TruthyPR

Judge issues gag orders on defendant for Google AdWords ads, but not for website

Last week Judge Susan Illston, presiding over Bowoto v. Chevron in the Northern California Federal District Court, ordered Chevron to stop running Google AdWords advertisements around the name of the plaintiff, Larry Bowoto.

This action seems consistent with the intent of a gag order.  "We're not going to fight the case in the press" she said, adding that plaintiffs would be forbidden from participating in rallies or protests surrounding the case.  

I find this puzzling, as she specifically asked if these ads were paid search results.  One of the co-counsel's for the plaintiff Bowoto in this case, EarthRights International, has a page about information that is second in the Google search results for "Larry Bowoto".

I find the judge's action to ignore published web pages about information around the case inconsistent and puzzling.  The search advertising in question is not the kind of expensive technique only available to corporate plaintiffs.  According to Google, there's no detectable traffic on the plaintiffs name.  I was able to place a $25 order for ads on Larry Bowoto's name while I wrote this article, and there's no competition for this keyword.

How Judge Illston could conclude that plaintiffs publishing web pages about the case that come up in the search results organically does not violate a gag order is a mystery to me.  If I were advising Chevron (I'm not, see Disclosure below) I'd tell them to hire a Search Engine Optimization firm immediately to help rank their own pages higher on plaintiff names and other keywords about the case.

If the judge is going to allow her counsels to continue to publish material on their websites as a loophole, I suggest Chevron drive a tanker truck through it.

Disclosure: Virilion is not engaged by any interested party to work on communications around this trial.

Internet-savvy communicator on the block

A colleague of mine who works at a client is leaving his large East Coast university for the private sector.  If it had to do with Millenials and the Internet, he was at the center of his organization's strategy. Online video, communities, outposts on social networks, and SMS, he's seen and done it all.  He's the guy that can both enunciate the strategy and then execute the project.

Contractual rules prevent Virilion from hiring him, but if you're interested please drop me a note and I'll introduce you both.

Choose Your Own Adventure: A new use for YouTube

Mobile gaming company Hexolabs recently created a 'choose your own adventure' style game on YouTube that has become an instant hit. 

The ability to use this to tell a story that revolves around policy or advocacy seems a particularly obvious leap.

What I find most amazing about this is that most of the online world has looked at YouTube and thought they understood what it was for, and yet they missed a use that's almost 40 years old.

'Choose Your Own Adventure' as a storytelling and gaming paradigm is almost as old as me.  Wikipedia cites the earliest use of it in 1969 and then popularized in the 1970's with a series of books where you made a choice and then turned to the page to continue the story.  Besides the books, there was a popular choose your own adventure arcade video game called "Dragon's Lair" that I remember playing as a kid.

Next time someone tells you about a new application, or a new website, consider the fact that we clearly haven't found all the uses for the ones we have.

Clay Shirky talk on information overload, privacy, and an engagement gone bad on Facebook.

             What I love about Clay Shirky is his ability to get to the heart of an issue and put it into perspective.  For most journalists today, especially tech writers, perspective is "the last five years".  For Shirky it's the last five hundred.

Shirky talks about that the "information overload" sense that we all have, the history of it, and looks at it in a different way.  There's also an entertaining story about an engagement on Facebook gone bad.

Take a few minutes out and watch his speech on information overload, filter failure, and privacy from a recent conference speech.

UNICEF launches MySpace page for Halloween

UNICEF USA just launched their Trick Or Treat MySpace page, which updates the traditional UNICEF fundraising Halloween box with modern social networking and mobile giving.  (And you can still order a UNICEF Halloween box through it!)  The mobile donation program that lets you donate $5 easily through text messaging.

However I would appreciate it if you would donate a few dollars to UNICEF through this link.  Whether its hurricanes in the Carribean, floods in Nepal or India, or helping children displaced in the Georgian-Russian conflict, UNICEF is there doing their top-notch relief work.  Please take a moment and join Virilion's effort and give now.

I just gave $50, which roughly covers the cost of vaccinating approximately 100 children against polio.  Can you give too?

UNICEF and UNICEF-USA are clients of Virilion.

Benchmark your 2009-2010 online efforts

Forrester Research recently published a survey about marketers use of different online techniques. Consider these as you plan your 2009 and 2010 budget.  Circle the boxes below that apply to your situation to compare yourself to where other marketers stand.

