How to Get Your Pitch Read Part XIV

By | November 22, 2011
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One way to try to get the journalist to read beyond the headline/subject is the EMBARGOED tag:

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Although it does sound somewhat pompous, and can backfire if it’s not a story worth breaking an embargo for.

Likewise a subject line prefaced by BREAKING NEWS:

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As you can see, MySpace’s PR seems to think anything to do with their client is BREAKING NEWS, and deserves CAPS all the way.

Both of these are in danger of Cry Wolf Syndrome. Use them too many times and they wear out.

Another, better way to get your press release read than to send it and then recall it:

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I have no idea whether these were all intentional but they certainly had me trawling through my trash for the originals. The fact that no explanation is given for the recall just makes it more intriguing.

This reminds me of an ex-colleague who used to put tiny mistakes in his Reuters features so they’d have to be corrected and run again. Doubled his chances of getting them in print.

Of course, overused, both endanger the credibility of the author: the journalist looking like an error-prone hack, the PR flak looking like someone who says something and then promptly takes it back.

The Freshness. and T-Shirt Worthiness, of News

By | November 22, 2011
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(cross-posted from a Loose Wire sister site, ConvergedMedia.net)

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CNN.com has a good way of informing readers of the ‘freshness’ of news by adding notes in red to indicate when the story was added or updated. (In the example above it also adds a ‘developing story’ label.)

This kind of thing is helpful in that the site can still order stories by their importance, but also flag those that are being updated:

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(It also adds a rather cute touch to its whacky stories, allowing readers to order a T-shirt with the headline on it:)

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Click on the T-shirt logo and you’re taken to a page where you can order the shirt:

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The Alarm Clock is Dead, Long Live the Cellphone

By | November 22, 2011
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Gadgets, like software and services, often end up being used in ways the creator didn’t intend. But how many companies make the most of this opportunity?

Take the cellphone. More than a third of Brits use their mobile phone as an alarm clock, according to a survey by British hotel chain Travelodge (thanks textually.org):

Budget hotel chain Travelodge quizzed 3,000 respondents on waking up habits and 71% of UK adults claimed that alarm clocks are now obsolete. The faithful bedside companion has been cast off in favour of the modern must-have, a mobile phone. Sixteen million Brits (36%) now prefer using the latest ring tone to rouse them from sleep rather than the shrill bleeping of an alarm clock.

Why? The article doesn’t say, but the answers are pretty obvious:

  • Who wants to take an extra device with you when you travel?
  • Ever come across an alarm clock with a dozen different ring tones?
  • Ever tried to program an alarm clock you’re not familiar with?
  • Ever tried to rely on wake up services?
  • Most alarm clocks are badly designed.

This might even reveal itself in the Alarm Clock Law: if another device can handle the task of a dumber gadget, it will replace it. So does that mean that the alarm clock is dead?

Not exactly. The alarm clock performs a single function: wake the person up. But that has turned out not to be as easy as it looks. While the design of most alarm clocks have been outsourced to the brain-dead, other designers have recognised the potential of alarm clocks that don’t merely wake up the owner, but keep them awake long enough to get up.

This list, for example, illustrates the thriving world of alarm clock design (think Clocky, that has wheels and has wheels and . And in this post about Seth Godin last September there was a bunch of responses suggesting that in fact alarm clock designers have tried to add features to make the alarm clock relevant. As one of the commenters pointed out, the problem is that we’re just not ready to pay more for those features because alarm clocks have become a commodity.

I suspect it’s a bit more complicated than this. There may be other factors:

  • the decline of radio, and therefore the decline of alarm-clock-radios (34% of respondents wake up to the radio in the Travelodge survey);
  • We travel more and carry more gadgets with us, so something had to stay behind;
  • As home alarm clocks became more sophisticated (music, radio, mains-powered) so we were less likely to take them on the road with us;
  • Then there’s security: I know I stopped bringing an old-style ticking alarm clock with me because it made airport security professionals nervous.

Perhaps most important, we have developed a comfort level with our cellphone’s inner workings, and few of us would like to entrust a morning alarm to something or someone we don’t know.

