Mediaboss Marketing

To tweet or not to tweet?

As companies flock to Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to tout their brands, many businesses are still struggling to strike the balance between immediacy and the need to exercise enough control to prevent ill-advised posts, tweets and other social media embarrassments.

A pornographic picture recently sent from US Airways official Twitter account is a fresh example of a social media misstep. In that instance, the company says an employee didnt mean any harm, but mistakenly posted a picture of a naked woman playing inappropriately with a toy plane.

Examples of embarrassing posts on official company social media accounts are legion: a reference to hitting the hay during a horse-meat scandal, a glib mention of not being able to tell the truth and posts making light of airplane crashes, to name just a few.

Separately, the actions of individual employees using their own social media accounts sometimes have brought unwelcome attention to their employers. Perhaps the most infamous example of 2013: the public relations professional who turned to Twitter to write, Going to Africa. Hope I dont get AIDS. Just kidding. Im white!

Where being quick on the trigger can be risky, there is an upside to a timely post.

Gordon Fowler, president and CEO of 3fold Communications in Sacramento, Calif., said a quick response to a pop-culture phenomenon can bring much more exposure to social media messages that would otherwise go unnoticed.

People are trying too hard to be relevant, said Fowler, who recently invited people to get over the sourness of Tax Day by visiting the companys Tax Day Bitter Bar for a lunchtime lemonade. Guests were then invited to take pictures and share them via social media.

The three most popular U.S. social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were conceived and continue to serve primarily as platforms for millions of individuals to connect, but more and more businesses are using them to reach customers. About 93 percent of marketers use social media to reach a vast and growing audience, according to statistics compiled by social media expert Erik Qualman. More than 1 billion people use Facebook, while Twitter boasts of 115 million active users monthly.

Local communications professionals agreed that staying out of the social media pool is not an option.

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Businesses navigating social media

Trinamool Congress president Mamata Banerjee today questioned the role of a section of media and accused cash loaded political parties of have taking control of media houses to serve their narrow political interests.

Alleging that the run up to the Lok Sabha elections has manifested an alarming role of a major section of the media, Banerjee, in a Facebook post today, said she was shocked with their partial and biased conduct. There is hardly any room for doubt that a few major cash loaded political parties have taken up control of media houses and engaged them to serve their narrow political interests, trampling down the ethics of democracy and voice of people, she said. The partial and biased conduct of a section of the media, both electronic and print, has shocked me, Banerjee said in her post. The brazen personal attacks, distortion of facts, character assassination and vilification in never before manner has stunned the nation.

The West Bengal Chief Minister said that this state of affairs could be overcome only if elections were held with state funding, which has been TMC's long-pending demand. These steps are essential for the sake of democracy. If the current trend continues, then the future of our democracy will, no doubt, be at stake, she added.

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Rich political parties taking control of media houses: Mamata

By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch

Donald Sterling, the disgraced Los Angeles Clippers owner, is seeking his 15 minutes of repentance.

Now, in the aftermath of the great American pastime of Celebrities Behaving Badly, Sterling has reached out to the American media to plead his case.

Im asking for forgiveness, he told CNNs Anderson Cooper.

Im not a racist, he added in an interview that will air on Coopers prime-time program Monday night.

Dont fall for his sad act. To put it bluntly, shed no tears for Donald Sterling. He is getting what he deserves. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has officially banned Sterling for life from the NBA and fined him $2.5 million, in the hope of forcing Sterling to sell the team. By the way, Sterling can probably get bids of about $1 billion in a sale of the team, so the NBAs death sentence is not exactly without its rewards.

But even if Silver can shove this storys villain out of the NBA picture, the media will keep Sterlings rotten image alive. In this age of 24/7 news, reputations are made and broken overnight and then sealed forever. Because of the advent of Google /quotes/zigman/30194416/delayed/quotes/nls/goog GOOG +2.16% Wikipedia and YouTube, people are, for better or worse, famous forever.

This is more than the fall of a very rich man of privilege and glamour. He got caught making damning racist comments during a private telephone conversation with a woman who was close to him.

It wasnt as if Sterling could claim he was misquoted or even misinterpreted by reporters. He was, after all, the source of those awful comments, which went viral almost immediately. Its essential to examine why the Sterling case resonated so deeply and decisively.

The saga tells, too, the real story of the American media in 2014. If Sterling really was a victim at all, it is because of his lamentable timing. This scandal came fast on the heels of the Missing Plane, a symbol of international intrigue.

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Media Blitz: Donald Sterling, as we know him, will live forever

MINERAL POINT The engine exhaust experts at Cummins Emission Solutions in Mineral Point didnt have to invite the media and local political leaders to the opening of its new high horsepower facility last month.

