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stevensilvers.com

added: Mon, 05th December 2005 | 1529 views | 0x in favourites
feed url: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Stevensilvers

Field notes from the information glut... Punchy, real-world perspectives and advice on corporate affairs, reputation management and communications strategy.

Latest feed entries:

What it means to watch some crazy naked guy fall out of a tree.

So I'm going through my morning routine with one eye on CNN Headline News. Thousands dead in Myanmar. Split decision in Indiana. Crises. Trends. Deals. Then suddenly a breaking news headline... Naked man rescued from tree near Los Angeles Video...

Do domain names even matter any more?

Back when this whole Internet thing started, companies jumped through expensive hoops to own the single-word domain name of their business. Times sure have changed. Here are 20 consumer terms picked at random and entered directly into the address bar....

British newspaper names the most influencial U.S. political pundits. Ditto-heads take big issue.

To the chagrin of many Americans who take their personal favorite talking-heads, radio hosts and comedians very seriously, Great Britain's Telegraph newspaper ranked the top 50 "most influential U.S. political pundits" ending with this top ten list: 10. Mark Halperin...

Would Hitler be wearing a seatbelt: Effective propaganda for today's America.

Propaganda posters like these helped America win World War II. Not to belittle the many fine public service campaigns out there, but I'm wondering if such simple, bold Big Brother messages would work today to promote conservation, saving for retirement...

All Hail the Intricacies of Flackery.

In appreciation for filling hotel rooms with a regional conference, PR people in Tuscon, Arizona got Mayor Bob Walkup to sign a proclamation naming April 25 "Public Relations Appreciation Day." The official document -- no doubt written by the same...

Congressional committees and Hollywood celebrities stroke each other's agendas.

You might remember Justin Bateman, who co-stared in the 80's TV sitcom Family Ties. The show ended 19 years ago, the same year that the first Internet Service Providers started business. Now Bateman is 46 and a partner in an...

Blah Blah Nation: PR people promote the value of blogging by boring potential clients to death.

Every minute, another PR agency announces that it has launched a new "social media" department to help clients leverage the amazing power of the blogosphere. Many of these companies and practices publish their own blogs to help develop new business...

You have a date with spam.

More great news. Email spammers have figured out how to make their ads automatically show up as meeting invitations on Google and Outlook calendars. . . . . . . . . . . Microsoft: 10 tips on how to...

The nine worst business stories in the last 50 years. Maybe.

Back in 1992, the conservative watchdog group Media Research Center launched the Business & Media Institute to give America a place "devoted solely to analyzing and exposing the anti-free enterprise culture of the media." This week the institute released a...

Best worst excuse to avoid jury duty: Your studly hotness.

All across America, courts are struggling to get citizens to act as jurors. One recent report estimates that half of all people summoned for jury duty don't even bother showing up. And the excuses are getting more creative all the...

The line between blogs and blather.

Time Magazine broke some necessary ice in the over-hyped blogosphere by including a "most over-rated" category in its first annual blog index. The critiques aren't pretty. Wrote Time's editors about the high-traffic Slashdot technology blog: "Reading Slashdot these days is...

Wacky Hillary to nation: That whole thing about being shot at in Bosnia is pretty dang funny.

It's been weeks since Senator Clinton was called out for claiming that she landed in Bosnia under sniper fire, having to duck-and-cover as she ran for her life on the tarmac. The truth is that nobody was shooting at anyone...

Honoring the nation's best newspaper business sections.

With local-market newspaper business coverage decreasing in quantity and quality across the country, it's certainly worth mentioning the winners of this year's "Best in Business Journalism" awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers: "Giant Newspapers" - Daily...

So maybe "Our Man in New York" isn't exactly Tocqueville.

The Independent Times of London has decided that America is experiencing "United States of America 2008: The Great Depression." Or so it says in a headline big enough to see from the end of the bread lines in which we're...

Big brand doody from the toilet paper wars.

Big-brand toilet papers are getting behind the trend to market personal care products without euphemistic niceties. Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB) has raised the bar -- or lowered the seat, depending how you look at it -- by promising that its Cottonelle...

What's missing from your communications plan.

Does your communications plan have a go button? Many don't. Each year, I review dozens of company, government and organization communication plans designed to approach all sorts of business initiatives, collaborations, issues and crisis scenarios. Most follow some variation of...

