Machine-to-machine communications has been around for ages. What’s fueling its current revival: Interest from a variety of vertical sectors in finding a good, low-cost way to automate mobile connectivity between millions of devices that, one day, could potentially be handling billions of transactions. For mobile operators, M2M is a low ARPU business compared to H2H (human to human — my coinage). But the sheer volume of the transactions makes M2M more than worthwhile.

Enter a new twist via the smart phone. Some pundits now suggest that smart phones are well-equipped to handle a “new” app: M2M. Consider how the M2M market might ramp up if that particular prediction comes true. Google currently activates more than 200,000 Android units per day. A recent report by Netmarketshare notes that iPhone usage is growing at twice the rate of the Android’s. Talk about a mouth-watering market opportunity. . .

However, such a possibility also raises questions. When a smart phone is involved in M2M, is it really M2M, or is it M2H (human) or some blend thereof? Which BSS model applies — dedicated or retail?

Maybe these are dumb questions. If so, I hope one of our smarter readers will enlighten me. I’ll stick by my mobile device.

It’s about mass market trends, our willing gullibility, and then blogs.

The lone dweeb strolling along Pennsylvania Avenue blabbing into his cell phone. . .that was around 1992. At the time there were 13 million cell phones total in the U.S. (Go look it up yourself — I had a long night.) He was the wave of the future, of course. Now every man, woman, child and canary owns a mobile device, maybe two or three. These chattering, thumb-sore, squinty-eyed souls might be mobile but they’re still wired — the invisible umbilicus between mobile handset and brain is every bit as binding as any land line. So they talk, type, play games, watch miniature videos or whatever, just because it’s there and they can’t help themselves. It’s a cheap, legal addiction and those who indulge willingly put this monkey on their backs.

Switching gears. Does any of the above remind you of. . .your blog? What about your corporate blog, or for that matter, the company’s entire approach to social media programs?

There are probably as many blogs now, or more, than even mobile devices. (Look that up, too.) Companies blog and do other social media because it’s expected. For the most part, a canary tweets better and makes more sense. Doesn’t have to be that way, though.

Had a recent chat with social media marketing pro Kate Schackai at Design Plymouth, which helps Northeast businesses get up, running and stay on track with social media marketing. A few (but not all) pointers she offered so that your blog works for you and not vice versa:

1. Have a plan. Your blog should be a Google magnet, a hub of dynamic content for current readers, and provide a wealth of accessible information for potential clients.
2. Know your “key words.” Do key word research (better yet, have it done by an expert) so that key words appearing in social media fit your company and audience.
3. Optimize content. Plug those key phrases into the blog to attract the right eyeballs to your site.
4. Be Anti-Copernican. Use the blog as the center of content releases — articles, videos and podcasts. The sun and planets should revolve around your web site.
5. Easy content navigation. Use high-level titles and pick tags that capture important niche concepts. Avoid date-based archives (who knows, cares or wants to scroll through what you posted last September?), and get rid of any duplicate categories or tags.
6. Use integrated applications to push blog content to social media platforms.  NetworkedBlogs, TwitterFeed, Feedburner, Aweber, etc.

Hm. Just realized I’m neglecting or have violated at least half this list of rules. What an idiot. Better have Kate fix it, but meantime I see the dog left his bluetooth on the kitchen counter and it’s ringing like mad. That “Lassie, Come Home” ring tone really gets up my nose.

“Rover, c’mere, dammit!”

I was reminded of this after stumbling into a chat on PR with a casual acquaintance who happens to be a C-level exec. He knows all about PR, or should, having burned through four agencies in 18 months. (I know this through rock solid hearsay, not personal work experience with the chap, thank God.)  Seems nobody can get his mug on the cover of TIME, Fortune or even Eastern Dogfood Gazette in 90 days, the bumbs.  It’s a major disappointment, but he’s hooked.  So he cycles through agencies in the hope of finding a winner, or maybe a lucky break. That line from Baudelaire comes to mind — “His face bore the forlorn look of a man condemned to hope forever.”

Listening to this tale of woe, I had a thought. Maybe I should tell him about social media and how it’s made traditional PR obsolete. But I thought better of the idea.  I have friends in that market and prefer to stay on good terms with them.

Heading out I bumped into a PR colleague, there to make his pitch on becoming Agency Number 5.

“Hey, got any tips on how to handle this guy?” he asked.

“Yes I do. Apply the Viking approach — pillage, plunder and get the hell out quickly.”

To backtrack. . .Earlier this week Virgin’s posting on its flat rate plan went live on Facebook a day or so ahead of the planned press release. Gleeful reporters were immediately all over the story, many noting the social media post that gave the news away. The company’s explanation for the apparent gaffe might be paraphrased, “hey, we goofed.” Well, maybe that’s so. On the other hand, as one of the savviest social media operators on the planet, Virgin may have known exactly what it was doing when that Facebook post popped ahead of schedule.

