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Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#11

Post by yuhong »

Steko wrote: post #8
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…

I couldn't help but notice the irony of TC's "Tonight We Dine in Hell" (which you just knew was an MG Siegler post before clicking through) right below the "AOL Hell" link. MG is one of the stars of the "AOL Way" but at least in this case and with the Project Spartan break, he's committed some real and quality journalism.

Though I think MG's writing style etc. dates back before the acquisition by AOL. Overall this acquisition did not go particularly badly IMO. The AOL-Huffington Post acquisition was a lot worse.

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#13

Post by yuhong »

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…

IMO it is time to move to "PR 2.0", which is not based on controlling the message.

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#16

Post by brandnewlow »

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's really annoying.

I would pay money for a gmail plugin that lets me specify the e-mail addresses of X PR people, and then responds to their press releases automatically with an e-mail from me telling them what it will cost them to buy advertising on our site that promotes the event they're touting.

If they're going to spam me, I would like to be able to spam them.

Most of them will just ignore the e-mails, but they'll get the picture eventually.

Meanwhile, some of them will convert into advertisers. If I pick up $1500/month worth of advertising from this tool, I would gladly pay $30-40/month maybe more for a service that lets me do it.

It could be free for one e-mail address, $29/month for up to 50, and so on and so on.

This way, the indie bloggers out there who can't sell an ad to save their lives but who get bombarded with PR pitches in their inbox all day can automate their sales process a bit AND get the satisfaction of annoying the crap out of the PR people bugging them.

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#19

Post by tjogin »

I actually think MG went really out of his way to look for a controversial reason for Facebook's choice of platform for Project Spartan. And I think he is wrong, this time.

Facebook could have gone with a native iOS app, granted that's what most companies do who are specifically trying to target iOS.

But is it really necessary to reach for far fetched reasons why they'd want to go with the web app approach instead? I mean, Facebook is a web app. Their developers are web developers, the vast majority of their developers are hired for their skills and penchant for web development.

As is evident from the regular Facebook.com, they have some pretty great web developers on board as well, knee deep in javascript, css and stuff like that every day, I'm sure. Wouldn't it be really practical to just leverage that expertise for Project Spartan as well, rather than have some other team work with some other code base for some other platform?

Then of course we have the slew of other good attributes of web development, to which Facebook are already accustomed. Like being able to update the app several times a day if they so choose, without Apple's adult supervision and delay.

Do we really need to look any further than that for reasons why Facebook went with the web as their chosen platform? I don't think so, I think it makes a lot of sense for Facebook to go with the web app approach. That Project Spartan uses mobile Safari, not webkit in general, as their target platform kind of shows that there isn't a hell of a lot of anger towards Apple anyways.

Re: Facebook PR: Tonight We Dine In Hell

#20

Post by jonursenbach »

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 can already do this with the Canned Responses Gmail labs plugin. Just set up a canned response and then set up a filter.
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