Last week I dissected a blogger outreach pitch email line-by-line in A detailed analysis of a perfect blogger pitchas a way of proving that no matter how brief and conversational one of Abraham Harrison‘s blogger pitches may appear at first blush, the effortlessness takes a lot of work and the time of three senior agents. Today I plan to go through, line by line, a site we create to support all of our blogger outreach campaigns. You can call it a Social Media News Release (SMNR) or a microsite, a resource site, or a fact sheet. To those of you who are in communications, you’ll recognize the structural similarity between it and a traditional news release or press release.

To the right, you’ll see, scrolling down most of this article, a full-length screen capture of the SMNR we produced for a launch campaign that we did for the first iPad tablet-only daily newspaper, The Daily. I am using this SMNR because we’re particularly proud of it, and you can explore it In Real Life (IRL) over at thedaily-newsrelease.com.

As I am sure you will notice right away, this SMNR — and all of our SMNRs — is a flat-file, traditional Web page. You’ll also notice that it scrolls and scrolls and scrolls.

No, we didn’t do this because we’re not good coders and don’t understand database-backed web applications like WordPress or Drupal. I have been developing Web applications since they were Perl CGI scripts, into PHP, then into Python-based Zope, and even Ruby on Rails.

We’re building our SMNRs on flat-file, scrollable, single-page Web pages because of human nature: people tend to click away from where we want them to be. We want them to be on-topic, on-target, and really considering the act of blogging on behalf of our clients. In this case, The Daily.

We use old-fashioned HTML standbys such as HTML anchors, allowing us to link within the same page. We don’t want people to miss anything and we don’t want people to get lost in a maze of pages.

We also use flat-file HTML on an Linux-variant Apache install because we tend to reach out to thousands of bloggers at a time — upwards of 8,000 — and we don’t want a database-backed website to get bogged down by a potentially heavy, all-at-once stampede of traffic. Flat-file pages tend to serve faster and more reliably because they’re generally much less resource-intensive.

What we did for The Daily, section by section

Let me go through the SMNR we created for The Daily, section by section, so that I can explain. Long story short:

If we can’t get someone we send an email-based blogger pitch to to post something within five-minutes of opening our email, then we’ve lost him. If it isn’t as easy as pie and as clear as crystal, then we might get nothing. If it looks like it’ll take six minutes instead of five, we’re lucky if we get a tweet or a post to a Facebook Wall. More about that later.

The banner

The banner is simply a quick, attractive “splash.” It’s always above the fold and needs to convey, in a single glance, what’s up and why we didn’t, in fact, waste the blogger’s time. The banner is useless but essential. It allows the client to clearly, as though in summary or abstract, convey the entire message of the campaign both visually and textually. Carefully selected choice slogans, logos, screen shots, and photos go in the banner. However, since it isn’t really possible to “steal” anything from the banner, all the content found in the banner should be replicated somewhere else deeper in the SMNR.

The banner may just seem like bling or flair but it’s is really the single opportunity the PR professional or publicist has to sink the hook, to build the resonance and excitement and to activate the passion required to encourage bloggers to spend their valuable time and finite energy on doing something for me and my clients for free.

One caveat, however, is to make sure the banner isn’t too tall that it blocks out the QuickLinks, below, or seems just like an advert or splash page instead of what it is, a multimedia press release rife with important, objective blog fodder.

The QuickLinks

OK, that’s rather hard to see, so I will make it a bit larger below so that you can see what I am talking about.

That’s better. Well, the QuickLink row is essential because it might be the only interactive part of the SMNR that’s above the fold for some viewers, especially those who are still running 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 screens. (Don’t roll your eyes about the small screen size — there are still millions of folks worldwide who are running small monitors, large font sizes, and also dial-up modems, not your big 2560 x 1440 resolution, double-screened 27″ LCD computer displays. You should work with and understand everyone and design to your lowest common-technology denominator.

So, the QuickLinks are a short-cut to what the blogger wants. These links don’t go anywhere off-page, but, rather, just link down to somewhere much further down on the single page.

And like I said, if we don’t do everything to make it as easy as possible to allow the blogger to search, discover, collect, and report on what we’re pitching, then we’re risking losing them.

The video introduction and the social network sharing

This is a two-parter. Obviously, the commercial that goes with the introduction of the then newly launched iPad-only daily news site, The Daily, is the main thing we wanted to promote. A no-brainer.

More importantly is what I circled in red, the “Share This” embed with the easy-to-share-to-Twitter-Facebook-Yahoo!-Etc. buttons. We never used to add this to our Social Media News Releases. Why? Well, we were afraid that if we did, bloggers would share on social media and social network and with either their Facebook or Twitter friends and followers instead of posting it on their blogs.

The truth is, the SMNR is all about making everything as easy for the blogger as they need it to be. Folks who feel the need to feed the maw of their always-hungry 24/7/365 blog, will always blog (and often then tweet and Facebook their post), and the folks who are interested enough but don’t have the time or interest in the topic or promotion or don’t feel like their blog is the right place for the news we’re pitching won’t blog no matter how much we may well disagree.

So, popping that little “Share This” array of buttons has quadrupled the number of earned media mentions that we get from folks who wouldn’t have blogged our stuff, our news, our clients, anyway — they are just interested enough to throw us a bone and share the Daily with their followers and friends.

The news

The news section is the most important part of the SMNR. Because there’s lots of great stuff to steal. Consider our Social Media News Releases to be one-page versions of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book — which is to say that once we have appealed to a blogger enough that she has opened our email, read our pitch, maybe emailed us, clicked through to the SMNR, scrolled past the banner, the QuickLinks, and ignored the Share This buttons, we want the blogger to have to do as little additional work as humanly possible.

We also post as many photos, illustrations, screen shots, and logos as we can into each SMNR, inline, so that a blogger can easily copy-and-paste each image into the blog post and not need to download and then upload. We act as the host, happy to sponsor the image hosting to the SMNR. As many of these as we can because we never know which one resonates with each blogger.

