Day 1 in Kathmandu
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Funny, Motorcycles on May 10, 2013
Fifteen hours after arriving in Kathmandu I thought it was a good time to check out the sites and get my bearings. And maybe figure out how to ride a motorcycle through Nepal.
I hired a driver out of the Summit Hotel to shuttle me around first to Swayambhunath Stupa (i.e. the Monkey Temple) then to the Thamel area to see where the tourists do their touristy things. As I was strolling through busy streets full of cars, people, bicycles and motorcycles moving in just about every direction one thought came to mind:
How exactly am I going to ride a motorcycle out of here in two days without hitting something?
Media relations is a wee portion of brand communications
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Public Relations on February 16, 2013
I remember not too long ago that the “PR guy” was the guy who wrote press releases and called down a list of reporters to ask if they got the release or not.
I swear. Like acid wash jeans — this happened!
While I think it’s been fascinating to watch the art of story telling make its way into PR and communications work, I think it’s even more important to see how the convergence of traditional PR with areas that might have been called marketing in the past is changing the way we think of PR and how we organize the function — whether it is in-house or on the agency side. I’ve been interviewing and prospecting for clients over the last 5 months and I can usually tell by the line of questioning whether or not the opportunity is going to be a good fit or not.
When a prospective employer or client asks me about my media contacts the giant reg flag goes up and I start looking for the exit signs. But when the questions are about engaging the right audiences using a mix of tactics and levers I think: “Winner, winner chicken dinner!”
So many companies go to PR people to help fix the business or make management happy that they lose sight of why you would initiate a communications campaign and they go into the market shopping for tactics instead of results. Here are some questions I’d ask if my boss told me to go get some PR help:
- What are we solving for?
- What exactly do you expect to get with more ‘coverage’?
- How should we integrate it with social, marketing, employee communications and the brand?
The answers to 1 and 2 are often intertwined in some sloppy hot mess about driving sales or the stock price or the b-word that drives strategic communications people the battiest: buzz. Whoever sold and popularized that BS term “buzz marketing and PR” needs to be dunked in a vat of ice and forced to watch re-runs of the first season of Seinfeld. If you can nail down the business objectives and explain that coverage is no panacea then and only then do you move on to 3.
This is organizational design and the only way you get to keep your job a year from now when someone asks why what’s on Facebook isn’t aligned with what’s on the blog and in the press coverage.
The best PR functions I’ve seen of late are built like this:
At the heart is the brand — including the stories and messages that work to connect with people over the long term — supported by an integrated effort of all the areas a person could come into contact with it and your product. Amazon and Apple have raised the bar very high here . . . and have wired people to expect a similarly consistent and high-level experience with every other brand and story they come into contact with — including yours.
So, who is the PR person today?
A story teller who can organize campaigns at the brand level and across all these domains. Let me know if you are in the market for one, because I may know a really handsome, witty guy who will ask you incessantly: “So, what are we solving for?”
- Jose Mallabo
If Chuck Knoll bought PR
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Public Relations on November 24, 2012
Most companies start shopping for PR well after they need it. I see it a lot and am sure you’ve also heard way too many times executives say things like “get in here and get some early wins” by “picking the low hanging fruit.”
If this was football and I heard my coach say that, I’d think this is not a team built for the SuperBowl and I’d be calling Jerry Maguire to get me on a Chuck Knoll-led team ASAP.
So many companies shop for a PR solution in the way you run to Home Depot for a generator. The lights are out, the milk is getting warm and the kids are getting bored with Monopoly. Emotions run high and that strategic thinking that should be driving the decision for PR to support your business for the next few quarters gives way to buying tactics and ideas that feel good today.
Those are usually sexy and fun ideas or trick hook and lateral passing plays that get everyone stimulated like chugging a Red Bull to get ready for work – when you probably should just eat better and get more sleep.
As anyone who has ever worked with me has heard me say: Ideas are like belly buttons, everyone has one and most of them don’t work. I’m more interested in creating the right organizational design from which to execute ideas that align against specific business goals. And I want people on my team who thought to buy the generator on a sunny day. Those people win you championships and have great ideas!
