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The odd underbelly of media monitoring

• Posted by Leo Valiquette
• September 12, 2008
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By Leo Valiquette

We have often talked about the merits, methods and tools for media monitoring on inmedialog, but it’s the amusing and bizarre aspects of the exercise that I want to illustrate today.

Media monitoring is, of course, the process of scanning media coverage for specific keywords and issues and presenting them to clients in the format that will best meet their needs. There are a number of free online tools and subscription-based services available for this. Some allow for extreme fine-tuning to narrow down search results with surgical precision. Others less so.

It’s the tools that fall into the latter category that often yield the most bizarre, and off base, search results. For one of our clients, upper limb prosthetics maker Touch Bionics, for example, I’ve learned far more than I wanted to about the new Bionic Commando video game, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and several other companies with bionic in their name that offer everything from energy drinks to home and office furnishings.

But it’s the news headlines picked up by search terms such as prosthetic, prostheses and amputee that are the most quirky, shocking or sad, as the case may be. The examples below all date from the past month or so and picked up a fair amount of press (I should know, I was deleting the hits from my inbox for days):

Horse gets prosthetic leg

Skydiver’s prosthetic leg falls off – and then vanishes into thin air – during jump

Police hunting for man who carries weapons in fake leg. Wife ‘could be in very serious danger’

Neb. man sues prosecutor to get his leg back

James Franco isn’t all natural down there

One-legged hooker slain

Cross-dressing mugger leaves breast behind

Wheelchair-bound thief steals condoms from Dallas 7-Eleven

Leo Valiquette

Posted in:

• Random thoughts

BBC shipping container about to set sail

• Posted by Francis Moran
• September 11, 2008
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By Francis Moran

In a remarkable combination of innovative journalism, corporate branding and GPS technology, the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation has embarked on a unique voyage of discovery that will see a BBC-branded, GPS-equipped standard shipping container quietly go about its business for a year, all the while beaming its coordinates back to the Beeb where its journey around the world will be tracked.

Members of the public can follow its journey on a special BBC web page. As of my writing this post, the container was just west of our Glasgow-based colleague, Danny Sullivan, where it was picking up its first cargo of — what else! — Scotch whisky. From there, it will go to the huge seaport of Southampton in southern England and from there to Asia. The BBC is hopeful the container will visit every corner of the globe, and that it will not wash overboard. Its correspondents will use the container as a continuing thread to pull together a series of stories that illustrate how goods are manufactured and shipped around the world and the lives of the people involved in doing so.

I was immediately attracted to this story. I have long had a fascination with TEUs, short for 20-foot-equivalent units, the proper name for the ubiquitous intermodal container that has revolutionized the global cargo industry, and the massive vessels that carry them from port to port.

One of the more memorable events I covered as a journalist in Halifax was the arrival of the first so-called 3G, for third-generation, container ship to visit that port. The night before, another reporter and I had been guests at a schnapps-fuelled reception thrown by a Swedish trade mission and then, on very few hours sleep and far too much aquavit, we caught a 6 a.m. harbour tug that was to meet the goliath of a vessel off Chebucto Head at the entrance to Halifax Harbour.

There have been few hangovers as memorable as the one that visited me as I fought for my sea legs on the aft deck of a diesel-driven tug boat out on the freezing cold and choppy waters of Halifax Harbour, all the while focusing a long telephoto lens on the coastline, the other harbour traffic and, of course, the huge ship we towed into Fairview Container Pier.

What I wouldn’t do for a good story and a great picture when I was young and foolish!

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Random thoughts

Web 2.0 is a PR expansion pack

• Posted by Leo Valiquette
• September 08, 2008
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By Leo Valiquette

In the course of staying on top of what’s the meme of the day in the PR blogosphere, I wade through reams of commentary on social media and how it can be turned to serve a corporate communications and marketing strategy. In fact, one would think it’s no longer possible to run a marketing or public relations campaign with any effectiveness at all unless it relies heavily on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube.

This perception has been fueled by passionate early adopters eager to explore the features and functionality of The Next Big Thing, whatever that may be. In fact, last week came word of one fellow launching a new PR outfit called 3W PR “designed to help organizations, brands and individuals navigate through the World Wide Web.”

Web 2.0 has certainly provided a dazzling array of shiny new tools for the marketing and PR toolbox. The trick is getting past the giddy rush of excitement that comes of having a new toy to play with and understanding how to use them effectively in a practical sense.

George Livingston over at the Buzz Bin reinforced that point today by extolling the virtues of having a sound grounding in traditional PR and marketing strategy to understand a particular business, its market and its value proposition, in order to develop an effective communications program.

Bottom line: Web 2.0 isn’t a standalone game complete in its shrink wrap for marketing and PR practitioners. It’s an expansion pack.

The subject warrants another look at a piece of Shel Holtz’s from a month back about where social media responsibility should reside in the enterprise and the importance of ensuring it is used with surgical precision to further the organization’s goals.

Leo Valiquette

Posted in:

• Social media

The littlest inmedianaut

• Posted by Francis Moran
• September 08, 2008
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By Francis Moran

Those of you among our clients who had Linda Forrest working on your account have been missing her outstanding services these past several weeks because she booked off on maternity leave at the end of July. We’re delighted to announce that her latest project, a joint venture with husband Jack Forrest, has now been successfully launched. Little Parker Simon Edward Forrest came tumbling into the world, healthy if a touch late, on Wednesday of last week.

Linda, who is well used to clients who set, and then never meet, deadlines, managed little Parker’s protracted arrival with the self-same aplomb and reports that he is “a very agreeable baby.”

Like many agencies, inmedia has been staffed mainly by young women over the past 10 years and yet, this is the very first birth to a full-time inmedianaut. So forgive us if we treat it as a very special occasion.

Congratulations, Linda and Jack. Now get that little guy in here so we can properly look him over!

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Random thoughts

10 years of Google – a technology triumph

• Posted by Danny Sullivan
• September 05, 2008
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By Danny Sullivan

This weekend, everyone’s favourite search engine turns 10. And what a decade it has been for Google – a rise to end all rises, “meteoric” doesn’t even do it justice.

One of the things that strikes me about Google is that its success is one of those increasingly rare occasions where the technology itself was the key. Those of us in technology marketing circles are only too aware that having the best technology by no means guarantees pride of place at today’s marketshare table.

I recall when Google first started to appear in the workplace – a colleague recommended I “give it a shot”, and from that day forward I never looked back. Up till then I had been a user of the “others” (Lycos, Alta Vista etc.) and, as I recall, there was nothing much to choose between them. But on that day, I was immediately staggered by the relevance of Google’s results and the speed with which they were delivered.

This was not part of some slick marketing campaign, designed to seduce me into believing that Google was the best new thing around. No, it simply blew everything else out of the water. Of course, Google has gone on to capitalize on its initial success, and marketing has been a huge part of its continued rise, but without that initial triumph at the technology level, none of this would have happened.

But those companies looking to emulate Google’s route to success should beware. Tech startup founders will often rail against marketing and PR – “We know our market, our technology is the best and will sell itself” they cry. Invariably, this is not the case, so unless you are supremely confident that your product has Google-like appeal, don’t forget to market the hell out of it.

Danny Sullivan

Posted in:

• Technology marketing