Scott Matthewman

Tom has much to say on PR agencies who try and peddle their wares upon personal bloggers.

There’s not much to add, especially beyond what Stowe Boyd has said. Other than:

• At work — where I’m assistant editor for a performing arts publication — so many PR agencies send out blanket emails from a centralised resource, e.g., MediaDisk, without ever checking whether the information is accurate. Or indeed, relevant — quite why I’d be interested in a local council anti-bullying campaign (worthy as it is) is dubious.

  Those organisations which take the effort to target occasional emails, even adding a request to forward it to a more relevant person, get a mark upwards in my book — although a couple or marks down if they don’t respond to my email updating their database.

  Companies who never attempt any filtering of the mailing lists they get from PR mailing list distributors are not only stupid, but spammers.

• Dealing with PR agencies is an occupational requirement in my line of work, and they’re extremely variable. Often, they don’t know how to deal with us, because we’re an industry paper with a public presence and they’re geared up to deal with 100% consumer press.

  There are some PR agencies whose reputation precedes them. If I suggest a particular show or interviewee to cover, some will elicit the response, “oh, good luck — <name> is handling the PR”. And yet, they still get a lot of work. It’s so infuriating.

I have met some good PR people in my time; special praise is due for the people who’ve taken a punt on something we may be interested in, have been politely knocked back and then returned with something we definitely would be interested in. The sign that you have listened and taken the feedback into account is always appreciated. Sadly (and I suspect every industry probably feels this) such people are a rare breed.

Via John Gruber, it emerges that Sun Microsystems is going to change its stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA.

Now, the four-letter stock symbol is predominantly a Wall Street thing, although many (if not all?) London stocks have a similar alphanumeric code that can be used in US-based portfolio checkers (the London stocks ending with a ‘.L’). But I’m not sure if this is a standard reference for those stocks. Back in the days when I was working with stock information every day at Financial Times Information (publishing the Daily Official List, as well as generating shares information pages for the Daily Mail and the Express), it was the SEDOL number that was important, and beyond that people used the full stock name or abbreviations thereof.

So, as a Brit, the merits of changing a stock symbol as a means of enforcing a company’s brand may be somewhat lost on me.

I do have some additional experience on this front, though. I was still working at the (now defunct) UK office of PlanetOut, Inc. when the company decided to list. My memory’s a bit hazy on the timeline, but as I recall I was on the verge of leaving the company and the terms of my severance package were still under discussion. So, at the conference call to discuss details of the IPO I was (for once) not about to rock the boat by stating my mind.

Over that conference call, the then CEO explained that the company’s stock ticker was going to be LGBT — which also stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered’, an attempt at all-inclusiveness that theoretically described the company’s target audience, although for as long as I worked there it was all about the G; lip service was paid to Ls, while the Bs and the Ts were pretty much left to fend for themselves.

I do remember everybody in America presenting the ticker announcement as being the most exciting thing — but over the phone, everybody in the UK was inidfferent. Branding by ticker is obviously directed towards a small section of the US business community — but I suspect it goes down better in the boardrooms of the companies who like to think they’re making a good decision than it does on the markets’ trading floors.

For the brokers, a more pertinent question than “what four letters does this ticker symbol consist of” is “how does this company make money”. In the case of PlanetOut, the answer was (and still is) “it doesn’t”. I can’t help feeling that having business people being more excited about their ticker symbol than making their company profitable may have been a big part of the problem.

And that’s what worries me about Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s enthusiasm for the change of his company’s ticker symbol.

As the marketing machine for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials films cranks up, the website gives you the chance to discover what your daemon would look like. You start off by answering 20 questions about your own personality, after which your daemon is revealed. Rather cleverly, the type of daemon isn’t set in stone: for the next 12 days, people can answer supplementary questions about how they see you, and your daemon may change form as a result.

For the time being, my daemon Brienne is a crow. But who knows what she will look like after you’ve answered five questions about me?

Update: That was quick! She’s now a mouse…

I enjoyed reading Michael White’s piece in this morning’s Guardian about the furore over the fate of Learco Chindamo, who may soon be released from prison after being convicted, aged 15, of the murder of schoolteacher Philip Lawrence.

A kneejerk reaction from certain quarters has been a call to repeal the Human Rights Act. It’s indicative of people’s seeming desire to take tabloid newspaper reports at face value, since it was they, and not the judgement of the asylum and immigration tribunal, which attributed the decision to allow him to stay in the UK to the Act. In fact, it was neither the HRA nor the European Convention on Human Rights, which the HRA allows to be enacted through British courts rather than taking a substantially more expensive route via Strasbourg.

But since when have little things like factual accuracy bothered the tabloids, and the politicians who crave their audience?

Some words of wisdom from Tinu Abayomi-Paul on how to measure the value of a Facebook friend:

…Facebook Friends aren’t All necessarily friends, not in the American sense of the word.

They’re people you know. But Facebook calls them friends and I like to treat them that way until such a time that they prove me wrong - which I doubt will ever happen with 99% of the people I know there.

Something that all social networks suffer from to some degree is a lack of distinction between different types of contact, grouping them all under one nebulous category of ‘friend’. Facebook does give you the option of providing information about how you know them, but that in itself only gives you a clue about the start of the relationship, not its intrinsic worth.

