Hope everyone had a great holiday and now it’s back to business. My business brain got turned on yesterday as I read the article on the front of the NY Times business section. If you haven’t read the piece on how an unscrupulous web vendor grew his business by exploiting Google’s algorithm (my guess is it’s the same with the other search engines as well), you can read it here. The gist of it is this dirtball welcomes and precipitates customer complaints, saying they vault his business higher in Internet search results. It’s really frightening but in the almost 48 hours since it was published (on the web site Saturday night) a lot has happened. Most importantly, it shows me once again why newspapers won’t die any time soon. Continue reading
Tag Archives: public relations
Undercover Boss
Like many of you (well, 38 million of you anyway), I watched the debut of Undercover Boss following the Super Bowl broadcast. Interesting premise – a CEO goes undercover at his own company to see how the “stuff” rolls downhill until it lands amidst the workers we see on the show.
On the show the CEO of Waste Management, a seemingly nice enough guy, got a taste of how the policies he sets forth get implemented. It’s like a big corporate game of telephone and he was looking to understand what came out the other end. What he found out was that even with the best of intentions (and we can debate for hours what came out in the editing room), policies often get screwed up on the way to reality. And that’s what hit me throughout: Continue reading
Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks
The Silent Treatment
I was trained to teach high school English. If you want to try a presentation skills challenge, try presenting poetry structure to the non college-bound freshmen at 8:30 in the morning. You almost have to set yourself on fire to get their full attention and many mornings I had a can of lighter fluid in hand as I reached my wit’s end. But then I realized that all I had to do was shut up. Inevitably, the class would calm down and listen up, often to hear who was on their way to the dean’s office. Continue reading
Filed under digital media, What's Going On
Consult Keith 