Straight Talk PR .com

Tools I Use: TweetDeck for iPhone

I don't Twitter or Facebook enough. But I know from posts like this on a blog I trust -- namely, TUAW.com -- that as I use these services more, TweetDeck for iPhone and for TweetDeck for Mac are the right tools for me to use to best read the traffic.

Below, the developer's video for the newest version of TweetDeck for iPhone:

UPDATE, just after posting: Another useful post is on Mashable.

Making Thoughts Apparent Globally is Obama's Internet Touch

UPDATED 11:30 a.m. 4 June 2009 -- I also liked receiving an email from David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, with a link to video of the speech. The White House is pushing this content out beautifully.

ORIGINAL POST:

It is thrilling to see how fluid President Obama and his team have become at making his thoughts and policies apparent to as many people as possible globally using the Internet. The latest piece of evidence comes from the White House's buildup to the Cairo speech today.

According to a New York Times report, "In a bid to make sure that Mr. Obama’s message will be heard, particularly among young people, the White House has mounted an unusually aggressive campaign, including a Web site created in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English where people outside the United States can sign up to receive the speech via text message. The State Department is to translate the speech into at least 13 languages."

This is a great commitment. I like the idea of people worldwide debating the speech in its original text, even in a U.S.-disseminated official translation text, on their own phones or laptops today. Great move!

How to Make Microsite and Blog Domain Names Attractive and Snappy

I've noticed something about great domain names for microsites, including custom URLs for blogs.

1. They have a call to action, or
2. They say something about the user.

Those seem to be two tricks to devising a snappy and compelling URL.

Two articles from a recent issue of PRWeek illustrate this.

Global Warming: Gore Eloquent in Nobel Peace Prize Speech

Al Gore's speech yesterday accepting the Nobel Peace Prize is a classic. I loved its eloquence and its imperative.

A speech is a derivative of face-to-face contact. A good speech can change the world. In the case of this particular speech, I certainly hope that it does. Al Gore is one of my heroes.

Strategy: Why 50 Characters Max in Blog Headlines?

Suddenly, there's a method to the madness of writing blog headlines. Wired PR Works explains why I carefully counted to make certain there are 50 characters in the headline just above. And why I'll keep counting.

Which Came First - The New Employee or the New Employee's Blog?

It's a joy to see the devotion of cutting-edge companies like Cisco to a cutting-edge panoply of blogs.

But I had to chuckle when I read the Chicago Sun-Times story about Padmasree Warrior, age 47, who on Monday departed Illinois' Motorola, where she was chief technology office, to take up the same post at California's Cisco.

Howard Wolinsky reported on Tuesday in the CS-T that Ms. Warrior made the move on Monday. He added this: "In her personal blog at Cisco, she said: 'It is an exciting time to join Cisco. Cisco is the company whose leadership legacy defines ‘The Network’ in many ways. Today, it is a company driving many new paradigms in communications and information technology. In the future, it will be a company poised to lead the industry to the next phase of Internet.'"

Now, that's speed! She leaves on Monday and has a blog post on Tuesday. Kudos! (Here's the link.)

Talk About Personal Public Relations! Within a Day of Getting Going on LinkedIn.com, I Have 330,115 New People in My Business Network

The heck with six degrees of separation. I'm pretty impressed with LinkedIn.com, which I embraced and began to work with about a day ago. Fewer than 24 hours later, I am connected to 20 people personally. They have a total of 2,300+ connections on LinkedIn. And those people -- who are just one introduction away from meeting me -- have a total of more than 330,000 connections on LinkedIn. So by going to friends or to friends of friends, I can access 330,115 people. That's just three degrees of separation! Maybe there's something to this social networking stuff after all! My public LinkedIn profile is starting to fill up. If this story appeals to you, I recommend checking out AskDaveTaylor.com, written by a blogger I met at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle last fall. He has a dozen or so posts on how to take advantage of LinkIn. I know that I'll be reading them during the next few days.

Technorati Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, LinkedIn, Social Networks, Taylor, Dave

Okay, Okay! "Dell Hell" is Real

Mea culpa. Shel Israel was right. There really is a "Dell Hell."

In October 2005, I protested that the Dell Hell thread running through many blogs amounted to piling on bad reviews for a good company. Unfair, I said. Dell still provides good customer service.

But on Friday night, a crazy train of phone calls to multiple toll-free numbers handed to me by clueless Dell customer representatives (clueless because each rep had a different 800 number to which they referred me) left me with the distinct feeling I was in Dell Hell. Worse, the main number I kep trying -- a number I found on Dell's support website, could have referred me to the tech support to fix my problem. Instead, for a computer covered by a bumper-to-bumper service plan, I spent two or three hours on the phone being shuffled around.

"You know, Dell is an worldwide company," one rep told me. Not my problem, I said. It's not my job to navigate a worldwide company. It's Dell's job to navigate its own tech support system. I'm usually tolerant, but Friday night I was jerked around. I didn't like it.

On Sunday, I went to the Apple Store in Indianapolis. I'm tired of fighting. The next time I buy a computer, I think I'll switch.

Winning Tip for Email: Fridays & Sundays Work Best

Now here's a quirky tip for the day: According to a study by Indianapolis-based Exact Target, emails sent on Fridays had the highest "open rate." That's the percentage of emails opened by the recipient compared to the total base of recipients.

And Sunday -- Sunday? -- had the highest click-through rate for links in the email message.

Thanks to Inside Indiana Business for this tip.

More Crummy Ethics When $$ Involved

Thanks to Daily 'Dog relaying word from the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, we see another case of crummy ethics. The hits -- hits to the public relations profession -- just keep on coming.

The political news show Fox News Sunday paid $14,000 to former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, for an interview four days after his indictment for alleged violations of Texas campaign finance law.

Good gracious, Fox. Do we need to review simple rules of media relations ethics? Try these:

• No self-respecting journalist should ever pay someone for an interview. I know it happens occasionally, and I have here some of the Barbara Walters interviews in mind. As for Fox, the $14K payment only reinforces the common belief that Fox is the right-wing cable news network.
• It's OK for media -- especially media fixed in one location such as a talk show wedded to its set -- to pay expenses for people to come to a studio for an interview. But paying for private jets ought to be very rare. And whatever happened to live remotes? Most local TV stations use them often.
• There are rare cases -- primarily in trade journals and among travel writers -- in which the product (resort, car rollout, new products) will pay for small but significant trade journals and newsletters to cover the launch of a product. I don't particularly like this practice, but as long as it is very limited to that segment -- and the payment is disclosed by the writer -- I can look the other way.

To sum up: Money paid by media to interviewees? No. Money paid for usual and customary travel expenses? OK, but better the media go to the interviewee. Money paid to journalists for interviews or travel to trade shows and product launches? Not good in vast number of cases, sometimes overlooked in cases of smaller newsletter or trade publications in which the travel budget can barely fund one trip. Should be disclosed.

UPDATE: Jan. 31, 2:37 p.m.
With ethics showing up so much in the recent news, I just added an "Ethics" category to this blog. I wonder how I got along without it for so long.

Technorati Tags: money payment pay interview media "Tom DeLay"