Calculated leaks and advances are time-honored ways of generating press coverage. Who among us in the PR profession hasn’t dabbled with both somewhere along the line?  With Facebook and Twitter to spread the word, the impact can be immediate and massive.  Net net, by the time Virgin’s release came out, it was virtually an afterthought — the story had already been widely covered in national and trade press. Makes me wonder: Is this a sign of things to come?

The possibility that we’re witnessing the imminent demise of the press release will impact several groups: (1) companies that still look to official announcements as the primary vehicle for news dissemination; (2) wire service companies that make a good living zipping announcements over the Internet; and (3) tracking services that monitor and report on press release postings and coverage.

As more companies like Virgin experiment with new ways to “get the story out,” consider what may follow:

1. Companies may begin to question their commitment to a news vehicle that, for the most part, ends up in the media dumping zone — those daily feeds of verbatim press release postings that scroll by on a news site home page and are quickly forgotten.
2. Wire service distribution services that charge to push announcements to search engines may face increasing pressure from social media outlets that deliver the same or better impact for free.
3. Lastly, given that the vast majority of what they track is just verbatim press release postings — and most of these are available at no cost via Google news — newsclip services could suffer declining popularity.

If any of the above comes to pass, maybe the traditional infrastructure for news distribution will become as quaint as reading hard copy newspapers and magazines. Time will tell, and I have a feeling it’s closing in fast.

I attribute his actions to Fear of the Dread Lord Google. We all know the sermon: In order to drive traffic to one’s site it’s essential to lay new content on the altar daily lest Google forget we exist. Whether that’s true or not, it recalls Old Testament faith in a remote God who cares not for humans yet must be appeased. Forced to worship a deity out of fear, not inspiration, an angel would (and once did) rebel.

Existential beats essential. Writers should write and post only when possessed by their own creative demons. If the spirit moves you 10X/day, then go for it, and in the moment. If that sudden burst is followed by days or weeks of silence, so be it.  It’s when we flog ourselves to meet a deadline that matters to no one, or fill space for the sake of it, that content rings hollow like liturgy.

Algorithms add. Customers struck by the uniqueness of your vision count.

Fact is, not every “story” a client considers hot stuff is really worth a press release. Make sure it has genuine news value before pushing the button on editorial costs to create it, staff, management and customer time/resources to review & approve it, and wire service costs to distribute it.

What’s newsworthy? New products. Client wins. Major partnerships. Key new hires and promotions. Some awards, i.e., those sponsored by a key industry organization or media that can add luster to your reputation with customers — but first make sure that the entity bestowing the award will participate by providing a press release quote; if they have a special “award logo” you can post on your home page, even better. Just one caveat: Recognize that other media rarely run coverage on a competitor’s awards program. However, you’ll get the usual postings on Yahoo Finance, etc., and the award logo looks spiffy on your home page.

As long as we’re in penny-pinching mode, here’s an updated version of one of our most popular blogs, “10 Ways to Save on PR.”

1. Hire Agencies that Hire Journalists. Reporters are trained to ferret out a news angle quickly, make it compelling and produce results on deadline. Emphasis on speed and performance translates to lower billable hours.
2. Always Ask What it’s Worth. Product development teams tend to think that everything they invent is priceless. Counter by asking how much revenue it will generate. Allocate PR resources accordingly.
3. Focus on 3 or 4 Big Stories. Ask management to list the top stories they want highlighted in the coming 6 – 12 months. Focusing on “what’s big” ensures a consistent story line and strong image. Diffuse PR programs undercut the brand and waste hours.
4. Brief the Account Team. Many an hour is lost because the client pulled its agency into a project at the last minute with no prep. Time spent up-front leads to high-impact, cost-effective results.
5. Use “Straw Man” PR Plans. A bulleted one-pager on goals, news, message, spokespersons and media targets is easy/cheap to create, and gets the attention of the execs you design it for. Sir Winston Churchill refused to read any memo longer than half a page.  Your execs think the same way.
6. Shop Around for Wire Services.  This is the Internet Age.  There is no excuse for vendors that charge $hundreds/$thousands for electronic press release transmissions that cost them pennies. Look for better deals from new online distribution services — after you first check that they offer the same breadth of distribution and immediate turnaround as the Big Boys.
7. Distribute Locally – Never Nationally.  The only reason to use any wire service is to push your announcement to search engines.  The same SEs receive your release whether you distribute it with a local dateline (low price) or nationwide (high price).  Always go local.
8. Keep Press Releases Short.  A  press release should be a door-opener with reporters, not a warehouse of technical or marketing gibberish.  Keep releases short and simple — like a wire service story — to generate interviews and coverage and cut content creation and wire service costs.
9. Re-Purpose Content.  Writing is expensive. Editing is cheap. If a subject is hot enough for a white paper, it may also be good for a blog, podcast or bylined article. Maximize your mileage on content by adapting it to multiple vehicles. (As an example, this year Crawford has created 15 home page blogs for one client and placed nearly every one of them, with only minor changes, as a “guest blog” or byline with the customer’s targeted media.  Blog creation and external placement were included in the monthly retainer — the client didn’t pay one nickel extra.)
10. Keep Meeting and Reporting Time to a Minimum.  Take a close look at your line-item agency invoice. You may be amazed at how much time is devoted to weekly meetings and reports.  It shouldn’t take that long for the agency to say what they’ve done and plan to do. Streamline the report, too.  Fancy, colorful spreadsheets overflowing with tabs on last year’s results, this year’s editorial calenders, next year’s trade shows and other filler are a waste of time. The weekly report should focus on one thing: Key action items. Period.

