I Am Responsible for Apple’s Cratering Stock Price

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Apple’s stock price seems to be in free-fall of late. The experts and pundits are offering up all sort of reasons why.

I’ll save them the trouble: It’s me.

How so?

I’m THAT guy. The guy who buys every gadget the minute it hits the store. That especially applies to Apple iDevices. I have bought so many iPod, iPads and iPhones over the years, I’ve lost count.

Except now. In the last three months, Apple has introduced:

  • iPhone 5
  • iPad mini
  • iPad 4
  • new iPod touch
  • new iPod nano

And I have purchased exactly… none of them. All of my current iDevices work just fine and none of the above mentioned new products are compelling enough to make me want to run out and buy any of them. On top of that, I have a considerable amount of money invested in an iDevice “ecosystem” of accessories and the change to the new Lightning connector renders all of them pretty useless.

So, thanks but no thanks Apple. Not only are you NOT inducing me to buy your new products, you are actually providing considerable incentive to hang onto my old ones as long as possible.

On the one hand, that’s a good thing. Your previous generation products are excellent, high-quality devices that work great. But viewed from the perspective of an Apple stockholder who paid north of $600 for your stock, I am a really bad dream come true.

Mark Zuckerberg is the next… Mark Zuckerberg

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Last week, I had dinner in San Francisco with a friend/technology journalist. Facebook had finished its first week as a public company and the stock was off 20 percent from the offering price.

I asked him if the Facebook IPO was still fun/interesting to cover or if it was getting old. He said it was getting old, because, at the end of the day, Facebook is… Facebook.

We both agreed that if, by some quirk of fate, we all woke up one morning and every product made by, say, Microsoft or Oracle had vanished, the world as we know it would come to a grinding halt. Even Apple products, if they went missing, would cause a major disturbance in the Force, though an iPad is not quite as mission-critical as a relational database.

But Facebook? Yes it’s fun and useful and a time-suck and many other things. But if tomorrow we all woke up to a world without Facebook, we would take to Twitter, say “WTF???!!!” and then get on with our lives. (But we still wouldn’t use Google+).

So any notion that Mark Zuckerberg is the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs seems, at best, premature and at worst, just plain silly. Maybe Mr. Zuckerberg has plans for Facebook that only he knows and that will fundamentally remake the world, but they aren’t readily apparent and maybe that’s why the stock continues to fall. No one else sees it either.

Perils of High Tech PR and Disappearing Clients

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Our work with (mostly) startup technology companies is fraught with peril. One of the perils for us is that their success becomes better known, which after all is part of our role. The result can be – and more and more it seems – that the company gets acquired.

We love our clients, we just wish they weren’t so darn successful. Or, maybe that we helped make their success so well known.

Just this week, another client that we had worked with – Wanova – was acquired (by VMware).

Here is our scorecard, which is either really good (for the companies) or really bad (because they no longer need us). It’s all a matter of perspective, you see.

We’re resigned to the reality of doing good work for our clients wherever that takes them. Heck, at times, we’ve made a few bucks when we were fortunate enough to share in the equity. And LogMeIn has grown from a handful of employees to hundreds, a successful 2009 IPO and is now doing some acquiring of its own.

Translating PR to Sales

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It has been a long time since a post about the value of public relations, in terms of business success or impact. Recently, we’ve had some very good recent examples where we could see a strong connection between what we do and its impact. Both cases were new clients where we got off to good starts, which we saw translate into heightened levels of activity on their websites.

In one case (we won’t reveal client names), prior to when our work started on September 1 the highest week total was just over 5,000 website visits. Through last week, that number of visitors was exceeded every week that we’ve worked together – with the exception of the month of December, which was clearly a down period during the holidays.

In another 10-week period, we generated 85 articles in IT media. The chart below clearly shows the dramatic rise in website visits.

Looking at the trusty AIDA (Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action) sales cycle, we can take some credit for increasing awareness, and generating enough interest for people to go to the client’s website. From here, the client translates those web site visits into sales. We set the table and bring them into the restaurant. Sales takes the order and serves the meal. It’s a team effort.

Image: www.mcdonaldbutler.com

If you work in PR, we’re interested in your comments and experiences measuring impact. And, if you’re a business, can we help? Contact us and let’s talk. We pride ourselves on delivering results and long-standing client relationships.

My Day with Steve Jobs

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Image: EzineMark.com

Right around 1989/1990, in my days working in IBM public relations I got to spend an entire work day with Steve Jobs – his PR person, an IBM executive and me.

No, he wasn’t at Apple then. That was in his Apple hiatus when he was heading up NeXT computer. IBM was about to introduce the RS/6000 – its UNIX workstation/server – and was licensing the NeXTStep software for its hardware. (For a full account of these days, take a look at Steve Vaughan-Nichols article published today.)

I wasn’t a Steve Jobs fanboy but left IBM’s office tower in midtown Manhattan that day knowing it was a very special day. We did a series of media interviews the entire day – one after another – with Jobs and an IBM VP (Nick Donofrio, if you really need to know). Jobs spoke in quotable quotes and every writer took notes when Steve spoke. My favorite was, “This isn’t an operating system for the common man.”