So, we pre-link all the items in the bullet-list with text links to the daily. We link the phrase The Daily any and every time it comes up in the list. This will appall SEO gurus who think I am an ignoramus who doesn’t know Search. I am an expert in search and my SMNRs are not Google-bait, they’re blogger-bait. We actually do not want our SMNRs to start competing with our clients’ sites — and they used to — but if we mess up all the delicate Google balance, then hopefully our SMNRs will not show up in the top-ten on Google, which is often quite challenging since most sites are absolutely terrible.

Actually, recently, we have had clients who have wanted to optimize their SMNR for search, but then you put the onus of linking, textually, on the shoulders of the bloggers, many of whom are not experts in search or HTML. So, we make sure that almost every single link has one linked textual on The Daily, just to make sure that every potential news item that a blogger might want to copy-and-paste onto his blog includes a link.

We never know what the blogger will or won’t steal, we don’t know how much or how little the blogger will copy, paste, then blockquote into their blog. Some bloggers go full-text, blockquoted, and then wrap the copy that we wrote in a bit of introduction and a parting shot into a blog-post sandwich where the copy, exactly as we wrote it, is the meat.

OK, you may have noticed that the page is pretty long. It requires quite a lot of scrolling, right? Well, remember how brief, concise, and minimal the blogger email pitch was? Well, the pitch might be laser-focused but the SMNR is everything but the kitchen sink. As many diverse and random and seemingly extraneous content and assets as we can find and collect we put into the SMNRs.

Those of you who have ever spoken to me about this before might want to jump ahead. I have an analogy for you. If you think of the Sunday paper and all those coupons, think of our email blogger pitch as a coupon for a big-screen TV at hhgregg.

If we can get that person who’s browsing the Sunday Post to cut out the coupon — already a huge task, to say nothing of even buying a paper, reading the paper, and braving the coupon section — and then pocket the coupon, get in the car, and drive to the store, once that guy gets to the store, he’s generally committed to doing something. While we’re pitching the TV, we’re just happy if that consumer ends up spending an equal sum on something — anything — else, just so long as it’s with hhgregg.

Same thing with an SMNR. The email pitch is the coupon selling a particular thing — the launch of the iPad app — and the SMNR is the big box store offering loads of other things, including bios, and other content. In the case of the Daily SMNR, a blogger may well come in to look at the offer to download and use the iPad app or to share the video with the readers of her blog but may report, instead, on Daily Editor in Chief, Jesse Angelo, who left the New York Post for a position with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

To me, it really doesn’t matter what news from the SMNR the blogger reports, it just matter that the blogger takes time out of her busy, busy, day to spend some time writing about our clients, for free. We really always remember that we’re not entitled to anybody’s time, especially if we’re not paying for it. No matter what, every mention is a gracious courtesy.

Multimedia elements and the essential embed code

I always tell everybody that only 1% of all bloggers have media, communications, or public relations experience. Full stop. Even fewer of them are HTML gurus. Nothing can be assumed. I am not recommending pablum. I am not saying that we have to dumb down for the bloggers, it’s just that they speak a different language from ours in PR. We don’t share lingua francas. So, we always go out of our way to make sure everything is as simple and self-explanatory as possible without ever insulting the blogger.

In the above case, we always make sure that embed codes are included whenever any video is included — if we ever want to see it embedded inline in a blog post. We had an embed code in the first video at the top of the SMNR but it was deleted by the client. Even if our blogger knows how to find the embed code himself, we really don’t want him to leave the site to go hunt it down over at YouTube, as I explained earlier. We don’t want people to ever click away.

So, we include all embed code at a height and width that is optimal for most blogs, in this case 480 pixels wide. If the blogger is sophisticated enough to want a 853 x 480 video, he can go get that, we’re just making it as easy as possible to make the entire process take less than five minutes from the opening of the email to the clicking on Publish.

Social media and tags

The “Share This” buttons at the top of the SMNR are promotional. They don’t reference the client-owned Social Media properties. It is essential to make sure that we offer up everything and anything to the blogger’s consideration.

Finally, to make it as easy as humanly possible for everyone, we include a string of comma-separated topical keywords that each blogger can easily copy-and-paste into the “post tags” portion of your blogging platform.

Yes, I know. this SMNR has everything including the kitchen sink. Not true. It gets worse. If you explore the SMNR for Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Day the SMNR we did for the US Olympic Committee we made for the Winter Olympics in Canada, or one of the SMNRs for the Fresh Air Fund, you’ll see that there are all sort of other things such as banners with embed codes and additional videos and all sorts of other assets — really the kitchen sink, in many cases.

Favicon, header title, and meta description

One last thing that I want to discuss before we end this helluva long post is about fit and finish. Too often “single use” sites like this just don’t get the love they deserve. Make sure you take some time to create a nice “Favicon” aka favorites icon, shortcut icon, website icon, URL icon and bookmark icon. Also, please take the time required to create a strong and descriptive Metatag Title and Description tag as well.

<title>Introducing The Daily - Facts and Resources</title>
<meta name="description" content="The Daily facts and resources page. Introducing The Daily The first digital daily news publication built from scratch for the iPad by some of the best in the business to bring you information that's smart, attractive, and entertaining.">
<meta name="keywords" content="the daily facts, the daily resources, the daily facts and resources, the daily, thedaily.com, rupert murdoch, news corp, apple, mac, ipad, ipod, iphone, iphone 3g, iphone 3gs, iphone 4, steve jobs, macbook, macintosh, mackbook air, ipod nano, new iphone, ipod touch, apps, ipad apps, iphone apps, mac rumors, ipad reviews, apple technology, apple news, ipad news, iphone news, tech, technology, geek, geek news, gadgets, new gadgets, new technology">

Why? Why is it even worth the extra time to go back into the engine room and tool with the Meta Data? Well, the HTML Title tag directly contributes to what people see when they either bookmark your page, what they see in a browser tab, or what they see in the Title Bar. Easy-peasy. A real no-brainer. Also, despite what anyone at SEOMoz thinks, meta tags are still important and here’s why:

You’ll notice that all the text in the search result that comes up when your search serves up thedaily-newsrelease.com as a result is content that Google didn’t so much have to find or scrap; rather, it simply serves up the text directly from the Title we wrote and also the Meta Description we also wrote in the form of the search result headline and description.

