Bloggasm

It happens all the time. A company spends millions of dollars advertising a product — creating slogans, musical jingles, product designs– only for it to be bought up by a larger company. That larger company wipes out the name of the original and incorporates it into its own products. All that money spent branding that original product is now useless because it no longer carries the same name.

Or is it wasted? It turns out it may be worth something. How many of you out there can still hum the advertising jingle of a product that’s no longer on the shelf? This is evidence that the brand lives on, and some companies are taking advantage of this.

The NY Times Magazine has a great feature article about how one such company is buying up the intellectual property rights of no-longer-existing products and using their still-remembered brands to kick-off sales.

The weekend is so close I can taste it. Despite the fact that I did almost no internet surfing today, I somehow have managed to amass quite a number of links. I must have been a web junkie yesterday. Here is some media-related news for your amusement:

1. Apparently back in 2006, Senator Joe Lieberman accused his Democratic challenger Ned Lamont of hacking his website. Well, it turns out the FBI has known for almost two years that this claim was complete BS.

2. A NY Times reporter embedded in Iraq gives his first-hand account of what it’s like to be held up at the purgatory-like checkpoints and the paranoia that journalists over there face every day.

3. Want to hear something bizarre? Rush Limbaugh’s fans listen to his ads more often than they listen to him. Of course, sometimes they’re doing both at the same time, since talk radio hosts often do mini-infomercials themselves. Does anybody else find it funny when they do this? It’s hilarious to hear Limbaugh puff up his manly war chest during his show, only to become a company’s bitch two minutes later so he can shill for its product.

4. Is it wrong to get off on pornography that uses the Holocaust for titillation? “In early-1960s Israel pornographic, possibly anti-Semitic novels that detailed sensational tales of the torture and rape of male concentration camp prisoners by curvaceous female Nazi guards rapidly rose from marginal pulp reading to mass-market popularity.”

5. Possibly some good news. Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer who was detained and held without charges by the US government for two years, may soon be released. An Iraqi judicial committee made the order. Predictably, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin isn’t happy after she spent so much time being used as a propaganda mouthpiece to try to frame him as a terrorist in the public eye. Malkin should really deduce that when the military resorts to anonymously feeding information to a right-wing hack, they really don’t have a leg to stand on.

6. Not long ago I went off on a rant about how PR people are terrible at their jobs, and based it on my own experience dealing with them. Since writing that post, for some reason my dealings with PR people have improved greatly. I don’t know if it’s because they read the post or because I’m starting to attract a higher caliber of marketers. Media Shift talks about the Web 2.0 version of a press release and how journalists and bloggers are becoming unneeded now that PR newswires can shoot your press release directly into Google News and other news aggregators like Techmeme.

This is my first Sunday that I have almost completely to myself (most weekends I travel to see my girlfriend an hour away) and I’ve taken the opportunity to do some house cleaning, both figuratively and literally. Part of that house cleaning involves shooing these media-related links out the door.

1. Have you ever wondered the difference between marketing, advertising, PR, and branding? Well, now you have this hilarious illustration to spell it out for you.

2. For weeks now, Tor Books has been giving away free ebooks of its print titles. Every week a new ebook is sent out to their mailing list. What’s most interesting (to me) about these mailings is that some of the authors are posting updates on their book sales and how giving away free ebooks affected their print sales. Tobias Buckell, whose novel Crystal Rain was recently given away in the mailing, posts graphs that show a recent spike in sales after the giveaway.

3. On a slightly related note, remember how Google has completely fucked me over in its recent indexing? Well, to find my Bloggasm article linked above about Tor’s ebooks, I Googled the words “Bloggasm” and “tor books” assuming that that post would come up first. I ended up having to skip through two or three pages of search results before I found it. Fucking ridiculous. And you know what showed up first in the search results before the actual article? All the dozens of blog posts that linked to the article.

4. This article makes me extremely jealous. It’s about a newspaper media critic who took a buyout and now runs a media website full time. My pipe dreams have become this guy’s reality.

5. More and more social networking scandals are breaking every week, these sites are likely going to create a whole new field of study for sociologists. This week’s scandal comes to us via New York, an article about school systems struggling to respond to libelous teacher attacks on Facebook.

6. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald tries his hand at satire by summarizing a recent AP profile on Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

In my admittedly unscientific observations, I have come to the conclusion that most publicists and people who work in PR and marketing are absolutely terrible at their jobs. Many in the PR industry make more than journalists, and yet the stuff they send to journalists to try to promote their clients is some of the laziest bottom-of-the-barrel shit — It doesn’t even begin to entice the writers to pay any attention to them.

How do I know this? Well, my email address is easy to find on this blog, and due to the fact that I’m what would be called a B-list blogger, I get quite a few emails and press releases from publicists. Out of all the emails I’ve received, there is only one instance that I recall actually replying with interest to the person who sent it. And even in that case I took a moment to tell the guy that he should have worded it better because I had almost deleted the email as spam.

To give you an example of what I’m talking about I’m going to have to pick on a publicist, sorry. Here is an email I received recently:

Hello

I’m Jacquinn, publicist at Adams Media; a publishing company in Massachusetts. I was surfing the web for intriguing blogs that review books and came across yours. I am interested in sending you some books to review if time permits, and a copy of our catalog so you can have your pick off our current offerings. What’s the best address to use? Thank you for your time.

Best,

Jacquinn Williams
Publicist
Adams Media

What’s wrong with this email? I’ll tell you what’s wrong in my five simple rules for PR people who contact bloggers:

1. Find out what the blog is actually about: As you can see, Jacquinn was searching out blogs that review books when she came across me. The only problem is that I don’t actually review books on this site. Not that I would be against reviewing a book, but it would have to be one that has something to do with the media or journalism. A quick look at Adams Media’s website shows that most of the books published there don’t fall into this category.

2. Address me by name: This one really gets me, that these people are too lazy to take the five extra seconds to take the message that they obviously copy and pasted to 50+ other bloggers and attach my name to the front of it. It’s not too hard to find, it’s right below my picture on the right and above the email address you just copy and pasted into your inbox.

3. Tie your message to a specific post I’ve written: It’s often not good enough that you’ve researched what kind of content the blog publishes. If you can tie your message to a specific blog post written by the blogger, you greatly increase your chances of being noticed. For instance, if you’re trying to promote a new social networking site, find a post written by the blogger that harshly criticizes Myspace and then explain to him in your message why your website doesn’t have any of the faults he listed.

4. Do not under any circumstances put me onto some mass mailing list: This is pretty much self-explanatory. Not only will this cause me to ignore you, but I’ll also block you as well, which will make things more difficult for you even if you clean up your act.

5. Space out your news announcements/tips: Even if you follow all the above rules, try to space out your news tips to a single person by at least a month. You should have a number of bloggers that you’re targeting. Divide them up into categories and then slowly feed them news on a cycle so they’re not getting overloaded with press releases every time your client farts.

Yes, I know that these rules mean that you’re going to take a lot more time writing to specific bloggers rather than being able to copy and paste press releases to over 100 in the span of an hour. But you know what? Doing things this way means your hit rate — aka, bloggers actually paying attention to you — is going to be much higher.

So how do I know this method works? Because I do my own PR for this blog, and I’m pretty damn successful at it. To give you just one example, I’ll copy and paste an email I sent to Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds a few months ago. The email resulted in a link from him and not only thousands of click-throughs from his site, but it also propelled it onto the front page of Fark and dozens of other sites as well.

Hey Glenn,

I know you’re a big science fiction fan, so I thought you might find this list of 50 nerdy pick-up lines amusing:

http://bloggasm.com/50-nerdy-pick-up-lines

Take care and keep writing,
Simon

See how simple that was? Because of that one email, that post has now received over 60,000 pageviews and counting.

Almost two years ago, frequent bloggasm reader Stephen Ward wrote a blog post about his terrible experience dealing with a company called Tiny Details. It wasn’t long before the post showed up on Google and ranked rather highly. Since posting it, he’s had a number of strangers show up in his comments thread thanking him for the post and saying it deterred them from doing business with the company.

Well, it took him long enough, but the president of the company finally did a Google search and found the post. Did he try to address the problems? Of course not, instead he emailed Stephen and threatened a libel lawsuit:

I am writing about the substantively incorrect postings that you have on your
website.

