Coyote Blog

This week's Canival of the Capitalists is up at XtremeBlog.  Don't miss my post on the difficulty of managing corporate public relations in the web age here.

Two different inputs recently have gotten me thinking about public relations and the web, and just how far behind the technology curve many PR departments may be.

The first input was a comment I got on one of my posts that I wrote while on vacation last month.  In this post I mentioned that I would be heading for Disney World for our traditional family reunion, but that growing crowds on Thanksgiving week would probably force us to try a different week next time.  I got a comment from someone who sounded like a Disney employee, recommending a better week.  Now, it turns out that it was not a Disney employee, just a helpful reader (one of my loyal 34 or so).  But it got me to thinking.  Are corporate PR departments keeping up with the web?  If Disney was not doing stuff like this, why aren't they?

The second input was this post in Reason's Hit and Run blog.  They point out TIVO efforts to manage the use of the TIVO copyright to ensure that they do not lose the rights to the name.  (Though the article mentions Xerox and Kleenex, my understanding is that Formica actually came the closest to losing its copyright on that name due to overuse as a generic term for, uh, whatever Formica is).  How can companies possibly keep up with their trademark usage on the web?

Back when I worked for a large corporation, we had PR people, either in or out of house, who would provide us with weekly news summaries of where the corporation was in the press.  This was particularly helpful to those of us in marketing, who wanted to make sure we saw all the reviews of our product (so we could use the good ones and refute the bad ones).

In the world of the Internet, this approach seems hopelessly dated.  In the "old days" I used to walk to school 20 miles each day in the snow, up hill both ways  (sorry, always feel like I am channeling my dad when I say "in the old days") the media might have 10  or 15 mentions of our product every two weeks.  Now, on the web, there might be 10 or 15 an hour. Every day employees may be talking about the company in a chat room, customers may be commenting on the company in some place like epinions.com or in Amazon reviews, blogs may be posting on the company, and authorized or unauthorized vendors may have set up shop to sell the company's products online.

How does  a company keep up with all this?  If I was a large company, I would be actively searching the web for key words associated with my company and competitors, looking for new posts or entries or reviews or even whole websites.   Employees spilling secrets in a chat room?  Need to tell legal.  New web site selling our product? Send it to marketing to make sure they are authorized and are using our trademarks and product descriptions correctly.  Blogs posting on us?  We might want to add our own comment to the post.

What we need is the modern technology version of the clipping service.  The technology would probably be pretty straight forward - a company wouldn't even have to build it's own search engine - it could just take a full snapshot of the Google results one day and compare those results to a search the next week, and look for changes.

Or, better yet, why doesn't Google provide this service to corporate accounts itself?  After all, they do need something to justify their sky-high PE ratio, maybe this would help.  Wouldn't Exxon pay $50,000 a year for this service?  Heck I pay D&B several hundred dollars a year for a credit watch service on my company's credit rating, I would certainly pay some hundreds a year for a PR watch of my small business and my competitors.

UPDATE:

One company that seems to be doing something ike this is BuzzMetrics.  Link courtesy of RatherBiased.com

The overly type-A readers may note that I have two different links to TTLB ecosystem ranks below.  Apparently, this site is in their twice, once as www.coyoteblog.com and once as https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/.  It is unclear to me how TTLB handles these.  From what I have read, I think they have yet to implement a merge code, and I know a while back there were folks who claimed that some rankings were pumped up by internal cross-links between URLs like these.  If anyone has any insight on this, please comment below.

UPDATE

Well, posting stuff like this can be simultaneously helpful and embarrassing.  I just got an email from a friend who pointed out that he did not know anything about TTLB, but the reason I was still getting linked via https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/ URLs was that I had not turned on domain mapping in Typepad.  I checked the box, republished, and now all my permalinks, etc. are in the coyoteblog.com domain.  Yeah.  And duh.

A second email pointed me to this TTLB notice, which seems to offer a way to migrate my old URL link history to coyoteblog.com. Thanks all.

This is a little trippy, but is a pretty cool illusion.  This is interesting because it is an art form that is really unique to computers - you really could not do exactly this, with the self navigation, in any other medium. 