He was very business-like, kind of aloof from all of us and kind of kept to himself. It struck me at some point then that we were the same age – and, for that matter, so is Bill Gates. I felt some sort of kinship knowing we’d grown up in the same times. (Somehow, I don’t think the same thought crossed Steve Jobs’ mind, but I digress.)

The IBM space never looked better than that day. We’d done lots of events and meetings on that floor but on this day when I arrived there were tulips and other flowers all around – red and white. It wasn’t overdone and was very tasteful. I was told Steve thought that was important. It cost someone a fair bit of money but definitely made an impression. I never forgot. It was an early lesson for me that “design matters” and one that Steve Jobs knew very well.

The day concluded without fanfare. We got lots of great media coverage – partially because of IBM’s stature and largely because of Steve Jobs charisma in dealing with the media and giving them what they wanted. That was another lesson I took away from the day.

Since that time, I’ve heard more than one account of Steve Jobs high standards and how people would come into a meeting with something they thought was finished work and be sent back to do more work because Steve felt it wasn’t ready for prime time. He is a perfectionist with high demands and expectations. That felt consistent with the one day I spent with him. It struck me that he held himself accountable to the highest standards.

I believe we’ll miss him in the tech industry and from my experience that he cannot be replaced. I’m not predicting the doom of Apple. I’m just saying that my one experience with him makes me believe no one can do exactly what he did.

Why Darwin Would Have Loved Technology

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The tech industry is one of the ultimate expressions of “survival of the fittest.” It seems a day does not go by that a company or hot tech product that was on top is being left for corporate road kill and yesterday’s also-ran is the most valuable company on the planet.

Some examples:

- Before Steve Jobs re-joined Apple in 1996, the stock was trading for about $6.00/share and there was chatter that Sun Microsystems would buy Apple. Today, Sun no longer exists as an independent company and Apple is king of the world.

- Just five years ago, MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the U.S. and was poised to take over the world. It was so hot that the dark lord Rupert Murdoch forked over $580 million for MySpace in 2005. As Murdoch’s colleague Homer Simpson might say: “D’oh!” Facebook came along and today MySpace is essentially worthless.

- I once used Yahoo! for all my searches. Be honest: when was the last time you used ANYTHING but Google? (Sure, Bing is pretty good, but I don’t use it and neither do you.)

- In May 2010, Microsoft, with great fanfare and after about a $1 billion in R&D, launches it “Kin” mobile phones. Hope you didn’t sneeze because they were such a hit that Microsoft killed them off after a month and a half.

- While BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is (to quote Monty Python’s “Holy Grail”) “…not dead yet,” its travails are well documented, having gone from first to almost worst in the past 12 months or so.

- Just this week Motorola, the same guys who created the walkie-talkie and the RAZR cell phone, decided that it can’t compete against Apple and Google in the phone and tablet space, so it sold itself to… Google. And HP decided the same thing just one year after paying a billion dollars for Palm and just two months after launching its own tablet.

I don’t mean for this to be a snarky litany of tech failures. To the contrary, in a way, this should be viewed as a celebration of innovation, capitalism and corporate Darwinism.

Technology moves so fast that the next best thing is always just around the corner and you can throw all the marketing and PR and spin you want at a product, but at the end of the day, customers decide who wins and who loses. In a world where banks are too big to fail and the alleged smart guys at places like Goldman Sachs would be on the unemployment line if they didn’t have the U.S. taxpayer to bail them out, it’s great to see an industry that thrives and dies on its own wits, merits, successes and failures.

Will Google always be on top? Can Apple continue its run? And nothing could possibly replace Facebook, right?

Right?

Well, if I were in Las Vegas a few hundred million years ago, I would have bet my cave on Tyrannosaurus Rex. He was big, powerful and a bad-ass carnivore (much like Microsoft used to be) who had a nice run, but a meteor and some pesky start-ups called “mammals” changed all that.

Yep – Darwin would have loved the tech industry. And I’m pretty sure he would have followed it all on his iPad.

My New Favorite Charity: Print Media

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Today, the New York Times enacted its long-anticipated “pay wall”, ending months of speculation and years of free rides for the denizens of the Internet who refuse to pay for anything, ever. (Well, not quite. We can read 20 articles per month for free. Seeing as how most people seem to think that news happens in 140 characters or less, 20 stories per month should suffice for the masses.)

It got me thinking: Why am I paying for THREE print editions of newspapers – The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local daily – to be delivered? Most of the time, I read both the Times and the Journal on my iPad, where I would still have to pay, but much less than for a print subscription.

I think I have stopped looking at my media subscriptions as purchases of products. I now see them as charities. It is my civic duty to continue to have the print version delivered. I am afraid that if I don’t, the last of the crumbling foundation on which journalism was built will collapse into a pile of dust.

So, in these tumultuous times of major news events, Internet pay walls and filing taxes, I wonder when the federal government will allow us to write off our print subscriptions as charitable donations. It’s the least our government (and we) can do for the journalism industry.