Chuck Knoll won four SuperBowl championships as head coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers and was famous for saying that “Three things can happen when you throw the football. Two of them are bad.” He was renowned for running the ball in a cloud of dust and punting on 4th and inches. What gets lost is the foundation he built as an offense and defense that allowed him to run any kind of play.
Oddly, I’m a lifelong San Diego Chargers fan and love the passing game. But when it comes to PR, I am more in Chuck Knoll’s camp than Don “Air” Coryell’s of the 80s Chargers — and so should you.
SuperBowl championships as a franchise:
- Steelers: Six
- Chargers: Zero
I rest my case.
- Jose Mallabo
Education and the Election
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Uncategorized on November 9, 2012
How the most and worst educated states voted in the US Presidential Election of 2012. There seems to be a correlation between college education and voting for Mr. Obama.
Who says education is overrated? Well, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said so. He claims that an ‘uninformed electorate’ helped vote President Obama into a second term this past week. But apparently that is not the case. The states with the greatest levels of college education voted for Mr. Obama, not Mr. Romney.
You can have your own point of view but you can’t have your own facts.
If fashion is never finished…
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Social media on October 24, 2012
. . . then entrepreneurship is forever.
Like Batman only with way cooler jeans and tee shirts.
The last few weeks have been very difficult for me and my team at Tweetalicious. But it’s interesting to look at what we’ve been doing since deciding to dissolve the company and shut down Mosaic. We broke up the band but have been out talking to other entrepreneurs to see how we can help or join forces with them to re-focus on the next next thing.
Even if that doesn’t happen, I have no doubt we’ll be back at it. Someday.
It’s only been a week but I miss the fight to build something out of nothing. I miss the heated discussions with my team. I even miss people telling us we were out of minds. It was a great ride and I’m proud of my co-founders for getting as far as we did with the MVP of Mosaic.
Onward.
Most visited tiles on Mosaic
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Social media on September 10, 2012
In the few weeks since we put Mosaic into beta testing at DiscoverMosaic.com it’s easy to see our user base has a palate for visual curation and design. The most visited tiles on the site are:
- Alexandra Spencer (@4THANDBLEEKER)
- Miranda Kerr (@MirandaKerr)
- Dolce & Gabbana (@DolceGabbana)
We curate content from three major areas: brands, fashion influencers and celebrities — and Alexandra is clearly a fashionable celebrity with influence.
So, what does this tell you about consumers and social content? Great visuals matter. The days of 140 text characters are dead like the Boston Red Sox. And I’d be willing to bet that if I looked at the least visited tiles on Mosaic – they’d all look like what happens when you cat stands on your keyboard.
Take a look at each of these handles and you’ll see commonalities. All of them create a steady flow of content often times posting updates five to 10 times a day. At least half of these tweets are pictures or videos. But what’s probably most important is that these are taken from a personal perspective. Even Dolce & Gabbana, obviously a company handle, pushes tweets out in a voice that makes it feel like a personal conversation. It’s an approach every social media pro aspires but often gets lost in execution.
Corporate speak: Boo. Personalized visual content: Bring it.
13 Signs you might be an Internet entrepreneur
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Funny, Public Relations, Work on July 24, 2012
13. You know the up and down connectivity speeds to your house
12. You can rattle off your IP address faster than your SSN
11. Your focus and visualization skills are good enough to make beef jerky taste like steak
10. You keep your house at 68 degrees Fahrenheit to keep the server comfortable
9. Before you go to bed you move the laundry to make room for your iPad and laptop
8. When you travel, the first question in the morning is to your co-founder sleeping across the room: “Dude, what’s the Wi-Fi login?”
7. When you travel, you stay in the kind of hotel where your car is parked right outside the door
6. You know the current time in Delhi and today’s date but have no clue what day of the week it is
5. You think Tom’s Shoes is a great authentic story of doing social good but wouldn’t wear them
4. You know the exact cost of your healthcare coverage and what’s included – or read this and realized you don’t have any
3. Your mom sends you links to some site called Monster.com
2. You miss @arrington
Number 1 sign you might be an Internet entrepreneur: All of the above is pretty much how you planned it except Arrington leaving TechCrunch. Still miffed about that one.
You’re soooo good lookin’!
