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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the pieces of commentary on the iPhone 3G launch has been around Apple’s seemingly limitless ability to generate press coverage. So, how effective are they? Yesterday Google released a new version of Google Trends, the tool for measuring search engine and news references for specific terms. Google Trends has high potential as a tool in the PR kit bag.
This graph shows references to iPhone beginning in late 2006, along with the specific news events that drove those references. Notice the steady climb in search volume over time, despite the fact that news references have been pretty constant.
When plotted against BlackBerry as a search term, it’s easy to see how iPhone dominates both the news coverage and the search engine interest. One can see how, despite steady growth in interest in Blackberry, iPhone emerged as the dominant search term by late 2007.
Google Trends also provides the ability for you to drill down into specific geographies, cities and languages, which tells a slightly different story. Here you can see that iPhone is very strong outside the US, but in a head to head battle with BlackBerry in the US. This suggests that Apple’s choice to quickly deliver on 70 carriers this year is a very smart move indeed.
My assessment? Google trends can be a useful tool for getting a quick proxy on consumer sentiment and news coverage. However, it can also be incredibly misleading if search terms aren’t chosen with care. For example, I plotted this chart showing iPhone vs Blackberry vs Nokia, which shows Nokia absolutely dominating search engine volume. But Nokia makes such a vast array of products and the search term is so general that it’s impossible to derive a meaningful comparison with this tool.
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