Altyrian View

Review products on your blog? If you do, and you get paid by the company that you are reviewing, look out! The FTC is going to start cracking down on bloggers who are on the take and giving good reviews.

The updated “Guidelines Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” will probably pass this summer. Under the new guidelines, the FTC is going to order bloggers to pay restitution to consumers if they don’t disclose that they are being paid to review products favorably.

You can read more about it here: PC World.

While this is a great idea in principle, I am concerned that blogs are suddenly under the purview of the FTC. And what constitutes a blog? After all, Twitter is micro-blogging. Try fitting that disclaimer in 140 characters. And what about Amazon reviews?

Don’t get me wrong. Companies paying for good reviews is dirty, and it hurts the consumer. But are we moving to an age where everything that we write is regulated by the FTC?

It’s been a case of the cobbler’s kids who didn’t have any shoes. Every day, we advise people on how to grow their companies. We have an amazing track record with stats to support our results. It’s time for us to grow.

As a part of that, I’m spending 20% of my time – one day each week – to work on growing the agency and my knowledge. I’m really excited about the prospects of spending time working on this new “client,” and I have a few projects that I’ll be working on in the short-term.

First, this blog is going to be woken from the dead. Without tooting my own horn, there are some good things here. Lots of people read the blog. They deserve my attention.

The podcast is also going to get a kick in the pants. With over 3,000 listeners, we are talking to more people than some of our local AM stations.

Yes, a book is coming. I just need to sit down and write it.

We will see how the experiment goes in the coming weeks.

I’m a Mac fanboy. I’ll admit it. I have all the latest gadgets. My friend sent me the following email that I thought you all would enjoy.

I think Apple will do just fine, whether or not Jobs returns to re-take the helm.

Amidst all the hype, people forget that Steve Jobs is not an infallible god of technology and marketing.

The Apple II, the first computer Jobs and the Woz put out, was not, in fact, a very good machine. Olivetti and Commodore had machines that were vastly superior. I used (and programmed) them all. The Apple II’s “storage” device, an analog tape cassette recorder, was a disaster, at a time when Commodore was using a digital tape storage device, and Olivetti was using a genuine digital floppy disk. Trying to edit on Apple’s display was an exercise in confusion, while the Commodore 8032 had an editing/display system nearly equal to today’s word processors.

In Jobs’ favor, he out-marketed Commodore and Olivetti, making the Apple II a must-have product. Commodore, old-timers may recall, abandoned its then-powerful desktops and went into games and toy computers. Olivetti, which was making products light-years ahead of those in America, never knew how to market them. (In 1978, I had a portable Olivetti, programmable in BASIC, that had a built-in printer, integral keyboard, and a 2-inch floppy disk unit! Did I mention it was portable?)

I painfully recall the Apple III. That was Steve Jobs’ personal project. As I recall, the Woz refused to have anything to do with it. I wrote a program for an Apple III, exactly once. It was the most screwed-up, buggy computer I ever put my hands on. As a result, I lost a bundle on the program I designed under contract, because coding it was such a horrendous project. As I recall, the Apple III was introduced as the first of a new generation. In fact, Apple dropped it and everyone who had bought one was left with a dead-end product.

Then there was the Lisa. That was Steve Jobs’ personal project, named after his daughter. Apple reportedly buried several thousand of them in a Utah landfill. I refused to touch one, even though my office was in an Apple store that had them in stock.

Then there was NEXT, the company Steve started after he left apple. Anybody know anybody who ever bought a NEXT computer?

A few years ago, I bought my wife an iPod that I think was called “Slim” or something like that. About two weeks later they stopped making it. Instantly, my wife’s was obsolete, another Apple dead end product.

More failed Apple products follow. In fairness to Jobs, some of those on this list were done when Jobs was out of Apple, squandering his stockholders’ investments in NEXT.

• Powerbook 150

• Mac Classic

• Powerbook 5300.

• Quadra 900

• Mac 128K.

• Apple IIvx

• 20^th Anniversary Macintosh

• A/UX Operating System

• “Hockey Puck” USB mouse

• Mac Cube G4. Died in less than a year. (An Apple insider said Apple’s mistake was “depending more on Jobs’ personal taste than market research.”)

• Apple Pippin – a game machine attempt, voted one of the 25 worst tech products of all time.

• Macintosh Portable (15-1/2 pounds, $6,500). A solution in search of a problem. Televideo had one out, but nobody noticed. It was a dream computer for its time.

• Taligent operating system. Mercifully died before it ever reached the marketplace

• The Newton handwriting recognition product that couldn’t read handwriting.

• Quicktake camera. $750 and it couldn’t focus.

• Macintosh TV.

• Apple’s music partnership with the Motorola Rokr phone.

• Apple TV (not to be confused with Macintosh TV). Also called iTV.

• Apple Interactive Television Box. Because so many were thrown in dumpsters, those that remain are collectors’ items.

• Emate.

According to Macworld, a Burger King ad campaign that had Facebook users “sacrificing” friends has been canceled. Seems that users that dropped 10 Facebook friends would get a free hamburger. What’s more, everyone that got dropped would get a nice little note saying that they had been dumped for a burger. As you might guess, Facebook didn’t see the humor. After trying to work things out, Burger King pulled the campaign, but not after the sacrifice of a quarter of a million friends.