I hope the previous 2,500 words have done a pretty good job of explaining why we at Abraham Harrison insist on producing a proper, well-produced, well-branded Social Media News Release (SMNR) — both philosophically, practically, and psychologically.

And because I really don’t know everything, please feel free to comment, contribute, share, and ask any questions you may well still have about the process, the evolution, and any technical details you might be unclear about or I have failed to cover. Thank you for your amazing attention span! Via Marketing Conversation via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz.

Related articles

• The Social Media News Release explained in detail (socialmedia.biz)
• Inside a Social Media News Release (biznology.com)
• How to write an irresistible blogger pitch email (chrisabraham.com)
• Why Using the Social Media News Release is a Big Mistake (hubspot.com)
• Authentic Internet inbound marketing the way God intended (chrisabraham.com)
• Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch (socialmedia.biz)
• The art of writing the perfect blogger pitch (biznology.com)
• Study Shows Social Media Releases Are Less Effective Than Traditional Press Releases (hubspot.com)
• Online newsroooms should go social (econsultancy.com)
• Flipboard, Smaller and Smarter, Launches on iPhone (prnewswire.com)
• Inbound marketing the way nature intended (socialmedia.biz)

I am having a hard time dealing with having just one phone. I dumped my Blackberry Bold 9780 and I am going solo with my Apple iPhone 4 — but the iPhone 4 lusts for juice and I was only lasting a half workday.

Unlike the Blackberry Bold, which has a removable battery, the iPhone’s battery is built-in.  I searched around and discovered that there is a solution. The Just Mobile Gum Pro is a little external battery that has a 4400mAh versus the iPhone 4′s one 1420mAh battery. So, you can charge your iPhone, your iPad, and really any USB device while on the road. It is very very cool and I plan to keep it in my pocket when I am on sales trips and sales runs.

It is surely and really cool and handy and it is much easier to charge one device in a hotel room than it is four.

Related articles

• 5 iPhone Battery Cases to Keep You Connected Longer (mashable.com)
• Rumor: Apple considering releasing Siri for iPhone 4 (applescoop2.wordpress.com)
• Apple Reportedly Testing Siri on the iPhone 4 (pocketnow.com)
• Apple iPhone 4S review: Still the best? (intomobile.com)
• Apple iPhone 4S Siri Commercial (great-ads.blogspot.com)
• Apple iPhone 4S with SIRI !! (gputoaster.wordpress.com)
• Weekend sales of iPhone 4S top 4 million, Apple reports (news.consumerreports.org)
• Apple iPhone 4s and iCloud Promo Videos (mobileoo.wordpress.com)
• Apple’s new iPhone 4S: An early review (bizjournals.com)
• Creanncy releases Camera Quick for iPad 2 and iPhone 4 (pitchengine.com)

I was one of the first Qik users and then it sort of all fell apart when Qik didn’t support my Blackberry Bold 9700 so I abandoned it. Now that I have an Apple iPhone 4, I have reinstalled Qik, paid up on my $49/month, and will see if I like it and use it. Here’s the feed, which I guess it either “last video” or “live video” depending on if I am filming or not. let me know what you think and if you like it or use it.

This morning I picked up the Financial Times and stumbled upon Lucy Kellaway‘s column this morning, Switch off and stay on through worlidays. According to Ms. Kellaway:

Worliday is a bit like holiday and a bit like work. It’s the future for most professional workers, and actually, contrary to what most people would have you believe, worliday is really rather nice.

Working at Abraham Harrison is a little like an everyday worliday if you play it right and get your work done.  Daniel Krueger, my Director of Client Services, is in constant contact with home base; however, he also makes plenty of time for the gym, his kids, his family, his foodie dinners, his garden, yard work, and quite a few well-deserved pops to the beach — and also winning second in a masters 35-and-over wrestling tournament along with his bantam wrestler son.

Here is the sort of thing I did when I was on worliday 10 days ago in north Cornwall. I would wake up, do a few e-mails and then go for a walk by the sea. Later, I might write an article sitting under a window with a view of a stream. After that, I’d go outside to light the coals to barbecue a sausage. Or rather, I’d look at the glowering sky and put the sausages under the grill instead.

Dan’s  work-life balance is not the result of excluding work at quitting time, but rather because he’s always accessible, from just after five in the morning until around around ten at night.  I like to think that we don’t take advantage of this accessibility but it is very reassuring to know that he’s monitoring client health, campaign success, and staff needs a little bit all the time.

Most professional workers have been taking worlidays for some time now. The steady advance of the concept can be traced by the rise and fall of the automatic out-of-office e-mail. Five years ago these were all the rage: if you sent anyone an e-mail in August, you would get an automatic message straight back telling you that the recipient was off on a two-week break. Then, a couple of years later, the response changed: you would still get the automated message but it would be swiftly followed by a proper response tapped into a BlackBerry from a Tuscan poolside.

This year, you will just get the message from the pool – hardly anyone sends out-of-office e-mails at all. Indeed last week I had lunch with the head of a media company who has forbidden his staff from sending them at all, on the grounds that they are both pointless and unprofessional.

And since we have virtual teams and a distributed company, his willingness to check his iPhone whenever he’s awake while being unwilling to build artificial walls to the company’s needs means that it always feels like he’s the first to come into the office and the last to leave — even when he’s picking tomatoes, besting his bench press personal best, popping off into the surf with his boy and girl, or grilling shrimp on the barbie.

This means the worliday is not family unfriendly at all as families get twice as many holidays. Admittedly they only have half the minds of their parents at any given time, but most children may see this as an advantage.

