Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#31

Post by palish » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 1:31 AM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #29

fryguy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was shocked that it was MG was writing it, since I scrolled up to the top about halfway through the article to check out who wrote it. There weren't any rabid apple fanboy comments, and it was somewhat well-written, and usually it's Michael Arrington that writes the anti-PR articles. Maybe he will be more of a journalist in the future, and my unsubscription from techcrunch in my rss reader will have been wrong.

I was also very surprised to discover (after the fact) that this was an MG article. I normally skip his articles; the problem isn't the fanboyism, it's that he writes like he's being paid by the word. They're all three times longer than they should be, and I long ago got tired of straining the soup for a few morsels of real information. Someone needs to give MG a collection of Hemingway's short stories for Xmas.

I too had the exact same experience: scrolled up halfway through to see whether Arrington wrote this, and was surprised to see it was MG.

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#32

Post by brandnewlow » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 1:34 AM UTC

sorbus wrote: post #30

brandnewlow wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just investigated! It's very limited. You can really only do one-line responses. I want to respond with an e-mail with pricing info, a media kit attached etc etc. Still looking.

So what you want is, in essence, a service which you can set up a filter to direct messages to (possibly safer than letting it interact with your account directly?), which then responds to each email it receives with a message that you previously generated, possibly including attachments. Gmail's vacation responder does all of that except attachments, but you could use the rich formatting of signatures to include lin…

Sounds like I can't just have it respond to specific e-mail addresses though. I'm telling ya. There's a fun service in there.

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#33

Post by sorbus » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 1:39 AM UTC

brandnewlow wrote: post #32

sorbus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you want is, in essence, a service which you can set up a filter to direct messages to (possibly safer than letting it interact with your account directly?), which then responds to each email it receives with a message that you previously generated, possibly including attachments. Gmail's vacation responder does all of that except attachments, but you could use the rich formatting of signatures to include lin…

Sounds like I can't just have it respond to specific e-mail addresses though. I'm telling ya. There's a fun service in there.

You can set up an email account specifically for the responses, and have messages forwarded to it by a filter. That's extremely hacky, though, and yeah, there's certainly a service there.

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#34

Post by benologist » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 2:30 AM UTC

temphn wrote: post #22

knowtheory wrote: post #3

Wow. Techcrunch defended journalistic integrity, and i actually believe them. They're right, this is a problem, and it's being highlighted in the correct manner. The other broader issue that has to be dealt with is that this is the face of the new media landscape. Where do you think journalists and writers have left to go in the collapse of the news media? PR flacks often times have journalism degrees, and the only p…

A journalist arrogates to himself the right to take your confidential code and splatter it on the internet in return for advertising pageviews. Siegler profits directly from leaks. Do you deny this? And FB does not profit from leaks. So this has nothing to do with integrity. What does printing something marked "confidential" have to do with integrity? Siegler is just mad that FB got someone to post their side of the…

Siegler's not mad at all. TC loves controversy, it's even easier money then churning out Apple pieces.

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#35

Post by Travis » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 2:44 AM UTC

brandnewlow wrote: post #16

Hey, HNers, Here's something I would pay money for and maybe other publishers, as well. Through WindyCitizen.com, I get about 40-50 press releases a day trying to get one our writers to cover some event or celebrity appearance in Chicago. This is absurd considering our site is all user-generated content. But we're on lists somewhere and so the PR industrial complex thinks we want to hear about all their fake news. It…

Is the power of this the Gmail integration, or is the power in the list maintenance?

Thinking about the MVP, it would be trivial to write a program that would login to a user's specific POP3/IMAP account, scan for messages from specific senders, and auto-respond. But how would you maintain the list of PR flunkies?

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#36

Post by cliffchang » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 2:49 AM UTC

It bothers me that TC writers, when called out on their bias, claim to just be mere "bloggers" who are supposed to be expose their bias so you know where they're coming from, but now they're claiming to be holy "journalists".

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#37

Post by bxr » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 3:20 AM UTC

While I like many of Facebook’s PR team on an individual basis, as a whole, they are probably the worst in the industry when it comes to manipulation, double-speak, and all around slimeballishness

Their PR team are a prefect example, in Zuckerburg's words, of a "lack of integrity".

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#38

Post by tatsuke95 » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 3:22 AM UTC

"Journalist" breaks story containing confidential information about a product in development. PR team kicks into damage control, trying to dismiss and deny the leak.

What is the story here? That's the job of PR! Whether journalists buy into the mess is another matter...

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#39

Post by rewind » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 4:28 AM UTC

brandnewlow wrote: post #16

Hey, HNers, Here's something I would pay money for and maybe other publishers, as well. Through WindyCitizen.com, I get about 40-50 press releases a day trying to get one our writers to cover some event or celebrity appearance in Chicago. This is absurd considering our site is all user-generated content. But we're on lists somewhere and so the PR industrial complex thinks we want to hear about all their fake news. It…

You'd pay $30-$40 per month for a service that generates an extra $1,500 in revenue per month? I don't think your argument for someone to build this tool for you is very compelling ;-)

Oh how I long for the good 'ol days when people just paid for value...

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#40

Post by brandnewlow » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 4:51 AM UTC

rewind wrote: post #39

brandnewlow wrote: post #16

Hey, HNers, Here's something I would pay money for and maybe other publishers, as well. Through WindyCitizen.com, I get about 40-50 press releases a day trying to get one our writers to cover some event or celebrity appearance in Chicago. This is absurd considering our site is all user-generated content. But we're on lists somewhere and so the PR industrial complex thinks we want to hear about all their fake news. It…

You'd pay $30-$40 per month for a service that generates an extra $1,500 in revenue per month? I don't think your argument for someone to build this tool for you is very compelling ;-) Oh how I long for the good 'ol days when people just paid for value...

Well, I'd still have to close the sale, get the ad creative, have a web site that gets enough traffic to deserve an ad spend of that kind, run the ad, answer questions from the advertiser as the ad runs, take down how the ad performs, answer questions from the advertiser about their numbers....

So yeah, the thingie that makes it easier for me to do step zero in this process is worth about $40/month in that value chain.