Walls have the same bad reputation on the web as they do in history. They work for a while, usually to someone’s benefit and someone else’s dismay, and then they come crashing down.
A walled garden often serves as a safe haven to rapidly grow a business. In the 90s and early 2000s, we saw AOL [...]
Category Archives: Technology
Is the glue of credibility strong enough to hold together a walled garden?
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On FTC’s blogging guidelines, ‘clearly and conspicuously’ is what everyone should be talking about
It’s been a little over two weeks since the FTC announced they were going to start watching blogs. Since then, there’s been healthy discussion and debate. Bloggers have had pretty much the same reaction as advertisers did when the FTC first came after unscrupulous ads. It’s great. It’s a sign that social media is coming [...]
Also posted in Ethics, Public Relations, Social Media 2 Comments
The farming game craze, from Harvest Moon to Farmville to Happy Farms
With everyone excited about wizards and vampires these past few years, one would expect magic or brooding bloodsuckers to be the focus of popular social games online.
But nope, look elsewhere: It’s farming, of all things.
A succession of popular farming games has hit Facebook this year, starting with myFarm, with the crowds seemingly then jumping to [...]
Also posted in Social Media 3 Comments
How to customize the look of your social media release
Every now and then we do a post on a Presskit’n feature. Today we’re going to look at how to customize the look of your social media release. Here’s a recent IvyLees release using the default theme:
We decided not to use the IvyLees theme (that would be trite, right?), instead opting for something a bit [...]
Also posted in Branding, Presskit'n, Social Media 1 Comment
Conversation vomit: Why aggregating everything everyone says is a stupid idea
You’ve seen it at the bottom of some blog posts. It’s a long stream of “So-and-so said this on so-and-so site” with every retweet on the subject clogging up the flow of discussion.
It’s conversation vomit. It’s when an aggregator eats everything around the Internet about a blog post, comes back to the blog post, and [...]
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What we can learn from Twitter Tracker: You can be mediocre. It’s okay now.
One of the fastest ways to elicit an eye-rolling from a public relations practicioner is to bring up the dreaded “new hire” press release. Nobody wants to read them. Even less want to write them. And certainly nobody ever ever would write about them (Unless you’re an Apple or a Microsoft). Yet clients still ask [...]
Also posted in Public Relations, Social Media 2 Comments
Interview with John, the mysterious creator of ‘E-mails from an Asshole’
I had a chance yesterday to conduct an e-mail interview with the comic genius behind E-mails from an Asshole. The e-mails he sent were from a familiar name: Mike Anderson, the same Mike who accused a stranger of running over his dog. Here it is.
Fedorable: First off, who are you?
John: We can go with John. [...]
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Driving the Online Newsroom
Our online newsroom builder here at IvyLees is driven by a lot of things. I’ll let Greg cover the tech stuff– here’s what went into it otherwise.
A mission
We want to make it easier for journalists, bloggers and PR people to connect. We felt one of the biggest places they did that was in the online [...]
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Where news releases go to die
People have been talking for some time now about how the news release is dead, or how it should be.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t– One thing is for sure: Lots of news releases are dead.
They’re sitting on harddrives of PR pros who are too busy to worry about them. They’ll continue to sit until [...]
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Optimized for Speed
News travels fast. This has always been the rule, even when fast was “on horseback.”
Now, fast is measured in milliseconds.
To keep up with our recent traffic increase, I’ve been taking steps to make the site continue to load as fast as possible. Yahoo has developed a firefox extension called YSlow. It analyzes all of the [...]
