by Michael Layne

As Tesla Motors stock climbed to its all time high today, from a public relations and crisis communications perspective, we ask the question, “When does it make sense for the CEO to go on the offensive when there is a crisis resulting from negative news coverage?”

It was just last February that the nightmare of nightmares occurred for Tesla CEO and product architect, Elon Musk. After putting his heart and soul into building a new kind of electric car company, he was slammed with a scathing review in the New York Times.

Musk is no shrinking violet. When the review was published stating that the car’s 300 mile promised range was bogus, Musk took an aggressive strategy in what we would clearly call a crisis communications situation. He publicly took the New York Times to task on the accuracy of the article, which had caused Tesla’s stock to drop precipitously wiping out millions of dollars in value not to mention the tremendous damage that a negative article in the New York Times can do to a company’s brand equity.

Nowadays, it is most common in a crisis situation for a PR agency to advise their clients on a defensive position, rather than launching an aggressive offensive campaign. At Marx Layne, we ask our Fortune 500 clients who are not facing a crisis, and clients referred to us by their attorneys who are in a crisis the following questions:

• How are you prepared for these situations?
• Is your messaging prepared for a negative eventuality?
• Do you have product video that speaks to the quality of your brand?
• Who is your spokesperson and has she been properly trained?

As with Tesla Motors, at Marx Layne we believe first and foremost that the product has to be top notch; whether it is a health care service, manufacturing product, food product, or other. A crisis communications event can happen at anytime to any private, publicly held company, or nonprofit.

Elon Musk clearly believes in the product he painstakingly helped to design, manufacture and market. He took the rare approach to aggressively go on the offensive against the New York Times.

At Marx Layne, we acknowledge Elon Musk and so did the stock market as Tesla’s shares have raced to an all time high.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

As long as people enjoy writing more than a few sentences at a time, blogging will never die.

I’d contend that if blogging is dead, as this New York Times article suggests, then it’s living a healthy afterlife.

NYT’s Verne Kopytoff writes, “Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.”

I’m fully ready to admit that sites like Facebook and Twitter are immensely popular. They offer fantastic services, but there’s a limit on consciousness at each.  Twitter’s limit is 140 characters, while Facebook’s status updates limit you to 420 characters.

If I want to share something that’s more substantial, like for instance this very post, I have to look beyond Facebook and Twitter.  When I’m done writing, I’ll certainly post a link on each network and will probably try to get linked to the stories on Techmeme.

The tech world had the blogging is dead conversation less than two months ago with a flurry of posts on Techmeme. Look at how Anil Dash chimed in with “If you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen,” which was itself a response to Clive Thompson’s Wired article suggesting “Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis.”

“I save the little stuff for Twitter and blog only when I have something big to say,” Thompson quotes Dash as saying.  Then Thompson sites another piece of research, a survey saying, “the most popular blog posts today are the longest ones, 1,600 words on average.”

There’s also the news from WordPress that it had over 6 million new blogs in 2010 with pageviews up 53%.

At the heart of the New York Times article is the suggestion that Facebook and Twitter are monopolizing the time that used to be dedicated to writing.  Kopytoff also makes concessions that blogging is changing.

He cites Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, as saying blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times.

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Rainie is quoted. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”

Then there are the numbers at the end of Kopytoff’s article, “Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.”

I think it’s more proof that when you’re trying to share a message, sharing it as widely as possible is what’s important.  If you have something that can fit in 140 characters or less, share it on Twitter and Facebook.  But if you have a long, complete thought that won’t fit then write it out.  You can post the link on your social networks.

Matt Mullenweg writes similarly in his post “Blogging Drift”, in which he says “You don’t stop using the lighter method, you just complement it — different mediums afford different messages.”

Ilene Wolff asks the question “To blog or not to blog?” for PRSA Detroit.  She cites the work we do at Marx Layne to maximize exposure to our blog and drive people to our website. We use the complimenting services to shed light on what we’re writing on the Marx Layne website.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

Google is mixing in more social elements to its search results, it announced this morning.

In a post by Mike Cassidy, Product Management Director, and Matthew Kulick, Product Manager, Google announced it’s “doing a little bit more to bring you all the goodness of Google, plus the opinions of the people you care about.”

