My Day with Steve Jobs

August 25th, 2011 by Glenn Rossman

Image: EzineMark.com

Right around 1989/1990, in my days working in IBM public relations I got to spend an entire work day with Steve Jobs – his PR person, an IBM executive and me.

No, he wasn’t at Apple then. That was in his Apple hiatus when he was heading up NeXT computer. IBM was about to introduce the RS/6000 – its UNIX workstation/server – and was licensing the NeXTStep software for its hardware. (For a full account of these days, take a look at Steve Vaughan-Nichols article published today.)

I wasn’t a Steve Jobs fanboy but left IBM’s office tower in midtown Manhattan that day knowing it was a very special day. We did a series of media interviews the entire day – one after another – with Jobs and an IBM VP (Nick Donofrio, if you really need to know). Jobs spoke in quotable quotes and every writer took notes when Steve spoke. My favorite was, “This isn’t an operating system for the common man.”

He was very business-like, kind of aloof from all of us and kind of kept to himself. It struck me at some point then that we were the same age – and, for that matter, so is Bill Gates. I felt some sort of kinship knowing we’d grown up in the same times. (Somehow, I don’t think the same thought crossed Steve Jobs’ mind, but I digress.)

The IBM space never looked better than that day. We’d done lots of events and meetings on that floor but on this day when I arrived there were tulips and other flowers all around – red and white. It wasn’t overdone and was very tasteful. I was told Steve thought that was important. It cost someone a fair bit of money but definitely made an impression. I never forgot. It was an early lesson for me that “design matters” and one that Steve Jobs knew very well.

The day concluded without fanfare. We got lots of great media coverage – partially because of IBM’s stature and largely because of Steve Jobs charisma in dealing with the media and giving them what they wanted. That was another lesson I took away from the day.

Since that time, I’ve heard more than one account of Steve Jobs high standards and how people would come into a meeting with something they thought was finished work and be sent back to do more work because Steve felt it wasn’t ready for prime time. He is a perfectionist with high demands and expectations. That felt consistent with the one day I spent with him. It struck me that he held himself accountable to the highest standards.

I believe we’ll miss him in the tech industry and from my experience that he cannot be replaced. I’m not predicting the doom of Apple. I’m just saying that my one experience with him makes me believe no one can do exactly what he did.

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Posted in PR Stuff, Random Computer Stuff | No Comments »

Why Darwin Would Have Loved Technology

August 19th, 2011 by Bill Baker
Photo: Smithsonian

Photo: Smithsonian

The tech industry is one of the ultimate expressions of “survival of the fittest.” It seems a day does not go by that a company or hot tech product that was on top is being left for corporate road kill and yesterday’s also-ran is the most valuable company on the planet.

Some examples:

- Before Steve Jobs re-joined Apple in 1996, the stock was trading for about $6.00/share and there was chatter that Sun Microsystems would buy Apple. Today, Sun no longer exists as an independent company and Apple is king of the world.

- Just five years ago, MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the U.S. and was poised to take over the world. It was so hot that the dark lord Rupert Murdoch forked over $580 million for MySpace in 2005. As Murdoch’s colleague Homer Simpson might say: “D’oh!” Facebook came along and today MySpace is essentially worthless.

- I once used Yahoo! for all my searches. Be honest: when was the last time you used ANYTHING but Google? (Sure, Bing is pretty good, but I don’t use it and neither do you.)

- In May 2010, Microsoft, with great fanfare and after about a $1 billion in R&D, launches it “Kin” mobile phones. Hope you didn’t sneeze because they were such a hit that Microsoft killed them off after a month and a half.

- While BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is (to quote Monty Python’s “Holy Grail”) “…not dead yet,” its travails are well documented, having gone from first to almost worst in the past 12 months or so.

- Just this week Motorola, the same guys who created the walkie-talkie and the RAZR cell phone, decided that it can’t compete against Apple and Google in the phone and tablet space, so it sold itself to… Google. And HP decided the same thing just one year after paying a billion dollars for Palm and just two months after launching its own tablet.

I don’t mean for this to be a snarky litany of tech failures. To the contrary, in a way, this should be viewed as a celebration of innovation, capitalism and corporate Darwinism.

Technology moves so fast that the next best thing is always just around the corner and you can throw all the marketing and PR and spin you want at a product, but at the end of the day, customers decide who wins and who loses. In a world where banks are too big to fail and the alleged smart guys at places like Goldman Sachs would be on the unemployment line if they didn’t have the U.S. taxpayer to bail them out, it’s great to see an industry that thrives and dies on its own wits, merits, successes and failures.