This Internet thing is going to be big.

This design firm's promotional-hype press release titled "Why Having a Website is Crucial to Your Business Success" still makes me wonder... Does anybody know of a legitimate company that doesn't have a web site? . . . . . ....

Check out the Colorado Municipal League's communicators conference, April 10-11.

I'll be presenting my thoughts on crisis strategies at the Colorado Communicators Conference, a two-day event being held by the Colorado Municipal League and Denver Regional Council of Governments on Thursday-Friday, April 10 through 11. Other speakers include my good...

Talking points: From denial to disaster in five days.

Official statement from Bear Stearns, Monday, March 10: "There is absolutely no truth to the rumors of liquidity problems that circulated today in the market." Official statement from Bear Stearns, Friday, March 14: "We have tried to confront and dispel...

Public awareness of the war plummets as news media lose interest.

Only 28 percent of American adults can tell you how many of our nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have died in the Iraq war. The answer was about 4,000 as of mid-March, when the question was asked in a...

Protecting a booming market of old people who can’t think straight.

Among the many dilemmas of America’s looming retirement crisis is the fact that millions of elderly consumers will be unable to resist the influences of slick marketing campaigns, high-pressure sales tactics and investment scams. Because their brains won’t be working...

Image and Influence Index

... Many of the fears parents have about sex predators roaming the Internet are myths. [Crimes against Children Research Center] ... In January, Americans searched the Internet 14.6 billion times — almost double the amount just two years ago. [International...

More TV ads that confuse and irritate this common consumer brain.

Jockey’s latest TV ad (right) shows a 20–something couple escaping from a giant totalitarian super-race underwear machine that molds men into Ken dolls and women into Victoria’s Secret models. The ad ends with the revolutionary call to “Dare to be...

HBO drops a cancellation bomb on football fans.

Each week some two million people watch HBO’s Inside the NFL, which after 31 years is cable’s longest-running program. And most of those viewers were shocked to hear the season’s final show introduced like this: Boy, that was an exciting...

A few thoughts on a superlative Democratic convention.

A recent London Times story started off by saying that “Denver has little reason to exist, and that may be why its inhabitants excel at superlatives.” I’m not sure what they mean by that. But I do know that the...

After all, it's not like fourth graders are going to go run up their credit cards.

So what would be wrong with a school district getting paid to have its crossing guards urge kids to buy a refreshing Dasani water during recess? If you’re the South Carolina Board of Education, not a dang thing. The state...

One more rule for PR students who still don't quite get it.

At the request of a university professor, I wrote a post recently suggesting that PR students should recognize five key truths about their choice of career: 1. Most PR people don’t write well. 2. You don’t have exclusive access to...

Great site for newspaper hounds and media junkies.

Check out the day’s front page from 604 newspapers around the world on the Newseum web site. Just hover your pointer over a city and the image of that day’s entire front page instantly appears. Click to enlarge the scanned...

Most popular Scatterbox posts of the last year.

Here are the five most searched for, linked and read Scatterbox posts over the last year: One of the best interview questions. If your advertising agency isn't getting arrested, maybe they're not trying hard enough. When resume inflation becomes bald-faced...

Good intentions aren't good crisis management.

Case in point: The San Francisco Zoo, where a 350–pound tiger escaped its enclosure and mauled three young men, killing one of them on the spot. Apparently, zoo officials hope to downplay extensive media coverage of the incident by reminding...

Do elderly Americans need protection from their own financial decisions?

The New York Times reports that senior citizens have filed thousands of lawsuits arguing that being old should make them less accountable for buying what salespeople sold them. The story refers to a ruined 81–year-old retired aerospace engineer who quite...

TV makes up for the lack of quality booze ads that kids see when they read Good Housekeeping.

A new study finds that while there's less youth exposure to alcohol marketing in national magazines, the number of cable TV ads they see has increased by 30 percent. The Council on Alcohol Marketing and Youth says increased advertising for...

Putting corporate spin on a lap dance.

“At first, they seem afraid of what I might say… Then, after a while, they realize they might as well be talking to Microsoft or Boeing.” — A lobbyist for VCG Holding Corp. (NASDAQ: VCGH), on how city leaders eventually...