I am asking that you remove this point immediately. Your representation of
Tiny Details is inacurate and libelous.

I have forwarded this information to our company attorney, along with your
domain registration information.

Please govern yourself accordingly.

Kristopher Buchan
President
Tiny Details, LLC

And then after Stephen wrote a quick response asking the company owner to point out which statements were libelous, he responded with this:

Mr. Ward,

You will be hearing from our attorney.

What you have posted is indeed libel.

I am in the process of seeking your address through your domain registrating information. You will be hearing from us shortly.

Kristopher Buchan

Big no-no, Mr. Buchan. If you’ll look in the revised 21st century PR handbook, it says to never send angry emails to bloggers and expect them not to post them. Actions like that tend to come back and bite you in the ass.

This list is fairly anemic, but I’ve been busy this week and haven’t had much internet-surfing time. Anyway, here are some media-related links:

1. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is one of the first Big Idea books of the 21st century — and though it presents a number of ideas about how trends spread, the notion that most people found intriguing was the fact that a small number of “influencers” were responsible for huge trends. Well, a man named Duncan Watts has devoted his life to proving Gladwell wrong.

2. Here are some pictures of workplaces in Web 2.0 companies. My favorite is the Craigslist pics — it looks like the company is run out of an apartment.

3. Waxy caught a PR flack link spamming social networking and media sites to promote The Times (UK). Given that so many desperate get-rich-quick bloggers spam these sites every day, I was rather unperturbed after reading this news.

4. Yes, I realize that Clinton is a minority and Obama is a minority. When did it become the trend amongst journalists to try to predict how other minorities will vote for each one? First there were the blacks, then there were the Latinos. With this next minority it’s just getting ridiculous: The Jews
. Update: They’re also apparently fighting over the gays. This is beyond parody.

5. A cool profile of a niche blogger who writes about immigration issues.

6. With some of the major news magazines like Newsweek and Time, so many reporters have contributed to investigating a story that it’s almost misleading to give a byline to a single person. One Newsweek journalist talks about his own experience grappling with this problem.

The other day, I was standing in a line at the grocery store when I saw that some shopper had discarded an unsold copy of The New Yorker on top of the stand that sells candy (for those who don’t know, The New Yorker is my favorite magazine). At first, I was astonished to see that a grocery store was selling the magazine — it was the first time I’d ever spotted a copy in such a place — and after this shock wore off I decided that I’d take the magazine and stand it upright on the tabloid rack facing out. Obviously, the copy didn’t belong there — it was likely supposed to be buried in the large magazine rack somewhere within the store.

This is not an uncommon occurrence for me. I’ll be browsing in a bookstore and come across a favorite author or book of mine that is placed in such a way that the spine is facing out. I’ll pluck the book from the shelf and then rearrange it so that the cover is facing out and prominently displayed. This increases the level of the promotion for the book — a wandering book buyer is more likely to see it this way, and it increases the likelihood of purchase. Do you know how I know this? Because book publishers pay thousands of dollars to chain bookstores to have their books arranged in the exact same fashion.

By engaging in this level of promotion, I’m committing a mild version of “shopdropping” a growing trend for many writers and artists. Let’s say you’re someone who has a book that has been published by a small press. The publisher obviously doesn’t have the thousands of dollars needed to pay big box book stores to display your book prominently in the “new releases” section. So what do you do? You start visiting the stores yourself and moving your books to this section.

But writers aren’t the only ones engaging in this sort of behavior. According to an article in The New York Times just about every artist or political group can use this sort of reverse-shoplifting to his advantage.

So does this really work? I’m willing to bet that it does. How stores display their products has a huge impact on the sales of said products. I worked at a Walmart in college, and they had an entire computerized strategy of how they wanted to promote the products they sold, and this strategy relied heavily on placement.

For the artist looking to promote his work, the best tactic would be to go for efficiency. Think about your target audience and where it shops. Get your product into a highly-visible place and then hope that it catches eyes before the employees catch onto your game. But be aware that retailers are becoming increasingly wary of such shenanigans — make the swap when the cashier isn’t looking.

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Related posts:
1. Newspapers employed speed readers to review Harry Potter
2. Digg ditches Google ads in favor of Microsoft
3. Wired editor bans email addresses from PR companies