Cellphone manufacturers, to their credit, seem to have acknowledged this new role: I tried to find the alarm function on a Nokia 6120 and did so in five seconds. I bet it would take me longer on any digital alarm clock. The process is quick and painless, and a little bell logo on the home screen reassuringly indicates it’s set. The alarm itself is cute and starts out unobtrusively but then gets louder until you’re up and about.

Or, more ominously, have thrown the phone across the room where it now sits in pieces. Maybe there is something to be said for keeping the alarm clock separate.

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When Technology Lets Us Down

By | November 22, 2011
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(from tcbuzz’s flickr collection)

Two recent events from the UK underlined how dangerous our dependence on technology can be.

The soccer UEFA Cup final in Manchester was overshadowed by riots when one of the massive screens installed in the city for fans who didn’t have tickets broke down.

And more recently, the inquest into the death of a former BBC editor found that she committed suicide after failing to find support among her colleagues. Her line manager, the inquest heard, tried to find her counselling:

However, her manager sent an email to the wrong address and his request was never acted on.

Technology is passive, and doesn’t take into account the implications of failure. In the first case the technology either didn’t work, or those setting it up didn’t know how to work (or fix) it. In the second case, the error was more obviously human: the sender of an email did not enter the correct address, or did not enter the address correctly.

This is more about our failure to anticipate failure in technology, and our blind dependence on it working.

Obviously, it would have been smart of the organizers in Manchester to have had a back-up plan in place for an eventuality like a screen breaking down. And the line manager’s apparent failure to see whether the email arrived at its destination or even to have picked up a phone and tried to reach the counsellor directly.

But perhaps there are ways for technology to further help us by providing a layer of redundancy? In the case of the screen, could there be some sort of diagnostics test which would alert the technicians that something was amiss, or about to be amiss?

And, in the case of email, the answer is perhaps simpler. There are tools out there to determine whether an email has arrived safely and been opened. The one I use is MessageTag, which will inform me whether an email I have tagged with the service has been opened. (The advanced service will give me a list of emails I have tagged and show me which ones have been opened, and which havent–a very useful checklist to show me which emails I need to follow up on.)

(There are privacy implications with services like MessageTag/MSGTAG, which I’ve gone into before. But sparing use of the service, I believe, is acceptable, so long as you give recipients the option of opting out of future tagging. Other people use the receipt acknowledgement option in Microsoft Outlook and some other email programs.)

We perhaps need to be reminded that technology, as it stands, won’t save us from ourselves.

The Size of the Future

By | November 22, 2011
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(This is a guest post from a friend and long-time colleague, Robin Lubbock of WBUR, who will be contributing to Loose Wire Blog. You can read his blog, the Future of New(s), here.)

Why don’t you buy hard-back books? Either they are too expensive, or too big. They are too big to comfortably hold in one hand. So if you’re sitting in bed trying to read you’ve got to find a way to prop the thing up. Not a hurdle you can’t overcome. But an inconvenience.

Now think about the reader of the future. It’s the same issues. Size, readability, and cost. Any lessons you’ve learned from book reading, apply them to the electronic book and you’ll be imagining the electronic reader of the future.

So why hasn’t anyone made a good electronic book yet?

I was in Staples the other day and an assistant asked me what I wanted. I said “I want something about three or four times the size of an iPhone which I can use for browsing the Web when I’m in bed.” He said they had nothing like that, but he wanted one too.

So when I saw photos of a group of proposed readers in an article by John Markoff in the New York Times this weekend I thought my dream had come true.

But Markoff has a different view. He says he also used to think he was looking for a mid-sized reader for the Web. He went over some of the issues. But he reached the conclusion that although chip power means that you can’t get book performance out of a phone sized reader yet, people could be comfortable reading newspapers on a three-and-a-half-inch screen.

I took his implication to be that if people are happy with a small screen for reading newspapers and blogs, there will be no call for a mid-sized reader.

But I still want one. And I still believe the company that successfully develops a tool that has the same benefits as a novel, in usability, portability and ruggedness, will make a fortune.