Very few organizations should be doing all of these and you shouldn’t just start one because “everyone’s doing it”.   That thing your mom taught you about jumping off a bridge with your friends?  It’s good professional advice too.

But if you’re not doing any of them, then you’re probably stalling.  If you’d like to explore which of these tactics would match well with your audience, e-mail me and we’ll discuss what might be right for you in the 2009-2010 budget year, and what you should be planning.

How to use the chart below: Take the tactic on the left and see which of the columns corresponds to your use of it.  In that same box is a percentage of the 300 marketers surveyed that are in the same place as you.

                                                                                                   

Tactic	Used for less than one year	Used for more than one year	Not using, but plan to	Not using, and have no plans to
Regular outbound e-mails	6%	90%	4%	1%
Search marketing (Google, Yahoo!)	14%	71%	9%	6%
Video (either on your site or YouTube)	20%	45%	19%	16%
Podcasts	19%	30%	28%	24%
Blogs: writing or contributing to	21%	27%	31%	21%
Social network (Facebook, MySpace)	21%	19%	36%	23%
User-generated content (user reviews, forums, contributions)	17%	23%	32%	28%
Widgets (small web tools included on other websites with your   content)	17%	12%	34%	37%
Mobile (a mobile site, mobile ads, or text messaging)	12%	16%	15%	67%

Everything you needed to know about 'Brandjacking'

Really, you don't really need to know much about brandjacking.  It's not like knowing the maximum deposit limit that the FDIC insures, which these days is a really important thing to know. [PDF]   But brandjacking is a far less depressing topic to talk about, so why not?

Every once in a while pundits come up with a phrase that's so catchy everyone who makes a living or a hobby watching/analyzing/commenting on an industry HAS TO start saying it.

I enjoyed the media's fascination with 'staycation' this summer, and in fact took one with my newly-one-income family.  But in the advertising and public relations world, brandjacking became hip in late August and seems to have finally run its course now.  Brandjacking is the concept that someone else has taken your brand and started representing you in an unauthorized manner.  It sounds far more traumatic than it really is, because of it's similarity to carjacking.

It first was coined when someone went onto Twitter named Janet (real name?) and created an account as if she was from ExxonMobil, 'brandjacking' them.  The story unraveled as 'she' commented about everything from their philanthropy efforts to the Exxon Valdez accident and people started to notice.

But like every Internet first, in many ways this is nothing new.  The most famous example of brandjacking is the fake Steve Jobs blog. Parodying the real Steve Jobs, Apple CEO genius, writer Dan Lyons entertained people for months while channelling the supposedly innermost thoughts of one of the world's secretive and successful CEOs in the only episode of brandjacking to also land a book deal for its author.  The mystery was unraveled when NY Times writer Brad Stone was looking at an advance version of Lyons' new book "Options" (written as Fake Steve) and recognized similarities in the writing style.

A lesser known episode, but one of my favorite, was the fake Kim Jong Il blog, written sporadically from 2003-2006.  Once again a secretive but high profile public figure was brandjacked by an ordinary person who used the Internet to aggregate a broad audience.

The most recent episode of brandjacking centers around the hit television show Mad Men, on AMC.  As many as fifteen characters from the show are currently being used as Twitter characters,  and the people behind them are posting as if they were real human beings.  Despite an initial flurry of objection from the television channel AMC that they were brandjacked, they've decided to let them stay, since presumably they are not really hurting anything.

Another entertaining use is the "What Would Don Draper Do?" blog, which takes quotes from the main character of the Mad Men, Don Draper, and uses them as if part of an advice column.

So there it is, your crash course on "brandjacking".  See you next week!

Disclosure: Virilion doesn't work for any of the companies mentioned in this article except UNICEF, but I dream of someday brandjacking a celebrity website and making thousands of people laugh.  Also, I totally stole the idea for this column from my friend and colleague Jason Alcorn, who's so busy helping UNICEF launch their Halloween Trick or Treat website tomorrow that he hasn't any time to be mad at me.

Advocacy: In-Flight Meal Service Petition

I've pointed out before the power that United's Pilot's Union is flexing by running a website named for United's embattled CEO, Glenn Tilton, at GlennTilton.com.

