SeanReadsTheNews

Trunk on Being a Rule Breaker

Workplace columnist Penelope Trunk did a great job with an old saw on April 18 - basically her specialty - by writing a post on "5 Ways to Make Yourself More Valuable," which included on piece of immortal advice on being a rule-breaker, which is why I'm highlighting it.

Advice admonishing you to break rules is so shallow. How can you break rules without learning them first? People who understand all the rules know intuitively how to break them because they know the rules that really are not working. People who do not know rules are not breaking rules. They are annoying people.

That cracked me up.

WSJ on Hiring a Pariah As Celebrity Spokesperson

I love stories where the subject has to take a big risk to get a big reward, and one such placement is Lee Hawkins' Wall Street Journal coverage of how Rob Vito of Unequal Technologies decided to hire Michael "dog fighter" Vick as the celebrity spokesman for his line of football pads.

News that Mr. Vick had signed his first endorsement deal since leaving prison caused a media explosion. "Within 24 hours, we had about 10 million hits on the website, and I was on CNN, Bloomberg, Fox, ABC and CBS," Mr. Vito recalled. "We had so many hits, it crashed our site."

The exposure gave Mr. Vito a chance to talk about Unequal's insoles, golf grips, sneakers and body padding, which are currently available only on the company's website. "The sales went up 1,000% when Mike came on board," Mr. Vito said.

I need to separate my personal feelings about Vick (which are negative) to my respect for the PR person who decided that flogging this project in The Wall Street Journal was a good idea in the first place.

Whoever he was (oh come on, you know it was a he), he ran right at the worst thing anyone could say about the company and its strategic decision and made it the centerpiece of the pitch.  And the story is an overwhelming postive look at a successful program execution for a company I had never heard of prior to opening that morning's paper.

Too many corporations are too afraid to take risks to get a reward so it's worth saluting those who do.  I just wish we could say no dogs died in the production of this blog post - because they did.

CNNMoney on Dropbox Growth

JP Mangalindan of Fortune reported on one of my favorite technologies, Dropbox, in his April 18 onine column, reporting that the plucky company that creates a virtual file server for pennies is booming.

It's pegged to an office visit by CEO Drew Houston and is a great example of how even companies that are already popular and beloved of journalists can get even better press by taking the extra time.

Beyond Mangalindan's expert capturing of why the company has such devoted followers, I really liked the way he transitioned to "what's next" out of the profile:

Houston envisions a fundamental shift, one that's starting to happen already, where all your devices are seamlessly connected portals to content in the cloud. (One need look no further than Google's (GOOG) upcoming Chrome OS notebooks or Apple's (AAPL) snazzy, but storage-poor MacBook Air for evidence of what's coming down the pike.) So the Dropbox of today, a simple file-syncing and cloud data repository -- becomes a service that links all your devices and web services together, whether they're on the Web, in your living room, your pocket, or driveway.

That's vision - but it gives you a lot to think about beyond just "Dropbox is cool," which is where a lesser article would have stopped.

GE Spoof Release Fools the Media

SeanReadsTheNews intends to catch up for the last several days this afternoon, starting with a now painfully dated April 13 article by Alex Sherman of Bloomberg News on how the media got fooled by an activist group that put out a fake press release that GE was going to give back all the money it claimed in tax breaks last year.

The release, which was picked up by the Associated Press, was part of the group’s effort to pressure companies to pay their taxes, Andrew Boyd, a spokesman for the group, said in an interview. US Uncut had the idea for the GE tax effort and then cooperated on execution of it with a group known as the Yes Men, which has been involved in similar hoaxes.

Alas, AP, this one was catchable.  I like stories like this because they demonstrate the true bonds of trust that journalists have with PR people - even though whenever anyone asks them they say they check it the fact that their mothers love them.

No, you don't.  You need us, and you need us to be reliable and tell the truth.  I find myself running into fewer PR haters out there in my usual business than in years past - probably because the demand of constant deadlines mean we've gone from a luxury to a nice thing to have to the water, sun, and sky for journalists trying to stay current.

BW: Men, Not Women, Suffer Most from Current Job Market

Peter Coy of BusinessWeek recently reported on the continuing disparate impact of the recession on male U.S. employment v. female.  This observation is turning into Nascar reporting - an endless loop of repetitive stories that add little to the conversation.

Economists are concerned that the recovery will extend an ominous trend of disengagement for male workers that stretches back six decades. The share of American men aged 16 to 64 who are employed has fallen in a sawtooth pattern, from nearly 85 percent in the early 1950s to less than 65 percent now. As the chart above shows, the rate falls steeply in recessions and does not get back to its previous high in recoveries. (Women's employment-to-population ratio has trended higher over the years.)

