Gearheads: The Sterling Communications Blog

Editing Your Wikipedia Edits

Ever wondered about the consequences of making an unwise Wikipedia edit?

Today, Wikipedia made headlines for banning changes made from Church of Scientology IP addresses. The ban came as a result of the fourth Scientology-related dispute and is attributed to biased and untraceable editing practices.

Trade Pubs Embracing Healthcare IT Sector

In a time when publications are slashing paper size, number of pages, employees, etc., I’ve been surprised to see the number of houses that are launching healthcare-related outlets. Most are focused in the IT space, but with the reform conversations in Washington making headlines as well, dailies may soon quickly follow (if they’re not already; one example is below). In the last month, I’ve come across the following updates in my RSS reader (and if you’ve noticed others, please share in the comments section):

New Leaders, New Media

Much has been made of Obama's work in the social media space during his campaign. However, for the most part those efforts decreased sharply once he took office. As it turns out, it's tricky to radically change the way a government thinks about its communication policies.

Slowly, however, the White House is making steps toward using new and interactive mediums (vs. traditional, one-way broadcast mediums) to communicate with citizens. On the White House Blog today,  Bev Godwin, the face of new media changes for the White House (her official title is Director of Online Resources & Interagency Development) posted a list of links to social media efforts from the US Government. The list is worth checking out; I've shared some of my favorites after the jump.

3 Reasons Why Cutting PR/Marketing Will Hurt You

This week I wrote a guest blog post for Jennifer Leggio’s Social Business blog on ZDNet on companies that are scaling back their marketing  and communications programs to streamline their operating costs. It’s ugly out there right now, and to many executives, communications programs are expendable when belts need to be tightened. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s why:

• Your sales team can’t sell in a vacuum. Your sales team is only as good as your communications program. Sales needs to be armed – they need marketing and communications to drive company buzz in the blogs and publications that your customers are reading. Knocking on doors isn’t easy, why make it harder? If executives are going to hold sales responsible for closing deals, sales needs to hold executives responsible for the tools to make them successful.

Love the Chaos

What makes Pixar so magic? How do they continue to make such odd-ball movies into box office hits? And how can we learn from them?

On Wednesday, the new Pixar movie “Up” debuted at Cannes, so I spent a few minutes reading about the film. It’s not exactly a secret around here that I’m a big Pixar fan— but it’s not just because I love Wall-E. I absolutely respect the Pixar corporate ideals; I love that they continue to produce unique movies, I love that they’ve openly stood their ground against mega-parent company Disney and I love their… well, sense of whimsy. (For some insight on why I say whimsy, check out this story on their wrap party for Wall-E.) So how do they do it, and how can we apply these lessons to PR?

Charging for Water

As you may have heard, it’s make-or-break time for print media. With ad dollars shrinking, circulation declining, Craigslist taking away classifieds and Twitter breaking news, it’s hard to believe any print outlets can actually still exist.

However, the reality is that good journalism should come at premium. Fact-checking, reliable sources and high quality writing all come with a cost.  The big question is how do you make people pay?

Twitter Go-getters or Quitters?

Everyone is talking about Twitter…everyone. I feel like I cannot go a day without mention of it on the radio, in the news, by my coworkers and even by some of my friends. Celebrities are all over Twitter, proving it’s really a mainstream application and not only for the tech savvy. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) has over one million followers and Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) even dedicated a whole show to Twitter and her first tweet.

According to comScore (as reported by TechCrunch), “worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million,” and 131 percent to 9.3 million visitors in the U.S. alone. That’s staggering! However, as Erick Schonfeld notes, the “numbers only include visitors to Twitter’s Website, which is not the same as active users and also does not include people who interact with Twitter via desktop or mobile clients (a large portion of users).”

Kindle Sets Fire to Newspaper Industry

Scary title huh? The combination of online news, the newspaper’s broken business model, among other things has led to a recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industry. In my last entry, I blogged about Seattle’s loss of its Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This week’s release of Amazon’s new Kindle DX is causing quite a stir in the newspaper industry.  Earlier versions of Kindle were great for small books. The new Kindle DX, however, has a much larger screen and is great for reading newspapers and textbooks. And the newspaper industry is worried about how the device will affect the already-struggling business model.

The newspaper industry is failing so badly that Rupert Murdoch has announced that he’s going to change News Corporation’s business model and begin charging for access to their news Web sites. And he’s not too keen about the whole Kindle business model, either:

"We will not be ceding our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle. We will control the prices for our content and we will control our relationships with our customers. Any device maker or website which doesn't meet these basic criteria on content will not be doing business long-term with News Corporation."

Aside from the newspaper’s struggling business model lies another, more important issue: journalistic integrity. Even the U.S. government is concerned. The government is considering tax breaks for newspapers to allow them to operate as nonprofits, according to a Reuters article. According to the article, Sen. John Kerry is worried that without newspapers, there will be too few journalists to investigate governments, companies and individual--I could not agree more.

It will be interesting to see how the role of the Kindle and the government play out in the future of newspapers.

Personally, I won’t get a Kindle. I have an iPhone. ☺

Why Every Day in the Trenches Can Be Likened to a First Date

Nicole and I are both graduates of Santa Clara University and we went back to campus on Monday, as one of our former professors was helping the Business School’s MarComm Network host an event called “The Public Relations Paradigm”, which turned out to be a fascinating discussion about how the changing media landscape has evolved the public relations industry, and what impact social media tools are having in today’s business world.

The featured speaker—Luca Penati, Director of Ogilvy’s Technology Strategy in San Francisco—grabbed our attention quickly, likening our changing world to a first date ☺ in that we don’t know what to expect; there’s a mix of anxiety and excitement all around. His stats were telling: 525 magazines closed in the United States last year, and ad pages for the top three publication houses (IDG, CMP and ZD) are down 50% since 2005. The next day I caught a tweet about an article chronicling newspaper layoffs so far in 2009; we’re sadly approaching 9,000 after the first four months. The figure is not surprising; when Luca asked how many of the audience got our news from a morning print paper, only two of us raised our hands.

So how does that affect those of us in tech PR? Luca noted that pages covering our industry have been shrinking to the tune of 30% less articles per day, as measured in the WSJ between 2006 and 2009. So we have fewer reporters with more jobs to do, and less real estate in any given outlet to get our message across. PR peeps used to fight for coverage in print or broadcast, but now it’s more of a mashup, with bloggers, podcasters and the like successfully competing with those traditional reporters for news (just think about how you first heard about the swine flu when news broke last week). In fact, Luca suggested that for the first time, reporters are being measured on how many clicks each story receives and it’s changing the way they write; he said they’re essentially SEO’ing their own article as they pander for clicks.

Empathy is the Word, is the Word, is the Word

The definition of “empathy” has suddenly become a topic for debate among Washington’s chattering classes, thanks to its appearance on the President’s wish list of characteristics of a new Supreme Court justice. See the very funny compilations of definitions offered by a variety of pundits on The Colbert Report  (“Code Word: Empathy”) and The Daily Show (at the end of “Justice is Bland”).

It’s funny that it popped up, because I discussed this very concept last week with my VP, Elke Heiss. We were talking about the secret sauce for developing strong client relationships. Sterling has worked with several clients for more than five years, one now for nearly seven, which is an eon by Silicon Valley standards. A large percentage of our business comes from returning clients; we’ve worked with some people through four different employers. The secret, I think, is empathy.