Escherman

Is it just me or has the whole world gone Facebook mad? I only joined a few weeks ago – but I can see how it is turning into the greatest productivity destroyer of all time.

Friends and contacts keep popping up daily. It’s like being in a sweet shop – someone invites you to try out a new application and you can’t resist – my profile page is awash with the things – but I guess you can try things out and remove if they don’t prove useful – I sure hope I settle down to a small core of relevant apps.

All in all, I feel a bit old. I was therefore amused to see that Jack Schofield of The Guardian is getting advice on how to use this new fangled Facebook thing from his son James – take a look here – on Jack’s "Wall".

BTW – the Food Fight app is probably the silliest thing I’ve seen for a long time – but I can see that quite normal people are spending significant amounts of their time flinging virtual burgers at each other.

I spent a very pleasant hour or so yesterday afternoon over a chilled glass of Oyster Bay with the mastermind behind TWL. (No, I won’t name them, but plenty of people know who it is anyway – and I’m sure it will be common knowledge soon enough). It was good to finally meet tech PR’s masked crusader – and to get an idea of where the TWL brand is going.

TWL has been around the tech PR biz for some time – hence why the content is nearly always "on the money". And as Peter Kirwan has already pointed out, although one may think that the site is simply there to find fault with everything, TWL would really like to run some genuinely positive material – it just seems hard to come by – or no-one feels comfortable sharing it.

The following are some of the (many) things we discussed:

1. TWL fulfils a need

Spin Bunny proved the concept and TWL has essentially picked up the baton. Interestingly, TWL is looking at expanding its coverage to encompass other areas such as financial and healthcare PR – broadening the appeal of TWL is certainly one way to give it more long term viability.

2. Bringing the fun back into tech PR

We both agreed that much of the fun appears to have gone out of tech PR – the industry’s general inability to laugh at itself needs addressing. TWL is at least doing its bit to help.

3. Fear of TWL link love

TWL revealed that many people are afraid to link to TWL because it is perceived as being, well, a bit naughty. Again, the sooner everyone lightens up the better.

Clearly, TWL has a whole lot more planned in the coming months – which will no doubt be revealed in due course. For what’s its worth, I think TWL is on to something – I really do think it can be a force for good – as well as offering an alternative voice in an industry that has traditionally run scared from discussing real issues openly and honestly. I certainly wish them well as things develop. More power to your elbow TWL, etc.

Well, this Valleywag piece (in turn based on a NYT article) was saying that video bloggers could learn from the porn biz – but the two comments they highlight could be be more generically applied to PR:

We use good-quality lighting and very good sound," said David Joseph, president of Red Light District, a production company in Los Angeles that has made films like "Obscene Behavior."

ie high production values are seen as a differentiator – all those PR 2.0 types armed with a mike and a copy of Garageband ought to bear this mind when recording their next rivetting podcast

There’s not a whole lot of story — it’s basically right to the sex, but we’re consistent with the quality," he said, noting that the company is also careful to pick interesting backdrops. "We use different locations, rooms and couches."

Of the hundreds of press releases that land in journalists in-boxes daily, how many get "right to the sex? Or provide a suitably interesting context?

As we all know, things are tough in the world of PR recruitment at the moment – so agencies are resorting to ever more aggressive tactics in a bid to lure talent.

However, seems that Inferno MD Grant Currie has somewhat shown his cards early in an apparent attempt to lure Rainier staff over to his camp. Clearly Inferno are feeling the heat in sustaining their 48pc y-o-y fee increase to £2,363,883.

Stephen Waddington has rather sportingly put Grant’s contact details in his blog post for anyone looking for a job at Inferno – though wonder how many other agencies have been targetted by them?

As Strumpette says, we Brits seem to be demonstrating what wildly creative PR types we are (or just naturally good at doing captions).

Full story here. As I told Strumpette, the easiest $1,000 I ever earned.

The Economist has just launched a a full audio edition  of the weekly mag. Clearly a lot of resource is going into this. On first inspection, the entire content of the print mag is being repurposed for audio – seems to involve an army of voice actors reading out, word for word, every article.

However, there are a number of issues here. First, you have to go to a specific web page to download (no iTunes podcast integration).  You can choose to download the whole mag (100MB – blimey) – or you can download individual sections. But each story is saved as an individual MP3 file – and unless you have some idea in advance (ie by reading the mag first), you don’t really have a clue about the content of each story (Retailing, for example, covers a rather wide range of possibilities).

Also, the reading of a single one page story lasts about 6.5 minutes – I’m sure the time-pressed senior execs who make up the magazine’s readership could read the printed version a lot quicker. And given that much of the material is focussed on figures, audio doesn’t seem the best medium to convey this – how do you create an audio version of a trends graphs, for example.

To listen to the content for the entire mag would come in at around 4.5 hours – I hardly think anyone, let alone a FTSE 100 CEO, has the time to spend listening to the Economist – especially when you can get the info you require much more quickly by simply reading the magazine.

Would have thought they might reconsider a re-think of their appoach – surely a 10 – 15 minute bespoke digest of the week’s main stories would be far more useful (and cost effective) solution.

PS The feedback survey is also quite frustrating – where you can provide additional comments, you are restricted to about 8 words – only right at the end can you provide in substantive feedback – I wonder how may people will bother to persevere to the end?

MediaShift . Our Voyeuristic World::Are We Sharing Too Much Information via Social Media? | PBS.

Good piece from Jennifer Woodard Maderazo – especially this comment:

Would clients be less likely to hire me because they know, through my
blogging, what my political views are? Would a suitor have second
thoughts if they found out, via LastFM ,
that my musical tastes mirror a late night Time-Life infomercial? Would
a potential employer not call back because — perhaps worse of all —
they see that I spend way too much time online, constantly updating the
world about the banal details of my life?

My LastFM stations are often used as the background music in the office ie I’m not actually at my desk listening to what is being selected – so my apparent musical taste may not reflect what I really do like – or listen to.

TWL recently kicked off a little round robin to pull together a joint entry for the British Computer Society short story competition – only needs a few more words to get it finished. I make a cameo appearance – I should point that this is a work of fiction – and references to my alleged brutal interview technique have no bearing in reality (at least I hope they don’t).