Dell attack-dog tactics backfire in the blogosphere

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A story has been playing out at Dell Computer this week that illustrates vividly the clash of cultures that must be going on in many companies over blogging.

Last Thursday, Consumerist.com posted a list of tips submitted by a former Dell sales manager that told, among other things, how to get the best deals and even get a free laptop replacement at the end of a warranty cycle. This kind of stuff is Consumerist’s bread and butter – and Dell one of its favorite targets – so the site gleefully ran the secrets, along with commentary from a current Dell rep.

Dell must have been ripped, but it then threw gasoline on the fire. On Friday, Dell sent a corporate lawyer after Consumerist with a cease-and-desist notice. What a boneheaded maneuver that was. Naturally, Consumerist posted the lawyer’s threat along with a response. The exchange made the Dell lawyer looked clueless, particularly since she never disputed the accuracy of the Consumerist information.

Meanwhile, readers were having a field day. Along with more than 300,000 page views, the Consumerist story on was dugg more than 3,600 times, making it one of the most popular technology news items of the last week. In trying to bury the offending item, Dell actually created a magnet of publicity

On Saturday, Dell’s Lionel Menchaca posted a thoughtful and somewhat extraordinary account of the whole incident on the Direct2Dell blog. He admitted that Dell had dropped the ball and should never have asked for the information on Consumerist to be taken down in the first place. He also addressed many of the flaws in Dell’s pricing, promotion and support system highlighted by the original post. What was extraordinary was the links to photos on Engadget of unannounced Dell products. People used to get fired for leaking news like that. Now they link to it on the company blog!

Needless to say, commenters have been all over this story. Consumerist comes out smelling like a rose, and it should because it published accurate, useful stuff. You have to wonder what kind of troglodyte at Dell thought it was a good idea to sic the corporate lawyer on Consumerist. In the professional media world, these kinds of disputes take place in the background and outside of the view of the reader. There is no such discretion in the blogosphere; in fact, many bloggers actually rejoice in tweaking the noses of those whom they offend.

The contrast between the corporate lawyer’s truculence and the corporate blogger’s openness are really a microcosm of what many organizations must be dealing with right now. There’s a command-and-control side of Dell’s business that attempted to apply decade-old containment strategies to a medium that simply laughed in its face. At the same time, you can see in the Direct2Dell experiment that a culture is emerging at the company that values a new form of interaction. You just wonder why the lawyer never asked the blogger for advice before going on the offensive.

Tool Talk: Two programs I wouldn't want to be without

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There are two programs on my desktop that I consider to be absolutely indispensable. They save me time each and every day and the fact that they are available only on Windows is probably the primary reason I haven’t moved to Linux. The hit to my productivity would simply be too great if I lost access to them.

They are Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Siber Systems’ AI Roboform. Anybody who does what I do for a living should consider investing in them.

Dragon has been around for more than 10 years, and they have been eventful ones. In the late 90s, the company that owned the software at the time was a darling of the Internet bubble, reaching valuations in the billions of dollars. Then there was a crash, an accounting scandal and some generally negative publicity about speech recognition software. The product faded from view for several years, but Nuance picked it up and has continued to develop it.

Speech recognition companies have long claimed accuracy rates north of 90%. I’ve never found this to be true, at least in my case. NaturallySpeaking version 8 probably gets about eight out of every 10 words correct out of the box, which isn’t bad. With training, you can indeed get accuracy up to the 90 to 95% range. Here’s a tip: backup your user files, because if you experience a hard disk crash, all of that training will go to waste.

I find that NaturallySpeaking about doubles my word output, which is important when words are a unit of payment. Even though I type 90 wpm, I dictate much faster than that and Dragon reduces eyestrain and the risk of repetitive stress injury. For $60 on eBay, it was is a great investment.

Roboform is a password manager/form filler/password generator and the only shareware I pay for. Most browsers have the ability to save passwords but Roboform does a lot more. It can store a rich set of information about a user’s identity and automatically fill forms with that data. This is enormously useful if you register on a lot of web sites – and who doesn’t these days? With Roboform, registration is a one-click process. The software also retains information about multiple credit cards and bank accounts, making it easy to fill in that information with one click.

The password manager organizes passwords in a master list that is easy to navigate. To go to any password-protected website, you click on the toolbar icon and select the account. Roboform takes you to the login page and signs you in. I am registered on well over 300 web sites, and it would be simply impossible to keep track of them without this program. Another very nice feature is that the Roboform user files can be stored on a server. That means that my current database of passwords is available to me from any computer on my network.

Roboform has some quirks that make it annoying at times. The vendor seems to release .updates about every week, and upgrading is an intrusive process. Also, Roboform has an annoying tendency to try to save login information as a new account, even when the account is already in the database. I dislike the number of dialog boxes it throws at me, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a very useful productivity tool.

I just wish they had it on Linux.

CMP layoffs dramatize bigger industry changes

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The news came down today that technology publisher CMP is laying off 20% of its workforce and merging several publications out of existence, including Network Computing and Optimize. I don’t suppose this is a surprise, for the print business in the enterprise technology market has been on the decline for a long time, but the scope of the cutbacks and the extent of the changes to CMP’s portfolio were breathtaking. Most publishers have been bleeding away properties as print business has turned down. CMP’s action was like an execution.

