In the asnwer she talks about how a company gets publicity on the internet. And she recommends a so caleld direct-to-consumers methods. Right away I remembered about the junk emails that we get on our inboxes trom time to time. Perhaps now it sounds like some cheap way of promoting your company, because most of the times, users just delete those and get annoyed.
But, I might predict that in veyr near future, that method could be one of the main means to promote your company. If they already do promotion by junk mails you get in your mail boxes, I am sure junk emails will follow up soon as well. But I really do not think it is a good idea though.
And she also talks about bad press being helpful as you get your name in front of people, creating awareness and visibility. I do not quite agree with that. Perhaps that is true in several cases, however very bad impression/reputation can scare away customers.
Basically this is all what PR is, right? Regadring bad press, there is one interesting observation I noticed. In Russian language there is a concept of PR = пиар = [pronounced: peeare] (didnt probably know how to translate it correctly, so just took the pronounciation of PR in russianized sound) should mean basically the same, but i noticed how distorted the meaning gotten in the mass usage of the word. Piar means smth like advertisement, but sort of in non-formal way. Like, Britney Spears going out and driving in crazy speed along the streets and showing up in parties = thats one of the examples of the term piar . Perhaps, I am getting a bit offtopic, but I thought it is kind of interesting.
In the following question, she talks about outside-the-box thinking approaches, and particularly about involving young people for novice ideas. I have either read or heard a very meaningful sentence regarding this, that goes: "If you do what you have been doing, you will get what you have been getting". Indeed, if you dont have anything innovative, it is very hard to compete in the market. Her response raised a question regarding old expertise vs. young energy. i have a professor, who is over 60 yrs old and it takes her at least five minutes to find the course website and get the file from there, another five minutes to put the screen up and turn the beam projector on, and five more mintues to make sure everything is working properly. And this happens every single time. Which is obviously already fifteen minutes of class time being wasted. I certainly do not blame her, she has not grown up in this digital era with computers at home and cell phones to use. She even did not have a calculator until she was in her middle ages, so at school they always had to calculate all the problems and equations by hand. And now compare somebody like her working in some digital-related field. That could be a disaster. Whereas for young people it would be simply easy to get adjusted to that atmosphere. This is just one example, but overall, I do agree that young people sometimes bring crazy ideas, adding up creativity to the process. However that does not mean, the whole company should have only young staff, good expertised employees are very important as well. One of my teachers regarding this topic said a brilliant thing: the difference between established entrepreneurs, marketers, f.e. Bill Gates or Iaccoda and etc and us is the key of creativity. We all - the human beings - have all same twenty four hours.But this key point, the creativity helped people like Bill Gates and etc become billionaires and create empires. Thus I want to emphasize the non-traditional methods of marketing that most of the times lead the company to success.
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I agree that junk mail is not a good idea for advertisement. It may have been in the early days when e-mail was new and the junk mails were few, but nowadays everyone's fed up with junk mail and knows it's just scams and viruses, so it is not a good space to put one's brand in.
Holman's idea of adding a younger person to team of more experienced people for creative thinking, that you pointed out, was actually one of the things that she said that I really found interesting.
Though, I don't think it would necessarily be a bad idea to have someone without good technological understanding (such as your 60 year old professor) in such a team, as long as she is not leading it. In the same way that a young person can add a new way of thinking, someone who isn't grown up with the technology can see it differently and offer unconventional och novel ideas and approaches.
I believe the key is to have a team that is dynamic and non-homogeneous (I hope that's the right word), so anyone -- be it either a 60 year old or a 15 year old -- who breaks the mold is an asset creatively.
Yes, I agree that email-based promotion is probably not a good way to go today. I find emails from companies that I have never heard of to be very annoying. I don't like to receive emails from companies that I do business with (such as Borders or Amazon), much less from unknowns.
Also the concept of "there's no such thing as bad publicity" may work in certain situations such as a content-based site, but would likely be very detrimental for an ecommerce-based site. If its a controversial story (content), I may be interested in reading it, but I would certainly not give my credit card and address to a website that received negative publicity.
With regards to youth, I think Filip makes a good point of having a non-homogeneous (or heterogeneous) team, which members of different ages and backgrounds. While youth definitely has an advantage with technology, experience that older people bring can be very valuable.
I also agree with that advertising through email is the wrong way to go. I actually don't even think anybody pays attention to these types of emails anymore. If your email application doesn't already have a filter, then I think most people have one, deleting these types of emails without even opening them up. Only thing spam creates is annoyance. And I really don't think bad press is to any help when it comes to marketing a serious business.
As for thinking out of the box approaches and non traditional methods I agree that these often times lead to success. Breaking the mold will logically always attract attention, being it good or bad. The tough part is finding these new, creative approaches, and I think a team consisting of many different personalities is a good way to go.
I aswell agree that adds through e-mail is a bad idea.
On the bad press beeing good notice, i can agree to some extent. As i see it it depends how bad the information is. Ofcourse if some big newsmedia comes out with an article that says that you are ripping off your ustomers or something like that it will hurt you. However, there is other bad press that can be turned to something good. Lets say you are a small unknown company that sells mp3 players. Then there was some bug in the latest version. Some big news media picks this up and writes about all the angry customers. Now, this might seem like bad press, and it is. However, if you as a company does the right things and repair or replace the mp3 players and makes the customers satisfied. Then all of a sudden the bad press don't seem to bad any more and what you are left with is haveing your company name and probably pictures of your products in allot of big newsmedia.
interesting about the professor. I heard that this era is the first time that father learns something from their daughters and sons...
Another point to make, as a PR practitioner, the big change is direct to consumer. In the past, PR mostly involve journalist relationship, but, now, even publicity becomes direct to consumer. (i.e. social media release)
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