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February 27, 2006

Dying for some recognition

Determined that the PR industry should not escape unscathed from carnage in the world of newsprint, Tom Foremski has demanded the execution of the press release, everyone's least favourite mode of communication, unless it gets a serious makeover. In the same way that PR predates an independent press - think roaming minstrels telling tales of derring-do - I suspect PR will have an easier time of post-press communication than Foremski believes. But that does not mean that I think the release is destined for much else than as search-engine fodder.

On the subject of news, Journalists often talk of the inverted pyramid. It is the only structure you need to know about when writing news - and is best avoided for any other type of article. You get the important stuff out in the first paragraph. Everything after that is just layer upon layer of progressively finer-grained detail. Press releases rarely follow this structure. Most of them are more like icebergs. The bit you can see does not give you any idea what the story really is.

Foremski identifies the DNA of the useless release:

They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on...

I have never been particularly unhappy with this state of affairs. There is something unsettling about receiving a press release so well put together there is nothing you can do but run it unchanged short of finding a completely different story buried inside it. If spin removal is the only thing you have to do as a journalist, then life is very easy, if a bit dull. The most troublesome releases are those that promise much but deliver little. These are the timewasters. You see the germ of a story in its first paragraph but after a little analysis you suddenly realise that it's not an iceberg at all but a piece of jetsam. There is no story there, just some vague intention. You could argue the spin strategy worked, albeit temporarily. And, clearly, some stories get to print that held together before anyone realises that the underlying content does not hold it up.

Foremski's prescription is simple enough: let the substance speak for itself. Don't spin, just state. Get rid of the canned CEO quotes explaining how pleased everyone is in Company X about their latest launch. And provide a load of backup material ready for assimilation into a finished story that fits the audience profile. However, I can't see how anyone is going to abide by these new rules, notwithstanding the fact that quote sheets are used in some releases. I can't see why a quote sheet full of canned, approved quotes is so much better than having them in the release. Live interviews are always going to trump pre-canned material of this kind whatever happens - and this is where most releases fall down, as all too often the people you need to talk to suddenly get all coy.

Putting tags in releases to make things such as inter-quarter financial comparisons easier is all very well - and that can be done to some extent using XBRL today. But I can't see how PRs and their clients necessarily gain. Take a financial release, for example. These can be works of arts in their attempts at legerdemain. A rule of thumb when dealing with any financial results release is to look at the first paragraph and work out what information is missing. Nothing on profits? Oh dear, sounds like they are down. Pro-forma prominent? Extensive pumping of EBITDA results? Regular metrics not looking so healthy. But if the release can convince an observer that operating profits matter more than net profits, well, I guess you cannot blame someone for trying.

And it is what happens to today's releases that determines the shape of future releases. If some PRs get away with positive spin with no substance, they are going to keep at it. The unfortunate truth is that PR is involved in a game of follow the leader - we reached the situation we are in because people who put together the first releases using the format that Foremski decries worked. Why is the language of the release so stilted? Because people look at the releases of the market leaders and copy what they see. "Well that works, let's do that," they can muse to themselves.

Following the market leaders is a poor strategy for new entrants. They have no reputation, no-one is following them. They need to stand out. But I doubt that any PR company will move away from what works unless an alternative turns out to deliver extraordinary results. And spin is inherent in the act of putting out a release. Companies only put out bad news release if they really have to. Named executives join with a fanfare through the front door, and are ushered quietly out the back with a binbag of personal effects. PR is not a public service: it exists to portray the client in the most positive light possible. If transparency works, then PRs will use it. But many companies do reasonably well on a diet of opaque announcements. It remains up to those outside the company - whether journalists, bloggers, activists and other parties - to work out what is going on.

In the meantime, I am going to stick with my current strategy. Ninety percent of all releases are of no value to me. I don't spend a lot of time, therefore, trying to decipher them.

Posted by Chris at 7:18 PM | Comments (3)

February 17, 2006

Link love is a rotten proxy for attention

The second part of Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere, for the start of 2006, contains an interesting but, to my mind, flawed assumption about what Technorati is able to measure. Sifry's analysis looks at "how attention has been shifting in the blogosphere". He then uses measures of link love to demonstrate that shift, but only to demonstrate that, even using blog-friendly metrics traditional media has captured much of the "attention".