Big companies still wary of online reputation management tools.

In response to the Deliver Magazine article concerning online reputation management, an executive from a large multi-national advertising firm said they repeatedly come up against two issues in selling their tracking services to big companies: “One… Somebody in these huge...

Thoughts regarding online reputation management.

Marketing magazine Deliver asked what I thought were some of the most important considerations toward managing a company’s reputation online: As marketing tools go, the Internet is easily the keenest of double-edged swords in any company’s arsenal. The same scope...

The new my space: Corporate tattoo you.

It’s weird enough that millions of Americans routinely pay billion-dollar companies for the privilege of being uncompensated walking billboards. (I know the whole psycho-consumer thing about brand affinity and affiliation. But I still think giving $10.50 to Gap Corporation for...

People don't trust campaign news coverage. Here comes citizen journalism.

Confirming an earlier poll, a new Harvard University study underscores across-the-board dissatisfaction with how the press is covering the 2008 presidential campaign. People want less focus on polls and “horse race” tactics, and more on each candidate’s public policy proposals,...

Imagine the information highway becoming gridlocked.

Perhaps the biggest factor in how people are influenced by what they see, hear and do on the Internet will be the Internet itself. A report from Nemertes Research predicts that the Internet will become one humongous traffic jam by...

Logo is another way of saying everybody has an opinion.

Updating a company logo can be a tortuous process. At least that’s what I was thinking after spending eight hours in a windowless room where a dozen marketing and creative people debated things like which shade of fuchsia most resonated...

Fear and loathing in being at the bottom of some "most whatever" city list.

In response to publishing company CQ Press’ annual list naming Detroit as the nation’s “most dangerous” city, the American Society of Criminology issued a terse statement saying the rankings represent an oversimplified, irresponsible use of government data. The FBI put...

Corporate brands prepare for bad PR around Olympics.

"Top sponsors are bracing themselves… The bad PR stuff, it's inevitable." — Sports marketing firm president Chris Renner on expectations that the Beijing 2008 Olympics will be mired in controversy generated by activist groups around the world that are preparing...

SEC decides it's fair to tell prospective defendant companies that they're not.

The Securities & Exchange Commission has changed its rather infuriating policy of not telling companies being investigated that they’re off the hook. The agency now says that staffers will send letters telling companies when it decides to not file charges....

Hard times ahead for many private-company communications departments.

Communications and PR departments of companies owned by private equity firms face tough times during what BusinessWeek predicts will be an onslaught of breakups and reorganizations that "could rival the downsizing binge of the early 1990s." With the world’s credit...

Publicists get uppity after Wired Magazine editor uses nuclear option to deter weapons of mass flackery.

This just in. Some journalists get really annoyed at all the unsolicited junk they get from publicists. Really annoyed. In fact, the New York Times reports that the things have turned "Ugly in the ‘Hacks vs. Flacks’ War" after Wired...

Horse race still dominates presidential campaign media coverage, despite what Americans say they want.

Media coverage of the presidential campaign has geared up earlier than ever before, becoming the second-most reported news topic almost a full year before anyone votes on anything. That’s different. But what’s being reported isn’t. Research shows that almost 90...

Rockies ticket sales fiasco a case study in bad news.

The Colorado Rockies created a case study in how to turn an operational melt-down into a customer-relations disaster. You may recall that the Rockies decided to sell World Series tickets online only — a decision that had many people scratching...

Why we say we won the game.

Denver radio host Peter Boyles kicked off a heated controversy by taking issue with sports fans using the collective “we” rather than “they” when talking about the Colorado Rockies or other favorite team. “I’ve always thought it was silly,” Boyles...

Forty percent of Americans hate to love their celebrity news.

A Pew Research Center study billed as “Evaluating the Media’s Agenda” notes that 40 percent of Americans think the nation’s news media give too much attention to celebrity news, more than three times the number citing any other subject like...

Don't miss Andrew Hudson's PRJobsList.com first Denver-area seminar and networking event.

Register now to attend the first-ever “APETOBERFEST," a networking event for Denver-area PR and marketing pros sponsored by my friend Andrew Hudson’s popular PRJobsList.com and the Denver Business Journal. Andrew asked me to co-present his seminar on “How to Find...

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