RaceTalk

By Kyle

Yes, the rumors are true.  We have closed on this site and are officially moving our digital digs to www.racetalkblog.com (check out the new design). The new site is also now accessible by clicking on the RaceTalk link in the upper right corner of the Racepoint Group Website. 

We got too big and popular and decided we needed our own domain.  Plus now we can actually take control of all the reigns and take the blog in the direction we want to go.  Expect more of the same including more exclusive RaceTalk Q&A’s.  We’re also looking forward to launching some new RaceTalk created video content that we hope to start populating the blog with in the upcoming months.  

By Ben

Last year Jordan’s Furniture came up with a creative marketing campaign that offered customers who buy furniture between March 7 and April 16 their money back if the Red Sox won the World Series.

This year, Jordan’s is using the same marketing campaign for customers that buy furniture between March 25 and April 27– but this time the Red Sox have to SWEEP the World Series.

By Ben

The Wall Street Journal will undergo another makeover in the next few weeks. The marketplace section of the paper will be changed to include more breaking news and shorter articles.

These changes come after current owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, bought Dow Jones & Company in December. Murdoch has been making changes to the Wall Street Journal over the past few months by incorporating more general interest news like world news and sports, in order to create a larger market for the paper.

These changes come as the newspaper owners are struggling to make a profit. The New York Times reports that last year alone, ”overall newspaper revenues dropped by about 7 percent, pushed along primarily by the secular change of readers and advertisers fleeing to the Web.

By Ben

The USA Today reported this morning that JuicyCampus.com, a site where students can post anonymously about other students, is being investigated by prosecutors to see whether it violates New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. JuicyCampus.com is in violation of the act if the site says that it doesn’t allow offensive material, but provides no enforcement or way for users to report or dispute the material

In what can’t be much of a surprise, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram said, “There’s an unbelievable amount of offensive material posted and absolutely no enforcement”. Prosecutors began investigating the site after a student reported to authorities that she had been targeted in very offensive posts, which included her home address.

JuicyCampus.com takes on a whole new meaning to Facebook’s honesty box, an application allows users to post a question that people can answer anonymously.

JuicyCampus.com has been met with a lot of negativity, as its primary function has turned into an outlet where students can write negative, accusatory statements about each other without any ring of truth.

By Ben

As the Red Sox board the plane today for their two game series in Japan, the Boston Globe reports that EMC has unveiled its new advertising campaign for this huge market.

The ad translates to “The moment when confidence becomes conviction. IT strategy based on EMC’s technology is the winning approach.”

EMC’s logo will also be on the Red Sox jerseys, which marks the first corporate logo on a MLB team uniform.

The last time an advertiser made it this far on the field was in 2004, when “Spider-Man 2” had arranged for the movie’s design to be placed on the bases. This arrangement was overruled due to overwhelming complaints from fans.

By Ben

Since the state of Israel was established in 1948, the country’s borders have been constantly changing with every war and peace agreement. The West Bank and Gaza strip have been particularly sensitive areas, with a lot of fighting and uncertainty.

However, in Facebook’s attempt to assign a network to the people living in the West Bank, it automatically assigned them to the Palestine network – a pretty bold move.

As one could imagine, pinpointing an entire region as Palestine did not sit very well. Every person in Israel defines themselves differently depending on their background, family, and religion. To label an entire region of people with such different backgrounds and identities seems to go way beyond Facebook’s goal of being a “social utility that connects you with the people around you.”

David Shamah, a reporter for the Jerusalem Post writes, “I think it’s very unfair of Facebook to take sides in an ongoing dispute by making official (the creation of a state called Palestine), something that the United Nations has not even decided on yet.”

After receiving a lot of complaints and being accused of having a political agenda, Facebook has now started to allow people living in these areas to chose whether they’re listed as being a resident of Israel or Palestine.

By George

There is some interesting work happening over at Optaros, a next-generation consulting firm. Optaros helps companies build web sites and back end systems using Web 2.0 principals. The company recently converted its own web site to showcase what it means by Web 2.0.

Full disclosure: Racepoint was Optaros’ PR agency of record for more than a year, but we are no longer are engaged with them.

Optaros’ new web site has a fresh look and feel (although some of the dynamic content looks a bit clunky, especially on the home page). Optaros lists its “8 Principals for B2B Marketing 2.0” in the new age of the web. Most of its principals have been said before, but they present it well. However, number 6 really took us by surprise:

“Stop issuing press releases “over the wire.” The first press release was “put on the wire” on March 8, 1954 by PRNewswire to 12 news outlets in New York City. The pricing model is still based on the number of words with the average press release costing between $500 and $1,000 to put “over the wire”. Instead, email them to reporters/ bloggers to build a personal connection and increase the probability of coverage.”

This is why companies shouldn’t take communications advice from marketers. They simply don’t understand public relations. This principal flies in the face of what is happening on the web (and also contradicts Optaros’ 7^th principal, which is to syndicate and actively share content).

In the age of interconnectivity and search engine optimization why would a company choose to limit the distribution of its own news? When a press release goes over the wire – it is automatically picked up by dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of online outlets. These “links” immediately push the press release to the top of Google and Yahoo searches.

When Racepoint launched Ringleader, a next-generation mobile advertising network, several weeks ago, its press release held three of the top spots in the first 10 results in a Google search for the company for more than 10 days. That meant anyone conducting a search for “Ringleader” had a 30 percent chance of clicking on a link to the press release.