But after 17 years of making emission-control products for global commercial markets in this small Iowa County city some 50 miles southwest of Madison, it was a good time for a public reminder of the companys enduring stake in the area, plant manager Giri Thiyagarajan said. About a third of CES 470 employees live between Mineral Point and Dodgeville, with the rest from a 90-mile radius.

This shows our commitment to this place, he said, about the expansion and unveiling of the new plant on April 16. Cummins could have pretty much put this facility anywhere. But based on the needs of our customers, as well as the expertise of our folks here, we thought this was the right place to invest.

Company officials wouldnt say how much the expansion cost. But it adds a second factory floor of some 20,000 square feet in a one-story building less than a quarter mile east of the existing facility, which includes 165,000 square feet of production space and the companys business offices at 856 Fair St.

Because workers on the new floor will weld together some of the largest equipment made by CES, the building includes overhead cranes to move products and machines to turn pieces as they are built to provide the best and safest angles for welding. It also boasts a prototype area to build and test new designs and a collaboration space featuring interactive technology that allows production workers in Mineral Point to see, talk and draw together with company engineers in Stoughton and other locations.

Our new plant is a direct reflection of our innovative mindset, said Srikanth Padmanabhan, CES vice president and general manager. While the plant is equipped for large-size (emission control) solutions and quality production, our business has placed an equally strong focus on employee and building safety.

The need for emission controls on engines for vehicles and equipment is driven by federal environmental regulations that since the 1970s have required increasingly more stringent air-quality standards.

CES is a subsidiary of Cummins Inc., a global enterprise based in Columbus, Indiana, with 48,000 employees worldwide thats best known as the worlds leading diesel engine maker.

Engine sales produced close to half of the conglomerates $17.3 billion in revenues last year, with the rest from related equipment, made by subsidiaries including CES, such as fuel systems, controls, air handling, filtration and emission control.

Created to provide cleaner solutions for treating the byproducts of engine combustion, Cummins CES subsidiary is a multinational corporation, with operations in China, India, Germany, Brazil, South Africa and the United Kingdom, in addition to Indiana and Wisconsin.

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Cummins adds second factory floor in Mineral Point to make emission control systems for big engines

20 hours ago May. 9, 2014 - 2:00 PM PDT

Ask almost any professional writer who has covered the tech industry during the years from the 1990s dot-com boom to the Facebook-buying-drones-era what their most difficult assignment has been, and theyll almost universally identify one of the most iconic companies in American history: Apple.

In the years following the second coming of Steve Jobs, which saw Apple ascend to heights the tech industry had never before seen, Apples public relations effort was viewed with equal parts awe, disdain, and outright hatred. It was led by Katie Cotton, an executive who was as much an extension of Jobs brain as famed designer Jony Ive.

Apple confirmed earlier this week that Cotton is retiring. The last time I saw Cotton, she was hurtling toward me with an outstretched arm, successfully trying to ruin a photo (from an iPhone, no less) of CEO Tim Cook chatting with former Microsoft executive Steve Sinofsky on the sidelines of last years D11 conference. She leaves behind a PR department that has shaped the direction of tech PR in general, for better or worse.

Yet Apples notorious strategy of ignoring almost all media requests and inquiries unless it considered you an ally or had no choice but to deal with you was more than just the public extension of the culture of secrecy Jobs enforced. It was a response to huge demand for its products coupled with the willingness to exploit an obvious weakness in tech media business models.

The Wintel-driven tech industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which was the primary story in tech media during those years, was much more accepting of media coverage than Apple, even when Apple was struggling. This was an era in which the tech industry was much smaller and more business-oriented than it is today. Microsoft, Intel, and its PC partners needed the fledgling tech media to spread its message and it needed a place to advertise its products before IT managers: Intel even invested in one of the earliest versions of CNET Networks, a company that later gainfully employed me from 2006 to 2011, and where I covered Apple as a single beat from early 2007 to 2009.

A product of that earlier era, Hubspots Dan Lyons who at one point somehow thought he could parlay a hilarious blog skewering one of the most revered technology executives in history into a serious job covering that very same company with top-level access highlighted several of the changing tactics Thursday that were used by Apple during its ascent, before going off the rails with a bizarre theory about masochistic journalists.

But he did touch on something notable about the Pax Apple era of the tech industry. It is no secret that during the years from, say, 2005 (the seminal event was probably the dramatic upstaging of the Moto Rokr by the iPod nano) through the launch of the iPad, no single topic in the tech publishing generated web traffic quite like Apple, just as the web was becoming the dominant medium for tech publishing.

Around the same time, a brand new class of tech media blogs was growing quickly, groups that were less interested in traditional notions of journalism and more interested in telling readers exactly what they thought about technology. This meant there was an explosion in tech content just as it was becoming clear how much consumers wanted Apples products, and somehow, demand outpaced supply.

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Why Apples PR strategy frustrated tech media for almost a decade