We don’t really ever know where he is or where he isn’t.  All he needs is a strong Internet connection for his PC to support Skype and at least a few bars of EDGE on his smart phone and he’s good to go wherever he is — and when he doesn’t have anything on his calendar, Dan has even more flexibility.

However, the mass adoption of the worliday doesn’t mean everyone ought to be given longer holiday entitlements. It means that holiday entitlements should be scrapped altogether. The current arrangement only makes sense for people who work fixed hours – they clearly need fixed holidays too. But for professionals who have not worked set hours for decades, fixed holidays seem an anachronism.

In fact, our CEO, Mark Harrison, has made the worliday his life and, in many ways, the company has been built in his image — in our image — since we’re both offended by the office culture of seat-warming — where the physical placement of a person during work hours is considered more valuable than the quality and quickness of work completed. If you’re the sort of person who can work poolside in Mauritius without compromising the communication chain, work quality, or accessibility, we honestly believe you should. Why should there be a work state and a vacation state?

The first great thing about the worliday is that there is no stark transition between the two states. Because I work when I’m away, there is no unseemly dash before I go. Better still, the worliday means you should be able to go away more often to compensate for the fact that you are still (sort of) working when absent.

The worliday is the only sort of holidays that business owners, consultants, and entrepreneurs have really ever taken; however, within the beltway in DC, the most ambitious among us — the professional class — tend to either never take their vacation time or naturally adopt the worliday.

And, you’re really not as ambitious as you think you are if you’re not tied to a Blackberry no matter what brand of Blackberry you have, especially in this economy — taking a couple weeks of work radio silence may be OK with your employer, but is it indeed a good idea for the vacation-taker?

The danger with such a scheme is that ambitious people could stop going away at all, but that is already a danger with the existing system. Indeed, so long as people are paid for results rather than for sitting at their desks, taking a great deal of worliday seems entirely consistent with achieving a great deal of success.

The irony is that the only disciplinary talks we have had with the staff of Abraham Harrison is when our management team starts building walls to our access. Since we’re a global, 24/7 company, direct, immediate, access to our managers is all we ask, whether we actually use it or not.

While there is the flexibility to be top employee at Abraham Harrison while being on permanent worliday, the system does break down when communication breaks down.  If you’re an essential member of the team, especially in the management team, you cannot be out of the loop.

We do not expect a seat warmer employee who literally is the first in and last out at the office, but when we’re 100% virtual, communication channels need to remain strong and the only mortal sin is unpredictably disappearing, breaking the client service chain, or being the last to know when something threatens to go sideways or blows up.

The worst thing that can be asked in such a permissive, trusting, worliday-friendly company is “where were you?”

For some people, the level of perceived freedom that we offer can be all the rope that hangs them. Though it is rarely because of malicious intent, sometimes the fit is wrong and that particular employee demands more structure and oversight. In order for worlidays to work, each employee needs to be self-motivating and committed to the success of the client and the team.

Via Marketing Conversation

As you know from my recent post, Calling Time-of-Death on RIM Blackberry, I could have written the following letter as an almost decade-long Blackberry fan, even though this was allegedly written by a Research in Motion employee, signed “a RIM user, Chris Abraham.”

Via MobileCrunch:

I have lost confidence.

While I hide it at work, my passion has been sapped. I know I am not alone — the sentiment is widespread and it includes people within your own teams.

Mike and Jim, please take the time to really absorb and digest the content of this letter because it reflects the feeling across a huge percentage of your employee base. You have many smart employees, many that have great ideas for the future, but unfortunately the culture at RIM does not allow us to speak openly without having to worry about the career-limiting effects.

Before I get into the meat of the matter, I will say I am not part of a large group of bitter employees wishing to embarrass us. Rather, I believe these points need to be heard and I desperately want RIM to regain its position as a successful industry leader. Our carriers, distributors, alliance partners, enterprise customers, and our loyal end users all want the same thing… for BlackBerry to once again be leading the pack.

We are in the middle of major “transition” and things have never been more chaotic. Almost every project is falling further and further behind schedule at a time when we absolutely must deliver great, solid products on time. We urge you to make bold decisions about our organisational structure, about our culture and most importantly our products.

While we anxiously wait to see the details of the streamlining plan, here are some suggestions:

1) Focus on the End User experience

Let’s obsess about what is best for the end user. We often make product decisions based on strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice — the end user doesn’t care. We simply have to admit that Apple is nailing this and it is one of the reasons they have people lining up overnight at stores around the world, and products sold out for months. These people aren’t hypnotized zombies, they simply love beautifully designed products that are user centric and work how they are supposed to work. Android has a major weakness — it will always lack the simplicity and elegance that comes with end-to-end device software, middleware and hardware control. We really have a great opportunity to build something new and “uniquely BlackBerry” with the QNX platform.

Let’s start an internal innovation revival with teams focused on what users will love instead of chasing “feature parity” and feature differentiation for no good reason (Adobe Flash being a major example). When was the last time we pushed out a significant new experience or feature that wasn’t already on other platforms?

Rather than constantly mocking iPhone and Android, we should encourage key decision makers across the board to use these products as their primary device for a week or so at a time — yes, on Exchange! This way we can understand why our users are switching and get inspiration as to how we can build our next-gen products even better! It’s incomprehensible that our top software engineers and executives aren’t using or deeply familiar with our competitor’s products.

2) Recruit Senior SW Leaders & enable decision-making

I’m going to say what everyone is thinking… We need some heavy hitters at RIM when it comes to software management. Teams still aren’t talking together properly, no one is making or can make critical decisions, all the while everyone is working crazy hours and still far behind. We are demotivated. Just look at who our major competitors are: Apple, Google & Microsoft. These are three of the biggest and most talented software companies on the planet. Then take a look at our software leadership teams in terms of what they have delivered and their past experience prior to RIM… It says everything.

3) Cut projects to the bone.

