Flack's Revenge

The NY Times covered the addition of Outcast Communications co-founder Margit Wennmachers to the partner ranks of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.  The article mentioned the dearth of marketing executives in top VC roles, and the importance of PR:

Several other venture capital firms have marketing executives, but few
are at the partner level…  Public relations plays a critical role for tech
start-ups, especially Web companies aimed at the general population,
because they have little money for advertising and rely on getting
attention in order to find users, employees and investors.

Perhaps this marks the start of a trend, and we will hear about more PR executives joining VC firms in senior roles.

So was it just a plain old bad idea? Was it a “rough draft” and a “bit of fun,” as a senior Chevrolet executive explained, regarding a memo disclosed by the NY Times yesterday in which the company exhorted against use of Chevy in favor of the full name?  Or was it something more sinister, even clever, a stunt designed to get fresh attention for the old brand?

The company wasted little time in responding to the negative public reaction in response to the NY Times article, which reported:

Bye-bye, indeed, Miss American Pie. If General Motors has its way, you won’t be driving your Chevy to the levee ever again.On Tuesday, G.M. sent a memo to Chevrolet employees at its Detroit headquarters, promoting the importance of “consistency” for the brand, which was the nation’s best-selling line of cars and trucks for more than half a century after World War II.

And one way to present a consistent brand message, the memo suggested, is to stop saying “Chevy,” though the word is one of the world’s best-known, longest-lived product nicknames.

While there aren’t many people that are going to stop using the shortened name, it is easy to see why Chevy would want to be consistent in their brand message. In today’s paper, there was a follow-up piece, which said:

But after a strong public reaction to a
report in The New York Times on the note, G.M. issued a statement on
Thursday that said the memorandum had been “poorly worded.” The
statement said that the memorandum reflected Chevrolet’s strategy as it
expanded internationally, but that the company was not “discouraging
customers or fans from using” Chevy.

It is marketing conventional wisdom: when it comes to brand awareness, there is only room for two or three
leaders in any product category. All others are pretty much disregarded – people just can't seem to make sense of or remember so many product choices.

Similarly, is our ability to focus on too many crises at a time limited?  That is what an article in yesterday's New York Times says.

There’s no obvious link between an American bank, a British oil driller
and a Japanese car maker. But the reputational struggles of these three
global giants suggest one lesson that won’t be lost on shrewd
corporations: the court of public opinion — led by the political class
and including the media — appears capable of coping with only one
villain at a time.

The reporter (no byline, a Reuters story) came to this conclusion by examining media coverage of Toyota, BP and Goldman Sachs in recent months.

I love words, and used to love William Safire's NY Times Magazine On Language column when he was around.
I also enjoy other parts of the Sunday NY Times (although it often takes me the better part of the week to get through it).

The longer articles in the weekend paper analyze news of the week and provide context.
This week's issue had two articles of that really caught my attention (so far).

The first, Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead, caught my eyes because of said word passion. It starts:

So this is about the word "so"

and goes on to describe the growing trend to use the word "so" at the beginning of a sentence:

“So”
may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk
in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can
portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a
major insight.

The article quotes no less a prim and proper figure as Hillary Rodham Clinton's use of the word in this way.
A little later, it states that the convention began in Silicon Valley:

So it is widely believed that the recent ascendancy of “so” began in
Silicon Valley. The journalist Michael Lewis picked it up when
researching his 1999 book “The
New New Thing”: “When a computer programmer answers a question,” he
wrote, “he often begins with the word ‘so.’ ” Microsoft employees have
long argued that the “so” boom began with them.

This jibes with my experiences, as I am sure I have run into this more in my conversations in tech circles than elsewhere.

Another article caught my attention because of my enthusiasm for all things related to social media.
Are 5001 Facebook Friends One too Many? discusses the theoretical and very real limits to the number of friendships one can maintain.

The Dunbar number, based on research (I have blogged about this) says that the number of friendships one can realistically maintain maxes out at 150.
Facebook, on the other hand, seems to scoff at this number, and does not discourage gratuitous friending – that is until you hit 5000 friends. The article says:

What would be an impressive, even exhaustive, number of friends in real
life is bush league for Facebook’s high rollers, who have thousands.
Other social networks use less-intimate terminology to portray contacts
(LinkedIn has “connections,” Twitter has
“followers”), but Facebook famously co-opted the word “friend” and
created a new verb.

Facebook discourages adding strangers as friends, adding that only a
tiny fraction of its 400 million users have reached the 5,000 threshold,
at which point Facebook wags its digital finger and says: That’s
enough. The company cites behind-the-scenes “back-end technology” as
the reason for the cutoff, implying that the system will implode at the
sight of a 5,001st friend.

I found another great article to include in my roundup – this one on journalist blogs and editorial standards, and featured as today's post on the Social Fluency blog,