That’s a powerful mode of communication. If a company was wise enough to include links to additional content in the press release then it now has an opportunity to engage more directly with potential customers.

Press releases are more important than ever. The mistake in Optaros’ thinking is believing that press releases are written for the press. That’s old-fashioned thinking for company touting to be Web 2.0. Press releases are now for everyone: customers, prospects, partners, investors, employees, bloggers, social networks, reporters, editors, and analysts.

Companies should be writing more of them – and distributing them widely through the wires, through RSS, through aggregators and social bookmarking services, and, yes, even directly to reporters when a reporter has asked for a copy of one (and generally before its been widely distributed).

(And on another note: Optaros clearly doesn’t understand how to develop relationships with the press either. One sure-fire way to get off on the wrong foot with a reporter is to clutter up her inbox with press releases she didn’t ask for.)

There’s little doubt that the industry needs to rethink the way they write press releases. We agree with Optaros that companies should kill the corporate voice and engage with everyone in a more straight forward, plain-spoken manner.

Here are some additional details about our philosophy on press releases.

It’s refreshing to see companies like Optaros opening up and communicating better. They are setting an excellent example for other companies to follow.

But they should leave the public relations advice to the experts.

By Ben

Almost a year ago, a new application called the ‘honesty box’ was developed for Facebook. This application allows users to post a question that people can answer anonymously – something that The New York Times says “has become another weapon in the cyberbully’s arsenal.

Some students Palo Alto High School in California have been using the honesty box for this exact purpose, and one student even received a message saying “You should kill yourself. No one likes you.”

Although one of the application’s creators, Dan Peguine, says he developed the honestly box because he was curious to see what people thought of him, it’s not shocking that the application has been abused. Still, Peguine says that the word used most in the honesty box is ‘love’.

In other news, the Chinese government blocked YouTube after protest videos about Tibet were posted on the site.

By Ben

Dallas Mavericks owner (and former ‘Dancing with the Stars’ participant) Mark Cuban has instituted a new policy of banning bloggers from the team’s locker room. According to an AP article, “the policy was put in place after Cuban decided to keep out a reporter for The Dallas Morning News whose primary job is writing for the newspaper’s sports blogs.”

As one can imagine, this decision has been met with complaints throughout the blogger community. TrueHoop, an ESPN blog, posted an email exchange it had with Cuban about his decision. Other bloggers have posted open letters to Cuban’ about his decision, such as this one where Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Kamenetzky says the ban is a slap in the face.

Ironically, Cuban posted a response to the outrage in his own blog, BlogMaverick.com:

“Some out there will take this as my not “liking” blogs. Ridiculous. Its the exact opposite. What I don’t like is unequal access. I’m all for bloggers getting the same access as mainstream media when possible. Our interview room is open to bloggers. We take interview requests from bloggers. I’m a fan of getting as much coverage as possible for the Mavs. What I’m not a fan of is major media companies throwing their weight around thinking they should be treated differently.”

Cuban also manages to throw in his own opinion on blogging:

“Newspaper blogging is probably the worst marketing and branding move a newspaper can make. The barriers to entry for bloggers are non existent. There are no editorial standards. There are no accuracy standards. We bloggers can and do write whatever we damn well please. Historically newspapers have set some level of standards that they strived to adhere to. By taking on the branding, standard and posting habits of the blogosphere, newspapers have worked their way down to the least common demoninator of publishing in what appears to be an effort to troll for page views.”

While many are questioning whether this new policy was put in place just to ban one specific blogger from being in the locker room, Cuban has certainly created some chaos, and a distraction from his team’s recent drop in the standings.

By George

It’s no secret that the Boston Globe does a mediocre job of covering technology innovation in Massachusetts. The newspaper often spends more time covering California companies or the big national technology brands (like Google and Microsoft) than exploring the incredible innovations happening right in its own backyard.

The reason seems to be that the Globe doesn’t believe the technology happening here has enough consumer value. We’re constantly getting push back from Globe reporters not interested in striking firsts happening here: like the creation of the first real DNA microscope, the invention of the portable CT scanner (being used by the NFL and being featured on TV’s “ER”) or protecting our mounting amount of digital data from disaster – be it dynamic, virtual or physical.

It’s true that a lot of the emerging companies in the Bay State are business-to-business, but we think the Globe needs to spend less time covering the video gaming industry and more time on what’s happening here.

One notable exception, however, is reporter Carolyn Johnson. She has been a refreshing addition to the business pages and appears to have a real passion for writing about next-generation technologies. And the great thing about Carolyn is that she gets technology and is able to translate complicated technologies to a mainstream audience.

I was impressed with her piece in yesterday’s Idea section on – of all things – boredom. Carolyn explores the idea that boredom is necessary to spark innovation and that our modern obsession with filling every moment with micro-entertainment might not be good for us. Take this passage:

“But are we too busy twirling through the songs on our iPods — while checking e-mail, while changing lanes on the highway — to consider whether we are giving up a good thing? We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life’s greatest luxuries — one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works.”

It’s a fascinating read and an example of how Carolyn gets beyond the obvious and explores the philosophy and trends behind where we are going as a society.

It also makes you want to put down your mobile device – at least for a couple of hours every day (or until it rings).