The Carnival of the Vanities is up at the Pryhills place, and the theme this week is getting some last minute shopping done at the mall.

This site gets a good number of hits from Google, for which I am very appreciative (the Google engine still tends to give blogs a disproportionate boost, due to all the cross-linking, but I won't complain).

One of the oddities, though I guess predictable in retrospect, is that my post "spanking employees" is by far and away my biggest Google draw.  Now, I enjoy having my work read by others (why else blog?) but it is a bit frustrating that that throwaway post about a funny news story is my most viewed work.  And, come to think of it, I probably just made things worse with this post.

Via Gongol, check out this site which is taking 1 gigapixel photos.  Look at the bridge in the top photo - it looks pretty detailed, but you are limited by your screen's resolution.  Now scroll down as they zoom - until you get all the way into a closeup of a man sitting on the bridge you could not even see in the first photo.  Pretty cool.

The voting is closed and here are the results in Wizbang's "best of the rest" category.  Overall results in all those much more trivial categories, like best blog, are here.   Thanks very much to those who ran the awards - they had to deal with a lot of foolishness as various groups tried to game the voting, but their response seemed quick and fair.

Coyote Blog finished just out of the medals in fourth place, which I choose to view optimistically --  Once they announce the top three finishers, Coyote Blog is then the best of the rest of the Best of the Rest category.  Hmm, anyway, yeah for us.

The Carnival of those selfish, greedy, evil capitalists are up this week at Samablog.  You can find our post called Progressives are too Conservative to Like Capitalism.

Welcome!  Thanks to Elise Bauer for ways to make this post sticky in TypePad.  Please, have a look around.  Here are some examples of what I do here:

Real-life small business experiences:  Buying a company;  Working with the Department of Labor

Economics:  Taxes and Class Warfare;  The Harvard MBA indicator

Libertarian political commentary:  Post election wrap-up;  Thougts on Kyoto

Frustration with runaway torts:  Jackpot Litigation; Coyote vs. ACME

Camping (my business):  New American nomads;  This RV is just wrong

Attempts at humor:  Replacements for Dan Rather;  Meyer's Law

ACME Products:  Instant Girl; Ultimatum Gun; Earthquake Pills

Enjoy.  And, don't forget to support small blogs by voting in the "best of the rest" category -- you can go vote here.  Coyote Blog (hint, hint) is in the middle of the list.

Its back.  The original blog carnival, now in its third year.  Find this week's edition here at The Big Picture.

The new Carnival of the Capitalists is already up at The Entrepeneurial Mind.  Don't miss our article here.

The new Carnival of the Capitalists is already up at The Entrepeneurial Mind.  Don't miss our article here.

Vote here.  Make sure to click on the "best of the rest" category.  And, if you are so inclined, don't hesitate to vote for this site!  If you are too lazy to scroll, you can vote for us here.

Like much of the media, the proliferation of blogs are leading new bloggers to seek out new niches.  Here are two pretty narrow, though as a guy, fairly compelling ones I found today:

The first is the NFL Cheerleader Blog.  Hmm, if I could find a way to get paid to write that blog, my life would be complete.

The other is RemoteBlog, a blog dedicated entirely to universal remote controls.  If that is too niche for you, you might like Gizmodo or Home Theater Blog.

By the way, if anyone is itching to send Coyote a Christmas gift, I will gratefully accept one of these bad boys.

Yes, its up again.  As usual, I will be linking to some of my favorite articles later today when I get time to read through everything.  Enjoy.

Yes, Marxists run and hide, the Capitalists are back in town at Lachlan Gemmell.  Look around the site, its pretty interesting - he's posting a diary of his day to day experience bringing a new software product to market, and letting his readers comment on key decisions.

Wizbang's 2004 Weblog Awards are accepting nominees.  We have been nominated in the "best of the rest" category, so come back and vote when the polls open!

Business Pundit has a post today about a new auction site named jittery. 

One thing BusinessPundit mentions is that the new site will have a

"Buy Offer" feature, which I believe gave him the idea in the first place. Basically, instead of buyers competing over an item and raising the price, buyers specify what they want to buy, which features are important, what prices they want to pay, and sellers compete to give them the best deal.

