Krazit observed the same thing with one of his articles…

Nothing in the article suggested that Mac users are revolting against Leopard, or that serious Leopard glitches have knocked the Mac user base offline, or anything even close to that effect. The majority of the discussion in the Talkback section, however, descended into the usual Mac vs. PC flame war. In addition to attacking each other, several people took me to task, saying that since they had never had a problem with their Mac or with their Leopard installation, I was clearly manufacturing problems as part of a sinister plan to either attack the Mac and put Apple out of business at the bidding of Microsoft, or through some naked self-interest of both myself and CNET to generate page views.

Does that sound familiar? If you’ve ever authored, or read, an article that has even a hint that Steve Jobs is not some kind of omnipotent being or Apple is less than perfect, you would have seen the ensuing attack by Apple’s “fanboys.”

As Krazit points out, this is a small hardcore group, created by Apple itself…

On his Web site, [Guy] Kawasaki describes his role at Apple in the mid-1990s by saying, “My job on this tour of duty was to maintain and rejuvenate the Macintosh cult.” There was a dedicated group out there who still believed in the Mac and its promise as an alternative to Windows, but they weren’t organized, and their morale was low.

In an inteview this week, Kawasaki recalled signing up 44,000 hardcore Mac users in 1995 on a listserv named, quite appropriately, “EvangeList.” “All I would do is disseminate good news,” Kawasaki said.

Sounds just like a summer blockbuster movie that turns up every few years. The government creates a group of super-soldiers who then go crazy and become uncontrollable.

Of course, most Apple fans are friendly, balanced in their opinions, and not insane (and have likely read this far, before deciding to leave an abusive comment). They’re still passionate about Apple and they’re ready to tell others how much they love their MacBook Pro–this is where I’d place myself. However, their voice is often drowned-out by those that accuse others of FUD, assume you work for Microsoft, and won’t hear a bad word said against Apple.

(As a side note, in my last post, the very people that attacked me included Apple employees. They tried to mask their identity, but didn’t do a very good job. Want to spot them in future blog comments? They’re usually simply “Steve” or “David” – no last name, no URL left.)

So, after “burying my headline” deep in this commentary, here’s my thought for Apple. Passionate customers is one thing–every company dreams of having customers that will defend its reputation–but don’t you think its getting out of control? Take a look around the web. It seems that the number of people discussing your rabid “EvangeLists” is growing. What persona is being conveyed to outside observers when they read comments and forum replies from a minority group with a megaphone and a penchant for abusive rhetoric?

I’ll leave you with this, Apple’s positive sentiment–as measured by customer satisfaction–slipped nearly 5% this year, and is now only 3 points higher than HP. Apple’s hype may well be in top gear, but as it grows and reaches the masses, it’s going to need more than just a hard core team of advocates.

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“The function that you are currently trying to use is disabled and will be back shortly,” states one message, which Laughing Squid encountered while trying to sign in.  “We are making some minor changes to this section so please bear with us until we can get it back online.  Please do NOT email me about this.  Just wait it out.”  And sure enough, Tom’s name is signed (and/or typed) to it.

I know, I know – there are important developments taking place involving stem cells, sabotage, and the Middle East, and we’re talking about an error message on a social networking site.  It’s just that kind of week, though – a story about Facebook’s use of the word “is” made the rounds yesterday.

Also, MySpace really isn’t going to win any fans with this sort of thing; while it’s funny (MG Siegler, to whom I owe a hat tip, calls it “just hilarious”), the humor is obviously unintentional. 

Ah, well.  Maybe Tom – or whoever wrote the message on his behalf – will have a good Thanksgiving and return in a better mood.

Randy Komisar’s comment seemed pretty straightforward.  Komisar, a partner at KPCB, simply told Tom Foremski, “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies.”

That sounds bad, but before everyone in Silicon Valley starts cashing stocks and buying canned food, it’s only responsible to explore a few possibilities.  First: maybe Komisar has essentially “gone rogue,” and no longer speaks for KPCB.  Second: perhaps Web 2.0 has lost its appeal (“interest”), but Komisar and KPCB still intend to throw money at it.  Or, as a much more likely alternative, this could all be a matter of definitions.

Following Foremski’s article, Tim O’Reilly wrote, “I think the real way to interpret this comment is to say that if a company needs to identify itself as a ‘Web 2.0’ company rather than describing the problem they are solving, or the opportunity they are creating, then they are just playing the buzzword game, and aren’t worth investing in, regardless of the buzzword!”

