Masood Mortazavi's Weblog

Wednesday May 04, 2005

[ Web ] Weblogs, Advertising and Patients

Brian Steinberg's "Advertising" column in the Tuesday edition of The Wall Street Journal reports on the blog movement among corporate marketers. (Subscription is required to access the online edition of The WSJ.)
"Piaggio Group, the Italian manufacturer of Vespa scooters, intends to launch two blogs written by U.S. Vespa owners," writes Steinberg.
Steinberg's report also includes some good corporate blogging tips from Michael Wiley, director of new media in the communications department of General Motors, who serves as an executive editor on GM blogs:

Be authentic: Don't turn it into a hollow public relations exercise. ("A lot of what blogging is about is authenticity, getting beyond corporate speak and PR, and really creating a conversation," Mr. Wiley says. "Not being thin-skinned and accepting the negatives, that's key.")
Keep things on topic: Corporate blogs are not about customer queries and commentaries on stock movment.
It takes work: Monitoring corporate blogs could turn into a real head-ache for executive editors and directors of corporate blogs.
Know your limits: Not everyone will get a personalized response. After all, we all have our day jobs to work on and worry about.

I am not sure if I am keeping to any of these tips on my weblogs but Wiley's advice deserves attention.

Blogs continue to be a hot topic for business journals.

Businessweek devoted a recent issue to corporate weblogs, and the daily barrage continues in The WSJ. For example, in today's issue, the Journal carried two articles on weblogs—one focusing on how T-shirts are becoming a hot item peddled by webloggers and another on "Blogging From Your Sickbed," a report on how patients are turning to weblogs to share treatment details. Examples: diabetesmine.com, www.beaverislandarts.com, prostate-help.blogs.com, www.thecancerblog.com.

Advertising, Blogs, Marketing, GM, Vespa, Patients.

2005-05-04 18:58:14.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Economics ] Stagflation--Reading the Paper vs. Listening to Radio "News"

Often (of course, not always) radio news, say NPR and programs produced for it, simply regurgitate what is already published in leading papers.
Take NPR and Marketplace on Tuesday. Two stories grabbed my attention in particular.
One NPR piece reported on public transportation via buses in L.A. vs. the same in Manhattan. It was a well-crafted, memorable piece with actual sounds of buses and interviews with passengers and experts in their life and work environments.

Another, a Marketplace piece, was simply a regurgitation of other reports on the dismal state of the U.S. economy. I had read about the same in a Financial Times report form Washington, Tuesday morning. The FT report was much better put, more lucidly argued with far greater impact. (Christopher Swan, "Dark Clouds on U.S. Economic Horizon Despite Optimism," Financial Times, May 3, 2005, P. 8) It contained one very impressive paragraph:

The basic problem appears to be that consumers have the willingness to spend more but increasingly lack the ability, while businesses have the money to step up spending but seem to lack the willingness.

Instead of this lucid paragraph, the Marketplace report tried to explain the technical phrase stagflation. (My own first encounter with this technical phrase was probably while reading an article by Paul M. Sweezy in one of the early 1980s issues of the Monthly Review, a magazine run by socialist American economists.)

Now, is it more important for the listener to know what is really going on (see quoted FT paragraph above) or to know the proper, academic definition of stagflation. I wonder.

In the midst of all this, Marketplace did carry a pretty good commentary by Joseph Stiglitz on the talk regarding China's currency floatation. In the main, he rightly insisted that the U.S. needs first to pay attention and put its own house in order by reining haywire spending and the deficit. It is most interesting that all this is coming at the same time the Congress is funding yet another year of invasion to the tune of several hunderd billion dollars, not to mention the absolutely immeasurable human cost, most of it paid by the invaded.

Of course, when we listen to radio news while we drive in traffic, it won't be odd to feel totally trapped and ready for a very good brain-wash by the "news". It happens specially when we are not paying attention, which is often the case when we drive.

Media, Economics, Public Transportation, Stagflation.

2005-05-04 00:09:17.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.