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"Everywhere and nowhere" claimed the Economist... sayin that.. it's a big thing (duh) but doesn't make any money actually... (seriously?) your take.. and jump here

PR & Marketing people should read this

Before you ask: This column was not sparked by my dealings with any one particular company, PR agent, or marketing executive. There's no recent review I wrote that was handled poorly by one company or another. In fact, that's why I'm choosing this time to write something that has been on my mind for awhile; there's nobody specific to lay the blame on.

If you work in PR or marketing, a negative review, preview, or editorial column about the company or product you represent is going to happen. It doesn't matter how much people love the stuff you're hawking. It's only a matter of time. Over the last decade or so, I've dealt with companies that take bad news very well, and I've dealt with ones that seem to do everything wrong. Today I offer some free advice to anyone working with a member of the press for what to do when this inevitably happens.

There's an old saying, attributed to Mark Twain: Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

Arguing with the press about why they're wrong in their opinion of your product or company isn't going to get you anywhere. If you tick them off, they'll just continually think about how awful you are, and it'll show up in print (or on the Web, or wherever). It'll taint future reviews. And even if you vow not to work with them anymore, it won't stop them from writing nasty things about your company or product. So what do you do when something negative about your product/service/company shows up in the media? Here are five rules:

1. Engage immediately: Don't let weeks go by without contacting that person. Letting bad press "sit there" is almost always a recipe for disaster, especially in this age where comments, blogs, and other Web sites pick up on controversial stories. Talking to the person on the phone is best; don't just fire off a big email missive. You want to actively diffuse the situation, not take a "ignore it and it'll go away" attitude.

2. Listen more, talk less: If the reviewer makes a factual error, it's fine to point it out and correct it, but don't go any further than that. Instead, you want to ask the person what their complaints are and try to understand them better. Find out what they didn't like, how they came to that conclusion, and take notes. The press hates being told how to do their job, and loves being listened to.

3. Answer previous concerns directly: The next product will undoubtedly address some of the things the press complained about in their negative coverage. As soon as you're able to talk about it, go back to the person and say "hey, we have this new Sprocket 2 coming out and we wanted to tell you how it addresses those things you complained about with the original Sprocket. We think you'll be really happy with it." The impression that you want to give is not one of hating the press for saying bad things about the Sprocket, but of finding their negative coverage to be a valuable tool to developing a better product. Even if it's not entirely true, it makes the press feel better about doing their job.

4. Don't let a negative review be the most recent one: We see this a lot in companies that make a lot of similar products. If tech analyst Robert Heron over at PC Magazine reviews your HDTV and gives it a low score, the absolute worst thing you can do is stop sending TVs. Now the site's most recent review from your brand is negative. What you want to do is immediately send out another TV that you think will get a better review. You want readers to have a positive impression of your brand.

5. Don't try to "fix it": For the most part, a negative review can't be un-done, and a negative editorial column is even further out of reach. If you're lucky, the author made a couple of factual errors and will revise their opinion on their own, once you point them out. If they had their facts straight and still hold an unfavorable opinion, trying to convince them to "take another look" or "re-review" your stuff is probably only going to make things worse. Sometimes the author will decide to do this on their own, but forcing the issue is like controlling the press, and the press will hate that. Just pay attention to #2 and #4 above, and make it clear that the author can always contact you with any questions or needs as they work on their future coverage.

Look, almost all companies mess up from time to time. Bad products are going to happen, and the worst part about being in PR or marketing has to be putting on a happy face and defending something you know really isn't that good. I know that I personally appreciate the kind of honesty where a company will admit to having a less-than-ideal product, but most people in PR or marketing don't have the luxury of doing that. It's when a company takes the exact opposite attitude that I get my feathers ruffled—when anything less than a most glowing review is unacceptable. Remember that a confrontation with the press is almost always going to end in more bad press, and a conciliatory tone can pay off big further down the line.

byJason Cross

ExtremeTech
19 March 2008

one day coktail play

title or book cover... click what you wish...

TO ALL WOULD-BE ADVERTISER OUT THERE!

READ !!!

====================================================================

How to advertist in-game...the RIGHT way

By Kristin

In-game advertising is not something that's terribly new, nor is it something that's terribly well done.

The first instance that I can remember of in-game advertising that I saw with my own eyes was in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. These ads were all for fictional companies and spoofs on current advertising at the time. Along with the radio commercials. Who didn't love to drive around in the car and listen to the various stations? Heck, I even had an entire GTA:VC loop on in my winamp at one point in time!

The next well executed in-game advertising was in Crackdown. Again, all fictional companies, it was fun to jump around the city and see the billboards, trying to figure out what real life life company they were spoofing.

