The MoPR Blog

Craigslist is a phenomenon that has swept the nation, and even the globe. In case you haven’t already sold your old couch or purchased a coffee table on Craigslist, allow me to give you a brief run down of exactly what it is. Thanks in large part to being completely free for users (minus the cost for posting a job), Craigslist is a hugely popular online destination for local classifieds and forums that is localized for more than 500 cities in more than 50 countries.

Craigslist touts the ability to search for jobs, housing, goods, services, local activities (my favorite!) and even romance. With more than 40 million people a month using its services, it’s no surprise that Craigslist has become a household name, along with its (more costly) industry peer, eBay. Speaking of eBay, a battle has been waging between the two groups ever since eBay purchased a minority stake in the company back in 2004 from a former Craigslist exec. I won’t bog you down with the details here, but if you want to check out Craigslist counter suit go here.

Lately though, the integrity of Craigslist has been put to question. What happened? Well, there have been a few strangers that have managed to creep in through the back door. Take for example the Vancouver couple recently caught allegedly attempting to sell their baby on Craigslist. Even though the parents claimed it was just a hoax, the folks at Craigslist (and the police) are not laughing. Craigslist rep Susan MacTavish Best stated that the “misuse of Craigslist for illegal purposes is absolutely unacceptable to us.”

Another recent post hit particularly close to home for me, when a user asked about a girl that lives across the street from him [and close to my own home]. He posted, “for a couple of months now I’ve been looking at you from across the street,” which I’m sure you’ll agree, would make any woman living in my area want to jump up and move. Fast.

Yes, I do occasionally get a good laugh out of the “Best of” Craigslist section where they place the rare, but quirky and crazy posts. However, this really isn’t what Craigslist is all about. The truth is, it’s an incredibly user friendly site that allows people to live out the phrase “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure”. Quite simply it’s the perfect online garage sale. And companies are starting to take notice.

Canadian mobility company Viigo has launched support for Craigslist that enables users to be notified on their smartphones when certain search criteria are met. Viigo allows you to stay on top of all the recent postings because hey, you’ve been waiting for that vintage Snow Patrol poster to pop up for months, and you don’t want another buyer to snatch it up before you do.

Another company called ImageShack has leveraged the site’s popularity by offering a photo hosting service. Craigslist offers a very simple photo uploader for posts, but they come out small and often fuzzy, which isn’t too helpful when you are trying to make your item extra appealing to a possible buyer. ImageShack solves this problem by hosting the pictures for you in numerous formats and sizes. All you need to do is snap and post.

With its popularity growing exponentially, I’m interested to see what other services and applications, particularly mobile applications, will start popping up in support of Craigslist. Stay tuned.

As for now, I’ll definitely be posting more items to Craigslist, especially when I move apartments.

Weekend Reading is posted every Friday and represents some of the cooler and interesting mobility, wireless and collaboration news Mobility PR has read throughout the week.

Look behind you TV execs – it’s online TV. According to a new report from Ipsos MediaCT, traditional TV is winning the battle for viewers – for now. Slowly and steadily, PCs are “capturing an increasing amount of screen time among those who download or stream video online” according to the report.

The quarterly tracking study investigating digital video usage and behaviors in the U.S. showed TV watchers are increasingly getting their action from somewhere else, like their PCs.
Are users flocking to other devices such as portable video devices or mobile phones? Not quite yet. Yet.

Mobile spying report: We’re homebodies. Chances are you read about this week’s brouhaha over the study by a group of researchers that tracked mobile phone usage geographically. The study found that nearly half of the people tracked kept calls to a circle of geography no more than six miles wide.
The study was based on cell phone records from a private company, whose name was not disclosed.

Old media still has a fighting chance. Conversation Agent, a favorite blog here at MoPR, linked to a timely presentation by Jeff Jarvis that lays it all out for media professionals. In a nutshell, Jarvis says today news is less about a one-way message to readers than it is about contributing to the conversation. But, it’s also about distributing news via new avenues, such as links and feeds, and finding and participating in existing communities.

