Posts under ‘Business Uses’

MediaPost: HP’s Bermel ‘Scared To Death’ Of User-Generated Content. User-generated content brings “huge additional pressure,” (Hewlett-Packard interactive director Mary) Bermel said. “We want our brand in the marketplace presented in a certain way. Our advertising teams are used to push marketing–now we’re asking them to create pull marketing, things that will attract people [...]

Over at the MozillaWiki, they’re asking users for ideas about what features to put in upcoming versions:
We are currently in the early development stage for Firefox 3, and would like to collect all the ideas for feature enhancements in a single place. Our goal is to create a single index that lists what sorts of [...]

Floyd Landis, who won the Tour de France bicycle marathon, was charged with doping violations. He’s put up his defense on floydlandis.com, replete with documentation and detail.
This is an excellent example of how to use the Web to amplify one’s own case in a complex situation. News coverage of the case has been, by definition, [...]

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Business Week: Wal-Mart’s Jim and Laura: The Real Story. So are Laura and Jim real people? Or part of an elaborate publicity stunt? It turns out they are for real. However, their story, told in full, with certain financial payments disclosed, does not reflect as well on Wal-Mart as perhaps the company would like. The [...]

WikiPatents - Community Patent Review says it
contributes to the US patent system by commenting on issued patents and, soon, pending patent applications.

OK, but what does the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office say? They’ll decide whether the overworked examiners — this is the charitable explanation for the garbage patents being issued all the time — will [...]

(Here’s an op-ed column I wrote for PR Week, on the issue of buzz marketing.)

When I was in my 20s, I rented an upstairs apartment from a middle-aged couple. Not long after I moved in, they invited me down for a beer.
After a brief chat, they launched into a pitch to a) sell me home [...]

The LAPD Blog (at the Los Angeles Police Department)
hopes to maintain an open dialogue with the communites we serve and those who have an interest in the men and women of this organization. We encourage you to express your opinions about current events through respectful and insightful discussion.

This will be an experiment worth watching. [...]

Jeff Jarvis, commenting on a couple of stories in the New York Times, says:
The problem is that they still think the internet is something the powerful use to affect the rest of us. Wrong. It’s what the rest of us use to affect the powerful.

It’s both, actually.
The bottom-up (or as I prefer to say, edge-in) [...]

No kidding. See this.
Then look at this parody — a remix of an ad for the Tahoe gas-guzzling truck — on YouTube. Hilarious.

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NY Times: Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in Its Public Relations Campaign. Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters. But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, [...]