Recently United announced that they were cutting some in-flight meal service, and the pilots used the GlennTilton.com website to run an advocacy campaign arguing for restoration of meals.

The pilots asked frequent fliers to "sign" the advocacy petition by leaving a comment on their website and it appears that over 170 of them did, many of them self-professed frequent, top-tier, customers.

This is exactly the kind of thing that must really irk United's Communications team.  It's employees are bad-mouthing the company to its customers.  On one hand, you could say the pilots are acting in a self-defeating manner.  On the other hand, every day that United has to watch this site grow in interest has to hurt, and only strengthens labor's hand.

GlennTilton.com currently comes back in the top ten results for searches of "Glenn Tilton", and is going to start making in-roads into other United-related search terms over time.

The real question is about long-term focus: do the pilots have the ability to keep active and alive the advocacy site for the next year and up through the contract negotiations?  It's a lot of work, but it appears to be paying off so far.

I've pointed out before the power that United's Pilot's Union is flexing by running a website named for United's embattled CEO, Glenn Tilton, at GlennTilton.com. Recently United announced that they were cutting some in-flight meal service, and the pilots used the GlennTilton.com website to run an advocacy campaign arguing for restoration of meals. The pilots asked frequent fliers to "sign" the advocacy petition by leaving a comment on their website and it appears that over 170 of them did, many of them self-professed frequent, top-tier, customers. This is exactly the kind of thing that must really irk United's Communications team. It's employees are bad-mouthing the company to its customers. On one hand, you could say the pilots are acting in a self-defeating manner. On the other hand, every day that United has to watch this site grow in interest has to hurt, and only strengthens labor's hand. GlennTilton.com currently comes back in the top ten results for searches of "Glenn Tilton", and is going to start making in-roads into other United-related search terms over time. The real question is about long-term focus: do the pilots have the ability to keep active and alive the advocacy site for the next year and up through the contract negotiations? It's a lot of work, but it appears to be paying off so far.

Understanding Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) NYT Magazine

If you've ever asked the question of others:

• "I don't understand Twitter, why would people tell each other that they're eating soup?"
• "Why do you check Facebook 10 times a day?  What do you get out of it?"  or
• "Do you those 500 people on MySpace are really your friends?"

Then you need to go read "Brave New World Of Digital Intimacy" by Clive Thompson in this Sunday's New York Times magazine.  Thompson's article is a story of someone over the age of 30 trying to understand why people voluntarily participate in things like Twitter and Facebook, where they "overshare" the little details of their life with friends. Most importantly he explains what they get out of it.

If you've always looked at these things and just shaken your head saying "I don't get it", then this article is for you.

It should adequately explain the reason people use these sorts of tools and hopefully give you some insight into how they could benefit you.

United Airlines Labor Troubles

Last week I profiled an attack site by the pilots union against United's CEO Glenn Tilton being run at www.GlennTilton.com.  Now comes news that United flight attendants have been wearing "Glenn's Gotta Go" bracelets while working on flights.   

I first heard about the wristbands while checking out the Association of Flight Attendants website.  I noticed that United and the union have been "battle faxing" letters back and forth about whether or not flight attendants are being harassed over wearing these bracelets on the flights.

I wonder just how long one can sustain a customer service business when the staff are in open rebellion.  Probably a long time in a market where cost of entry is so high.

From United's point of view, most of the communications options are undesirable.  Many of my PR colleagues have been saying that United's management should be engaging their critics online because their issues are getting defined around them.  I'm sorry to say that I think they're all wrong on this one.

These issues don't get any better as a result of more communication.  The union and unhappy passengers aren't unhappy simply because they don't understand United's management decision and motivations well enough.

Customers are unhappy with cramped planes, fewer routes, flight cancellations, and the nickel and diming that's going on for amenities on board. United took these steps out of economic reality and expected the blow back.

And the unions' complaints?  They aren't going to get any better as a result of management talking to them.  They are substantive and can only be changed by changing the business model or the operations of the airline.  Explaining them better won't accomplish a thing.

There are times when a professional communicator looks at a problem and realizes that it's not a misunderstanding, it's a conflict.  In that case you wade into the fray not because you want to persuade the other side, but entirely because you want to affect the optics of how the conflict is perceived.  In this case, even the optics are lined up against United.

The rush to get online and defend themselves is ill-advised.