It’s hard not to feel like an old codger at times like these, for I remember the days when Computerworld’s print business was so healthy that the company had to start ancillary publications just to handle the overflow of ads because the printer couldn’t produce issues that were large enough to hold them all. I don’t pine for those days, though. There were times when the editorial staff was slapping almost anything it could find onto a page in order to fill space around the ads. No one was well-served by that. What’s different about online publishing is that the space expands and contracts to fill available content. There is much less of a need to provide some content — any content — to run around advertising. It’s perhaps one of the great under-appreciated benefits of new media.

People sometimes complain that one of the shortcomings of new media is that space is unlimited, meaning that writers can write as much as they want about whatever they want. I suppose that’s a problem in some respects, but isn’t the ultimate arbiter of value the reader? If writers don’t produce interesting copy, then no one will read them, and it won’t matter how many words they write. The Web is liberating in that way. In removing constraints of space and time, it frees the writer to focus on content and the reader to make choices based upon what they want to read rather than what the publisher chooses to give them. I think that, in the long run, we’ll realize that this was a great liberator and a step forward both for the craft of journalism and the service that publications deliver to their readers.

For now, though, I feel badly for the 200 people who lost their jobs today. They were victimized not by any failure on their part, but rather because of a structural shift in the market over which they had no control. I fear that they are simply the first casualties of a much bigger change in consumption habits that will sweep over much of the mainstream media in the coming years. In the end, it will lead to a richer, more vibrant media landscape, but there is bound to be a lot of suffering in the meantime

Survey says IT pros put their trust in social media

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ITtoolbox and adverting agency PJA published the results of a survey that they say demonstrates that IT professionals spend more time on social media sites than reading traditional trade publications and trust the information they find there more than any other published source.

The results serve ITToolbox’s interests and the .5% response rate makes them statistically irrelevant; still, the findings about trust are probably valid. IT managers have always said they trust each other more than any other source, probably because the other sources haven’t done a very good job of being all that reliable.
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I question the survey’s findings that executive decision-makers spend 3.5 hours a week on social media sites, but I have no doubt that the people who work further down in the organizations spend at least that much time. After all, Slashdot.org was probably the earliest successful group blog. It was Digg.com before there was a Digg.com.

How to sell to CIOs

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Episode 12 of Tech PR War Stories – the podcast for PR people that I co-produce with David Strom – is all about selling to CIOs. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been spending a lot of time with CIOs recently and over the years. I’ve observed that they care a lot less about products and vendors that they do about issues like business alignment, governance and skills retention. I have some observations to share about how they look at vendors.

David actually spent some time working in large IT organizations. We both agree on a few things: CIOs look for trusted partnerships more than products; they rely on their peers and staff for advice on what to buy; and the best route to the CIO’s office is up from the lower levels in the organization. In other words: stop focusing your pitch solely on CIOs because that’s a lousy way to actually reach them!

Click here to read the blog entry and listen to the podcast.

Tech PR War Stories Episode 11: our guest is Sam Whitmore

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Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey is one of the most influential publications in the high-tech PR community, and David Strom and I were fortunate to have Sam himself as a guest on Tech PR War Stories this week.

We asked Sam to talk about the up-and-coming influencers in IT media and his response surprised me. He’s evidently looking at media that tap into the real issues that IT pros wrestle with week-to-week more than new publishers and editors. He also had a lot to say about the ethos of the blogosphere and how PR pros should work with this new class of journalist. Bottom line: deal with it. These are the new journalists and their ethics and practices aren’t all that different from the folks you’ve dealt with for years.

Good stuff from a thought leader who pulls no punches.

Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains – June 1, 2007

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Business 2.0 magazine has a great feature on Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains. Ham has parlayed users’ foul-ups and ignorance about how to use the Internet into a fortune. Try this: type “www.newyorktimes.cm” (not .com) into your browser. You’ll come to a website that has lots of come-ons for publications. That’s the work of Kevin Ham, who has not only snapped up thousands of erroneous URLs typed by fumble-fingered users but who has cut an ingenious deal with the poor African country of Cameroon – which owns the “.cm” domain – to intercept traffic intended for the big-brand websites.

I had lost track of the value of domains after “business.com” sold for $1 million in the late 90s. This article shows that the domain trade is alive and well and becoming very sophisticated. No one is more sophisticated about it than Kevin Ham. This is an excellent profile of someone who’s making money by working under the Internet covers. You can argue about whether his work is contributing in any meaningful way to the economy or furthering the advance of human knowledge, but what you can’t argue about is whether Kevin Ham is succeeding. He’s filthy rich.

More evidence of a newspaper death spiral

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Alan Mutter writes perceptively on the recent plunge in newspaper revenues on his outstanding Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

“Print advertising sales for newspapers appear to be on track to plunge by $2 billion this year, which would make for the worst performance in a decade other than the disastrous period following 9/11,” he writes, noting that this will be the first time newspaper revenues have ever declined in a time of economic prosperity.