Then came Guitar Hero 3 with the blatant, over the top, real life company ads. Who REALLY wants to see that huge McDonald's logo? When I started playing and noticing the advertising in the game and how utterly OBNOXIOUS it was, it made me want to boycott those companies that paid to have their ads inserted into the game. Your advertising is on the radio (why I listen to CDs), the television (why I play games and watch movies, I catch my tv shows online), and on billboards (why I watch the cars tail lights in front of me), don't invade my private zone of "my gametime". This is where I go to escape mainstream and life.

However, I do think mainstream advertising can be done well in games. This generation hates anything that smells of marketing unless it's VERY well done, edgy, comical, and memorable.

Cat herding anyone? Yes, you remember that super bowl commercial. It was funny, it's different, it was completely unexpected. Those weird little troll-like-things that quizno did a couple years ago that sang about the moon? Yeah you remember what I'm talking about.

In game marketing can be done successfully, the best way to do it would be to make up a fictions company that is a spoof of your real life company. It makes the gamer see the ad, go oh! That's XYZ company in real life they're spoofing, and they appreciate the company poking fun at itself (although the gamer may not realize the company paid for a spoofed ad - they may think it's the game designer spoofing a company).

You get brand recognition (McDonalds could have flipped their arches to spoof themselves, and shrunk the ad, Gamers LOVE to find easter eggs in games), you get the consumer thinking about your brand, and as they go by your establishment/product on the road/in the store it'll trigger a memory of the game -> trigger memory of your brand -> if executed correctly brand loyalty and a purchase.

I saw some concept art at one point for a blackbird campaign that had in game advertising. It was AWFUL. I'm so thankful everyone that saw the concepts reacted with the same visceral distaste and disgust that I did. Guess why it sucked so bad - it wasn't designed by gamers. Notice the Voodoo laptops in Call of Duty 4? Very understated, very subtle, very sexy. Why use 1 million words when 1 will do?

It can be done people. Just don't let suits design the ads. When your designing for your demographic, ASK your demographic or even better yet; have YOUR demographic design it.

Kristin Reilly
(www.rahulsood.com)
(http://www.rahulsood.com/2008/03/how-to-advertist-in-gamethe-right-way.html)
==============================================================


there u have it.. a nice n neat article on how to advertise in video games... to all the bald man (or white haired or whatever) in suites... this may as well become your reference text when you guys are going to put some advertisement in video games in the future...

and make sure whoever have even a tiny bit of interest in pc gaming / video games industry as a whole checkout rahulsood's blog! over n out...

the ultraslims and the race for perfection

the wonderful world of electronics & computing technology

a comparison between 2 gorgeous ultraportables - sourced from Engadget




there's nuff said abt the macbook air... so how about some stories on the black one?
here's the link:

businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_08/b4072042350389.htm

(Courtesy of BusinessWeek & Engadget)

something about cost cutting

Why companies cut costs?

Today we are going to discuss cost cutting. Cost cutting increases net income, most particularly of the person who is doing the cost cutting. In fact, the more managers can cut costs, the more they can pay themselves, thus allowing them to make a bee line for the exit door before anyone has found out how incompetent they are. Some argue that managers engage in rounds of cost cutting in order to keep the organization sustainable, but I am afraid jokes like that are in pretty poor taste. The world has quite enough standup comedians as it is, thank you very much, and I shall be recommending an across-the-board pay cut immediately.

"But isn't ripping out costs without scant regard for customers just a way to squander money?" I hear you ask. "No," I reply. Then I continue: "If you go about it with real commitment, pretty soon there won't be any money left to squander. And, with luck, there won't be any customers, either."

So what are the 10 steps to effective cost cutting? Here are mine:

1. Always tell anyone losing their job that their loss is your annual pay rise.
2. Say that capital is precious, which is why it is a capital idea that they lose
their livelihood.
3. Tell the shareholders that customers are an optional extra, and can probably be
dispensed with entirely in the future.
4. Say that someone has to make the tough decisions, such as whether to spend the
bonus on a hobby farm or a third Rolls Royce.
5. Announce that your human resources manager has only half a brain, so is obviously
an unusually gifted member of the profession.
6. A company has two buckets, revenue and costs, and there is little further to say
on the matter.
7. I love the smell of retrenchments in the morning.
8. I am conducting this round of cost cutting because we are actualizing our on going
strategy map (OGSM), just as soon as I figure out what an on going strategy map is.
9. Oh, I have just been told we can't afford an on going strategy map (OGSM).
10.Good, that probably means another pay rise.

- By David James.