Will Google always be on top? Can Apple continue its run? And nothing could possibly replace Facebook, right?

Right?

Well, if I were in Las Vegas a few hundred million years ago, I would have bet my cave on Tyrannosaurus Rex. He was big, powerful and a bad-ass carnivore (much like Microsoft used to be) who had a nice run, but a meteor and some pesky start-ups called “mammals” changed all that.

Yep – Darwin would have loved the tech industry. And I’m pretty sure he would have followed it all on his iPad.

Posted in Marketing, Mobile, Random Computer Stuff | 1 Comment »

My New Favorite Charity: Print Media

March 28th, 2011 by Bill Baker

NY Times

Today, the New York Times enacted its long-anticipated “pay wall”, ending months of speculation and years of free rides for the denizens of the Internet who refuse to pay for anything, ever. (Well, not quite. We can read 20 articles per month for free. Seeing as how most people seem to think that news happens in 140 characters or less, 20 stories per month should suffice for the masses.)

It got me thinking: Why am I paying for THREE print editions of newspapers – The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local daily – to be delivered? Most of the time, I read both the Times and the Journal on my iPad, where I would still have to pay, but much less than for a print subscription.

I think I have stopped looking at my media subscriptions as purchases of products. I now see them as charities. It is my civic duty to continue to have the print version delivered. I am afraid that if I don’t, the last of the crumbling foundation on which journalism was built will collapse into a pile of dust.

So, in these tumultuous times of major news events, Internet pay walls and filing taxes, I wonder when the federal government will allow us to write off our print subscriptions as charitable donations. It’s the least our government (and we) can do for the journalism industry.

Posted in Media: Old and New | No Comments »

How (Not) To Communicate in a Social Media World

March 21st, 2011 by Bill Baker

old Telephone

I’m a pretty simple guy. I still like to read newspapers every morning, like a good tuna sandwich almost as much as a gourmet meal and I will pick up the phone and call someone if I urgently need to communicate with them.

But I am not a Luddite. I get that social media is the wave of today and tomorrow. Facebook and Twitter are contributing to government overthrows as well as Charlie Sheen’s meltdown. I’m (sort of) OK with all that.

But, like many businesses, Baker Communications Group relies heavily on email. And this morning, we are facing a two-hour (and counting) email outage from our hosting provider, Network Solutions.

This is not good. So I picked up the phone and called the support line and got – a BUSY signal. When was the last time you’ve bumped into one of those? It’s like being teleported back to 1986.

I had to go to Twitter to see that many others around the world were having the same problems. Perversely, I had to “Like” Network Solutions on Facebook in order to communicate with them. (Let me just say that in no way do I ‘like” them at this moment.)

Instead of a busy signal, how about a simple prerecorded message saying that they are working on the problem. Maybe even a notice stating the same on the support web page. These are both very complex yet highly effective tactics that were mastered decades ago. One would think that a company like Network Solutions, which manages massive datacenters (sometimes), could deploy these two sophisticated techniques.

By doing so, they would save themselves from a ton of public grief and outrage on social media.

But what do I know? I still wear a wristwatch and drink Maxwell House coffee.

Posted in Marketing, Media: Old and New, PR Stuff, Social media | No Comments »

The Delicate Dance of Disclosure

January 17th, 2011 by Bill Baker

(Image: Wikipedia)

Today comes the unhappy news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is once again taking a medical leave of absence.

Apple is not a company known for openness when it comes to just about anything: products, problems, how it approves apps for the iPhone – you name it. And it seems that, once again, Apple is searching for the right balance between its CEO’s personal privacy and proper disclosure from a publicly traded company.

It’s not an easy task. For several years, I was the investor relations officer at a public company and there were a couple of occasions when a difficult decision had to be made about:

A): Whether or not to disclose

B): How much to say

C:) How and when to get the word out.

Here’s how we worked the problem:

A:) Whether or not to disclose: This one should be relatively easy. The test should be that if the news is something that an investor would likely want to know before buying or selling the company’s securities, there is a duty to disclose. Of course, there is a huge gray area here, but a test for reasonableness should be applied. In other words, most reasonable people probably don’t need to know that the CEO had knee surgery, since it is unlikely that the knee surgery will affect his or her ability to do the job over the long term. If, however, the surgery goes horribly wrong and the CEO will need four months to recover, that is probably a disclosable event.

Another way of applying this test is: If the discussion to disclose lasts more than five minutes, then you probably should say something.

Clearly, Apple had a duty to disclose.

B:) How much to say: This gets a bit more complicated. It depends on the issue. In the specific example of Apple, if I knew something to be an absolute incontrovertible fact, then I would advise the company to disclose as much as necessary as it relates to his role at the company. So, by this test, we know that Mr. Jobs is sick and that he will be out for an indeterminate amount of time. It does not matter if he is sick, or bored or going on walkabout in the Australian outback for some unknown period. All that matters is that he won’t be around to run the company.

If at some point in the future (say, a month from now) he returns to health (something I think we all hope for Mr. Jobs), then Apple makes an announcement that he’s back on the job and we move on. If, however, a month from now Apple becomes aware that Mr. Jobs will never return to being an active CEO, then I believe there is a duty to disclose that immediately. I don’t think we have a right to know what is specifically is wrong. We (shareholders) only have a right to know how his absence affects his role at the company we own.

Bottom line: There is a duty to update material information as it becomes available.

C:) How and when to get the word out: This is also a gray area, though Apple handled it pretty well by doing it on a Monday when the markets were closed for Martin Luther King day. This gives analysts a chance to analyze and a full 24 hours before trading in the stock resumes. In our second-by-second, “shoot first, ask questions later” news environment, this is a pause that refreshes. Of course, there is no way of knowing when the decision was made for Mr. Jobs to take this leave. After all, he was not at the Verizon-iPhone launch event last week. But, tactically, today was a good day to announce it.

It may sound crass or unfeeling to be discussing a human being’s health in such a cold, business-like manner, but this is the bed that Apple has made for itself.

Steve Jobs has created a cult legend around himself as the final arbiter of all products, down to the last detail. If Steve doesn’t like the way a button clicks on the iPhone, it doesn’t get released. But that also means that people believe, rightly or wrongly, that all of Apple’s fabulously successful products begin and end with Steve Jobs. “Without Steve, what is there?”, people legitimately ask.

Also, as mentioned, Apple is super-secretive. If you don’t tell people what is going on, then rumor, whispers and speculation will fill in for the truth. That may or may not help Apple executives and their PR staff, but it is almost never good for investors.

As a long-time friend and very successful (now retired) professional investor once told me:

“Wall Street loves good news and can handle bad news, but it hates NO news.”

Tomorrow’s trading in Apple stock will be interesting, but not necessarily fun for all. But, then again, proper disclosure is not always about fun, games and cool gadgets.

Posted in PR Stuff | 1 Comment »

The State of Tech PR in 2011

January 14th, 2011 by Glenn Rossman

While recently doing some media research for one of our clients, I got to thinking again about how much change we’re seeing in tech PR. The mainstream IT media – Computerworld, eWeek, and the rest – seem to continue along with ever-shrinking staffs making it increasingly difficult to get their attention. Meanwhile anyone and, it seems, everyone, is publishing on their own blog site.

I’ve just added another handful of blogs to my tracking list with more in the pipeline. Themes are emerging:

1- The World is Big (and Small) – On the one hand, the sheer amount of content out there is daunting. It makes the world seem very large. Before the Internet, we could pretty much limit our work to U.S. media and the English language and our world was smaller. Of the blog sites I’ve just added, several are outside the U.S. but in English. This makes it easy to connect and makes our world smaller.

2- Anyone is Media – Anyone who publishes and can draw an audience can be considered a media outlet.

3- Diversity and Fragmentation Rule – Mainstream IT media staff pretty much come from journalism backgrounds, while bloggers come from much more diverse backgrounds and many are quite technical. Their articles reflect their backgrounds and so do their opinions.

4- How Do I Contact You? – In our world of enterprise IT, it seems many bloggers could care less about being contacted. The ones I’ve looked at recently sometimes provide an e-mail and phone – more typically a “contact us” page on their site. This isn’t usually their “day job” – unlike the IT media – so it’s less of a priority.

5- Audience Size is a Moving Target – The IT media circulations are well-known and audited for advertising purposes. With online media, that’s hardly the case. I’ll quote from one of the blog sites I looked at recently:

“We don’t know just how big our audience is. In January 2008, we tracked 350,000 unique hosts visiting the site and we use four different statistics packages to track our RSS and site visits. We’re unable to accurately measure the entire readership because our news feed is openly available, parsed and integrated into hundreds of web and private databases. We know we’re viewed by many large corporate intranets as we can often track the referring visits from them. We estimate our audience to be at least 250,000 per month, but in practice we suspect it might be much larger.”

These days in tech PR, things are a lot less defined. Boundaries aren’t clear. Our objective, however, is constant and that is to reach a target audience – wherever they happen to be, or what they happen to be reading.

Posted in Media: Old and New, PR Stuff | 1 Comment »

And Make Sure You Use a Really Cool Font, Too…

November 16th, 2010 by Bill Baker

We are often implored by clients to include trade and service marks next to every mention of their product in press releases.

Of course, we know that journalists will dutifully ignore them and quietly get annoyed with us for including them in the first place, but everyone understands how the game is played.

But whatever you do, Mr. and Ms. Reporter – do NOT say “Kleenex®” when you mean “tissue.”

Think Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex® tissues, is not serious? Check out this full page ad that appears on the back cover of the latest edition of the Columbia Journalism Review.

No word yet from the folks who make Q-Tips, Tampax or Visine as to whether they intend to follow suit.

(Click on the image twice to see full size)

Kleneex

Posted in Marketing, PR Stuff | No Comments »

Avoiding Worst-of-Breed Clichés in Order To Facilitate Tier-One Interdisciplinary Dialoguing

November 11th, 2010 by Glenn Rossman

Blah

I never get tired of reading articles by media directed to the PR community (honestly).

This “Editor’s Message to Public Relations“ hits the mark IMO and, for me, has a certain charm for its directness and honesty coming from a non-native English speaker. We do our best to follow the advice here. Maybe that’s why, once upon a time, Baker Communications Group made the PRSourceCode list of top PR firms as viewed by tech reporters.

Posted in Media: Old and New, PR Stuff, Self-Indulgent Stuff About BCG | No Comments »

“Pssst: My CEO has gas! Hold the story until next week!

August 2nd, 2010 by Bill Baker

shhhh

A classic example of why some reporters get really, really annoyed at us PR people, courtesy of Business Insider. Of course when I say “us” PR people, I really mean all the other PR people who ask reporters to honor ridiculous embargoes.

We never do that…

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The Sights and Sounds of a Summer Road Trip

July 8th, 2010 by Bill Baker

Humongo logo 2010

Every summer, my long-time friend and colleague, Darryl Ohrt takes a carload of young men on a trip across some randomly selected portion of our country.

“Um – how’s that?”, you say.

No, Darryl is not the head of some weird cult or a despondent kidnapper/sniper. He runs a branding and design firm called “Humongo” and social media plays a big role in the campaigns they develop for some of the world’s biggest and most important companies. This road trip gives them a chance to showcase the power and importance of social media, not to mention a good quality underarm deodorant.

This year they are going from Portland, Maine, to Miami. Yes, I know. I had the same thought: “All this just to be able to stream porn on their laptops and iPhones without the worry of getting caught by wives and girlfriends?”

Think what you will, but there really is some sort of business purpose. You can follow the whole thing, in real time, over on the Humongo Nation web site and see for yourself.

Darryl and the guys understand that not everyone can follow along for the entire trip, so they created a sort of Cliffs Notes version of the conversation that generally takes place in the car whilst they drive hither and yon, from place to place:

—

Phil (not his real name): “Are we there yet?

Darryl: “Where?”

Phil: “Wherever it is we are going next.”

Darryl: “Does it look like we are there? If we were there, we would be there and we wouldn’t still be in the car. Tell me – why did I hire you again?”

Doug (not HIS real name): “I have to pee.”

Darryl: “Dude – maybe skip the 64 oz Mountain Dew Slushee at the next 7-11. You’re killin’ us.”

Doug: “Fine – but I have to pee – NOW!”

Stan: “If he pees in the car, I am likely to puke.”

Doug: “If he pukes, we’ll all puke.”

Phil: “That will make for some killer live video! Make sure you tweet it!”

Darryl: “Social media ROCKS!”

—

You get the gist: these guys are not coming up with a fix for the BP oil spill or developing a new variant on string theory that will finally reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. But, they are nice fellows, who know their craft (but God-forbid they get a flat tire.)

What is my stake in all of this? Despite having an entire off-site storage facility filled with useless t-shirts from my past, I can not resist the siren call of one more free shirt for the collection. Hence, this blog post. Plus, I like Darryl and am hoping that he will one day adopt me.

Posted in Media: Old and New, Social media | No Comments »

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