable expectation that it wouldn't show up until Tuesday.
Note that embargo and press release have nothing to do with company trade secrets or signing documents threatening legal action.
Therefore, a "verbal NDA" is an oxymoron, worth the paper it is written on...
Posted by dmohney at 02:51 PM
April 07, 2007
Wire into Techorati
Is this joining the circle of trust? Hmm. Anyway.
Posted by dmohney at 09:22 PM
April 06, 2007
MR 101 - Education for PR - 1 Day Event - Draft Vision
Shopping for a new PR firm? Looking to learn more about PR? If you're going to spend thousands of dollars per month on an external PR firm, shouldn't you spend a day and some (smaller) amount of money learning the most effective ways to work/use PR in the first place?
My vision is to have (currently hypothetical, nothing committed) an event whereby you, the designed marketing/PR person, staff or executive charged (i.e. stuck) with PR duties can come and learn more about media relations.
MR 101 - (MR = Media Relations) - would occur during the July/August time frame, with perhaps one session happening on the East Coast, one on the Left/West Coast. I know, it's during your "vacation"/downtime, but that's the POINT for two reasons: 1) If it's trade show season (i.e. September onward) you don't have the time and 2) Quite frankly, you should be doing strategic marketing and PR planning for the Fall and Spring "seasons" way before September.
MR 101 would provide context to what "PR" means, how it fits into the overall framework of marketing/marketing communications, what a reporter does, different techniques for pitching your story, and the like.
Let's face facts: If you are talking about press releases just the week before a big event, you've already lost the battle.
Dirty little secret: (with respect to Jim Dunnigan) A certain number of companies end up in print more often than others because they 1) Plan in advance, 2) Build a comprehensive 6-12 month plan 3) Steadily execute on their plan.
Dirty little secret #2: If you hire a PR firm and expect them to instantly get you in print in 90 days or less, you have, shall we say, unreasonable expectations. (For one thing, print cycles alone can be 60 days)
Speakers would include a combination of media people (i.e. like me) from different publications and principals from select PR firms. Participants would hear from media DIRECTLY, unfiltered by the spin of a Big-Name PR firm. Participants would also hear PR principals talk about the CUSTOMER'S responsibilities when it comes to PR, both what they should expect from a PR firm -- if they need one -- and what the customer should be expected to provide in terms of education, information, and oversight.
Sure, you can wind-up a PR firm and let it go off without supervision, but if you do so, doom on you, baby.
Do you like the idea? Are you interested? What would you want to learn about? If so, e-mail me; dmohney@vonmag.com is easiest.
I think the biggest problem in this hypothetical event is to keep it tight and functional, so you walk out of there with enough tools to be effective, rather than a heavy toolbox with stuff you don't have the time to use.
Posted by dmohney at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2007
ATTACHMENTS ARE EVIL! EVIL! AHH AHHH....
Every time I get an attachment for/on a press release, I start channeling Sam Kinison.
"OOOAHOAHHOOHH...why are you doing this? Haven'tyoueverheardofVirusesorspywareorPDAsorcrappynetworksOHAHAOAH!!!"
Why do people insist on .PDFs? or .DOC files??
Two big reasons why I hate them are as follows--
1) Bandwidth. I travel. Believe it or not, when people travel, they don't have fat pipes like they do at home or in the office. Hotel networks, be they wired or wireless, just freaking COLLAPSE when the techies come to town, because when everyone leaves the show floor at 5 PM, 75 percent of them run back to their hotel rooms to check e-mail... thereby dragging everything to a crawl.
I saw this happen at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston during a Fall VON a couple of years ago. It was the major event that moved me into getting an EVDO phone and data service from Sprint. (Well, that and a crappy Wi-Fi connection at the Imperial Palace during CES, but I digress).
Since I get tons of e-mail (57 before breakfast, Tuesday, Spring 2007 VON, no joke, most press releases), every attachment, every 300K to 1MB .PDF adds up. Even with the speeds I get from EVDO, it takes a while to download mail, so I curse every large attachment that comes through.
2) Viruses, spy-ware.
The security problems with MS Word .DOC files are, shall we say, well documented. Adobe Acrobat .PDF files have been used in at least one documented instance to carry a payload of spyware and it's one of the "flavors of the month" for mischief in the future.
You could add on a third "Why on here?"
3) Portable devices. Sure you CAN (with great difficulty) read a .PDF or .DOC file on some portable devices, but on every cell phone? On a Blackberry?
That's just from the client/receiver side -- i.e. the guy that's got to read it when/if it arrives.
Consider what sending all this stuff through a mass mailer might do to your network connection and/or hitting a flag on a third-party spam filter somewhere in the network.
Stick to plain text or HTML in the BODY of an e-mail message. Everyone can read it on most all devices and it arrives much faster when we're not jacked into the cable modem at home.
Posted by dmohney at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2007
Wish I had a stopwatch...
Love 'em or hate 'em, Microsoft knows how to do PR...
At 10:49 AM ET, I dashed off a note to the Rapid Response Team at Waggener Edstrom -- Microsoft's agency of record, asking for more information about the new TV broadband gizmo they sent over to the FCC.