Maybe so.  This news, combined with the recent Bubble 2.0 talk, is still going to sadden a lot of people, though.

I wasn’t really aware of Kleiner Perkins doing all that much investing in Web 2.0 companies, actually. I always thought of them as playing in the big leagues — the Googles, the Ciscos, etc. But whatever. I guess the party is over now, right? Kleiner has taken away the punch bowl. All those startup CEOs hoping to get rich quick can go back to working at Kinko’s or whatever they were doing before Web 2.0 came along.

As far as I’m concerned, if KP’s comment means less money flowing into questionable startups with no business plan and a stupid name that’s missing a bunch of vowels, I’m all for that. I’m going to side with Tim O’Reilly, who posted a comment on Tom’s blog saying:

“If a company needs to identify itself as a “Web 2.0″ company rather than describing the problem they are solving, or the opportunity they are creating, then they are just playing the buzzword game, and aren’t worth investing in.”

If that’s what the Kleiner Perkins guy meant when he told Tom that they’re not interested in financing Web 2.0 companies any more, then I think he’s into something.

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As you might have guessed (or remembered from our previous coverage), the new suit relates to copyright infringement.  “Veoh follows in the ignominious footsteps of other recent mass infringers such as Napster,” stated Universal in its legal complaint.  “Veoh’s rampant infringement will not stop until Veoh, and those who own, control, and run it, are enjoined and held financially responsible.”

Those aren’t the sorts of words that any site wants to hear from a corporation as powerful as Universal.  Bloomberg’s Edvard Pettersson pointed out that Veoh has some strong supporters, including Time Warner and Michael Eisner (as well as Tom Freston), but still . . .

Veoh’s doing its best not to blink, though.  CEO Steve Mitgang even issued a statement to Wired’s David Kravets that appears to call Universal “ignorant.”  “UMG’s action is not surprising and reflects their limited understanding of Veoh and of the online video space as a whole,” he wrote.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.  Following a similar suit, Warner Music Group and Imeem somehow managed to resolve their differences and form a partnership, but on the other end of the spectrum, Bolt.com recently dropped dead.

SES: Avoid Those Rough Landing Pages

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Tim Ash of Site Tuners thinks too much landing page neglect has taken place. Site publishers need to care about tuning their sites for conversions.

For example, a landing page should lead to a trackable action. That offers a direct way to see if a landing page accomplishes part of the conversion process.

Designers have to look at the whole picture: the page’s headline, its layout, the navigation. As with everything about a website, landing pages need testing again and again, especially when elements have changed.

The testing process can span across multiple landing pages, with additional paid search ads leading to them. This is where data is the publisher’s best friend; don’t make decisions based on too little information.

Google Website Optimizer product manager Tom Leung suggested six types of tests to run to gather that data:

Classic A/B
Classic Multivariate
Split path
Multipage multivariate
Time-based
Do anything

Jamie Roche of Offermatica believes personalization is the key to successful landing pages. It’s something publishers should include with their testing.

As the site gathers data, visitors can be grouped by several factors as the publisher evaluates the analytics. Those factors can be as follows:

Behavior
Time-based
Source
Environment
Registered customers

Verster CEO Scott Miller summarized the approach to tweaking landing pages by saying all of the components have to work in harmony. From page title and copy to value propositions and promos and prices offered, the only way to get to that harmonic optimization is through continued testing.

Adfero representatives offered well-thought-out arguments for rejecting the bullet-listed “Core News Facts” section of the social media release. In a comment to my post, Adfero’s Jeff Mascott wrote, “The best approach for a news release is still the narrative format –- it the easiest to read by reporters, bloggers and interested citizens alike.”

The rationale for the bullet approach comes directly from the Tom Foremski post that launched the social media release effort to begin with. Foremski wanted companies to “deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher, I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.”

The social media releases I have crafted have, in every instance, been paired with a traditional release (as in this example, but Adfero doesn’t like that approach, according to a comment from Chris Battle: “While I respect your idea of sending two news releases -– one with the narrative and one without -– our goal was to create a release that accomplishes our goals in one document.” Others have rejected the dual release concept simply because it takes too much time.

I respect the positions Adfero and others have taken on these issues. But I don’t buy ‘em. Communications shouldn’t be about consolidation. We should target the message to the audience (a term I use advisedly). I see three distinct audiences, each with unique needs:

• Traditional media
• Online media (including bloggers)
• The general public

Let’s tackle the public/press issue first. Battle writes:

we are not writing solely for journalists. One of the things that makes the new media environment so much more productive is that organizations can issue their news releases directly to the public. The goal is go convince the mainstream media and the blogosphere to pick up the release and run a story about it, but it is not the only goal. Equally important is to deliver that information directly into the hands of target audiences in the public.