I am extremely skeptical that this would work.  As background, I ran the marketplace portion of Mercata, that similarly tried to bring a different, more buyer focused model to table and failed fairly spectacularly.  We found that you can be as innovative as you want, but you need a lot of traffic to your site, and building such traffic takes a lot of time or a lot of money or both.  You also need to provide a value proposition for both buyers AND sellers.

A LOT of people have tried some sort of reversal of the auction process, where buyers specify the goods they want and sellers bring them to the table, bidding against each other (ie lower and lower prices) to get the business. FreeMarkets made some hay with this in the B2B world, but from the beginning the auctions were never really the money maker, but were a Trojan horse for supply chain consulting, which helps to explain why they merged with Ariba. 

The only people to make this model work in the consumer area is Priceline.  However, what most people fail to realize about Priceline is that it fulfilled a real business need for SELLERS, even more than for buyers. 

Airlines have a classic fixed cost pricing problem.  They want to sell as many tickets at a high price as possible, but an incremental passenger costs them nothing, so if the plane is not full, getting even $50 for a passenger to fill an empty seat at the last minute is profitable to them.  The problem is somehow offering the $50 fare only to the passenger who would not fly otherwise, and not cannibalizing the customers who are willing to pay $300. 

The problem is, if they offer the $50 fare to anyone, they can't hide the fact very well.  The airline industry, as most know, have very transparent computer systems that let everyone know their prices on every route every minute of the day.  If an airline cuts prices on a route, everyone knows - so that competitors can match the cut immediately and customers can switch from the higher to lower fairs.  Airlines protect themselves somewhat with limited availability of certain fares and advanced purchase requirements - so that people, particularly business travelers, who need to maintain flexibility, have a reason to pay higher fares.

However, advanced purchase requirements were not providing enough protection.  What airlines really wanted was a way to cut fares for one person who might not have flown otherwise, and let no one else see them do it.   And Priceline was the answer.  Yes, airlines had to tell the Priceline computers what the lowest bid they would accept from a customer for a flight was, but this did not constitute an official price that went into the reservation systems.  So, the airlines could cut their price (via Priceline), but only the customer who got the price ever saw it.

In fact, the story is even better.  At the time Priceline came around, one airline had a particular problem they needed to solve.  When TWA got a loan from Carl Icahn, an almost unnoticed part of the deal was that a certain travel agency owned by Icahn, small at the time, would be guaranteed TWA tickets at a healthy discount off the lowest published fares.  This agency, with this boondoggle, grew to enormous size as Lowestfare.com.  TWA, beyond the reasons listed above, therefore had a second reason for not wanting to publish their lowest possible fare.  Normal limitations that most airlines could set on how many seats would be available at their lowest fare could not be enforced by TWA.  If they offered a new $100 fare, Lowestfare.com could blow out an unlimited number of tickets at $80 or less and TWA would have to accept it.  Therefore, by offering discounts unpublished via Priceline, TWA prevented the travel agency from getting inventory even cheaper.  And so, a huge portion of the early Priceline inventory was TWA.  (ironically, after the American Airlines acquisition of TWA killed the deal, the Lowestfare.com URL was bought by ... Priceline.

Anyway, I just don't see how reverse auctions can work in the consumer world, particularly if the customers are allowed to specify price and quality and features, etc.  The transaction costs for suppliers would be just too high wading through this stuff -- in fact, many companies in the B2B world, where transaction sizes are in the millions, have come to this same conclusion - for a variety of reasons, they are choosing not to participate in reverse auctions (here too).

Marketplaces must offer value to both buyer and seller.  If you don't offer honest value to sellers, then no products appear on the site and it will fail.

Basically, there are two gorilla's in the online marketplace arena - eBay and Amazon.  eBay had the head start in building a brand and community in the marketplace space, but Amazon has brought some really nifty technology to the table.