Take some time to watch the slideshow – especially pages 28 through 33 - that illustrate nicely how media is morphing into a different beast. The presentation really energized our thinking on how to share our own client’s story and message.

Marketers will do more online ad spending. More than three-quarters of marketers surveyed in a study by Eloqua and reported by eMarketer.com say they will increase their social media spending during the next three years. Seventy-four percent plan to increase their direct e-mail spending while about two-thirds will spend more on mobile texting and SMS.

Nine out of 10 marketers said they would continue to increase their direct online ad budgets. Unfortunately for traditional print media, “55% of respondents said they will probably decrease print ad spending in the next three years.”

eMarketer also projected that advertisers will spend $3.8 billion in mobile messaging advertising in 2011, up from almost $1.5 billion in 2008.

Make a mobile donation. Now there’s an easier way for organizations to accept donations – text message giving. Supporters of an organization’s cause can send a text message from their mobile phone to a specific keyword/short code and their $5 or $10 donation can be applied to their cell phone bill.

Obama vs. McCain Political Website War. Vanity Fair looks at the importance of campaign website design and evaluates our current candidates’ offerings.

Our favorite part of the post was design expert Doug Jaeger’s assessment of Obama’s site and his praises of the candidates’ social networking campaign, including “Obama Everywhere” that illustrates all of the sites Obama links to such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blackplanet, FaithBase, Digg, Twitter and more.

Hat tip to Read/Write Web for flagging this comparison in Vanity Fair and for its own insightful review of the candidates sites and online images.

The PR profession is buzzing this morning. My colleagues and peers are worked up by something they saw on CBS Sunday Morning and read on the program’s website. I’m worked up too.

Here’s an excerpt from what CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen had to say:

“Show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful,’ and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.”

The irony of an attorney making a blanket statement about another profession is in and of itself comical. That this attorney works for a news organization infamous for its own casual handling of “facts” and “truth” transforms the statement from merely ironic to absurd.

To illustrate how ludicrous it is for an attorney to cast blanket aspersions on all practitioners of another profession, I tried an experiment which you can do yourself at home. Google “all lawyers are” (be sure to use the quotes). Here are a few choice examples from among the some 57,000 results returned – and I only scanned through the first 30 results:

• …all lawyers are basically immoral
• …all lawyers are crooks
• …all lawyers are a- -holes
• …all lawyers are d- - - - -bags
• …all lawyers are evil
• …all lawyers are dishonest

I for one don’t agree with any of the characterizations above. For example, the corporate attorney for Mobility PR, Matt Lowe of O’Donnell and Clark, is one of the most honest, moral and ethical people I know. The last corporate counsel I worked with, Bruce Posey at iPass, raises ethical business practice to a new bar.

But here’s a news flash for CBS and Cohen, the vast majority of public relations “flacks” (as Mr. Cohen calls us) are likewise honest, moral and ethical. In our agency and at agencies large and small throughout the U.S., we counsel clients to tell the truth, urge transparency in online communications and to address problems head-on, “warts and all.” Show of hands across the PR profession of those of us who had such a conversation on these subjects with their clients in the last week? I was in two myself.

Imagine the fall-out from a situation where a company knowingly lied about a product or service and then was caught doing so. First, sue-happy ambulance chasers would no doubt take legal action. The company’s public perception would be substantially damaged, perhaps irrevocably. The hard-earned relationships forged with those in the media would be severed and the PR flack who suggested that strategy would probably be fired. Mr. Cohen, the PR persons who are “inaccurate” and “untruthful” are the ones who are unemployed.

Mr. Cohen, I don’t know you, but when I review the above list of adjectives I found for attorneys, I’m reasonably sure you aren’t immoral, a crook, evil nor dishonest. But I’m going to leave it at that.