Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Gizmodo’s Brian Lam is ticked off.  The Blackberry PR team didn’t provide him with a review unit of the new Storm 2 before launch, and consequently he didn’t write a review. Only the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal got the units, apparently.

RIM has consistently ignored bloggers for a very long time, so Brian shouldn’t be that suprised. Their strategy looks like a hold-over from their enterprise sales days.  The Journal and the Times are two of the biggest publications read by business leaders across the US, and so they get the review units.  As RIM continues their assault on consumer markets, however, it seems clear that they’re going to have to change the way they approach media outreach.  They’re going to have to come up with programs that target writers in enthusiast markets, and in mainstream publications.

The best at providing review units and opportunities for writers is Nokia. Nokia’s “blogger relations” program was started by Andy Abramson five years ago. The program cultivates a community of enthusiastic geeks (like myself) who are always pleased to get a chance to see and play with their latest offerings, and to write about them – good and bad.  It has paid off for Nokia with a large and loyal following of enthusiastic customers.

Over to you, Waterloo.

In the annals of bizarre interviews, there must be few stranger than the latest Billy Bob Thornton piece on the CBC.  Billy Bob is currently touring with his band, the Boxmasters, as the opening act for Willy Nelson.  It’s a promotional gig for their new disk.

CBC interviewer Jian Gomeshi had Billy Bob and the band in the studio, and made the mistake of mentioning Billy Bob’s acting career in his opening comments. What followed was painful, bizarre, and sometimes comical.

It’s not until the 10 minute mark that Gomeshi mollifies Thornton, and they get on track to talk about the music.

So what was accomplished?  Nothing, really.  Nobody wrote about the Boxmasters music.  The headlines were all about Billy Bob’s behaviour.

One of the first things you learn in public relations training is how to deflect a question.  Billy Bob should have focused on getting the message about the band out.  Two appropriate responses to Gomeshi’s context setting might have been to:

• ignore it altogether and focus on the music.
• acknowledge it with “Yes, I’ve had a very successful career in film, and now I’m really happy to be working on another of my passions, music.  Let me tell you about…”

The next time you’re confronted with a question you don’t want to answer in an interview, remember Billy Bob’s example, and be prepared with a few deflective responses to get the interview back on track.

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Beyond PR: Can social media actually impact the regular customer? Robyn Tippins talks about some recent customer service horror stories of her own, how her blog attracted executive attention and got results. One, Comcast, came via the Comcastcares twitter account. The other came from Capitol One patrolling mentions of their name. Both resulted in mostly positive results but took very different approaches in the way they contacted and later dealt with the situation.

Other callers on the line discussed similar customer service horror stories, and how social media helped them achieve results… or not!

On the Calliflower Conference Call today: Robyn Tippins, Sheryl Breuker, Dan Rockwell, Sergio Meinardi and Tom Orr.

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 Squawk Box September 16 - Beyond PR [19:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

David Spark has been working away on a fabulous new resource for folks thinking about the role that social media should play in the business plan. Called be the voice, it’s a blog and podcast featuring “stories of thought leadership driving business growth”.  Thought leadership, of course, is one of the most powerful public relations strategies if you can execute it well, and David’s blog is a showcase of some of the best.

Although the podcast officially launches this week, I am flattered to have been David’s first interview.  In Sell your product by letting everyone see you use your product, we talk about iotum’s strategy to promote Calliflower conference calls with the SquawkBox podcast.  But don’t just listen to my call.  With folks like Charlene Li, Oliver Marks, Chris Heuer and Peter Hirshberg on his show, there’s a wealth of material to learn from.

Put it on your iTunes subscription list.  That’s what I did… you won’t want to miss a single episode.

You may remember Global IP Solutions, or GIPS, as the company responsible so many years ago for the audio infrastructure that made Skype sound so good in the early days.   Skype was the tipping point that ushered in the age of internet telephony, and in the process, they made GIPS a well known name in the industry.

Today they’ve announced that their VoiceEngine platform is now available to iPhone developers.  Want to build a voice-enabled WiFi application on iPhone?  This may be the easiest way to deliver a quality audio experience.

This particular announcement caused a minor flap last week when GIPS agency, High Tech PR, blind mailed some prominent bloggers with details of the announcement, but asked them to honor an embargo — ie not write the story until the news was released today.  You can read about it on Jeff Pulver’s blog, including the snippy response from the agency’s Terry May.

I get asked to embargo news all the time, and when asked I honor the request.  Usually I get mailed a teaser, and then I can make a decision about whether to accept the embargo.  The problem with Terry May’s mailing was that the entirety of the news was included in the mail — that GIPS was planning to VoIP enable iPhone.

Or… perhaps it wasn’t such a boneheaded move. Perhaps it was a canny strategy by an agency to gain coverage for a thin story… I certainly wrote about it.