The New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post are out in front still, according to his metrics. But the blog Boing Boing has overtaken BusinessWeek and Forbes among others, and is beginning to trouble the Guardian. Both Boing Boing and Engadget have apparently trumped Slashdot. The metric that Sifry is using is based purely on the number of unique links made to each site from blogs that Technorati tracks. In fact, looking at the data, it's not even clear that, by his definition, the attention is shifting away from the dreaded MSM. There are fewer blogs in the top 30 from January than from August 2005 or March 2005. January's graph is a sea of blue mainstream media sites with just four red blog bars in the list.

The problem with the analysis is that, using inbound links alone does not in any way capture attention. If you compare the Techorati results with the Alexa traffic stats, you come up with a completely different list of top sites. I know there are issues with any third-party stats, but it quickly becomes clear that Slashdot merrily trounces Boing Boing for actual attention - that is, people actually looking at the site's pages. I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence recently that slashdotting is still a force to be reckoned with. Boing Boing traffic coming your way is nice, but nothing still melts servers like a popular post on the site no-one in the world of blogging wants to call a blog - even though it shares a lot of DNA. The BBC ranks much higher under Alexa than on Techorati's list, easily surpassing the New York Times for traffic.

What is clear is that the Technorati stats show something but not "a shift in attention". They simply show the sites that people are most keen to discuss online using one particular website format: that does not mean attention from a worldwide population but what remains a largely North American community. The New York Times and the Washington Post clearly collect a lot of links from political bloggers of both persuasions, alternating with praise and opprobrium. They effectively collect a two-for-one every time and benefit from early growth in North America.

Sifry has decided that the place we need to look at is in the Magic Middle, where vertical blogs can compete happily with traditional media. That makes a degree of sense, as blogs tend to have a narrow focus. But, again, using links to measure attention is going to get you nowhere. Concentrating on links makes blogs focus inwards rather than on communicating with an audience. People write stuff for what is likely to pick up a link from what remains a small proportion of the online population. The numbers that Technorati touts sound big, but any analysis of blog traffic stats reveals how much larger the potential audience for a blog really is.

Sifry's posting followed last week's about the apparent rampant growth of blogging around the world, which caused some to question whether blogging had indeed hit its peak already.

Even after taking out all the splogs it could find, the company came up with a total of 27 million blogs, up from 20 million blogs in the autumn. That 20 million from last autumn contained a number of obvious splogs, which prompted Matt Galloway to perform an analysis based on predictions made by Umbria. Because splogs looked to be multiplying faster than blogs written by people, Galloway wondered whether the real blog count was going to be on the way down real soon. Sifry stepped in to claim that the 27 million was indeed free of splogs (at least as far as Technorati could determine). Now, that indicates that blog growth over the last six months was actually faster than Sifry claimed, as the numbers from the autumn have not been adjusted - assuming that Umbria was right and they needed to be adjusted.

The curve has got to turn S-shaped at some point, although that point will be delayed by the effects of churn - people moving from one blogger site to another - and the bulking effect of dormant blogs. Whatever the trajectory of the curve, the blogging population still some way behind the online population of some 1 billion people. The open question is what is the proportion of people who are willing to launch and maintain a blog? If that number were to move much nearer to the online total, then link love might indeed become a good proxy for attention. But, right now, it is going to give very skewed results.

Posted by Chris at 10:32 PM | Comments (2)

February 8, 2006

BT learns how to build its own DDoS attack

I just received an email from BT telling me that I can win free songs from iTunes by logging in every day to a subsite at BT.com with a name and email address. OK, it has to be a BT email address to qualify, except for Fridays when it looks to be a free-for-all and you get to play for an iPod as well as songs. The first batch of vouchers gets released at 9am tomorrow (Thursday 9th February). And it's: "first come, first served...Log in early to see if you can get your hands on them!" Oh dear.

Limiting the qualifiers to BT addresses most of the time will limit the damage but I can't be the only person who saw the email and thought, "Hmm, I wonder how long it would take to set up a cron job to do that every day until the 10th March?"

If you find a very, very slow server at 9:00:10 GMT tomorrow, don't be surprised. And Friday? I don't think it's going to be pretty.

Posted by Chris at 9:45 PM

What a difference a slogan can make

First, an apology. This is a post about Google. I'm sorry I couldn't help it. The guff about Google doing the same thing tonight as it does every night ("Wozzat Brain?" "Why Pinky, take over the world of course.") is getting to me. I have visions of blog posts rising up like a great tide and crushing every meme in their path. And this is another one. So, I'm sorry.

Like the Brain, Google has been trapped by its own catchphrase. Wannabe corporate management take note. Don't come up with a company slogan that is impossible to live up to but easy to pick holes in. It would explain why almost all corporate mission statements are in equal measure bland and impenetrable. In coming up with "Don't be evil", Google sought to set itself apart from all the other corporations that populate the IT (and most other) sectors. As a private company, the policy might have been possible. The trouble is Larry and Sergey made a promise they can't keep. As a public company, it's the shareholders that own the company, not the management. And, I'm afraid to say, shareholders tend to like evil - not too much, but just enough to keep that share price rising.

So, what we have now is the ugly spectacle of people saying: "Look, Google is just like all the others. They're going to take over the world just like Microsoft, and IBM, and err...the other companies like that. And they're not doing it nicely either."

Giving BMW.de the heave-ho from the listings for an outrageous piece of cloaking was just one of Google's apparent crimes. People are now worried about Google's "accountability" - that it is judge, jury and executioner for its own search listings. Bloggers, in particular, fear the power of Google and so fret about it in public. Curiously, Google is not the primary carrier of traffic to blogs, even though blogs come off bizarrely well in search rankings. Maybe Google will get even more aggressive about protecting the integrity of its search results and I think that concern is uppermost in bloggers' minds when they write about abuses of power at Google.

I think some of their concerns will turn into reality, but only so far as search engines need to deal with the imbalance between blogs and regular websites in the rankings. The situation was probably not helped by the purchase of Pyra Labs and the growth of Adsense on blogs - that will have encouraged Google to allow blogs to maintain higher rankings than they really deserve in search results. But sooner or later, the first pages are going to be stuffed with blog entries that force down pages that people are really going to be looking for when they use a search engine. Which is a bit of a problem when the medium benefiting is getting plenty of real traffic by other means, such as RSS, Technorati or direct links.

Next up in the Google crime department is the arrival of more ads to the search pages. I don't know if you've noticed but Google makes its money off advertising. And it needs more. And more. And more. I think this is the point where Google will begin to lose its shine among users. Google has been a good site to use because it is not cluttered. Advertising clutters pages. But it pays for them as well. Somewhere there is a middle ground that people will accept. But while it finds that middle ground, some users will drift away. And Google's attempts at search dominance take another knock.

I doubt that MSN, AskJeeves or Yahoo will knock Google off its perch. They broadly have the same business model and the same problems. I suspect the challenge will come from one of two directions (maybe both combined). One is improved AI from a new challegner. That is not to say that Google has not been doing a good job of adding its own. Over time, Google has added natural language processing features such as word stemming to improve searches. You no longer have to use the OR tag to find different forms of a word. I would imagine some level of context analysis to provide close synonyms is on the menu at some point. Let's face it, Google has a fantastic corpus for doing that kind of processing. It is way beyond any of the standard corpi that the independent researchers have been using for that kind of work. However, maybe one of the researchers has something a bit special up their sleeve and, like Larry and Sergey, a bit of encouragement or latitude from their supervisors.

The other direction is P2P. I have noticed Yacy, a P2P search engine that I have yet to get my head around turning up in the referrer logs. I remember the old days of the Interweb (that is, ten years ago), when agent-based searching was going to rule the world. Something like Yacy may be the next stepping stone to that. I have no idea whether it will be Yacy as I don't yet know enough about it. But I have a suspicion that the ultimate competitor to Google will be distributed. It's just another turn of the cycle - IBM - server-centric computing ; Microsoft - client-based computing; Google and Ajax - server-centric computing; SearchX - client-based computing.

And SearchX should have the slogan "will work for food" or something less ambitious than "don't be evil". Because Google's epitaph will probably be: "But I couldn't help it."

Posted by Chris at 9:27 PM

February 4, 2006

Tell it like it is, PRWeb

Sometimes, when the red haze settles on a blogger and the rant spews forth it's a bit disappointing when they apologise 24 hours later. David McInnis, CEO of PRWeb, should really have stuck to his guns after deciding that journalists are like lemmings and went public with his thoughts:

Next, let’s not kid ourselves. There is nothing sacred or holy about journalism anymore. For goodness sake, it has been the biggest product placement network going for close to three decades now. Turn on any network morning show, if you can stomach it, and you see one product placement after another. They are largely able to get away with it because it is so carefully orchestrated. Apart from being the ultimate in product placement, journalists today seem more like lemmings chasing the same dozen stories on a given day. What happened to variety?

