Monday Feb 07, 2005

Two really good bits from Steve Rubel talking marketing & PR.

(1) In the first Steve is quoted in the Christian Science Monitor in a piece about how marketing is dealing with the rise of amateur ads.

This rise in unofficial marketing has companies and ad professionals puzzling over whether to quash or harness the home-based pretenders. Even if the primary aim of amateur admakers is to tout themselves, what's at stake is who plays the lead role in shaping culture.

"The marketing community for many years has built its business model on control," says Steve Rubel, a vice president at New York public-relations firm CooperKatz who also writes a blog called micropersuasion.com. "[But] it's very hard to control the message these days."

I agree with that. But others are having a hard time of it and still want to control that "message." I love this response:

"It's a real problem," says Jack Trout, a veteran marketing consultant at Trout & Partners, in Greenwich, Conn. "And the problem gets bigger the more people see this stuff. It begins to muddy the message." He concludes: "The ad industry should rise up against" amateur ads.

Steve's way out ahead, though. He sees opportunity in change. He's not afraid. He's not defensive one bit.

"They should embrace it," adds Mr. Rubel of CooperKatz. "If they can find these evangelists and reach out to them, there's a tremendous opportunity there.... Give them the keys, and some incentive for bringing in customers. It's really the greatest opportunity [they've] had in years."

(2) The second article Steve points to focuses on transparency in PR in the Wisconsin Technology Network. The best bit is this:

[T]he blogosphere moves way too quickly and is far too critical to wait for a PR maven to release a story to the news media. Word gets out and it spreads among interested bloggers faster than a PR person can say "Not for Publication." Ironically, the harder the PR team tries to control the story, the more it often spins out of PR's control.

That last sentence says it all.

My wife and I were walking around Sausalito on a really nice Sunday afternoon recently. We go there from time to time for lunch, and every time we go we always seem to be there when this guy is there playing with his magic rocks. I can spend hours watching him. The patience is amazing. So relaxing. Go to his site and you'll see him in action in a short video clip. He actually works pretty quickly. It's almost as if he can see exactly where to place the rock.







Some more pics from the Global Challenge race this morning. The race organizers run hot and cold with posting pics. You never know. They also have audio and video clips up there, but then they pull them from time to time. My cousin's boat, Samsung, is currently in fourth place. It's a quick 7 days to Sydney for this leg of the nine month race.




All my blogs on the Global Challenge here.

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