As a user of both, I welcome a new competitor, sortof.  I hope that there will be competitors who force eBay to adopt some overdue new features (e.g. auction sniping protection and better search features on past auctions) but I don't really want any to be successful enough to create a third or fourth or fifth major platform out there, because that just increases my search costs and time when I want to buy something.

UPDATE

I missed pointing out one bit of irony.  The Internet is generally attractive to consumers because it increases product information, and particularly increases knowlege about market pricing.  However, in this case, Priceline's attractiveness to airlines was that it decreased pricing transparency in the market.

UPDATE #2

Welcome Carnival of the Capitalists readers.  Have a look around, and check out our thoughts on replacements for Dan Rather.

Just in time for your Thanksgiving holiday reading, find the new Carnival at Interested Participant.

Find the link here at Social Twister.

A comment I got on one of my posts on Friday got me to thinking about corporate PR departments and whether they are really keeping up with the web.  In this post I mentioned that I would be heading for Disney World for our traditional family reunion, but that growing crowds on Thanksgiving week would probably force us to try a different week next time.  I got a comment from someone who sounded like a Disney employee, recommending a better week.

Now, I don't know if they were an employee, or whether they found the post by accident or through an active search program.  But it got me to thinking.  Are corporate PR departments keeping up with the web?

Back when I worked for a large corporation, we had PR people, either in or out of house, who would provide us with weekly news summaries of where the corporation was in the press.  This was particularly helpful to those of us in marketing, who wanted to make sure we saw all the reviews of our product (so we could use the good ones and refute the bad ones).

In the world of the Internet, this approach seems hopelessly dated.  Every day employees may be talking about the company in a chat room, customers may be commenting on the company in some place like epinions.com, blogs may be posting on the company, and authorized or unauthorized vendors may have set up shop to sell the company's products online.

How does  a company keep up with all this?  If I was a large company, I would be actively searching the web for key words associated with my company, looking for new posts or entries or even whole websites.   Employees spilling secrets in a chat room?  Need to tell legal.  New web site selling our product? Send it to marketing to make sure they are authorized.  Blogs posting on us?  We might want to add our own comment to the post.

So I got to thinking - was that Disney that found my site?  If so, is this what they are doing to manage their online PR?  And if not, why aren't they doing it?  You wouldn't even have to build your own search engine - just take a full snapshot of the Google results one day and compare those results to a search the next week, and look for changes.

Or, why doesn't Google provide this service to corporate accounts itself?  They need something to justify their sky-high PE ratio, maybe this would help.  Wouldn't Exxon pay $50,000 a year for this service?  Heck I pay D&B several hundred dollars a year for a credit watch service on my credit rating, I would certainly pay some hundreds a year for a PR watch.

UPDATE #1

See comments below - the original commenter apparently not a Disney employee.  Never-the-less, the idea still excites me.  A company like Disney rests almost completely on its reputation - why isn't someone out on the web every day monitoring what is happening vis a vis their company?

Headed for our once every two years (is biennial twice a year or once every two years?) family reunion at Disney World.  Years and years ago, when we first started this tradition, Disney World was deserted on Thanksgiving week - no one wanted to be away from their families.  Now, its a total zoo and about the busiest week of the year.  Though I am a sucker for tradition, I am going to petition the family for a date change before the next one.

Every time I go to Disney World, I think of this exchange from National Lampoon's Thats Not Funny, Thats Sick:

(fake) Mr. Rodgers: "would you like to go to the magic kingdon?"

Stoned-out Bassist (Bill Murray): "no thanks man ... I gotta drive." 

Over the couple of months I have been blogging, I have been moving steadily up the TTLB Ecosystem.  Today, when I looked at the site, I thought that I had surely fallen a notch.  Yesterday I was a crusty crustacean, but today I am a slimy mollusc.  That felt like a drop, but, as it turns out, I actually moved up.  I guess squids are pretty cool, but my anti-mollusk bias probably comes from living in Seattle for a while and finding my patio covered in giant banana slugs.  Ugghh.

UPDATE:

Now I am a lowly insect.  This is progress?

I wrote here about my frustration with friends and family credulously forwarding hoax or urban legend emails.  Here is a nice post at techno mom with similar advice.  This post has similar advice.