Brand Central Station

Translation: Nice Try, Mom …

From AdPulp. Thanks for the grin.

Here’s a good one to print out and keep on hand for future reference. If you have clients asking for viral ideas or agencies proposing ideas that they claim are “viral” – now you can do your own self-diagnosis.

All thanks to Seth Godin’s Blog.

It’s nice to have access to research that shows PR’s power (versus Pay-Per-Click Advertising), but why do we get into these arguments in the first place?

(Note, a login is required to download the research.)

From Steve Hall and the gang at AdRants.

For those of us in the US, we often take our freedom of speech for granted. Here’s an interesting blogpost from Rebecca MacKinnon, that highlights what the Chinese government is doing to crack down on political speech.

MacKinnon, a former CNN reporter who covered Japan and China, maintains the RConversations Blog and is currently studying law at Harvard.

Sit back with your own bottle of “Two Buck Chuck” and follow the story of Trader Joe’s as recounted by the folks at the BrandNoise blog.

Another fascinating post from the Ageless Marketing blog.

What David Wolfe offers in this article is an interesting take on how young people’s sense of “self” is driven, to a degree, by the maturing of the population. The implications for marketers trying to find their way to Gen Y and beyond are significant.

All comments (c) 2005, Brand Central Station – all rights reserved. For more information about BCS, please visit our website.

From the Hidden Persuader Blog. A quick list worth reviewing if you’re pitching a women’s product or a client who must sell to women.

John Porcaro, a corporate PR person for Microsoft, points to an interesting piece from Sun Micro’s Kathy Sierra in his mktg@msft blog.

For those of you not following the story, John and the marketing team at Microsoft have been weathering the fall-out of a re-org and some less than sterling press reports that rely on a corporate “Deep Throat” named “mini-msft.”

Maybe that is what’s behind this focus on internal communications and employee focus – it doesn’t really matter. The pieces of wisdom shared by John in this blog entry are worth reading, regardless.

Thanks.

One of my favorite bloggers, BL Ochman, relates an unbelievable exchange between a publicist and herself. It’s a good lesson for new PR’s – and a painful reminder to those of us who’ve been doing this for a while.

… and one last thing: If you’re pitching a blogger who blogs about blogging, don’t ever, ever, ever say that you’ve never considered blogs “useful for the clients I deal with, for lots of reasons.” You’re just inviting a blog flogging, which is what this guy receives from BL, a recognized “corporate blog strategist.”

D’oah.

Egad.

I like JS Logan’s blog about marketing. It’s helpful and insightful. This piece (from August) asks why more people don’t comment on other blogs. They read (we think) but don’t post.

Take note of JS’s other observation that “it just seems it’s the same small group of bloggers you see commenting everywhere.”

The universe is actually much smaller than we think.

PRWeek (who now syndicates their content via RSS) has an interesting piece out on how PR firms should prepare to weather emergencies.

That most excellent PR blog, PressThink, has a great piece on the NY Times’ new TimesSelect venture. It’s interesting to note that after all the research and effort put forth by the Times they decided it was “opinion” that drove value in their property, not “news.”

An interesting read for media-geeks like me.

Thanks to Jay Rosen for pulling it all together.

All comments (c) 2005, Brand Central Station – all rights reserved. For more information about BCS, please visit our website.