A powerful morning sunrise in North Carolina.
And in a week in which we poke no matter who the grammar police is. A grammatically incorrect sentence and two spaces following a period later, we realize at the end of the week we've remembered the 12th anniversary of 9/11 and survived yet another Friday the 13th.
What a week of news it has been! Have you been reading? If you have, I probably don't have anything for you here. But if you haven't this post will catch you up.
1. Aristotelian concepts of persuasion. This is what I call a lucky find, because my reading habits have branched out and I know read trade publications for lawyers. It has completely flipped my lid too, because the parallels between what law firms are experiencing today, and PR firms experienced five or even 10 years ago, is amazingly similar. At any rate, my reading brought me to this post, a primer on Aristotle's concepts of ethos, pathos and logos. Having read Rhetoric cover to cover several times, I'd reckon this primer to get a grasp of ethics, emotion and logic. I've got more theory on marketing to emotions in this guest post.
2. Speaking of 9/11... My goodness what flubs this week. Who on earth would ever think it's a good idea to commercial 9/11? It doesn't take a degree in psychology to understand the human nature of this event. Apparently it takes a degree in ethics. AT&T, which I would point out over the years has been a staunch supporter of military charities, had to apologize for a 9/11 flub. Old Mama Bell wasn't the only one tripping over her apron. Shel Holtz, whose book was required reading in graduate school shortly before 9/11, captures several others in this blog post which in essence presents a question.
3. Twittah files for IPO in 140 characters. At 5 p.m. EST, after the markets were closed, Twitter tweeted to the world it had filed for IPO. Marketing Land's Danny Sullivan was all over the story - and quickly. And since the story broke, as we can anticipate, the analysis cycle starts. What is the benefit of Twitter's secretive filing, which is actually part of Obama's Jobs Act, for IPO? According to Marketplace it's this:
Stephen Diamond, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, says the idea is that it allows what are called emerging companies an opportunity to fix filing mistakes before facing public scrutiny.
Gini, my dear friend, if you are done with your bike ride and still reading, then we need to set your grammar police after the phrase "publicly filed for its IPO." See? The AP Stylebook can't save everyone, not even NPR. Twittah is for my old Worcester friends. Worcester does not sound like its spelled. Neither is Paaarkin' my caaa.
Oh, and I'm no stock analyst but I'm definitely buying 25 shares in Twitter. I own 25 in Facebook and zero in Google, which had its own controversy, when it filed for IPO many moons ago. Back then I thought $80 a share was way too much. Check out the big GOOG now.
What's the over/under on Twitter's stock ticker?
4. Livefyre acquires Storify. This is the most under reported story of the week. Actually, I did see quite a lot of stories, but the social media buzz was tepid. It amazes me, because, well, there's a gazillian Storify stories about the Twitter IPO! Like this one by CNBC. All I'm saying here is, as a free customer of Livefyre, when you bubbas go public, I'm buying 25 shares of that too! Livefyre CEO, Jordan Kretchmer, writes on the company blog about the Livefyre-Storify deal:
Over the coming months, we'll be merging Storify's multiple paid tiers into a single enterprise offering, that will include brand new features such as single sign-on to create stories, centralized story and editor management, Storify galleries, user participation tools and engagement analytics.
5. What would Google do isn't relevant. With apologies to Jeff Jarvis, SMX held an interesting panel that explored what your or I might do if we were Google. It's easy to bash the search giant, but the fact is, the company wrestles with some incredibly challenging dilemmas. Such as, "A woman commits suicide. She leaves a note online, which then ranks tops for her name. Her family wants it removed. Do you take it down?"
Here's the panel discussion:
6. Ketchum, Putin and the New York Times. It's an ethics debate says PRNewser.The PR industry is going to take a hit says crisis pro Gerald Baron. Its GW's fault says the National Journal. Hey, there, Alex...ya can't blame it on Bush anymore. You own it in the second term. That's just the way it is. See? It's like ending a sentence with a preposition.
Seriously here's my take: We don't repress free speech in this country. Ketchum is fully entitled to help our former cold war rival place op-eds in U.S. pubs. Although I have little appetite for another war, if there's another American politician that wants help with the counter offensive, call me up. Business people working on passion, and not for pay, can run circles around lobbyists.
If you enjoyed this post you might also like:
Reading: Goat becomes Raleigh-Durham Publicity Hound