Google has put its foot down. According to the Bad Pitch Blog, Google has advised Business Wire that media release headlines that are longer than 22 words will be ignored by the search engine’s spiders.
Here’s a tip: Headlines longer than 22 words will be ignored by editors too.
Back in the day, I would write what I like to call “management headlines.” These are headlines that management wants, and they are the exact opposite of what the editors want. Mark Mathis’s book Feeding the Media Beast has some great ideas about headlines. In a nutshell, headlines are never published so they should be used to get the editor to read the first sentence of your release. Of course, they must pertain to the subject, but they can be off-beat, funny, thought-provoking – anything to get the editor to read your lead. Be creative!
I’ve found that using more creative headlines than a regurgitation of my lead has gotten my clients more coverage. Sure some of those headlines were hard to sell to management, but at the end of the day, it’s the coverage that they want.
If you’re like me, nothing could get you into the shopping crowds on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I did that exactly one time about 10 years ago. Never again.
Today is the day that people return to work, but instead of getting back into the grind, they do some online shopping. In theory, this is the biggest online shopping day of the year.
While that might have been true in 1997 when the phrase was coined by Jerry Shereshewsky, I think that so many people have access at home that most of the online shopping is done over the weekend.
Nope, today is about catching up on YouTube videos. All the same, Black Monday has a better ring to it than Black Weekend.
A new report finds that teens are using instant messaging to avoid awkward moments. They are texting instead of having face-to-face confrontations. According to a story on Fox News, 43 percent of teens use IM to say things that they wouldn’t say in person, 22 percent use IMs to ask people out on dates or to accept, and 13 percent use them to break up.
So instead of the “Dear John” letters, now we have DJ IMs.
I was contacted by someone that I met in Second Life who is doing some research to explore the relationship between a corporation and its PR agency. She wants to talk to about 30 corporate PR people to get their views.
If you are interested in helping, drop me an email. Read her original email to me for more information about the research. Good stuff…
Thanks to Neville Hobson, I’ve added a Wordpress plugin that reformats this blog for iPhones and iPod Touch users. I’ve got an iPhone and the new format makes surfing to Altyrian View much faster. Great find, Neville!
If you don’t have an iPhone, you should think about asking Santa for one. It has changed the way that I communicate.
If you are an executive at Whole Foods, you can no longer post information about Whole Foods, its competitors or its vendors on online forums. This includes all posting – under pseudonyms or even real names. From the Whole Foods code of conduct:
“To avoid the actual and perceived improper use of Company information … no member of Company Leadership may make any posting to any non-Company-sponsored internet chat room, message board, web log (blog), or similar forum … either under their name, anonymously, under a screen name, or communicating through another person.”
Real progressive company, that Whole Foods. They missed the boat. Let’s pretend for a moment that you had an executive writing anonymous letters to the editor of a newspaper talking about your company. That’s not appropriate behavior, and it should be stopped. Whole Foods is taking the stance that unless it’s a corporate newsletter, no more comments to the media.
Online forums are just another medium – treat them that way! Just like you don’t want to have executives granting TV interviews without running through the PR department, you don’t want executives chatting on an online forum. As a company, however, you do want to be involved in the conversation.
On my way to work on Monday, I caught her press conference about her South African school’s sex scandal. If you missed it, it’s worth a watch. It is always fun to see someone use crisis management best practices when handing a nasty story. Here’s the vid. More after the break.
Classic crisis communications. Provide the facts. Identify what you did to stop the problem immediately. Provide details about the research you are doing to identify where the system broke down and how you can fix it. Provide details of how you are moving forward with checks in place to protect from the same happening again. Say you are sorry.
If you want to see more about the story, be sure to check out PR. Differently. Peter Shankman did a great interview about the topic.
According to IDG News service and as posted on MacWorld, Google will today announce OpenSocial, its foray into the social media space where MySpace and Facebook are among the competition.
Google will take a page from the Facebook strategy by opening up APIs (application programming interfaces). For those of us who aren’t programers, this is a big deal because it allows applications and Web sites to interact directly with OpenSocial. As a matter of fact, many think that’s why Facebook has become so popular.
With its ownership of YouTube, Google already has access to millions who use social media sites. If done well, OpenSocial could be big…
