15 minutes of fame

I was almost Slashdotted (or in my case “Scripted”) the other day. When checking the stats for my blog I noticed three times as many visitors on May 11 (about 180 page visits) than on a normal day, which I found odd, especially since I hadn’t posted anything that day. When going through the referring links I found a post from Scripting News which I later realized is an established blog, even ranked #17 on Technorati Top 100. It’s really silly, but seeing that your blog actually has an audience is quite an ego booster.

Banana Republicans – new book from PR Watch

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of Center for Media and Democracy (and PR Watch), authors of for example Toxic Sludge is Good For You and Weapons of Mass Deception, are launching a new book on May 24, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State. This book should be a must read for anyone in the “perception management” business.

You can still contribute to the project via the website Banana Republicans, which comes in a neat wiki format.

Depth is out. Speed is in. I’m late for yoga, hurry!

The launch of free newspaper Metro’s New York edition yesterday was commented on some places, for example here. It might seem as a tough task for a Swedish newspaper to establish itself in New York, and it probably will be. But I wouldn’t underestimate these people, they have proved that they are able to challenge monopolistic and oligopolistic markets before. Metro was born with the help of Jan Stenbeck, a man (sadly passed away last year) who among other things introduced commercial TV in Sweden via its channel TV3 in the 80’s.

B.L Ochman comments: “It’ll be harder to get the target audience to actually read the paper. Young people don’t ignore newspapers because they cost 50 cents or a dollar. They ignore them because they prefer to get their news online or on TV. They want to skip the ads and they only want to follow news topics that affect them personally.” I respectfully disagree.

Having seen the development of Metro live, I moved to Stockholm in 1995 when it was launched, I admit I was skeptical at first. The short summaries of news agency material are not news, was a common reaction. But Metro found a niche that it exploited successfully. The “metrofication” of news has just accelerated since then and a lot of people who previously didn’t read papers, now read Metro. Since the birth of internet, people are more and more getting used to not paying for information which has paved the way for free newspapers. And since it is handed out in the subway, you might as well take one. It’s designed to last as long as your subway ride and why not grab a paper instead of trying not to look at the guy in the seat in front of you?

Another trend is what Trendsetters call “time compression”. People get more and more stressed and try to fit in more things in their lives. No one has time to watch TV movies or follow long TV series anymore, they’re too busy. Speed dating is just another example. The quote from Ellen DeGeneres: “I’m late for yoga, hurry” brilliantly illustrates how our lives are metroficated, cut up in small shallow pieces.

Depth is out. Speed is in. Metro fits right into that picture. Whether New Yorkers agree is yet to be seen, but I can’t see why it should be any different from London, Paris or HongKong.

IP tracking of comments

Wherever there is a source of information, there is a PR person trying to manipulate it. In a comment to a news article on Poynter.org, Robert Niles writes about his theme park website and how he tracks the IP addresses of all comments.

“…it’s telling to see how many comments from supposed tourists were actually coming from inside the corporate network at Disney.”

Robert discovered that he was manipulated, but what about all the other cases when PR people are just a fraction more intelligent and post their “under cover” comments from home? I’m sure it happens all over the web already. Then again it could be an internal communications issue, it might not be the works of the PR departement at all. It could just be employees of your own organisation out on the web posing as something they’re not.

Either way, you get badwill.