Chipotle Mexican Grill had their IPO last week and the WSJ ran a short piece on the titles that company leaders use.
The customer service manager goes by “Manager of Duct Tape and Plungers”. The guy who runs creative-services is the head of “Special Weapons and Tactics”. Finally, the company’s spokeman goes by “Director of Hoopla, Hype, and Ballyhoo”.
That probably gives some indication of the kind of place it is to work. 🙂
I finally shut down the BizLinkBlog and got everything moved over to my del.icio.us account. Here is the RSS feed.
There is alot of good stuff over there and I thought I would highlight a few.
I think we can say that the Oprah Winfrey Pontiac G6 Giveaway worked for Oprah but not Pontiac.
There is alot of hubbub over a Detroit Free Press article today that says G6 sales are 30% below expectations and they are using a lot of incentives to move them now. It must have made the wire services because I heard the story on the radio this morning.
The giveaway was PR that GM hoped with turn into word of mouth marketing. It got people talking about how Oprah gave away cars (Jim Carrey joked about it when he was on the show). It really didn’t get anyone talking about the car. As a matter of fact, an audience member tried selling theirs on craigslist.
Update: Brand Autopsy also has a post on this too.
Today’s news seemed to be dominated by dollar signs.
I am all for capitalism, but this seems to show it is all about the money. The companies producing these products have found the traditional media more than happy to report the hype. The trouble is it does nothing to represent the products. People aren’t saying “Wow they made $99 zillion dollars. I need to go buy that.” People aren’t telling there friends that either. They are buying them because they are great experiences and that what they are talking to their friends about.
There has been an interesting discussion started around PR and blogging. It started with John and Richard of the Marketing Playbook sending out some email to bloggers telling them about their new book. Peter Davidson immediately stepped in and called the authors out for sending out spam and not knowing how to pitch to bloggers. All sorts of people have chimed in since including Kristen and Rich. The boys at MP have posted an apology or two.
I talked about how I liked the book over at 800-CEO-READ, but in this post I want to talk about the PR and blogging.
Here is my thoughts on the subject:
Here is a bunch of posts I ran across this weekend that I thought were interesting:
Global PR Week is going strong. There is tons of great conversation going on. Today’s topic is Corporate Blogging.
Here is my contribution.
Go check it out.
The way it looks it will be impossible to avoid hearing about I, Robot this week. They are having a mega-advertisement on Fox tonight. MTV was doing an I, Robot themed 10 Spot last night. I was even flipping through the channels and saw the boys at Orange County Choppers talking to Will Smith about making a I, Robot chopper.
The marketing people for the movie have gotten very creative for the release of the film, but I don’t think the novelty of the approach is going to any more people to see it. I think it was going to be a big movie anyway.
Sony Pictures has been keeping a Spiderman weblog since April of last year. The author is Grant Cutris, Co-Producer of Spiderman 2. I think he has done a really good job. He give a great behind the scenes view of S2 and answers questions from specific readers in his posts.
They have doing some interesting things. They have an education area to teach readers about weblogs. They have S2 blog templates that you can download. I also thought it was clever that when you subscribe to the RSS feed, you got all the entries from the beginning.
The biggest mistake they make is there are no permalinks. Here is the link to the main page and you can find the blog under the Daily Bugle.
I have never seen this blog come up in my reading. Does this show how important permalinks are?
Trevor Cook of Corporate Engagement is organizing a blogsphere PR Week for July. You can check out the wiki and see the proposed topics. They have corporate blogging as a topic for one day, which I am going to get in on.
I’ll pass along more details as they come.
Marketingsherpa has an article out about how PR people should contact bloggers. From the article:
[Seth] Godin writes about marketing, he’s super well-known, and he needs to be on your radar if you’re in the marketing or PR industry.
But don’t try to pitch him, or even contact him.
“PR people should never contact me. It has never worked once. If they
do, I make it a point to never mention their client, ever,” he says.
I share the thoughts of Seth Godin. PR people have contacted me. When I try to engage in a conversation, I am offered a list of canned statements I can quote. That’s not what I am looking for.
Bloggers want something that matches their interest. They want something they can link to. I am looking for things that are unique and readers won’t find on other blogs.
Steve Hall of Adrants describes well what I want:
Think of your relationship with a blogger as a conversation, he suggests. For example, one person sends weekly instant messages to Hall, always “the juiciest stuff,” he says. “He sent me a lead on this scavenger hunt in New York City that Nike is doing. I scoured Google for news on it, couldn’t find it anywhere, and had it on my site a week and a half before I saw it anywhere else.”
I talked about the AmEx article from the WSJ on Tuesday and the Jerry Seinfeld Q&A on Wednesday.
Today MarketingVOX alerted me the new webisode of Jerry and Superman that is available. I watched it and thought it was pretty good.
I also think AmEx is good at PR. They got both of those articles placed just prior to the launch. The viewers go into the webisode with a slightly higher awareness for the AmEx brand. Maybe, viewers will be a little more likely to try the product out.