What I like about Tinu’s approach is that it turns this potential drawback on its head, to make it an advantage — everybody in your social circle known as your ‘friends list’ has the potential to be a friend.

To whit, she has three points which, she says, illustrate what makes a Quality Facebook Friend:

1. They’re Active - they log in often enough for you to maintain a connection through Facebook, and do they do interesting things when logged in.
2. They’re Friendly - they may not all be your friends, but if you say hello/poke/message/write on their wall, they’ll eventually return the greeting in a fashion of their choosing.
3. They’re Enigmas in the inspirational sense of the word - enough alike me that we have common ground, but different enough for me to be fascinated by what they do.

I have people on my friends list that I’ve only met once, through work; some who I went to school or university with; people I work with every day; friends I’ve met elsewhere, and wish I could see more often; and people with whom my relationship has, to date, been exclusively online. But pretty much all of them fit those three criteria.

PS: If you’re on Facebook, I’m easy to find — I’m the Scott Matthewman who lives in the UK and not Florida.

This comment piece on PC Pro’s website by Barry Collins gets some of the points about social networking spot on. In particular, it understands that Friends Reunited — which, for a while, was one of the biggest sites in the UK — now looks like more of a dinosaur:

Friends Reunited — once the multimillion pound poster child of the social-networking generation — is now little more than an online time capsule from 2001, with swathes of profiles that haven’t been updated in years. The site recently sponsored a TV programme on ITV (Friends Reunited’s parent company), about a woman who came out of a coma after 18 years. I’ll be amazed if Friends Reunited comes back to life that quickly.

Annoyingly, Collins doesn’t connect that situation with another nugget of information about Friends Reunited:

I’ve yet to see any evidence that Facebook can generate significant profit from its millions of users. There’s no charge to use the site or make contact with friends — even Friends Reunited had the gumption to tap you for a fiver if you wanted to get in touch with the girl you used to ping rubber bands at in Geography lessons.

The charging structure must surely be one of the principal causes of FR’s decline. While it’s true that Facebook as yet shows no sign of having a clear, reliable and long-term revenue model (something that Collins gets spot on through his piece), ITV’s problems with Friends Reunited show that choosing the wrong revenue model can kill your site faster than any competitor ever can.

Jeff Jarvis always puts up compelling arguments in the ‘old’-versus-‘new’ media debate. Friday’s piece looks at a report that says that local newspapers are most threatened by the internet. Replace ‘local’ with ‘specialist’ and the argument (and counter-argument) remains the same — and Jarvis’ points about how to succeed in the future still apply.

Some useful tips on the best way to learn effective chopstick use (via Lifehacker).

I tend to do okay with chopsticks, but always think I could do better. Still, practice makes perfect…

More for my sake than anything else, here are the links to each of my TV Today weekly reviews of the BBC’s hunt to find a West End Joseph, Any Dream Will Do.

• Week 1 — the auditions and callbacks
• Week 2 — ‘Joseph school’ and the final selection
• Week 3 — first live show; Chris Crosby eliminated
• Week 4 — Johndeep More eliminated
• Week 5 — Antony Hansen and Seamus Cullen eliminated
• Week 6 — Chris Barton eliminated
• Week 7 — Robert McVeigh eliminated
• Week 8 — Daniel Boys eliminated
• Week 9 — Craig Chalmers eliminated
• Week 10 — the ‘semi-final’; Ben Ellis eliminated
• Week 11 — the final; Lewis Bradley third, Keith Jack runner-up, Lee Mead winner.

Also, my interview with Daniel Boys after his elimination.

If you’re in Edinburgh this weekend — which, sadly, I’m not — and are in any way shape or form into Doctor Who — which, happily, I am — then make sure you go along to a one-off charity event in aid of ACCORD, the hospice where David Tennant’s mother worked and, recently, passed away.

Comedians appearing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe are staging a special one-off Dr Who-themed comedy show as part of the David-Tennant.com fundraiser, which intends to raise money for the ACCORD hospice in Paisley, Scotland.

The comedians taking part were moved by the response from Dr Who fans to the recent death of the actor’s mother Helen from cancer.

The gig will take place at Laughing Horse@Linsays (Fringe Venue 56) on Saturday 18th August 9.10 - 10.10pm. Although the show is not ticketed, and is not part of the official Fringe programme, those attending will be asked to donate £10, with all proceeds going to the ACCORD hospice appeal.

Venue details: Laughing Horse@Linsays, 15 Brunswick Street, Edinburgh, EH7 5JB Box Office & Enquiries: 0131 556 8974

Full details can be found here.

Those taking part will include Toby Hadoke, the genius behind Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf, and Mitch Benn, star of (among others) Radio 4’s The Now Show.

Of course, you’ll all know of this already, thanks to its plug on Show 12 of The Stage/TPN Fringe podcast. You have been listening, haven’t you? If not, subscribe now in iTunes. As I type this, we’re at no. 11 in the Arts chart and with a few more subscribers we could well go Top Ten!

Oh, and if you haven’t been lucky enough to catch Toby live, here’s a taster of his live set: