« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »

May 27, 2006

New-format press release. It's...er...lovely

I'm not sure whether Tom Foremski has had a look at the new-format press release that his February tirade set in train, but I can't help feeling that the result that Shift Communications came up with was not quite what he had in mind. Maybe it's a bit like Christmas where what you hoped you were getting turned out to be a chartreuse and puce Fair Isle sweater with three sleeves. "Mmm, thank you. How...different."

Personally, I have no problem with the existing format of press releases. It's what goes into them that is the problem. All that Shift has done with its format is split all the bits up and reorder them, and add in some social-media fairy dust for a bit of extra gloss. It does not address the central problem of companies telling you how great they are without actually providing any evidence. And no format is going to do that, only an understanding of what gets a release picked up.

If anything the social-media add-ons, like ready-to-roll Technorati and Del.icio.us tags make the new format harder for anyone to use. Just try to work out what is going on in the example release. First, you've got a bunch of bullet points and quotes.

• There is nothing particularly wrong with bullet points.
• Except that that the bullet points read just like the first lines of a traditional press release.
• But with fewer verbs.
• And broken up to make each element look important.
• So why not just have an intro para like, erm...a press release or a news story!
• Maybe this is easier to edit and, ahem, remix.
• For those too slow-witted to work out how to select sentences in a conventional release.

Following the bullets, we have all the Del.icio.us stuff. It's a purpose-built Del.icio.us page, apparently. And it contains all the stuff tagged to Shift, not anything directly relevant to this release. If you wanted to know why the release was put together this way, you are so out of luck if you thought clicking on that link for more information was going to get you anywhere. The quotes are the usual tired old guff that you would find in most conventional releases. So, no surprises there.

I'm still a bit mystified by the tag-intensive nature of Shift's approach. I guess that came about because Foremski spent a lot of time talking about tags in his original post. However, I don't think he meant tags like this, but the more formalised approach that you would use in an XML document. The idea, as I understood it, was that you would use those tags to pull out information relevant to your audience and let automated tools perform comparisons, between quarterly net income numbers, for example.

An intelligently tagged release might actually be helpful. But, as I have written before, I cannot see it ever happening. The work needed to come up with something useful that an entire industry would get behind is immense. And, by that time it happened, the primary target for the releases would be search engines, not journalists.

Posted by Chris at 2:55 PM | Comments (5)

The unusual nature of PR apologies

One of the most curious things about the PR-journalist relationship is how PRs try to make amends for things going wrong. An interview meant to happen yesterday did not materialise in time to hit a deadline. I did not find out it was not happening until the deadline ran out. This was after giving the company something like eight working days to come up with someone qualified to talk about the subject of a release issued by the very same organisation.

I had to go out straight after the deadline and found, on my return, a voicemail and an email. Both said sorry. But in the email there was something to make up for all the hassle, which actually goes back a lot further than this incident - this is not the first time that the company has failed to deliver anything useful, and in response to some pretty innocuous requests. The most I have got out of them recently was an earful from the US marcom about untrustworthy British journalists. But that's another story.

Attached to the email was a press release. "A UK exclusive", according to the PR on the voicemail. Fantastic, because we're still using the old steam-powered Interweb here, which is incompatible with the US superhighway that carried said announcement to the rest of the world on May 16. In fact, when I first looked at it, I thought it was a more recent release that went out the following Monday. But on closer inspection I released the release actually pre-dated the one I was trying to follow up.

But it's curious isn't it? I am not just some idiot who cannot, apparently, access the newswires to get this myself. I'm supposed to think that the chance to publish some puff piece on an old dull partnership deal makes up for all the trouble. Right. I only hope they don't mess up something really badly.

Posted by Chris at 12:26 PM

May 26, 2006

All quiet on the 'blog more' front

It's curious. When a blogging lynch mob forms, you have all manner of PR bloggers calling for the victim company to blog more. "Oh, if only Kryptonite blogged, peace would have broken out, rather than this nasty riot". Yet, it's spookily silent. That might be because blogging in the latest instance actually made the problem a whole lot worse for O'Reilly and Associates.

Originally, IT@Cork was threatened with a nastygram from CMP, the owner of a couple of applications for a service mark on the phrase "Web 2.0" - something the company protected assiduously by putting the mark on a slightly different phrase. One of the organisers published the letter on his blog and a veritable storm burst. But not over CMP. Over O'Reilly. The book publisher was named as the prime mover behind the warning letter, although the letter clearly came from CMP.

This being the world of blogs, a lot of people took the original post at face value and started to collect their virtual pitchforks and rope, ready for a good ritual hangin'. And O'Reilly was to be the first on the list. Some people counseled caution.

Then a response came from O'Reilly. And even the doubters over whether O'Reilly was involved began to think the mob can't always be wrong. But, being at the core of the whole Web 2.0 bandwagon, O'Reilly was going to have to say something. Curiously, rather than just pointing the finger at CMP, O'Reilly said it sanctioned the letter. Then the real lynching started. Score one own goal for blogging as a way out of trouble.

Now that O'Reilly has put its hand up to trying to trademark "Web 2.0", various conspiracy theories have been hatched. The main one is that CMP and O'Reilly planned all along to use the service mark in much the same way that companies use patents in standards. File them as quietly as you can, then spring the IP nastygrams on victims once it's too late. However, this is unlikely on two counts. One is that trademarks don't work that way. If you don't enforce them consistently, you don't get to keep them. Going aggressively after a victim in a country where you have a really weak claim after two years of relative inaction on your home turf is an even worse policy.

A commenter at O'Reilly Radar, Stephen Gilbert, noted that an easy way forward would have been for CMP to offer a licence for use of the Web 2.0 mark. It's a pretty standard thing and you don't have to make it an open-ended licence. Done civilly, a lot of people would just say OK and not bother to check the actual status of the trademark. But the initial letter blew that option away. The IT@Cork blog posting drew a lot of attention to the service mark's actual status - and its relative weakness.

It all smacks of incompetence not conspiracy. A lot of people seem to think that, when Tim O'Reilly gets back from his short, sudden holiday, he will be able to smooth it out with a considered blog posting. The reality is that a lot of this is out of his hands. The decisions are down to the owner of the applications for the trademark: that's a different company. The best he can do is convince other people of what they need to do before he starts blogging in true Web 2.0 PR style.

Posted by Chris at 9:03 PM | Comments (1)

Don't try organising a Web 2.0 soirée

Because a soirée is an event and CMP Media has a trademark on it. Well, sort of. The reality is a bit more bizarre.

The story so far is that CMP sent a letter to a not-for-profit IT group in Cork, Ireland, which has a half-day conference on Web 2.0 in early. Foul, cried the CMP legal team. Web 2.0 is our trademark (at least for events). It's our precioussss and we was gived it. Evidence was preferred of a service mark application to the US Patent and Trademark Office, made in 2003. Later, they followed up with one made in Europe under the harmonisation rules - but not until March of this year.

Oddly enough, there was a "Web 2.0 - Hip or Hype" seminar that was scheduled to take place only two days later. It was not organised by CMP or O'Reilly, the other company involved in this little wheeze, I might add. Oh dear, it seems the company might be trying to trademark something in Europe that is already a generic. But it gets better.

In the US, the organisers of the Web 2.0 Conference were a little unsure as to what in the name they planned to protect. The USPTO database clearly shows an application for Web 2.0 being made in late November 2003 as a trademark for events. Yet, the following year, MediaLive, the events company that applied for the mark and which was later bought by CMP, was stating that a longer, more precise phrase was the claimed service mark:

MediaLive International, Web 2.0 Conference, ... and associated design marks and logos are trademarks or service marks owned or used under license by MediaLive International, Inc., and may or may not be registered in the United States and other countries.

Even today, the service mark noted on the conference's website and in the event's logo is for "Web 2.0 Conference". From the application, I guess they planned to have Web 2.0 Seminar, Web 2.0 Workshop, Web 2.0 Love-In as follow-ons. Whatever the plan, it looks as though MediaLive (and CMP) went the wrong way about doing it.

Now, having brought the collective ire of Web 2.0 boosters upon themselves by nastygramming the organisers of a conference that was unlikely to threaten their $3k a pop, invitation-only event, the people behind this wheeze will have to explain just why they applied for a trademark and, for more than two years, made no visible attempt to enforce that version. Oh, and then picking as your victim a conference in a jurisdiction where your claim to distinctivenes is much weaker. It hardly strengthens the IP protection case.

Mind you, if it means the end of Web 2.0 as a popular phrase, I say: "Go lawyers".

Posted by Chris at 3:28 PM | Comments (3)

May 21, 2006

Clicks of doom

Spanish antivirus firm PandaLabs dropped a bombshell on Google and Yahoo just before the weekend (covered here initially): announcing that it had uncovered more than 30'000 zombie computers running software that generated fake clicks on pay-per-click adverts. The number looks scary. The story appeared just days after the SANS Institute wrote about a Google-specific botnet.

The PandaLabs figure looks like a whole lot of compromised PCs. But the number by itself does not mean all that much in the world of pay-per-click. A botnet measured in tens of thousands of machines could mean that the sploggers running the botnet are making out like bandits - well, they are bandits - or that is how big a botnet you need to make any money out of click fraud. There is a pretty wide gap between the two. The SANS Institute figures indicate that this is a big network designed to liberate cash fast. Swa Frantzen reported a small botnet of just over 100 machines, each running producing just 15 or so clicks while monitored.

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 did some arithmetic on what 30k PCs running a click bot could achieve and the theoretical payout. The top end of the scale ran to more than $6bn in annual pay for those clicks to the fraudsters. And that was for just 100 clicks per day per machine. Bots can easily crank through many times that number. However, because of the way pay-per-click works, I reckon a number closer to 10 per day is probably more realistic. That is because, to get the money, you need to keep your head down as long as you can. Machine-gunning clicks at Google will only draw attention to your activity. But, it's hard to tell. The only people who know for sure are those operating the botnets.

The problem for pay-per-click advertising is that, for a model that is meant to represent the pinnacle of transparency in advertising, there is actually precious little hard information on the scale of click fraud. The search engines don't like to talk about it, except to say that they "have it under control" and offering the odd refund here and there. And the sploggers are hardly going to come out and say: "this is how we do it and this is how much we make".

The open question is: how many clicks from these computers have been recorded as valid clicks and how many were rejected? It's not as easy as it looks, even for the search-engine companies. Clickbot.A seems to make up IP addresses to try to disguise the fact that a lot of clicks are coming from a small base of users. Now, this might be alarming to those who provide the money for pay-per-click advertising. But, as South African specialist Incubeta found out last year, even using different IP addresses to access the same ad will not necessarily be recorded by a search-engine company as a valid click.

Google registered just one click out of ten made for the same ad even where ten different computers were involved. There appear to be mechanisms in place to control how many clicks end up being recorded as chargeable. As Incubeta reported, there are lots of bits of information that come with a HTTP request that could identify duplicates.

If the IP changes on a series of requests closely spaced in time, if the browser version, language, referring page and other information are all the same, then you can pretty much write them all off as dupes. If I were at Google and I wanted to screen out more fraudulent clicks, I would probably also pay attention to where ads were served at any one time. If the referring page does not match up with the ad clicked - bingo - I can be pretty sure I have a fraudulent click. That would make the job of the fraudster tougher - it means having to take note of where ads turn up rather than just banging on known $5-per-click targets with random details.

The search engines have another early warning network: their customers. Advertisers don't care much about clicks; they care about how many users make it to the destination page and what they do after they get there. Smart advertisers monitor this process - called 'conversion' - and get on the blower to Google or Yahoo or whoever to ask why reported clicks, and their charges, have gone through the roof when conversions have gone nowhere. Unfortunately, not enough advertisers check these figures. They may have campaigns that don't last long enough to come up with reliable information. But that does not mean they should be ripped off.

If I were an advertiser, I would expect a lot more information on how the search engines deal with these issues. There are too many unknowns in this environment. If they continue to sweep the problem under the rug, they simply build up trouble for tomorrow. You can put a financial value on 30k bots that send out spam. That we cannot for bots clicking on ads does nothing for confidence in the medium of pay-per-click advertising. These botnets might not actually take money from Adsense or similar programmes. They may simply be rented out to naive webmasters who believe that faking clicks on their own sites will make them rich. It would take them a while, and long after the cheque has been cashed, to find out how the search engines handled their fake traffic. But there is no way of telling - and that does the search engines no good at all. Tens of thousands of bots programmed to click on ads says something is going on and with little other information, it looks damaging.

Personally, I believe that there is no way to measure advertising except through sales and sampled surveys, that the measurability of pay-per-click is mostly illusion. But the search engines would do well to prove me and others wrong, and that means coming up with some harder evidence of the damage caused by botnets and what they are doing about it.

Posted by Chris at 5:47 PM

May 18, 2006

Does your slogan do what it says on the tin?

Sometime in the 1990s, management gurus decided every company needed a mission statement. Something that said something about leadership and excellence and stuff. The statement would generally appear as the second or third foil in Powerpoint presentations. The exec would read it out, everybody would ignore it and life would proceed. Well, once the obligatory org-chart was out of the way.

Today, both the mission statement and the org-chart have gone the way of the executive desk toy and Filofax. Maybe companies spend so much time reorganising they dare not put up org-charts for fear of listing entire departments that got merged or were deleveraged or whatever only weeks before. Now, life is simpler, every company just needs a snappy slogan. A one-liner to slide neatly under the recently redesigned logo. Intel moved its famous dropped 'e' - in the early 1990s it was wicked, know what I mean - to let the company add the "Leap ahead" slogan. HP told us to invent. And AT&T told us it delivered the world. Now that's ambition.

Some other technology companies have not been so lucky with their slogans. They started off bravely enough but something went a bit wonky on the way.

I assume that Stretch, a company that makes reconfigurable processors, was thinking of a slightly different phrase when it came up with "Extending the possibilites®." Maybe they felt the letter 'i' dominated the shape a bit too much and took one out. Yet, it has a catchy feel to it. It's hard not to try to set part of it to Desmond Dekker and the Aces' most famous song. All together now: "Aah, aah, the pos'bilites".

Then you have computer board maker Radisys and its call to togetherness that just, I don't know, evokes thoughts of something else. Or is it really arguing for the restorative power of micturition? A bit of attention to old-fashioned grammar might have solved the problem. It illustrates so well why you should distinguish between the nominative and accusative cases of pronouns.

Update - 27 June 2006

It looks as though Stretch finally got around to changing the logo on the website to add an extra letter. Judging by an entry in the referrer log, I'd guess it happened sometime last week. No more pos'bilites then. The company got some more money too - about $10m in Series A venture funding.

Posted by Chris at 5:24 PM | Comments (2)