Fedorable | Ethics, bootstrapping and tech in public relations

When a co-founder dies

Rex Sep 25

greg Greg and I have tried here on Fedorable to give our insights on various challenges we have faced in developing Presskit’n and IvyLees. It’s in that spirit that I write this post, even though he’s not here to help me with it.

Greg died on Sunday, September 13th in a car accident while returning from ProgPower, a metal concert in Atlanta. He was 25.

Together, we had learned a lot of our start-up lessons the hard way. We had been slapped by the chicken-and-egg problem. We had several of the I-should-be-asleep-right-now rushes to fix last-minute bugs. We had major new features go virtually ignored. We had faced criticism, both fair and unfair. We had struggled to maintain a constant user base.

And, every time the going got tough, every time we failed, we shrugged our shoulders and continued on.

Then, out of nowhere, Greg died. Suddenly, scrambling late at night to find an elusive bug seemed like nothing. His death wasn’t nearly the same type of problem. I found myself unable to lift my shoulders, and unable to go on.

Initially I had wanted to write this post on the technical details of this event. I wanted to separate the emotional parts. But I can’t. It just doesn’t work that way.

Relationships between co-founders can range from a 9-to-5, just-the-business relationship to “Sure, I’ll get a blood test to see if my kidney’s good for a transplant” friends. Greg and I fell into the kidney category.

If a start-up has the foresight to prepare for something like this, they’ll usually do it in a very details-oriented way. There will be preparations made for roles in the company, tasks to be done, and for shares of ownership.

But after the fact, those are just details, especially if the co-founders are good friends.

Greg was great with Django. He was ceaseless in championing our products. He could fix any problem just as soon as it popped up.

After his death, I didn’t find myself asking, “Can I go on without someone great with Django, someone who could champion our products, and someone who can fix bugs on the site?”

I found myself asking, “Can I go on without Greg?”

It’s been 12 days since his death. Only now is the answer to that question even beginning to shift towards Yes.

I suppose, in the end, the only way to prepare for an event like this is to set aside time away from the project. As they say, time heals all wounds. Even as someone who throws himself into his work to get away from stuff like this, I found myself simply unable to distract myself through it, since I worked so closely with Greg on a daily basis.

I won’t get back to work today, and probably not tomorrow, but I will get back to work. It’ll just never quite feel the same without Greg.

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

On shilling: Where the “everyone does it” sleaze mentality comes from

Rex Aug 22

TechCrunch recently covered an example of shilling, where interns were paid to post fake reviews on Apple’s App Store. The sleazy PR firm in question this time was Reverb Communications, based out of California. TechCrunch’s article pulls up a lot of great points, even going as far to post an e-mail from Reverb in which the faux PR firm defends their practices with halfhearted arguments.

My problem with the whole ordeal, and the point the article doesn’t really touch on, is that they’re paying interns to do this.

In other words, they’re not just practicing sleazy, backward ethics; they’re teaching them. Here’s an excerpt from the Reverb e-mail, written by Doug Kennedy, who I imagine has something like Overseer – Sleazebag Production on his business card:

My office did mention that you had issues with our staff and interns writing reviews for some of our clients games, I’m sure you are aware that in order to write a review on iTunes an individual needs to purchase the game or app and can only write one review. Our interns and employees write their reviews based on their own game play experience, after having purchased the game by themselves, a practice not uncommon by anyone selling games or apps and hardly unethical.

I could make the assumption that Doug is a complete idiot. I could just assume that nobody has mentioned anything about bias due to financial stake to him, that he never accidentally read something on disclosure ethics, or that he’s never heard anything about the mechanics of social media or the way the Internet works in general. But I won’t give him that benefit of a doubt. I have to just assume he’s just a sleazebag.

On some level, I can deal with that. For better or worse, shilling is a fairly widespread practice. For now we have to settle with the fact that, every now and then, a sleazebag like Doug gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

What I simply can’t deal with is the fact that he’s passing on these dubious ethics to interns, masquerading them as industry standard. Practices like this should only be taught as an example of what not to do.

They say it’s always good to end a blog post with a call to action. Well, here’s Reverb’s client list. I think you know what to do.

Posted in Ethics, Public Relations | 1 Comment

Brand image and brand perception: Two sides of the same coin

Rex Aug 19

We had an interesting talk on #pr20chat a couple weeks ago, when Beth Harte started with a simple question: “What is branding?”

All of the PR folks in the chat promptly painted their faces with war paint and went to battle against each other.

Okay, so it wasn’t that bad. But we were starkly divided over the core idea of who owns the brand– is it the customers or the company?

I think, in the end, despite the great observations and arguments on both sides, we were really arguing semantics. Sender, receiver, signal… we were all talking about the same process. What we really needed were some common terms to agree on (and not the terms settled upon after a war, but words).

Brand Image

On the Company owns the brand side of things, we have brand image. Brand image is how a company wants you to see them. Of course, even here we’ll see disagreement, but for the most part this is the realm of the Public Relations team of the company.

Brand Perception

In the other corner stands The customer owns the brand, which we’ll call brand perception. Brand perception is how the public (the ones you are relating to) views the product. It’s the favorite team shirt a football fan wears on Sundays. A band poster hung in a teenager’s room. An opinion voiced to a friend.