Peter Kelleher tries his hand at interpreting this blog entry (saving the reader the effort (and the time and the money)

Sir Brent Fuse is in no position to comment on the reasons a company should cut costs, being a lifetime public servant. Which is why he feels he can offer in a spirit of complete disinterest the following pontifications:

1. Cost cutting is a perilous pastime; it turns very quickly into trimming the employment fat. And, boy, is Sir Brent employment fat! Although, on the other hand, he has never tried unemployment thin, so has not the experience to comment (ahem).

2. Sir Brent makes no bones about his inability to penetrate managerial speak or executive double-speak or entrepreneurial triple-speak. Even English is a second language to him, having been brought up by a tribe of headhunter advertising hacks in the hinterland of the Siberia end of Collins Street, whose language consisted of grunts, moans and pelvic thrusts.

3. Sir Brent feels, that if the reader could make it through to the end of Slithershanks' remarks, he must be executive material and should reward himself immediately with a 2000% pay rise, 1 million further options to buy shares at diddley-squat and a performance bonus based on the number of fresh mortgage holders he can push out onto the bread line, at $500,000 per head.

4. When it comes to standup comedians, Sir Brent and Slithershanks, rather surprisingly, part company. Sir Brent is of the opinion that you can never have enough standup comics; especially if you stand them up before a firing squad, the traitorous, greenie, pinko commo bastards (don't blame me; that's what Sir Brent said).

Items 5 through 10: approved anonymously, all being related to directors' compensation; which, unlike workers' compensation, is worth the injury.

Picture and caption: Kelleher.
Posted by David James
December 4, 2007 8:06 AM
The Age Blog - Slithershanks (http://blogs.theage.com.au/slithershanks/)

one ad like no other

"Time" names iPhone "invention of the year"

an interesting article on CNET

====================================================================

And lo, it was foretold in the fall of 2007, that a mobile telephone would lead humanity out of the New Dark Ages and into a better future free from roaming charges and buttons.

Time, which likes to anoint things, has named Apple's iPhone the "Invention of the Year," following such recent IotYs like YouTube and SpaceShipOne. The number one reason why the iPhone is Time's Invention of the Year? "It's pretty." Further: "An example: look at what happens when you put the iPhone into 'airplane' mode (i.e., no cell service, Wi-Fi, etc.). A tiny little orange airplane zooms into the menu bar!" Cool!

In all seriousness, the article accompanying the award lays out several reasons why the iPhone is indeed very important to the computer industry. The relentless buzz around the iPhone, as well as the sales figures, are signs that the general public is starting to really think about what they want in a mobile computer. The iPhone has made the wireless industry sit up and realize that the bar has been raised. And it's also setting the stage for a future in which your mobile computer gradually occupies a larger part of your world.

We're a technology publication, and were we to pick a tech product of 2007, the iPhone would definitely wind up as one of the final three choices and would probably win. But Invention of the Year?

Shouldn't Time, a general-interest publication, really consider that a broader category that includes extremely important and noteworthy advances in other areas of science and technology? Breakthroughs that might one day have a far more profound effect on the planet than a consumer product?

I guess not. After all, this is a publication that named You, and your user-generated, Web 2.0, no sense of buzzword-irony selves as Person of the Year for 2006, joining other odd PofY choices such as 1966's "Twenty-five and Under," 1969's "Middle Americans," and 1975's "American Women." Sometimes, it's just easier to pick something that will make everybody happy rather than to actually put some thought into the person or the thing that helped change the world that year.

Besides, science is hard. Look at the shiny thing! Isn't that the shiniest thing you've ever seen!

====================================================================

By Tom Krazit, CNET News.com
Nov 02, 2007

you

もしも願い一つだけ叶うなら

君の側で眠らせて　どんな場所でもいいよ

迷わず君だけを見つめている

自分の美しさ　まだ知らないの

儚く過ぎて行く日々の中で

もしも願い一つだけ叶うなら

君の側で眠らせて...

ツキアカリ

青い　青い　空に　月の光をともす
甘く　淡く　重い　そんなものに捉われて

この月明かりの下　ひとり知れず
君の名前だけを呼んでいた
いつまでも未来をさがしてた
この光の中に．．

いつも　いつも　そばで　信じてゆく力が
遠く　脆い　ものを　動かしてる気がしてた

この月明かりの下　ひとり知れず
君の名前だけを呼んでいた
静かな愛情を信じてた
この光の中に．．


何も掴めないような夜には
君を想わないときはない
There isn't a day I don't think about it
迷う心が　君に届くように

この月明かりの下で　私の名前を呼んで
たしかに逢にゆくよ　どこへでも
君のそばに

この月明かり　瞬きひとつせず
静かに私を見つめていた
君との未来をさがしてた
この光の中に．．



(rie fu for d-black)

Bières de Chimay

beau, mooi, schön..


bloody wonder....

Version Two Point Zero

TIME - July 9, 2007

click to enlarge!