Facttactic

Corporate and technical writers

Customers

will pay-per-view websites hinder PR?

Getting your company mentioned in the media and then having those mentions filter through the internet to be found by potential customers via search engines has, for many years, been a big part of getting company messages seen and heard.

Are those days coming to an end? Rupert Murdoch has reportedly announced today that people will have to pay to access his News Corporation’s newspapers’ websites.

News Corporation controls much of NZ’s media and has a huge influence around the world. Let’s hope a very useful channel for publicity is not shut off to the internet masses in favour only of people who can afford to pay to view.

the multi-million dollar give-away that wasn’t

Looking for a publicity campaign that will hit all the right targets? Probably best to stay away from a campaign like that of U.S online brokerage site Zecco who reportedly surprised its customers by giving them multi-million dollar trading balances on April Fools’ Day!

Zecco was surprised when some customers began making real trades with their newfound riches … and the company then, reportedly, further alienated customers by making them wear any losses they incurred in their trading!

ugly girls make poor PR

Good read in the paper over the weekend with Tui Breweries having to defend its service of offering ‘Tui girls’ from Wellington at a higher price to punters hiring out its Mangatainoka brewery if they didn’t want to have the local Tui girls.

Made our iconic brewery look kinda tacky although Tui’s spokeswoman pulled it back well in saying travelling costs from Wellington and a modelling agency fee were behind the higher charge.

She wasn’t helped in her work though by loose comments from the brewery’s manager, who excelled in the poor taste humour stakes by saying “We don’t put any ugly ones out there, if that is what you’re asking.”

I feel an advertising catch-phrase coming on: Palmerston North girls are more attractive than Wellington girls … (you can complete the rest!)

microsoft opens window on good PR

I have been enjoying seeing the tidal wave of articles on Microsoft’s beta operating system Windows 7: firstly reading about what the system has to offer, but secondly for following the hugely positive PR Microsoft has had with the system.

Good press

For those who don’t know, Microsoft is giving away beta (test) copies of the Windows 7 system (a replacement for good old XP and the much-maligned Vista) to anyone who wants to download it from their website.  Thousands of people have done this, and hundreds of people have written about it after they have trialed it.

The news has been largely very positive; and scores of lengthy, detailed and positive articles have been written about Microsoft and Windows 7 and appeared in media around the world. Here’s just one recent example from the New Zealand Herald.

The system is not even due to hit the shops for another year but they have managed to build up a powerful sense of anticipation around their flagship product. Even the criticism can be viewed as a positive thing because  Microsoft has all this year to continue developing and refining the product based on customer feedback, which it has been doing.

Responsive to customers

It is also getting tons of love for being seen to be receptive and responsive to customer critiques. Something the generally prickly and defensive company can not really claim to have been in the past.

The change in approach is a massive ground-shift for the company, who, in allowing any-one who wants to test-run Windows 7, is playing the marketing game more like young online upstarts than the cumbersome and slow-moving giant it has so often been portrayed as previously. Microsoft, has in the past, been highly secretive around their new products.

Giving away stuff to make friends

The strategy is also further vindication of the increasingly popular, online business strategy of giving away stuff to get people to buy more. There’s more about that strategy here.

Microsoft is feeling and sharing the software love and making friends everywhere. What a difference a clean Window makes.

make a ‘performance’ of your online activities

Wondering how to get attention to your online communications? Interesting stuff here from a new report …

Some US web researchers (Rubicon) argue that online discussion is a poor way to communicate with the average customer, because average customers don’t participate. But it is a great way to communicate to them, because average customers watch and listen.

So you kind of have to put on an online performance to attract and hold their attention.

What do they mean? Well … if you have lots of comments or customer feedback to your site, they reckon proportionately few people actually create them – 80 percent of content is created by 10 percent of users.

The active 10 percent is therefore the group that holds all the power and influence over how your business is perceived online.

“This means it is critical that companies understand who [they] are, and how to take care of them, because they are the companies’ fellow actors in the online performance. … Use your website to reach out to them and make sure their needs are met,” Rubicon says.

To get the most benefit from these active participants on your site, interaction with them should be viewed as performances, because the other 90 percent of visitors will simply be watching passively as an audience. You need to interact with the active users to “educate, persuade, or entertain everyone else”.

“When we say web communities are theatre, we mean that literally — you need to partner with the [actors] and make sure the show looks good. The difference from theatre is that you can’t pay the actors; you have to win them over through love, enthusiasm, and fairness.”

Need to know more? Read the recent Rubicon report here. It’s packed with clearly written, easy-to-read information and lots of great graphs highlighting stuff.