Mike Arrington has another entry in the "how stupid can a media company be?" sweepstakes. This week's pile of stupid comes from Marvel (the comic book guys) who want to shut down a screening of Iron Man that Arrington arranged - even though he worked with Paramount to make it happen.

You have to wonder about the thought process (such as it exists) in media companies...

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

Rob Fahrni sums up Microsoft's stance with customers:

So, you have the Vista debacle, iPod rules the roost, the Yahoo! acquisition is going well, and now you're going to shut down people who legally purchased music from you? Wow.

I think their customer service story could be stated as "And the horse you rode in on..."

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

Jeff Jarvis notes the absurdity of this:

On NPR this morning, I heard an old lady in a wheelchair forced to come to the airport to change her canceled American tickets -- she wasn’t allowed to do it online or on the phone, not even after she said she was disabled and her daughter had seven children and a newborn and couldn’t take her to the O’Hare’s hell.

Unless you sell a commodity whose value is solely determined on price grounds (like, say, gas at a self serve station), customer service is everything. The reason a lot of companies don't get this is simple: Excellent service seems to have little upside. No one comments on it, and praise is infrequent. However, bad service gets passed around via word of mouth. Restaurants figured this out a long time ago; unless you can count on a steady traffic of non-locals, you simply cannot afford bad word of mouth n the food business.

The thing that's changed is how viral word of mouth has gotten. A decade ago, stories like the one Jeff relates would have appeared (maybe) in a local newspaper. Unless a national news organization latched onto it though, it would have been very unlikely to see it spread beyond the people the woman in question knew.

Now? All it takes is someone who thinks the topic should be talked about, and there are so many bloggers around that the liklihood of that happening starts to approach 100 percent. That doesn't mean that it will be known by "everyone", but you can bet that frequent travelers - who follow this kind of news - will find out early, and react to it. It's a whole new ballgame, and it's one that companies and public figures are having a lot of trouble with. Take this item about Bill Clinton, for instance - and never mind the politics, it's the communications issue I'm interested in:

Watching Bill on the trail makes folks wonder whether he could have held up to scrutiny in 1992 had YouTube and instant fact-checking existed back then. No one has seemed less prepared for the intense scrutiny of this campaign than Bill. He seems to forget that even when he's in rural Indiana, he's on the national stage. In '96, the Clinton campaign thought their local market strategy was innovative (it was), since it allowed him to talk to key media markets outside of the interference of the national press. Now, the national press is everywhere since local can become national in an instant.

This is a key thing in modern PR that is just as true for companies: it's virtually impossible to segment a message to different audiences now. Want another example? How about this Absolut Vodka campaign, intended to be targeted solely at a Mexican audience? Again, the people who put that together assumed that the audience was limited; they learned all too quickly that the audience was global, regardless of the theories they held.

You simply can't segment the audience with any expectation that it will stay segmented. "Edgy" campaigns are now every bit as dicey as the idea that you can campaign one way in this area, and another way in a different one. You have to assume that a video camera, phone, and internet connection exist in every single context, and act accordingly.

Technorati Tags: marketing

Mathew Ingram points out that a lot of PR pros haven't caught up with reality - the "dead tree" release is as dead as many newspapers are:

This is not rocket surgery. Put links to relevant information in there; add multimedia content if you have it, with either embedded images or links to them. Better still, create a blog post that has all of these things in it and is tagged properly, and people will find it. Whether you follow the structure here or not is up to you (some people believe starting with the facts and not the spin or “hook” is the wrong way to go, but that’s debatable). Just put some damn links in there, and quit hoping that a boatload of overused adjectives will somehow sell the thing for you.

With old releases, the goal was to get phone calls. With new ones, the goal is to drive people to the right part of your website. If you aren't linking to it, how exactly is that supposed to happen?

Technorati Tags: marketing

As Mike Arrington says, Comcast mostly doesn't have to care about your connection issues (or TV issues, for that matter), because they have a local monopoly in most places (I suspect that I have things a bit better here because Verizon laid down fiber - and started offering a real alternative). Having said that, what possesses them to tell outright falsehoods? Like airlines, are they operating under some bizarre belief that "we can't handle the truth"?

As Arrington relates the story, they told him that the outage he had was "California wide" (even though he was getting online at other people's houses nearby). It was only when he started the tweetstorm that Comcast called him, and then came out and fixed his problem. On the one hand, it's good that they monitor corporate references; on the other, they end up looking stupid due to the earlier behavior.

This kind of thing drives people nuts, and makes them feel like a prisoner rather than like a customer. Does anyone at Comcast see that? From here, it looks like the answer is a resounding "no".

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

I noted a few days ago that Creative was trying to irritate its customers by threatening a developer who - unlike Creative themselves - was providing a solution for people using Vista. Well, it seems that someone at Creative realized that there was no upside to this policy, so they've backed down - The Register received this from them:

We have read the strong feedback about Creative's forum post regarding driver development by daniel_k and other outside parties. Creative's message tried to address our concern about the improper distribution of certain software, which is the property of other companies. However, we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties.

The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products.

Outside developers have been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our Sound Blaster products, and we do support and appreciate these efforts. This however does not extend to the unauthorized distribution of other companies' property.

We hope to work out a mutually agreeable method for working with daniel_k in supporting his efforts in driver development. Going forward, we are committed to doing a better job of working more closely with third parties to support their development for our products and our customers.

The problem is, that helpful tone doesn't match the obnoxious message that the developer in question says he's been getting (see the story for that). As I've said before, lawyers are now part of your PR group, whether they like it or not. Sending out a threatening legal letter may well not be the end of a problem, as it would have been a decade ago - it could be the beginning of a very big, public, and damaging black eye.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

I love it when old style management runs into the buzzsaw of web enabled PR. Consider Creative, makers of sound cards for PCs. Their latest cards have problems on Vista (shocker, that), and they've been slow to push out updated drivers. Enter the community of Creative users - one of them created working drivers for the cards.

Now, this is a good thing for Creative, as it gives them a working solution for Vista. An intelligent response might be something like "we can't support this community driver, but people say it works. So long as you willing to take the risk, it might be a good solution for you until we have an official one". An even better response might be a call to the developer, so you could see whether he could help accelerate the efforts your staff is making.

That would assume cognizance of the way things work now though. Instead, Creative's VP of Corporate Communications decided that using legaleze would be a great way of dealing with this, so - on a Friday, figuring the issue would die over the weekend he pushed this out:

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Yeah, there's a brilliant response. Let's see: your stuff doesn't work on Vista now. There's a community solution that people seem to be using. If they use it, they might keep buying your product. On the other hand, if you decide to go all legal on the community, you end up shipping a useless brick to customers.

Hmm - I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing the complexity here. This VP might well be one of the dumbest PR types out there, and - with morons like this in the mix, that's saying a lot.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

Charles Miller points out how many companies still get EULAS wrong, and what the upshot of it ends up being:

As more and more of our interactions with companies are governed by explicit legal agreements, companies need to realise that your legal terms are part of the public face of your company. The clauses in your EULAs are the most explicit evidence available of the regard in which you hold your customers, more than anything else because you know somebody has sweated over them word for word to give them a precise, legally binding interpretation.

As I've said before, your lawyers now engage in PR (however unwillingly). You can try to pretend that isn't the case (and end up looking stupid, as Charles makes clear) - or you can simply accept reality and move on.