There is a serious need to consolidate our focus to just a handful of projects. Period.

We need to be disciplined here. We can’t afford any more initiatives based on carrier requests to squeeze out slightly more volume. Again, back to point #1, focus on the end users. They are the ones making both consumer & enterprise purchase decisions.

Strategy is often in the things you decide not to do.

On that note, we simply must stop shipping incomplete products that aren’t ready for the end user. It is hurting our brand tremendously. It takes guts to not allow a product to launch that may be 90% ready with a quarter end in sight, but it will pay off in the long term.

Look at Apple in 1997 for tips here. I really want you to watch this video because it has never been more relevant. It is our friend Steve Jobs in 97 and it may as well be you speaking to RIM employees and partners today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY

4) Developers, not Carriers can now make or break us

We urgently need to invest like we never have before in becoming developer friendly. The return will be worth every cent. There is no polite way to say this, but it’s true — BlackBerry smartphone apps suck. Even PlayBook, with all its glorious power, looks like a Fisher Price toy with its Adobe AIR/Flash apps.

Developing for BlackBerry is painful, and despite what you’ve been told, things haven’t really changed that much since Jamie Murai’s letter. Our SDK / development platform is like a rundown 1990?s Ford Explorer. Then there’s Apple, which has a shiny new BMW M3… just such a pleasure to drive. Developers want and need quality tools.

If we create great tools, we will see great work. Offer shit tools and we shouldn’t be surprised when we see shit apps.

The truth is, no one in RIM dares to tell management how bad our tools still are. Even our closest dev partners do their best to say it politely, but they will never bite the hand that feeds them. The solution? Recruit serious talent, buy SDK/API specialist companies, throw a truckload of money at it… Let’s do whatever it takes, and quickly!

5) Need for serious marketing punch to create end user desire

25 million iPad users don’t care that it doesn’t have Flash or true multitasking, so why make that a focus in our campaigns? I’ll answer that for you: it’s because that’s all that differentiates our products and its lazy marketing. I’ve never seen someone buy product B because it has something product A doesn’t have. People buy product B because they want and lust after product B.

Also an important note regarding our marketing: a product’s technical superiority does not equal desire, and therefore sales… How many Linux laptops are getting sold? How did Betamax go? My mother wants an iPad and iPhone because it is simple and appeals to her. Powerful multitasking doesn’t.

BlackBerry Messenger has been our standout, yet we wasted our marketing on strange stories from a barber shop to a horse wrangler. I promise you, this did nothing to help us in the mind of the average consumer.

We need an inventive and engaging campaign that focuses on what we are about. People buy into a brand / product not just because of features, but because of what it stands for and what it delivers to them. People don’t buy “what you do,” people buy “why you do it.” Take 3 minutes to watch the this video starting from the 2min mark: http://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4

6) No Accountability – Canadians are too nice

RIM has a lot of people who underperform but still stay in their roles. No one is accountable. Where is the guy responsible for the 9530 software? Still with us, still running some important software initiative. We will never achieve excellence with this culture. Just because someone may have been a loyal RIM employee for 7 years, it doesn’t mean they are the best Manager / Director / VP for that role. It’s time to change the culture to deliver or move on and get out. We have far too many people in critical roles that fit this description. I can hear the cheers of my fellow employees now.

7) The press and analysts are pissing you off. Don’t snap. Now is the time for humility with a dash of paranoia.

The public’s questions about dual-CEOs are warranted. The partnership is not broken, but on the ground level, it is not efficient. Maybe we need our Eric Schmidt reign period.

Yes, four years ago we beat Microsoft when everyone said Windows Mobile with Direct Push in Exchange would kill us. It didn’t… in fact we grew stronger.

However, overconfidence clouds good decision-making. We missed not boldly reacting to the threat of iPhone when we saw it in January over four years ago. We laughed and said they are trying to put a computer on a phone, that it won’t work. We should have made the QNX-like transition then. We are now 3-4 years too late. That is the painful truth… it was a major strategic oversight and we know who is responsible.

Jim, in referring to our current transition recently said: “No other technology company other than Apple has successfully transitioned their platform. It’s almost never done, and it’s way harder than you realize. This transition is where tech companies go to die.”

To avoid this death, perhaps it is time to seriously consider a new, fresh thinking, experienced CEO. There is no shame in no longer being a CEO. Mike, you could focus on innovation. Jim, you could focus on our carriers/customers… They are our lifeblood.

8) Democratise. Engage and interact with your employees — please!

Reach out to all employees asking them on how we can make RIM better. Encourage input from ground-level teams—without repercussions—to seek out honest feedback and really absorb it.

Lastly, we’re all reading the news and many are extremely nervous, especially when we see people get fired. We need an injection of confidence: share your strategy and ask us for support. The headhunters have already started circling and we are at risk of losing our best people.

Now would be a great time to internally re-brand and re-energize the workplace. For example, rename the company to just “BlackBerry” to signify our new focus on one QNX product line. We should also address issues surrounding making RIM an enjoyable workplace. Some of our offices feel like Soviet-era government workplaces.

The timing is perfect to seriously evaluate at our position and make these major changes. We can do it!

Sincerely,

A RIM Employee

I have been devoted to Blackberry since my first RIM Blackberry 957. Before that, I don’t believe I had a pager style but I might have had a 950, which was really tiny any really handy.  Anyway, I have never been without once since. 2003-2011.

I still have one, a RIM Blackberry Bold 9780. I still love typing on it; however, the stupid thing always has some sort of availability issue that disallows it to actually work for me as I patiently wait for the little clock to stop spinning on it’s face.

It is incapable of multitasking so when it’s deep in though, I can’t even make or receive calls.

I upgraded from the RIM Blackberry Bold 9700 thinking that the new OS and double the memory might help but the little memory manager has made me uninstall everything, down to my Google Talk client, my Google Sync, and my de-duper (contact dupes suck and there is no built in merge application).