Last night I attended a fantastic presentation by Peter Shankman in which he mentioned one of the problems with Facebook: Everyone is equal. I have more than 200 friends of Facebook. Some I see everyday; some I’ve met once and might never meet again. I like them both, but I am more interested in some friends than others. Like Shankman, I wish that there was a way to “rank” friends. Those friends that I want to watch their feeds every and those that I can follow every once in a while.

As many of you know, I spoke at the SAS Ragan Conference in Durham, NC, last month. If you haven’t been to a Ragan conference, I highly recommend them. They are both informative and fun.

Below is an interview with me conducted by Mark Ragan.

MacWorld is reporting that an Apple iPhone ad has been pulled in the UK by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). This is the offending line in the ad:

Which is why all the parts of the Internet are on the iPhone.

If you have an iPhone, you know that most of the Internet is on the iPhone. Indeed, it’s the best Internet I’ve ever seen on a smart phone. But, not all of it is there. Java and Flash are still missing from the iPhone which is why the ASA chose to pull the ad.

Of course, Apple is defending its decision based on information from iPhone, Therefore, iBlog:

Apple disagreed, arguing that its claim referred to availability of webpages, rather than their specific appearance.

As you may know, this is not the first time in a few months that Apple has caught some flack for its iPhone advertising. The spot for the 3G that claimed twice the speed has spurned a lawsuit here in the States.

I’m not sure where I fall on this one. On the one hand, I agree that the ad can be misleading. On the other hand, do we need “Drug” ads that explain every single statement in its entirety? Is it Apple’s fault that Adobe’s product isn’t available for the iPhone? What about Microsoft’s Silverlight? If it’s not there, is the ad still misleading?

I think that if there hadn’t been flack from the “double the speed,” wording, this ad would still be on the air.

That’s my Altyrian View.

On Friday, I guessed when Barack Obama might announce his vice presidential running mate. I will say that 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning never ever crossed my mind.

From a media relations perspective (this is not a political blog), I can’t think of a worst time. Few people are awake. Newspapers east of the Mississippi have long passed their deadline. The evening news is long over. It’s a Saturday – the slowest news day of the week.

So, who from the establishment are the media winners? CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. And the losers? ABC and CBS. But maybe Obama isn’t worried about the established media. Maybe he is looking at the new media outlets, and he understands that their deadlines are moving targets. They “publish” when there is news.

So, was it a mistake? I guess we’ll know in November.

That’s my Altyrian View.

As you know, this is not a political blog so my purpose is not to theorize on who he will pick (seems that I’m not on the short list). What is interesting, however, is when he will announce his decision.

Of course, we are not privy to the scheduling constraints, so for the purpose of this conversation, we are merely talking about the best day to announce. As of this writing (1:52 EST), there has been no announcement. We know that by yesterday, he had made his decision. Why not announce Thursday?

I think that there is some benefit to waiting. The media is in a frenzy over whom he will pick. Let that story, one that cannot be considered a “bad” story, continue to ride. Once he announces, every political analyst will weigh in with a different opinion. Might as well let the “good” story stay on the front page.

Okay, why not announce Saturday? I think Saturday is a bad idea. Unless his schedule requires it, I think that announcing “big” news over a weekend is a bad idea unless he wants the story to still be active on Monday. Perhaps he wants to have a little thunder going into the convention (we can talk about the Clinton “crisis” later). Maybe he will wait until Monday to announce.

So, that leaves today. Friday isn’t typically the best day to announce news because of the weekend. Should Obama have announced earlier in the week? Let’s face it, the Obama camp created the excitement over his decision by hinting that it was coming. Why not do that last week, and announce this past Tuesday?

That’s my Altyrian View.

I thought the new Batman movie was fantastic. What was really fun was the marketing before the movie. Warner Brothers did a great job of hyping the movie with “fake” graffiti from the Joker. Unfortunately, however, this easy-to-do vandalism has taken on a life of its own. Below are two examples that I came across this morning.

Did Warner Bros. do anything wrong? I don’t think so. They are getting free “advertising” for their motion picture, but I’d bet Chad Perkins isn’t too thrilled about it. I doubt that anyone charged with marketing the movie would have thought that people would start vandalizing using their guerilla tactics. Although I doubt they would have changed the campaign if they had known the consequences, we as marketers have to think ahead.

That’s my Altyrian View.

Sometimes a healthy dose of controversy is a good thing. Take Conservative Cafe as covered by the Chicago Tribune. This unique coffee shop serves up “Radical Right” coffee with pictures of Ronald Reagan on the wall and Ann Coulter’s books stacked by the fireplace. The last sentence of the article sums it all up:

“If I called it ‘Dave’s Cafe,’ no one would talk about it. There’s nothing intriguing about that.”

Exactly right, Dave! Sometimes in PR we want to avoid controversy, but we have to remember that sometimes creating (yes, creating) controversy is a good thing.

A friend of mine used to run political campaigns. He would choose a campaign issue that no one cared about except for 10% of his opponent’s base, and his candidate would take the opposing viewpoint. His candidate would get free press talking about an issue that did not hurt him politically but would fire up his opponent. His opponent would focus on this unimportant campaign issue while his candidate could expand his message. This tactic won many political races for my friend. Remember, keep your eye on the ball.

That’s my Altyrian View.