First quarter revenues for classified advertising – the most profitable part of the newspaper business – were off a staggering 13.2% in the first quarter, Mutter notes. Automotive advertising, which is newspapers’ Rock of Gibraltar, was off nearly 13% last year. Nearly all of this business is going online and it’s not coming back.

I’ve characterized the scenario facing major metro dailies as a “death spiral” in my own writing on this topic. Alan Mutter’s statistics and analysis bear this out. In a spiral, the speed of descent increases as the object hurtles toward the ground. The numbers indicate that a spiral could be developing. According to Mutter, print advertising revenues were off .5% in 2005, 4.6% in 2006 and are on track to decline 6.4% in 2007. It’s too early to call this a pattern, but in an industry that Mutter notes “has been masterful at increasing its revenues in good times and bad,” this twist of fortune is unprecedented and alarming.

Desperate acts like the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent decision to eviscerate its newroom staff indicate that the industry is in panic mode. The Chron is basically committing hara-kiri rather than continuing the fight. I suspect it’s only the first of many to do so.

Mutter, a newspaper-editor-turned-entrepreneur, offers some historical context:

“In retrospect, it is clear that newspaper publishers were lulled into complacence in the early years of the Internet by their prior skill in achieving consistent sales growth in even negative economic conditions. But the growth was not achieved as much by recruiting new customers – or even selling more advertising to existing ones – as by using their monopoly-like positions to force hefty annual rate increases on advertisers who essentially had nowhere else to go.”

Monopolies thrive in the absence of competition, but they tend to let atrophy the skills needed to compete. Newspapers have almost no weapons with which to fight the online hordes that are devastating their business.

Front page of the Merc

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In The New Influencers, I wrote about the TechCrunch blog and suggested that it may have more influence in Silicon Valley than the San Jose Mercury News. Fortunately, the editors at the business section of the Merc overlooked that aside when they chose to feature Dean Takahashi’s column about the book on the front page of the May 17 business section. I’m grateful to Dean and to the newspaper, which is THE paper of record in Silicon Valley.

The day this feature appeared, New Influencers jumped into the top 1,200 titles on Amazon. It’s slipped since then, but the sales rating stayed within the top 10,000 for 10 days. Hopefully, this will get some other people reading and talking about the book.

Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve had a photo published in a major newspaper (the shot of Peter Rojas is mine). Unfortunately, the photo ran with a credit to the book publisher, not the photographer. Ah, well. Such is life. 🙂

(Click on the photo to get a larger image)

Tool Talk: saving and finding stuff made easier

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Having worked independently for 18 months now, I thought I’d write about some of the technology tools I’ve discovered to make my life easier and my work more efficient. In this installment, I’ll tell how I manage my reading.

Like a lot of people, I need to do a lot of reading to keep current. Nearly all of my reading is online these days, and I tend to get to it in snatches of a half hour or so, usually early in the morning or late at night.

The constant stream of newsletters and RSS updates that cross my desktop don’t live by my schedule, though, so I rely on three tools to help me organize content and find it when I need it. They are Google Desktop, del.icio.us and Firefox, and I wouldn’t want to be without them.

Google Desktop is an incredibly powerful product that indexes nearly every word on your computer. With it, I can find files by keyword with almost instantaneous speed. The shortcut to bring up the search box is hitting the Control key twice. That brings up a small Ajax applet that delivers results as you type, which is much faster than using the full-page Web interface.

But I find the hidden value of Google Desktop is the information it indexes in hidden and cached files that would never be visible otherwise. This is an invaluable tool when you’ve discarded something you never thought you’d need and then suddenly find yourself wishing you had that information back.

For example, last week I was listing some rental property on Craigslist.org. I wanted to find the original listing that I had used last August when the apartment was last rented. I never bothered to commit that information to a document, but Google Desktop was able to pull it out of cache memory: it literally found the page I had viewed on Craigslist when I posted the ad nine months ago.

This feature is also useful when traveling because it essentially gives you access to web pages when disconnected. Many times I’ve been able to fish information out of my computer that was on a website I visited weeks or months ago but which was still available to me because it was cached.

Which brings me to how I use these tools to manage my reading. Much of my news comes in the form of links in e-mails and RSS feeds. I use Firefox’s tabbed browsing feature to open these links in tabs (Control-click on a link does this automatically), which I can look at later. At some point during the day, I’ll go through these tabs and tag them to my del.icio.us account using the bookmark extension, a plug-in that basically replaces Firefox bookmarks with a del.icio.us back-end.

Saving a page on del.icio.us is as easy as striking Control-D and typing a tag. For articles I want to read later, I the tagl “readit.” Later, when I have time, I’ll select the “readit” tag from the del.icio.us browser plug-in and choose the “Open in Tabs” option. This automatically opens every item with the readit tag in its own tab. If I’m about to hit the road, I can shut the lid on my laptop at this point. When I open it on the plane, all the pages are still there. What’s also cool is that with Google Desktop, these pages are automatically cached for retrieval offline, so I can actually read web pages on the plane, even if I haven’t read them previously.