Everyone told me, “wait until the RIM Blackberry Bold 9900 — now that’s going to be a phone,” but that’s what someone told me about the Flip video cam right before it was dismantled with extreme prejudice.  I can’t wait until the Bold 9900 or Bold 9930, I need a Blackberry that keeps me in love with the Brand immediately as in now!

So, I finally bought myself an Apple iPhone but it doesn’t type well at all.  Not as fiercely quickly as does my series of RIM Blackberries.

I call time of death on RIM. It’s over.  You guys are done.

I am surely not the only one who feels this way. So does John Biggs over at Mobile Crunch who just posted RIM, You’re Done Here:

Research In Motion is done. They’ll be bought in the next year or so, their products will roll into whoever buys them – Microsoft, most probably – and they’ll go the way of Nokia, Danger, and countless other mobile platforms. They’ll exist independently for a while and then be subsumed. It’s over.

Here’s why.

There is no money in “business” phones. Blackberries aren’t status symbols. They’re the real-world equivalent of the thick, heavy IT-department-assigned business laptop. They’re staid, boring, and unwanted but people are used to them and, for email, they are quite capable. But that’s about it.

But these phones are increasingly getting a drubbing from IT departments who are starting to support more popular devices including, obviously, iOS and Android phones. No one ever got fired for installing a BES, but you can be sure someone will get fired for not supporting WebDAV standards over the next few years.

You can make lots of money selling hardware to fleet buyers, to be sure. But when those fleet buyers are saving money by refusing to pay for devices, where do you think consumers are going to go? Back to the same hardware they’ve been saddled with for years?

Their audience has already moved on. I remember a few years ago I was invited onto MTV (and never invited back) to talk about the “top smartphones.” I think it was 2007. These included a Windows Mobile device, a new Sidekick, and, inexplicably, a Blackberry Curve. The results of a viewer survey had the Sidekick beat out the other devices quite handily but what I couldn’t understand was how the Curve, for all its benefits, could have made it onto the list in the first place. The Sidekick was a lifestyle device and even the WinMo-powered Dash by HTC could be seen as a lifestyle device. But the Curve? Never.

RIM has an audience, but that audience is shrinking. Arguably they had a good run, but there are plenty of other devices from other manufacturers – Microsoft included – that have much more cachet in terms of general appeal. Even BBM no longer sounds as enticing as it once did, especially in an era of Facetime, Qik, and Hipchat.

RIM’s competitors are stronger and faster. Android is taking the lead and iOS is a close second in the general consumer phone market and, barring some misstep by either party, RIM will always be a distant third. I’d even say that Windows Phone, post Mango, is looking to be a better business solution for many users than anything RIM has to offer. What could RIM do to pull out of this death spiral? Release consumer phones? Nope, tried that. Release business phones? Nope, tried that. Release a tablet? Nope. Which brings us to our next point:

They blew the tablet race. Completely. They blew it. RIM is estimating they’ll sell 800,000 after preliminary expectations of 2.4 million. Even if every single Blackberry owner was forced by their IT departments to buy a Playbook at gunpoint they probably couldn’t sell half that number.

The Playbook is a beautiful, well-made device. But it is a year too late and far too confusing for the average consumer. Their biggest mistake? RIM failed to provide native email out of the box. That’s the long and the short of it. The biggest name in email couldn’t pull off email.

No matter what they change, they can’t escape the past. Take a look at the video below. This is from Nokia’s last smartphone to run a variant of Meego. Looks pretty great, right?

But it’s not. It will never see the light of day and, in fact, all of the dedicated work put into the UI and the OS will soon be lost. Why? Because it’s far too little far too late. Nokia, a giant in the industry, now exists as a shell of its former glory. RIM can, and will, go the same route.

RIM’s legacy is writ large on the world around us. Almost every major enterprise mobile system is patterned on their excellent email and PIM solution. But they are now slaves to their own success. They can’t sell anything other than a keyboard-candybar phone in an era where the keyboard is increasingly irrelevant or hidden away until needed. This failure of imagination in both consumer and manufacturer is their curse. In a world where every phone is smart and every phone does email, there is little to recommend any RIM phone over any other. It’s over and now we’re just waiting for the buy-out and inevitable disappearance of one of the greatest mobile companies in modern memory.

As “biased” as you’ll say I sound in this post, I’ll be sad to see them go.

Cute promotion for the new Leica V-Lux 20 12.1 MP snappy via Creative Criminals; however, what makes cameras obsolete is not size or quality or price, it has to do with functionality: where’s the phone?

It’s the phone, stupid!  It’s the inability to live-tweet, live-share, live blog, and live-Facebook that makes us always choose the 5-8MP smart phone over the 10-14MP digital camera, stupid!

I would be happy to buy a camera with a phone (I payed over $700 for the Nokia n95 because of its early 5MP camera with its Karl Zeiss lens — but it was a phone, too)

Cover via Amazon

I carry my Amazon Kindle 3G device everywhere.

Currently, I read MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times exclusively via my Kindle, delivered via WhisperNet.

I run through as much content as possible at the gym on the machines or maybe on walks.  Yes, I have books as well.  I can buy them too easily and on the fly.