At 10:55 AM ET, I received a response from the RRT, saying someone would be in touch with me. (timestamped at 7:55 AM PT)
By 11:33 AM, the words "Microsoft" and a 202 number -- their Capital Hill/DC office -- appeared on my caller ID and I was chatting with someone who knew a bit about the gizmo and put me in touch with a compadre in the "White Space Coalition" who had more of the technical and holistic (my word, not theirs) details.
I don't know how much Microsoft pays W-E, but I'm seriously impressed. This doesn't mean I'm going to convert all my boxes to Vista (sorry, guys), but it's still a demonstration of serious organization and execution.
People could learn serious stuff from this example. I've called into various government agencies and had to go through three levels of sub-contractors and two days of time before someone called me back (Yes, it's the Federal Government, but still...).
Most of my encounters with the private sector have been good; even the independent one-man shops are happy to call back, but you've always got the exception to the rule.
I remember trying everything to get a hold of someone at one DC-based company that had just sent out a press release about Something Wonderful. E-mailed their designed PR contact two or three times. Called at least twice to their switchboard, getting to the mailbox of the designed "media contact," leaving a message. I suppose I could have driven out there and shown up in their lobby, but people just don't like that... something about stalking and/or "60 Minutes."
Funny thing, the article I wrote goes into print and a week later I'm getting a call from the company's PR firm and they're wondering why they didn't end up in the piece. So I go tell the poor sap that's following up what I did and when and there's a bit of silence on the phone and he says "Yes, our client just recently had some issues in that area..."
*sigh*
Posted by dmohney at 08:28 PM
April 03, 2007
E-mail is not "Five-9"s reliant
E-mail is not "Five-9"s reliant, although many companies and PR firms assume it is.
Let me translate that into English: E-mail is not as reliant as the legacy "POTS" telephone call. But many assume that it is -- at their own peril and/or headaches.
Time to get out the virtual whiteboard and explain further....
The term "Five-9s" and shorthanded by me here refers to the cliche/statement that such-and-such a thing is 99.999 percent reliable. So if we were talking about a telephone system, it would be NOT be available for less than 6 minutes a year...
(There's a whole school of thought about the "myth of the nines," but you get my point -- On any given day, and on most days of the year, you'll have dial tone and be able to place a phone call on a POTS line without breaking a sweat).
People have come to ASSUME the same reliability of e-mail -- on any given day, most days of the year, your e-mail message will get through.
Now, you KNOW that isn't true, correct?
Let me tell you my little Spring 2007 VON story to illustrate. Over the course of the four day event, news@vonmag.com -- the e-mail box for press releases -- received about 183 unique press releases that were published in the electronic newsletter. On some bizarre impulse, I checked the FILTERED e-mail folder on our web mail service and found two releases hung up in it. Filtered e-mail doesn't get POP'ed off (downloaded), so there's two e-mails missed right there.
Out of that raw sample, we come up with 98.9 percent reliability -- not even two nines, unless we round upward.
More disturbingly, I found a couple of e-mails from VON Mag's Director of sales in the DELETED items folder; the filters on my laptop labeled the inbound mail as SPAM. Why? I don't know, but I had to add her as a trusted user and now things are OK, but you see my point.
Unfortunately, there's no easy solution to this. E-mail is reliability enough, but not TOO reliable.
You could call everyone you send e-mail to, but that's time-consuming and could be annoying to the person you are calling (I received 57 e-mails before breakfast on Tuesday at Spring VON -- I don't have the time to even take a fraction of "confirm" phone calls).
Some PR firms have a knee-jerk habit of re-mailing if they see any sort of error message - this is not smart as in best-case, I now have double the releases. Worst case, this sort of mass-mail behavior trips a spam filter threshold and then NONE of their e-mail gets through.
Return-receipt-requested? No, that's also annoying if you have to pad through 57 e-mails before breakfast, and then someone on the receipt end has to match up receipts with a mailing list. Sounds non-trivial.
A second e-mail a few days later, asking if I received the first e-mail? (See above: 57 e-mails before breakfast).
Don't know if there is a solution to make everyone happy.
Posted by dmohney at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2007
And so it begins...
I can't believe I'm doing this.
Unfortunately over 80 percent of the PR firms in the world have driven me to blogging.
Why? Because they are they are the ones who are charging their clients thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per month in retainer fees for... what?
I've been working as a published writer since around 1994 or 1995, writing for a couple of hack newspapers, graduating into BOARDWATCH and a couple of other trade pubs in 1997 and beyond, finally ended up at VON Magazine where I now sit as Editor-in-Chief.
In addition to that, I had two day jobs at two Internet startup companies that had me interacting with The Media and PR firms. In the 1996-1997 instance, I was doing classic PR work pitching stories directly to reporters. From 1997-2001 or so, I was Director of Marketing, and ulimately had a staff of two (2) dedicated PR people reporting to me, plus I went through a number of PR firms.
Sooo, I've seen a lot of PR firms "do their thing" over the past 3.5 years, heard too many companies complain that we didn't write about them in such-and-such and aritcle, and heard wayyya too many pitches from youngsters just out of college blindly reading off of a piece of paper.
Enough is enough. I'm getting on the virtual soap box.
Posted by dmohney at 04:21 PM