Posted by Jose Mallabo in E-Commerce, Work on July 17, 2012
Discover Mosaic
On the 4th of July don’t be a picky eater!
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Funny on July 4, 2012
There’s this great New Yorker cartoon of two women sitting at a meal. One woman says to the other:
“I started my vegeterianism for health reasons, then it became a moral choice, and now it’s just to annoy people.”
The fondest memories I have growing up weren’t of going to Disney Land or road tripping up the California Coast in the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser (see the car from That 70′s Show). It was of hanging out with my family at a park in Long Beach on July 4th, 1976 — and every 4th of July after that. For the bicentennial, I wore some crazy red-white-and-blue plaid Garinamals outfit that looked like a wardrobe in a blender. My cousins were in the Navy and lived with us and it was so cool to hang out with them and tell other kids “they’re in the Navy!” In my head, that won me some social cred points.
What I remember most was the food.
It didn’t matter what the holiday was, what the state of the economy was, whether my parents had money or not — the spread was always big, always Filipino and anyone was welcome to it. My food is your food.
Straight out-of-the-ocean crabs, pancit, fried fish, rice, lumpia, dinuguan and desserts that challenge my Tagalog to remember. And if we were ‘lucky’ one of my aunts would bust out the much fabled-Filipino style spaghetti — yes, it has cut up hot dogs in it. I remember kids from other picnics at the park coming over and trying our food — some of them liked it, some ran back to their picnics thinking WTF was that?
My parents went through a lot to get to the the US and become citizens — and left a lot of family behind. But the food comes with us.
As my California-Northeast-Filipino palate woofed down some Southern inspired cooking today and sipped on sweat tea, I remembered those meals and this New Yorker cartoon and realize just how much picky eaters annoy the living crap out of me.
Picky eating is a first world problem. People in the developing world aren’t turning down hamburgers because there is a tomato on it and it annoys me when people do that. And no one ever died saying “golly gee, I sure am glad I never tried that plate of . . . that nice man offered me.”
The Fourth of July is the celebration of this country’s birthday — a birthday of immigrants and their food. So when you’re at that park BBQ or picnic reach over and grab a piece of something new or something you might even call foreign on any other day of the year. Remember, your exotic is someone else’s normal. Grab a little exotic even if you are a picky eater. It’s the American thing to do.
You can go back to annoying me tomorrow.
Happy Birthday, America.
And thanks mom and dad. I’m grateful to be here, but now I’m hungry.
- Jose Mallabo
What if Twitter accounts = active users?
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Social media on July 4, 2012
I left LinkedIn about 18 months ago and remember marveling at the insane growth Twitter was experiencing at the time. They hit 50 million tweets per day so quickly and had driven so much activity within LinkedIn. That figure is now 340 million tweets per day driven by 140 million active members.
About a year ago Twitter reported that close to 500,000 new accounts were being opened each day. That’s about 180 million accounts on an annual basis, right? Or about 500 million registered users today.
Hmm.
The lesson here is that accounts do not equal people. A lot of those accounts are machines but a lot of those accounts also are dormant users who don’t do much once they create an account — because the pace on Twitter is impossible to follow and there are few tools built for consumers to help manage and consume it.
The reality is that a small fraction of people actually create content on Twitter. But people say that like it’s a bad thing. A lot has been written about how these above vanity numbers are just that — hype. The comparison to Facebook’s staggering growth and engagement rates are natural and daunting and only feeds the sentiment that no one is really using Twitter.
Not so fast you Nancy Naysayers!
Mass media — namely that little ol’ thing we media researchers like to call the ‘most influential medium in the history of mankind’ or simply ‘television’ — lends a great example of how Twitter content is used by the masses. People watch and consume content, not necessarily create it.
Think about it. If you’re old enough to rent a car in the U.S. odds are you averaged somewhere between 3 to 5 hours a day of TV consumption for a good chunk of your life. How many times did you create TV programming or call or write NBC, HBO, Cinemax or any other programmer to comment on their content? Answer: Zero times in the last (pick any number) years.
What if there was a tool to consume Tweets the way people consume TV programming? What would you call those ‘dormant’ Twitter accounts?
I’d call it an opportunity. Here I come.
- Jose Mallabo