The first time I heard the idea that press releases need to accommodate both the media and the general public, it came up twice in one day. The first was a high-tech company that asserted the need to write releases that might be too technical for the average journalist because the release would be read by sophisticated IT types. The second was a telecommunications company that insisted it needed to dumb down its releases because Joe Beercan might wind up reading it on the web.

We need to make a distinction between press releases and news releases. A press release is targeted at the press and should be crafted to meet the needs of a reporter or editor. A news release is for general distribution to the public. While this is not the approach taken by many PR practitioners, it’s one that makes more and more sense.

As for the traditional vs. social media release, it’s important to remember that some publications don’t have the resources to turn a release into a story. Early in my career, I worked for both trade and public publications where I was one of two writers/editors. Much of the editorial was made up of press releases, run just as we got them. There are still a lot of outlets in that position. For them, a traditional release is the answer.

For online journalists and bloggers, however, a social media release—one that makes it easy to grab elements and insert them, whether they’re text or multimedia—is in order. The idea is to make the information easy to adapt to social media tools, like blogs and websites. And here, I have to return to Foremski’s original rant:

Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on…

Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists.

This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.

Formeski’s solution to the narrative approach (what Tom calls “topspin")—the solution embraced by the social media release working group: “Provide a brief description of what the announcement is, but leave the spin to the journalists. The journalists are going to go with their own spin on the story anyway, so why bother? Keep it straightforward rather than spintastic.”

And what of the time it takes to produce two or even three versions of a release, each targeted to the appropriate audience? I don’t buy that, either. Start with the traditional, narrative release, then use it as the basis for the others. It has never taken me more than an hour to create a social media release from a traditional release.

Finally, there’s the worry that the wrong audience will see the wrong release, given that any release will wind up in places like Yahoo’s finance site. But it’s easy to begin any release with a line like this:

This is a press release intended for use by the news media. A general news release can be found here and a social media release is available here.

As communicators working in an increasingly fragmented world, we should not strive to make one size fit all. We should target our messages for maximum effectiveness. If that means an extra hour or two to produce niche-focused versions of releases, then that’s what we should do.

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The name and the concept both sound a bit strange, and since it’s quicker to explain the former, I’ll start there.  Lughenjo is a “Tuvetan word meaning gift,” according to Tom Shelley, Red Stripe’s main blogger.

Ludwig Siegele, another member of the team, addresses the whole money thing.  “You can be sure that we have had more than one heated debate about this question,” he writes.  “Initially, we wanted Lughenjo to be not-for-profit, with revenues to finance the programme coming from The Economist Group as well as long-term sponsors and grants.”

Siegele then continues, “Yet this would have been an all too easy way out, not very innovative – and would likely have led us into a dead end.  A business model mainly based on the financial support of others has serious drawbacks that would limit Lughenjo’s growth and sustainability.”

The Red Stripe team’s self-proclaimed Methusaleh then names one other well-known, for-profit, charity: Google.org.

So, that’s the “what” and the “why.”  The “when” has yet to be nailed down.  As for the “how,” Lughenjo fancies itself a version of “Yahoo! Answers for good,” and will put deserving groups’ questions in front of people who can help solve their problems.  Lughenjo will also “do what media companies do best and put ads in front of eyeballs.” 

It remains to be seen how this will all work, but Marketing Pilgrim’s Kelvin Newman – to whom I owe a hat tip – seems to feel there’s a lot of potential.

An article in The Motley Fool outlines the situation with the humor you’d expect from such a source.  “The company is taking a different approach this time,” writes Rick Aristotle Munarriz.  “Instead of surrendering, it is simply retreating.  It will be back with a new partner – this time TOM Online – to see if it can get it right the second time around.”

And, as you might have been led to believe by that “retreating” line, Munarriz adds, “Just because eBay’s going in with a different local guide and a fresh attitude doesn’t mean that it won’t get pummeled again.”

Indeed, considering all the other American companies that have met with something less than success in China (Google and Yahoo might be the two most relevant examples), it would be something of minor miracle if eBay does well.

Still, some investors apparently have confidence in the company – the Wall Street Journal reports that eBay’s stock went up when its plan to reenter China was announced.