What's interesting is that the two unemployed men that Coy chooses to highlight in the story are not exactly sympathetic profiles.  One is a 19-year-old who says "he's talented" but was expelled from high school and was fired from a construction job for fighting.  The other is a 55-year-old who was working in "corporate travel" when he was laid off.  News flash: it isn't that hard for executives to plan their own travel now.

Reading these stories convinces me not that there is a fundamental unfairness toward men in the job market - it's that employers naturally favor employees who finish school, don't fight and focus on providing lasting value.  Not all of these people are women but if they are - why would employers owe anyone a job just for being a man?

NYT: Why Do Expensive Hotels Charge For Stuff That's Included Elsewhere?

Joe Sharkey of The New York Times covers a pet peeve of mine today - that luxury hotels charge for stuff that's free at mid-range properties even though they charge two and three times more per night.

As to “value,” let’s consider what many business travelers regard as the most annoying aspect of staying in these hotels: being nickel and dimed with fees and surcharges. We have become accustomed to free Internet, free parking, free breakfast and maybe even a free nightly cocktail hour at many midscale and sometimes even economy-scale chain hotels. But five-star hotels and luxury convention hotels have long been notorious for slapping on extra fees for a wide range of services.

Basically, the conclusion is self-evident.  They do it because people still want to stay in 5-star properties even if they get dinged for $19.95 for the Internet.  But he also notes that this is changing and we can only hope that the Ritz Carlton's of the world are forced to include basics like Internet access in the future.

WSJ on Remaking AOL: Spin-Jitsu

Jessica Vascellaro's Wall Street Journal feature on how Arianna Huffington is remaking AOL following the merger with her Huffington Post has the most brazen attempt at Spin-Jitsu, my term of art for corporations stating their negatives as positives, I've seen in a while.

In a paragraph on how Huffington has attempted to change the culture at AOL, Vascellaro writes:

She has introduced herself to employees in more than a half-dozen cities with Greek cookies and personal tales, such as one tying her passion for local journalism to her upbringing in a small Greek village. She's tried to win over those anxious about change with a promise to take "the best of the old with the best of the new." With celebrity designer Steven Gambrel, she overhauled AOL's 38,000 square-foot main New York newsroom that houses nearly 300 editorial and tech employees, overseeing the painting of "The Huffington Post Media Group" on the wall in a typewriter-style font. She introduced three employee nap rooms to encourage work-life balance. AOL would not comment on the cost beyond saying it was "minimal."

The talking point appears to be that Huffington is as self-absorbed as her public image - of course everyone cares about her childhood and ethnic food as well as vision of herself as a modern-day William Randolph Hearst - and that's a good thing.  My favorite part, though, has to be positioning the need for a place for employees to sleep without leaving the office as "work-life balance."  

If that's work-life balance the company stores and dorms enjoyed by 1800s coal miners must have represented the most balanced lives of all!

Forbes on the Higher Education Bubble

Because of my history with the topic and the venue, I feel obligated to link this Forbes.com article by Richard Vedder of Ohio State on how higher education is a bubble.

That is all.

The Atlantic Mocks The New York Times' New Paywall

This piece from the Nieman Journalism Lab is pretty funny - the Atlantic is providing links to get people around the NYT's paywall by highligting the Grey Lady's top stories.  I've been too busy to report much on the Times' new strategy for getting paid online but the summary is that they've made it so easy to evade I really haven't noticed it.    Before it even went into effect the mere fact that I am on a spam list from a local car dealer gave me unlimited access.

I say we should all celebrate The New York Times' paywall strategy.  I hope all papers contemplating a paywall strategy use this exact one.

 

WSJ on the Strange Afterlife of IE6

Steven D. Jones of The Wall Street Journal yesterday shined a light on an odd backwater of enterprise technology, the longevity of Microsoft's ancient Internet Explorer 6 browser and why many companies are resisting upgrading to the newer model despite the Redmond company's recent decision to stop supporting it.

The problem: Explorer 6 was introduced in 2001, a period when many businesses were starting to write internal Web applications for everything from expense management to process control, and up to 40% of those applications don't work on newer versions of Explorer. Halting the use of Explorer 6 would force businesses to rewrite applications at considerable cost, even though the ones they have can operate safely behind corporate firewalls.

It takes a good journalistic eye to find the news enterprise technology stories like this as they don't touch the consumer.  Jones did a great job of finding what's broadly interesting and making lessons applicable to a broader management/technology user audience.

My guess from the article is that the small software company that has created a fix to keep IE6 viable without Microsoft support, UniBrows, placed the story.

I can see the new client meeting now: "We make a product that helps update 10-year old technology so it can keep running outdated web applications in a private network that users don't see and only IT workers would know about.  Can you get us in The Wall Street Journal?"

Well, if you start finding interesting places for conflict, like Microsoft's product people against their own users, the often-maddening user agreements that UniBrows probably violates, as well as connecting with end-user frustrations that "upgrades" frequently aren't - yes.

It's excellent positioning all around by the company and the journalist.