I found a gorgeous bullet list of reasons I wish I had thought of as to why I love the physical Kindle device, with 3G Whispernet, from Robin Sloan in the form of The Kindle abroad:

• The Kindle has a web browser. It’s simple and slow, but solid enough to check Gmail and mobile.twitter.com. In fact, it works beautifully with the mobile versions of most sites.
• It’s almost miraculously connected. The browser wouldn’t mean much if Whispernet—Amazon’s set of carriage agreements with cell networks around the world—didn’t work everywhere. It does, and it’s also free. I was using Edge and 3G Whispernet reliably in remote-ish provinces and on sleepy islands. In fact, my Kindle generally got a stronger signal than my iPhone.
• It’s light and durable. There’s a big difference between older Kindles (which I’m toting) and newer ones in this regard; I’m considering snagging one of the latest simply because they’re so much smaller, slimmer and lighter. But any Kindle is more portable than any iPad, and I also felt a lot more comfortable tossing the Kindle into a bag or dragging it across the beach. (I had my iPad on this trip, too, but barely used it.)
• The Kindle works in direct sunlight. Especially when you’re traveling, this is a big deal. Standing on a busy corner or sitting on the beach, the Kindle is always totally usable. And this provides another contrast to the iPad, which always sends me scurrying to the shadows. (It really is a resolutely indoors device, isn’t it?)
• The battery lasts forever. You know this already. My Kindle was on a once-a-week charging schedule, and that’s with lots of reading and regular internet checks.
• Your Kindle is your itinerary. Using the Kindle as a virtual folder for travel documents was perhaps the biggest aha; it was my traveling companion who figured this out first. We got into the habit of forwarding tickets and reservations straight to our kindle.com addresses, which all Kindle owners have. (Oddly, this is the one part of international service that’s not free, but the price is negligible: $0.99 per megabyte for documents delivered this way.) It feels so good to have all of your information right there, in a format that’s so legible—not just to you, but to others. Once, in Turkey, I simply passed my Kindle to a ticket agent to help her understand where we were trying to go.
• Travel guides on the Kindle work great. I was a little skeptical about this—I think of the Kindle as being bad at random-access material, and a travel guide is definitely one of those books you want to be able to flip through freely. But as it turns out, we got a ton of use out of a Lonely Planet Kindle edition—purchased mid-trip, natch—and by the end of the trip, I felt like a dope for having bothered with a physical guide (which weighed in at about five Kindles).

I am going to add a few more of my own:

• The deal for using WhisperNet abroad is a bargian. When you are abroad, in whatever country, you only have to pay, I think, $4.99/week to connect all week, wirelessly, via their local 3G and once you agree to that, it will recur as long as you’re abroad.  Considering how expensive 3G can be abroad for international roaming.
• While you don’t want to do it, losing or breaking your Kindle doesn’t hurt as much as it could. I know you could read your Amazon content at the gym via your iPad or iPhone; however, losing a $114-$189 device is a lot more bearable than losing a $300-$900 device at the gym or in your travel bag or in your backpack or anywhere.  In addition, all of the content is completely replaceable.  If you lose your Kindle, disable it via your online Kindle home, order a replacement, and all your content will be there when you re-connect.  And even if it is not, you can “send” any content you have purchased to your new Kindle.
• You can afford and support more than one Kindle with mirrored content. You can buy one 3G Kindle and then a couple cheaper Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers at just $114 each and then leave them at home, leave one near the sofa, one in the bathroom, and make sure your Kindle 3G is reserved for the road — so just leave it in your “to go” bag like I do.
• The only Kindle that sucks is the Kindle you don’t have. Be sure to either keep your Kindle, habitually, in your day pack, your work briefcase, or your purse, because there’s really no reason to have a WhisperNet-enabled Kindle unless you bring it with you.  It should not be preserved at a precious thing — it is a lot more durable and tough, even without a pretty Kindle Lighted Cover like the one I have, with integrated, Kindle-powered light.
• The official covers are the best covers for the Kindle, especially the one with the reading light. I personally use a black Kindle Lighted Cover which I use to read the Kindle on flights or in bed. Just beware that using the integrated light really sucks the power out of the device, rendering it as power-hungry as its cousins the Android tab, smartphone, the iPad, and the iPhone.  Otherwise, Robin is right, the batteries last forever!
• While it isn’t perfect, Kindle does have a sort of Social Network and Social savvy.So, this should be my official Chris Abraham Amazon Kindle Profile that you can look at and, I guess, connect to.   Also, if you have a Kindle be sure to sign up in order to be able to share what you’re reading and selected excerpts to Twitter and/or Facebook, which I do; caveat, the links aren’t friendly and only go to a promotional page and not to the free, web-accessible, page, which is pissing my friends off, even though they all probably know how to use Google to find the content if they need to and are just being lazy bastards.
• Finally, you don’t have to buy every single book you want to remember to read when you own a Kindle.Thanks you to the doctor who told me that I can add any title I think of without paying if I want to remember the books by adding them as “Try a Sample” instead of buying the whole book. Who knows if I will actually like A Game of Thrones; however, I can download a sample, which acts as a reminder, costs nothing, and also allows one to see if you like it by reading a bit, like you might do, at your leisure, while spending a lazy afternoon at Powell’s City of Books.
• I have replaced a lot of paper media with ones and zeros towards saving the earth. I can gloat here in Portland because I have replaced a lot of paper-based monthly and weekly magazines and daily papers with digital content, saving the forest and oil and the gas-emission of Mr. Postman.  Aside from the daily Oregonian and New York Times, which I receive at my door every morning, most of my weekly journals and magazines and daily newspapers  are delivered automagically via WhisperNet currently in the form of MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.  That says nothing of the hundred or so books I have downloaded to my ebook reader, both bought or downloaded for free.  And, I am pretty sure that powered by technology developed by E Ink Corp requires a lot less energy for its batteries from the mains and is better for the environment anyway, all on its own, rather than needing to be charged nightly — or several times a day for the power users — like the tablets and smartphones are.  Yes, yes, a well-used book is way more environmentally kind as is library use — unless you consider the overhead of heating, cooling, and lighting a library, that is.

Again, thank you so much to Robin Sloan of Snarkmarket in the form of The Kindle abroad for inspiring this post.

Abraham Harrison LLC’s client, The Daily, just launched it’s cool new iPad application today!

The Daily is a first-of-its-kind daily national news publication built exclusively as an application for tablet computing. It provides readers the engaging experience of a magazine combined with the immediacy of the web and the need-to-know content of a newspaper, all while elevating user experience beyond the printed word. The Daily is a subscription-based news product, published 365 days a year, at the cost of $0.99 cents a week or $39.99 a year. For more information on The Daily go to: www.thedaily.com.