So there we have it, the two sides of the branding coin. Big thanks to Shel Holtz and the others for helping to hammer out these terms near the end of the chat. In the end, both sides were right, we were just looking at it from different perspectives.

Although, if you had to look at it from one side, obviously the company owns the brand.

Posted in Branding, Public Relations | 3 Comments

Newest revenue stream accessible via Twitter: Lawsuits

Rex Jul 28

Gawker is reporting on an apartment management company that’s sued a former tenant over a tweet.

In the tweet, the tenant said her apartment was moldy and also mentioned the company, Horizon, by name. The damages claim? 50,000 bucks.

The tenant had 20 followers. That’s 2500 bucks a follower.

At the moment, Horizon Realty is a trending topic on Twitter. I have to wonder: Is it worth it?

Some companies jump at the opportunity to answer a customer’s complaints on Twitter. And then some companies get sue-happy.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Having a code of ethics, in and of itself, is meaningless

Rex Jul 27

Some organizations treat the topic of ethics as though it were something on a checklist. “We have an ethics page on our site; therefore we are ethical.”

The word ethics leaves a lot of room for this type of behavior. In the end, being ethical simply means consistently following a set of rules. But the rules can be anything, and are for the most part left up to the individual or corporation. Take the following:

Company X: Public Relations Ethics Code

Rule 1: Create a new account (not a fake, but an “avatar” representing our corporate beliefs) any time a website negatively covers our news to inform the public in a friendly manner.

Rule 2: Ensure as many people as possible hear our news by sending out mass e-mails to thousands, or if possible tens of thousands, of users.

Rule 3: Encourage industry experts to tout our products by giving them regular financial incentive packages.

Rule 4: Sacrifice a kitten any time someone retweets a blog post.

Company X, if it followed this code with consistency (it’s hard to keep well stocked with kittens), would technically be ethical. But would they be good? Even the biggest cat hater would have a hard time thinking so.

Approach codes of ethics with caution and skepticism, because it’s the next place the sleazy companies will go in an effort to look good while still being bad.

Posted in Ethics, Public Relations | 1 Comment

Digg’s short URL fiasco and what we can learn from it

Rex Jul 20

When Digg first came out with their short URL service, they saw tons of usage right off the bat, regardless of the fact that they were attaching their patently annoying Digg bar to every page instead of using a real redirect.

Thousands and thousands of people used it, but some hated it. I personally never went back to the site, even for daily link browsing. After they changed it to an actual redirect, I was still wary of clicking digg.com short links.

It seems I had the right idea. Yesterday, Digg changed their short URL behavior (for all existing and new short URLs) to send the unwitting clicker to a Digg landing page. Nobody was notified beforehand.

A few hours later Kevin Rose tweeted that he had no idea this was going on.

Yeah, Kevin, we didn’t either.

So what can we learn from this?

No small changes

There are no small changes to a web app. URL shortening is a fairly simple, straightforward service. A tiny change gets noticed, and a big change like this can rock the entire landscape.

Values are a company thing, not a CEO thing

It’s interesting that Kevin Rose was on vacation for two weeks before this happened, but not particularly meaningful as a defense for Digg. Ethics should be company-wide. The “I didn’t know” or “It was the employee’s fault” excuse only gets so far.

Big players can ruin the game faster than small players

There’s anxiety brewing already over short URLs. Some people think they’re ruining the Internet. Digg has twice now delivered heavy blows to consumer confidence for an entire group of sites. It’s probably not fair that bit.ly (what I currently use) will suffer because of what Digg did, but that’s how it works.

Posted in Ethics | Leave a comment

The price of being sleazy: Three hundred thousand dollars

Rex Jul 16

The New York Times reported Tuesday on a cosmetic surgery company that was faking reviews online. The cost? $300,000. And of course a New York Times article outing them as sleazebags.

I wonder if they used the “But everybody’s doing it!” defense.

The article was particularly surprising to me because I know that some PR and communication firms regularly engage in this practice. Lifestyle Lift, the company featured in the article, was engaging in the practice heavily, ordering employees to take time out of their day to post fake reviews.

But Lifestyle Lift is a fairly large company. The only reason they got caught is because they were really stupid about it, having multiple people to blow the whistle and also leaving an obvious online trail. Meanwhile thousands more fake reviews are posted every day by unscrupulous “reputation management” firms around the country. Will they stop now, knowing there’s a definite cost associated with it?

I’m sure the ones in New York will think about it for a second, then go back to business as usual. The firms in other states won’t miss a beat.

Another question is one of accountability. If a sleazebag company pays a sleazebag PR firm to post fake reviews, who picks up the tab when they get caught for being “cynical, manipulative and illegal” (As the New York attorney general so eloquently put it)?

Posted in Ethics, Public Relations | Leave a comment

How to customize the look of your social media release

Rex Jul 13

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 more plain and clean-cut. So we went to the Release Style tool in our social media newsroom and changed it to the “IvyLees Lite” preset, with the “Plastic” column style.

And here’s what the release looks like after the change:

Looks great! Since the colors are customizable, you can get any look you want. Here, we see a softer side of IvyLees:

Your release styles are local to a newsroom, so when you change it once, it applies to all of your releases: past, present and future. Changing it again is just as easy. It’s also one of our free features. Isn’t that neat? Have fun customizing!

Posted in Branding, Presskit'n, Social Media, Technology | 1 Comment