Pharmaceutical Companies, Public Relations & Search
Saturday, August 19, 2006
One major feature driving the growing popularity of public relations for marketing is its ability to live within limitations and restrictions set by law. The rules governing pharmaceutical industries come to mind. Everybody has noticed change in drug commercial TV-spots resulting from the FDA's truth in advertising laws. But when your publicity is being driven through word-of-mouth and matter-of-fact editorial coverage, you don't have such restrictions. Editorial gets a "get out of jail free" card when it comes to garnering publicity. It's exposure in mainstream media, but it's just not advertising.
Public relations is made to order for drug companies. In addition to developing strategies to get your message out, public relations is uniquely suited to deal with damaging news stories, preferably diffusing the story before it even hits the press. And with today's real-time blogging, sometime it is even beneficial to monitor the mention of drug names online in real time. The danger is that un-tended, just about any blogger with a horror story and axe to grind has a decent ability grab that first page of search results on the drug's name. The ability of single individuals to impact the viability of entire product lines is constantly on the rise. PR firms know how to manage this. Managing your Web and "search engine presence" is now firmly in the realm of public relations, so you can get a complete and very strategic alternative marketing campaign from a single company.Labels: blog, pr, search
Stumble Upon Channel Surfing
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Recently, I've been able to add Stumble Upon to my Internet Explorer 7 beta. I think when I started using Stumble Upon, it was FireFox only, which was a major boon to FireFox, but probably quite a large detriment to Stumble Upon, for limiting its reach. But now that Stumble Upon is available for Explorer, I find that it plus Google Bookmarks is about the ultimate combo for channel-surfing and favoriting goodness.
The irony here is that with broadband access, the modern equivalent of channel surfing has become fun, fast, addictive and visual on the Web. And simultaneously, it has become slow, boring and totally text-based on TV. This is another case of mainstream media just not getting it. Where did channel surfing go?
I made a post about this awhile back on my personal blog, but this is more of a Connors media topic. I made the observation that the only people I've seen cognizant of this problem is ATi, which is now purchased by and part of AMD. The ATi HDTV Wonder card, which is essentially a $100 over-the-air HDTV tuner/PVR card, was going to scan all the HDTV channels and make a thumnail preview of what's on now available in their channel guide. This would have appealed to visual learners, as opposed to the classic TV Guide grid (interactive program guides), which frankly is more auditory in nature than visual. One may argue that text is a visual way of absorbing information, but for most, pictures are much more instantaneous, and text must often be sub-vocalized and funneled through the voice box or bronchial tubes--quite literally a bottleneck.
I mentioned in my previous post, the days of rapid-fire channel surfing ala Toy Story 2, where the pig is looking for the toy store commercial, passes it, and has to go around the dial again because it's faster. That perfectly epitomized the days of analog cable, and taps into a part of the human brain discussed in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. Well, those days are over (for now), replaced by more cerebral channel guide, that makes you sit back and intellectually pursue what's on before making your choice. Any attempt to channel surf is met by really long, annoying time-delays that makes going around a 500-channel dial completely unrealistic. I could easily blink my way through 500 channels... if the technology (which is supposed to be following Moore's Law) could keep up.
So, it is ironic that Stumble Upon has come onto the scene, literally adding the channel surfing model to the Web--in an even purer sense than surfing links, because no thought is necessary. A thoughtless, click, click, click to see what's interesting has come to the Web, but it has been removed from digital television! How ironic. The TV broadcast industry just can't afford to let nails be so thoughtlessly driven into the coffin. They should be jealously defending the characteristics of old-school broadcast television that people loved.
Whose at fault? The MPAA for creating digital channel formats that are processor-intensive and only have full picture data every 10-or-so frames? The set-top box people, like Motorola and Scientific Atlanta who leave out circuitry for instant channel-changing (a THIRD tuner)? Is it the component manufactures that make the decoder chips used by the set-top boxes, such as Broadcom? Somewhere in this chain, engineers forgot that people like to channel surf, and by forgetting, thereby shifted away a major usability advantage that was previously held by traditional media, towards the new media competition.
I notice that YouTube is sensitive to this issue, and added a "Next" link in the lower-right of their video. Watch out, television media. Even YouTube is getting it. I guess the big saving grace is that Stumble Upon is still a well kept secret, and is not a default feature in Web browsers (yet). But for those who are not exposed to Stumble Upon, it's like taking the Yahoo Cool Site of the Day from ages ago, combining it with an inexhaustible set of cool pages, adding social aspects that make the coolest things come up most frequently, and taking away all navigation except for a browser button that says "Stumble!" Brilliant.Labels: Firefox, Google, Stumbleupon, Yahoo, Youtube
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