This is an important step for Google, because the world is becoming more social as people look for information from their friends. It’s easier than ever to turn to a social network to get the best information.  Google is now integrating that in its search results.

As you can see Google’s picture, there are notations where someone you know shared something.  Google says it’s “enabling you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they’re publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website.”  It’s important to note, as Search Engine Land has, while there’s a lot of social integration as of now, your Facebook friends’ likes will be excluded.

As Google continues to refine its search results, it’s making it a more personal experience.  While optimizing results is still possible, people will be getting different results based on their personal input and preferences.

Google posted a video explaining the social search update. You can watch it embedded below.

By MICHAEL LAYNE, Marx Layne

If there’s a harder working account team than the members of Marx Layne & Co., show me.  From top to bottom, the Marx Layne team has showed that hard work pays dividends.

The partners, vice presidents, senior account executives, digital architects, account executives, account assistants and interns have kicked it into high gear in this still relatively new 2011.

A team recently returned from the Chicago Auto Show, where we were representing Panasonic Automotive Systems of America and are proud of their launch of the new Fender Premium Audio System in the new line of Volkswagen vehicles.

Our team worked the early morning hours last week with Verizon to successfully launch the new version of Apple’s iPhone 4.  Gathering photographs, video and interviews, Marx Layne associates were able to deliver results for Verizon Wireless.

In Metro Detroit, the Marx Layne team successfully completed the seventh annual Motown Winter Blast.  Held in and around Campus Martius Park in Downtown Detroit, the event features value-conscious, winter-themed activities for children of all ages, including marshmallow roasting, a snow slide, ice-skating and more.

This year’s event also featured the best ever local musical and entertainment acts on three different stages with genres appealing to all tastes and ages.

The Marx Layne team also put on the first annual “Touching Communities, Touching Lives” collegiate ice sculpture competition hosted by the MGM Grand Detroit at the Grand Garden.

Six teams consisting of students from Henry Ford, Oakland and Macomb Community Colleges will compete with the top three teams receiving scholarships.

MGM Grand Detroit has committed $1 million over a 5-year period toward the Green Garden, which is maintained by Greening of Detroit.  Creating alliances and partnerships with key organizations are instrumental in providing resources and opportunities to Detroit and its citizens.

All of this work shows the continued dedication of Marx Layne & Co. to its clients.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

I noticed something interesting last night when checking out my latest followers on Twitter. Take a look at Rick Wion’s page below. He’s the Director of Social Media for McDonald’s.

You might not see it right away, so I’ll point it out.

Twitter added Connections yesterday, a new way for you to see the mutual friends and acquaintances of others. It’s a simple way of seeing whom you both follow. It also shows you else follows that person that you’re following.

Twitter’s Carolyn Penner is quoted in a TechCrunch article saying, “By exposing accounts that you and another user have in common, you will now know how those accounts are connected to other accounts you already follow. As a result, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions about which accounts to follow.”

Twitter’s not the first to launch a mutual connections feature, but it’s definitely a welcome feature. I think it will be a great benefit to the service as people look to find new people to follow and learn more about the people following them.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

Have you used Google Voice?  Do you even know what it is?

In short, Google Voice allows you to bind all of your phone numbers in to one super number.  Your Google Voice number will ring your home phone, cell phone, work phone or any other number you have simultaneously.   You can watch this quick video about the benefits before we get to the number porting.

What is Google Voice?

I’ve used Google Voice while I was writing tech reviews, because it allowed me to have one number for all of the review phones.  I didn’t use it exclusively though, because I didn’t want to go through the pain of getting everyone my new telephone number.

Now, Google is letting you switch your number over for a $20 fee. Google does offer this warning though: “After porting your number to Google Voice your mobile service plan will be cancelled, and there are a couple of steps that you’ll have to take to continue making and receiving calls on your mobile device.” That means you may have to pay an early termination fee, if you don’t clear the switch with your service provider beforehand.