PR Steve Rubel decided that this may be time for another boycott. For some strange reason, Rubel thinks you should use a service based on what the vendor says about it, not whether it actually works or not. Does PR do that to you after a while? Do all those years working on the message mean the message becomes the medium?

I can see Rubel's point. In general, it's considered good business practice not to insult your customers. At the same time, when someone gives their honest opinion, it is refreshing, and better than having everyone self-censor because someone might just take offence.

McInnis need not have worried about backtracking in a subsequent post on two counts. Strictly speaking, journalists are not customers of these press-release distribution services - those are the clients and agencies. I don't much care if the service is good or bad from them. If all that the feeds contain is junk, they just get pulled out of the RSS aggregator. No complaints. No "why doesn't this work better?" calls to the company. They just go.

I have to say that PRWeb tends to be stuffed full of more junk than the two large distribution services BusinessWire and PRNewswire. I don't lay the blame at McInnis's door. In being a free service to many, you are going to get a lot of stuff that people would not bother with publicising if they had to pay real money for it. The big two, however, have the advantage of "matter of record" status for financial announcements. That makes them difficult to dump even though there is a lot of guff stuffed in between the more important releases. However, the minute I find a better way of getting that source information, all those feeds are going in the bin. On any given day, more than 1000 entries are sitting unread in the PR group in NetNewsWire. And old releases roll off the end pretty fast. I skim through that lot maybe once a day, often less frequently than that, just to check I haven't missed anything. And that is where McInnis's comments ring true.

Product placement is a large part of the output from TV, newspapers and magazines, although it is a long way from being all of it. We spend a lot of time shoehorning product launches into news-form stories, and it's not a good fit in general. The day something is "announced", you are not going to get that. All you have are the claims and, if you push a bit, counter-claims from the competition (although, courtesy of the PR filter, company spokespeople have become increasingly cagey about being publicly sceptical about their competitors' launches) and analysts.

However, the process is quite artificial. It's not news as I would care to define it. The chances are that the bigger customers have been told all about the product weeks or months in advance. Certainly, in the trade sector, one of the considerations in deciding whether to write about a product launch is to weigh up whether everybody who might care already knows about it. Then you have the arbitrary launch dates; briefings under embargo possibly weeks in advance; and in some cases PRs trying to negotiate over cover slots, prominence or position.

To a degree, this all worked in the past, because people did want to see or read this content in magazines and other media. Ideally, they wanted impartial reviews, but that kind of thing has to wait until someone has tried it out. And, frankly, the review only works for certain classes of product. You can review a word processor easily because just about anybody who can use a computer can do that; evaluating a $100 000 chip-design tool implies you have a $1m chip to design in the first place. That is where the Internet and the user-written Web comes in. People with an interest get to do their own analysis and recommendations. As journalists, we can concentrate on pulling together that kind of input with other information that companies are less forthcoming about, such as delays or problems. Old-fashioned news, basically.

Similarly, there used to be a good reason for hacks to chase the same story. Circulations never overlap 100 per cent, even though there may be high overlap in some fields, particularly in controlled-circulation media. You want to make sure you have all the important stories covered. And, of course, you always believe you have the best approach.

Again, the ability to digest news from many different source through one tool, such as an RSS aggregator, makes this behaviour much more difficult to justify. I don't think you are going to get a gentleman's agreement whereby one group of journalists will always cede a story to another because it might be closer to a story - you would never get that level of co-operation even if it was healthy. But, the changes in user preferences means that chasing exclusive stories will take precedence at most media outlets. The herd instinct is not good for webstats.

McInnis is clearly thinking ahead, having realised that direct-to-consumer company announcements will become the mainstay of his business. If you take the trends outlined above and project them onto what that means for the press release, the conclusion is pretty clear. Most releases are useless to journalists because they announce things we will never write about and, because they are distributed widely, there is no possibility of exclusivity. But there is a user community that could be interested.

PRWeb and other distributors have a problem in that the material supposedly going to the consumer is not just bland and uninteresting, but often impenetrable. The advantage of the traditional model was that journalists are prepared to translate releases in plain English - often just to work out what the company is banging on about. The consumer or blogger audience has a far lower tolerance for opaque content. That will have to change if these companies are serious about a direct-to-consumer business. But I don't expect to see innovations from the distributors for journalists on the press release side of things. It will all be for the consumer, although I have my doubts as to whether the consumers will like what they get unless PRs change their ways.

Posted by Chris at 5:17 PM