The FAQ covers a lot of the details that you might be wondering about:

What is The Daily?
The first digital news publication with original content created every day exclusively for the iPad®. Built from scratch by a team of top journalists and designers, The Daily covers the world: breaking news, sports, pop culture, entertainment, apps, games, technology, opinion, celebrity gossip and more.
The Daily has the depth and quality of a magazine but is delivered daily like a newspaper and updated in real-time like the web. Great stories, photos, video, audio and graphics come alive the more you touch, swipe, tap and explore. The customized sports section allows you to follow your favorite teams’ scores, pictures and headlines — even players’ tweets.

How often does it publish?
There is a new edition of The Daily early every morning — 365 days a year. The Daily can update with breaking news stories throughout the day, and many articles pull in data from the web at large, so that stories have elements that live in real time.

How much does it cost?
The Daily is absolutely free for 2 weeks. Then it’s just 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year. If you’re interested in the math, that’s around 14 cents or 11 cents a day, respectively — far less than any traditional newspaper that we’ve seen. And every day’s issue has the amount of content you might expect from a monthly magazine, many of which cost $2.99-$5.99 for a single issue. The Daily is currently available exclusively on the App Store. If you already have an iTunes account you don’t even need to pull out your credit card.

How do I download the latest issue every day?
Just open The Daily app on your iPad when it’s connected to the Internet via WiFi or 3G. The latest issue will start downloading automatically. You can begin reading almost immediately. No need to wait for the whole issue to download; it will continue in the background as you read.

Do I need to be connected to the Internet to read The Daily ?
Once you’ve downloaded the day’s issue, there is no need to be connected. All the articles, text and photos will be there; you only need a live connection to stream videos that you’ll find throughout the issue, to pull in the live feeds attached to some articles, and to comment and share. The long and short of it is, there’s plenty to read and do in The Daily when you’re on the subway or otherwise out of range. Being connected makes it better.

Why the iPad?
The Daily was created to take advantage of everything tablet computing can do. Without the legacy of print or even a destination web site, we can focus exclusively on a great tablet computing experience. The iPad offers an incredible reading experience, and being the first of its kind also means there is an existing reader base that can take advantage of The Daily. In the coming months we’ll announce The Daily’s availability on Android tablets, and we’ll also be considering other platforms as people adopt them.

What about sharing with friends that don’t have iPads?
While The Daily lives on the iPad, web-friendly versions of most of its articles can be easily shared via Facebook, Twitter and email. Hit the ‘share’ button at the top right of the app to try it. While the full tablet experience is unavoidably lost in translation, the text, photos and video aren’t — and quite often that’s enough to share articles conversationally with friends and colleagues.
You can also find some of our content on our blog, http://blog.thedaily.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo for updates and more.

You can also follow The Daily on all the normal social media sites:

Via Marketing Conversation

I have done everything to do with podcasting except for having a podcast.  I would say I am as close to an expert in podcasting as anyone can be without a stitch of practical experience.  I have been listening to podcasts for well over five years and know all the major podcasters.  I attend as many podcamps as I can.  I have even been blogging for 12 years and yet I have never started a podcast.  “Why,” you ask?  Well, because podcasting is really really hard.

It has been such a challenge to be persistent enough to maintain both Because the Medium is the Message and Marketing Conversation.  To keep up-to-date with what’s going on, being au courant, relevant, and interesting.  That’s hard enough. Recording audio or video, synchronizing with a co-host, making technology work, making sound work, learning the recording, editing and compression strategies necessary to compete with more professional podcasts, and then being persistent, consistent, amusing, reliable, and worthy of a Very Large Download approaching 50-100 megabytes.

I listen to No Agenda religiously as well as Adam Curry‘s Daily Source Code when I can.  I also listen to Shel Holtz‘s FIR as much as I can and used to listen to many more — but it is also hard to spend and dedicate the time listening.

I believe that podcasts are going the way of the blog.  As I wrote in The Blog is Dead — Now’s the Best Time to Start Blogging!, most of the fair weather bloggers have given up because even blogging is hard. Especially when you do it alone. Now, Marketing Conversation is becoming much more effective and popular these days, but that’s because we’re blogging as a team — we’re collaborating.

Podcasting is sort of a little like radio — people listen to their favorite personalities.  I guess you could have different hosts and run Coast to Coast AM post Art Bell and have a stable of hosts, but then there is the challenge of organizing more than just yourself, wooking multiple people to commit what can be a grueling schedule of keeping, maintaining, editing, uploading, and marketing a podcast.

What’s more, podcasts are a little dangerous.  The more successful a podcast becomes, the more people download and the chance that you will incur lots and lots of bandwidth overage charge.

What’s more, casually monetizing podcasts is impossible. With this blog, I can post annoying Google AdSense / AdWord ads all over the place and make a couple cups of coffee back and help underwrite the hosting.  For Podcasts, however, the only advertising that you can do is either reading ads into your podcast that one or more sponsors have given you — thus, you have to spend lots of time finding sponsors and advertisers — or you can ask for pledges the way Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak — and NPR — does, sending people to a pledge or donations page.

That said, God bless everyone who goes through that ringer.  I guess I would surely participate in a podcast as long as someone else did all the editing, all the pre- and post-production, all the uploading, all the hosting, all the fees, and took care of all of the advertising stock.  Then, I would be more than happy to saunter in and be the face, be the voice.

So, until someone offers me that, I will just listen.  I listen via my iPad, via my iPhone, via my Blackberry using an awesome app called Podcasts — and it is surely worth the $3.99 fee as you can download password-protected podcasts like Streamlink offers — and also I love using the built in Nokia podcast software on my aging-but-still-awesome Nokia N95.

Anyway, happy new years and I don’t know really why I wrote this.  Maybe because I was listening to some podcasts this AM and, for a second, I was contemplating it, especially as I unpacked my trusty ZOOM H2, until I stopped, reconsidered, and said, “no way, man, podcasting is too hard!”

God bless you merry podcasters of the world!