They have a detailed list of instructions on how number porting works, and some tips on how to make it go smoothly in the Google Voice Help Center.
You can watch the Google video on number porting below:

By MICHAEL LAYNE, Marx Layne

How comfortable would you be if on top of your car was a sign that had your name, where you were from, where you were going, a slide show of the party you were at this weekend, what you were doing and was regularly updated with the latest and newest information?

You may not be that interested in driving around, would you? With portable electronic devices becoming more prevalent in our society, the amount of information being shared for public consumption is rising dramatically.

“Over the last few years the consensus about privacy on the Internet seems to have changed a lot,” writes Frank Groeneveld, Barry Borsboom and Boy van Amstel for CDT.org. “A few years ago, people were still hesitant about using their real names online, but nowadays people are comfortable sharing their exact location with the whole world.”

The three are the creators of the website PleaseRobMe.com. The site’s aim is to increase awareness about over-sharing by publicly showing location-based messages. From the site, “We’re not showing the Twitter messages anymore, as they no longer add anything. If you don’t want your information to show up everywhere, don’t over-share.”

In the wake of the shooting of Congresswoman Gifford, more people are analyzing where they share information and how much of it is being made available for public consumption.

In a post on ZDNet, Violet Blue notes: “Most everyone in the wake of the Giffords shooting wants to “do the right thing” in their online behavior. But in this instance, social media and tragedy reveal monstrous behavior.”

The Please Rob Me trio asked some very important questions about the openness of social media that are even more relevant today: “Where does this change in consensus come from? Are people starting to feel too comfortable? We’re not sure, but over-sharing might result in more risk and unintended consequence than one might think, especially in the long run.”

Social media can be and has been used to have overwhelmingly positive effects, but people also need to be aware that the web has no undo button. Even if you delete something, it can still be archived, screen-grabbed and more. You shouldn’t share anything that you would want to broadcast from the top of your car.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

Have you ever felt like there was too much to do—that your schedule just wouldn’t allow you to do anymore—that there just weren’t enough hours in the day? I know I have. Sometimes it feels like I’m buried under a stream of tweets, deadlines, to-do lists, new articles to read and that’s before account for the more personal commitments.

Evan Williams is the co-founder of Twitter, a realm of social networking based on sharing information with your followers. I use Twitter. I get the latest news, reviews and updates on Twitter. I like Twitter, but it’s contributing to the world of “too much.” It’s heaping piles of information, under which people are being buried.

Williams himself admits in an interview with Om Malik that there are challenges in a web of infinite info. Malik opines, “Ev, when you look at the web of today, say compared to the days of Blogger, what do you see? You feel there is just too much stuff on the web these days?”

“I totally agree. There’s too much stuff,” Williams responds. “It seems to me that almost all tools we rely on to manage information weren’t designed for a world of infinite info.”

Williams wants his creation to be an “antidote to infinite information, not a cause of it.” He continues, “We can let people follow as many accounts as possible. We just need to let them find the right stuff.”

The interview reminded me of a comic I’d read a few weeks back by Stuart McMillen. Entitled “Amusing Ourselves To Death”, McMillen’s comic uses the words of Neil Postman to compare George Orwell’s view of the future in “1984” to Aldous Huxley’s in “Brave New World.”

“Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us,” Postman writes and McMillen illustrates.

There are ways to avoid that ruined future. Beyond unplugging from everything, there are ways to start digging out. I’m not going to say that what we love will ruin us

Patton Oswalt said there’s a similar problem in geek culture. He wrote this piece for Wired saying, “I’m not a nerd. I used to be one, back 30 years ago when nerd meant something.”

His problem is that anyone can use the Internet to become an instant “expert” on anything, “The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku (a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests) about anything instantly.” The danger? Patton writes that it “creates weak otakus.” It creates weak experts, who are more interested in adding to the noise than adding anything of value. Patton describes our current state as “Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.” Patton’s solution strikes me as one Tyler Durden would come up with. He sees “Etewaf as the Balrog, the helter-skelter, the A-pop-alypse that rains cleansing fire down onto the otaku landscape, burns away the chaff, and forces us to start over with only a few thin, near-meatless scraps on which to build.”

I don’t subscribe to that theory; because I don’t think what we love will ruin us if we can learn to manage it. Instead of losing focus trying to gather everything in, we can refine our focus by doing things that matter. Going back to Williams, he recognizes there’s an overflow of information, but has a more creative solution.