How (Not) To Communicate in a Social Media World

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I’m a pretty simple guy. I still like to read newspapers every morning, like a good tuna sandwich almost as much as a gourmet meal and I will pick up the phone and call someone if I urgently need to communicate with them.

But I am not a Luddite. I get that social media is the wave of today and tomorrow. Facebook and Twitter are contributing to government overthrows as well as Charlie Sheen’s meltdown. I’m (sort of) OK with all that.

But, like many businesses, Baker Communications Group relies heavily on email. And this morning, we are facing a two-hour (and counting) email outage from our hosting provider, Network Solutions.

This is not good. So I picked up the phone and called the support line and got – a BUSY signal. When was the last time you’ve bumped into one of those? It’s like being teleported back to 1986.

I had to go to Twitter to see that many others around the world were having the same problems. Perversely, I had to “Like” Network Solutions on Facebook in order to communicate with them. (Let me just say that in no way do I ‘like” them at this moment.)

Instead of a busy signal, how about a simple prerecorded message saying that they are working on the problem. Maybe even a notice stating the same on the support web page. These are both very complex yet highly effective tactics that were mastered decades ago. One would think that a company like Network Solutions, which manages massive datacenters (sometimes), could deploy these two sophisticated techniques.

By doing so, they would save themselves from a ton of public grief and outrage on social media.

But what do I know? I still wear a wristwatch and drink Maxwell House coffee.

The Delicate Dance of Disclosure

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(Image: Wikipedia)

Today comes the unhappy news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is once again taking a medical leave of absence.

Apple is not a company known for openness when it comes to just about anything: products, problems, how it approves apps for the iPhone – you name it. And it seems that, once again, Apple is searching for the right balance between its CEO’s personal privacy and proper disclosure from a publicly traded company.

It’s not an easy task. For several years, I was the investor relations officer at a public company and there were a couple of occasions when a difficult decision had to be made about:

A): Whether or not to disclose

B): How much to say

C:) How and when to get the word out.

Here’s how we worked the problem:

A:) Whether or not to disclose: This one should be relatively easy. The test should be that if the news is something that an investor would likely want to know before buying or selling the company’s securities, there is a duty to disclose. Of course, there is a huge gray area here, but a test for reasonableness should be applied. In other words, most reasonable people probably don’t need to know that the CEO had knee surgery, since it is unlikely that the knee surgery will affect his or her ability to do the job over the long term. If, however, the surgery goes horribly wrong and the CEO will need four months to recover, that is probably a disclosable event.

Another way of applying this test is: If the discussion to disclose lasts more than five minutes, then you probably should say something.

Clearly, Apple had a duty to disclose.

B:) How much to say: This gets a bit more complicated. It depends on the issue. In the specific example of Apple, if I knew something to be an absolute incontrovertible fact, then I would advise the company to disclose as much as necessary as it relates to his role at the company. So, by this test, we know that Mr. Jobs is sick and that he will be out for an indeterminate amount of time. It does not matter if he is sick, or bored or going on walkabout in the Australian outback for some unknown period. All that matters is that he won’t be around to run the company.

If at some point in the future (say, a month from now) he returns to health (something I think we all hope for Mr. Jobs), then Apple makes an announcement that he’s back on the job and we move on. If, however, a month from now Apple becomes aware that Mr. Jobs will never return to being an active CEO, then I believe there is a duty to disclose that immediately. I don’t think we have a right to know what is specifically is wrong. We (shareholders) only have a right to know how his absence affects his role at the company we own.

Bottom line: There is a duty to update material information as it becomes available.

C:) How and when to get the word out: This is also a gray area, though Apple handled it pretty well by doing it on a Monday when the markets were closed for Martin Luther King day. This gives analysts a chance to analyze and a full 24 hours before trading in the stock resumes. In our second-by-second, “shoot first, ask questions later” news environment, this is a pause that refreshes. Of course, there is no way of knowing when the decision was made for Mr. Jobs to take this leave. After all, he was not at the Verizon-iPhone launch event last week. But, tactically, today was a good day to announce it.

It may sound crass or unfeeling to be discussing a human being’s health in such a cold, business-like manner, but this is the bed that Apple has made for itself.

Steve Jobs has created a cult legend around himself as the final arbiter of all products, down to the last detail. If Steve doesn’t like the way a button clicks on the iPhone, it doesn’t get released. But that also means that people believe, rightly or wrongly, that all of Apple’s fabulously successful products begin and end with Steve Jobs. “Without Steve, what is there?”, people legitimately ask.

Also, as mentioned, Apple is super-secretive. If you don’t tell people what is going on, then rumor, whispers and speculation will fill in for the truth. That may or may not help Apple executives and their PR staff, but it is almost never good for investors.

As a long-time friend and very successful (now retired) professional investor once told me:

“Wall Street loves good news and can handle bad news, but it hates NO news.”

Tomorrow’s trading in Apple stock will be interesting, but not necessarily fun for all. But, then again, proper disclosure is not always about fun, games and cool gadgets.