“I think we need to design (our products) for a world of infinite information,” Williams tells Malik. “There’s always somewhere else to go, delivering more value in less time should always be the focus.”

I have to ask myself if I’m following that advice. The goal should always be to deliver more value in less time; otherwise we’d all be better off grabbing a shovel to start digging out from the avalanche of information overload.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

For five days last week, users of the Google Chrome web browser were invited to “browse for a good cause.” For every tab opened, people could contribute vaccinations, books, clean water, shelter or trees. It broke down like this:

• 10 tabs = 1 tree planted
• 10 tabs = 1 book published and donated
• 25 tabs = 1 vaccination treatment provided
• 100 tabs = 1 square foot of shelter built
• 200 tabs = 1 person’s clean water for a year

I tweeted about it last week, and opened hundreds of tabs myself. I’m completely astonished at the end result though, as Chrome users opened 60 million tabs.

Check out how the donations break down:

Chrome For A Cause

• $245,278 toward planting trees in the Atlantic Forest, one of the world’s endangered tropical forests.
• $232,791 toward providing clean water, by building freshwater wells for communities in developing nations.
• $112,078 toward building shelter, to be constructed by volunteers for impoverished families in Latin America.
• $267,336 toward administering vaccinations against meningitis to combat outbreaks in Africa.
• $142,518 toward publishing books by local writers and illustrators, which will be created and donated to schools and libraries across Asia and Africa.

All this was accomplished through a simple Chrome plug-in that kept track of the number of tabs you opened and then offered you an option at the end of each day to distribute your tabs to the specific charities.

If you contributed, you can read more about how your opened tabs will make an impact on the websites below:

• The Nature Conservancy
• charity: water
• Un Techo para mi País
• Doctors Without Borders
• Room to Read

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

There’s a really interesting article on The Wall Street Journal right now, “Phone-Wielding Shoppers Strike Fear Into Retailers.”

The premise is simple: smartphones in the hands of shoppers is a scary story for retail stores. The WSJ writers tell the story of Tri Tang, who found a GPS in one store, compared the price to online retailers using the smartphone and ended up buying it elsewhere for cheaper.

The lowest price won and beat out the convenience and instant gratification of walking out of the store with device in hand. Smartphones are making for smarter shoppers, who are more apt at finding the best devices for the best prices. The WSJ notes, “Mr. Tang’s smartphone reckoning represents a revolution in retailing—what Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Chief Executive Mike Duke has dubbed a ‘new era of price transparency.’”

Retailers should start to embrace that transparency, and the added value that comes with it. If there’s a customer in your store with a smartphone, the most important takeaway is that they’re in the store.

“Only a couple of retailers can play the lowest-price game,” Noam Paransky, senior manager at consultancy Kurt Salmon Associates, told the WSJ. “‘This is going to accelerate the demise of retailers who do not have either competitive pricing’ or a standout store experience.”

That standout store experience is what’s going to keep customers coming back and it’s going to prompt them to share their experiences with others. If someone had a fantastically helpful experience with a representative, they can instantly share it on their smartphone.

Comparing the numbers of smartphone-equipped users on Black Friday in 2009 and 2010, there was a 50-fold increase according to the WSJ article. If that trend continues, which is likely from market research, then more and more people will be electronically equipped all the time. Right now the technology is best suited for comparing big-ticket items, like TVs or the GPS mentioned above. Right now, you’re not likely to se someone price-checking the cost of broccoli at the supermarket.

A traditional brick-and-mortar store may not be able to compete with internet giants on price, but they have an arsenal at their disposal that internet shops can’t compete with: service and customer experience. Shoppers in stores also don’t have to worry about shipping or delivery costs, which can add to the final price.

As one commenter on the WSJ article wrote, “There is value to being able to pick up or return purchases to a local brick and mortar location… There is also value to instant gratification in addition being able to see products side by side. These advantages do not however give the local retailer a license to mark up products to a ridiculous level.”

Retailers shouldn’t be fearing the smartphone, they should be embracing the connectivity it brings.