Get to it, my fellow Scrooges. PR is always your best and most lasting form of promotion, marketing, and yes, advertising — and the cheapest, too.

In her recent book, Different, Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon points to an epidemic of me-too thinking infecting brand value, often with mortal impact.

“In category after category,” writes Moon, “companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate — which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become. Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them.”

In this bizarre world, companies race to keep up with each other on features and functionality, but rarely leap forward feet first into the unique. Differentiation is dead. “Marketing strategy” is reduced to an oxymoron. In the end, herd thinkers compete only on margin and tip into a death spiral as deep-pocketed competitors undercut prices to and below the bone.

Look at any market niche — cell phones, TVs, OSS and BSS software — and you find a profusion of once unique but now commoditized products and services that perform identically. Each is a stationary target for the first company that smacks them aside with a product idea that makes customers’ brains sizzle.

Such “idea brands” up-end the limits and assumptions of market categories. They’re not built around a suite of well-rounded products and services that perform satisfactorily in a hundred areas. The company may only do one thing — but they do it exceptionally well.

Howzat?  Consider that every Saturday, ordinarily mild-mannered men by the thousands magically transform into The Terminator. . .just by donning black leathers and jumping on their hogs. Harley-Davidson owns the stand-out brand that converts accountants and school teachers into bad-ass mothers. A favorite t-shirt slogan with this crowd reads: “We don’t care what they’re doing in Japan.” That’s the magic of drop-dead, to-hell-with-the-competition idea branding.

How can you tell if you’re that kind of company?

Read Youngme Moon’s book cover-to-cover, twice.

Walk into the front office and ask any employee to recite in 25 words or less what makes your company stand out.

Ask yourself: If we disappeared tomorrow, would anybody miss us?

Now that social media is all the rage and its competitors are elbows deep in the stuff, that once too timid company is blogging and tweeting furiously. There’s a tiresome sameness to such assembly line-style content, and it’s hard to distinguish one me-too outfit from another.

Take one aside and ask face-to-face what sets them apart.  If being completely candid they’ll reply, “We really don’t know.”

Later, dudes. It’s Tuesday morning, the roads are clear of dentists on Harleys, and transformation awaits me astride my kick-ass, suicide shift, brakes-are-really-just-a-suggestion 1946 Indian Chief.

Steve, we love ya. You’ve always been the creative wild man standing up against the monolith of IBM, Microsoft, and now, the entrenched mobile players.  So we forgive you for the “antennagate” outburst. We’re writing this off to the crankiness that comes with age.

But the next time a problem comes along, just admit it, fix it, and move on. Apple’s devoted followers will continue to love their iPhones, and the issue soon will be forgotten. Trying to sweep a problem under the rug only highlights what you’re trying to hide. If it was a PR agency that recommended this strategy — or even if it was your idea and they went along without warning you of the repercussions — you might consider yanking them.

In your defense, you’re not the first to think he can gloss over a blatant problem. Roman orator Cicero provides a choice example, describing a senator who tried to deflect attention from a bad decision by reciting his many virtues.  As Cicero said of that inept politician, “The more he spoke of his honesty, the faster we counted our spoons.”  You can’t run from trouble.

Thanks for the free phone case, so nifty that it almost, but not quite, thrusts the antenna issue from our minds. If you really want to do something nice for customers, though, maybe partner with a robust network service provider?

A new friend, Steve Pastner, offers to take me on a trip 20 miles down the coast to visit a fishing village he lived in and studied for a year. Steve is an anthropologist. It’s the kind of friendship strangers in a foreign land strike up quickly. Big, burly and funny, Steve makes it his first act to move me out of the Hotel Intercontinental to a ramshackle hostelry that backs to the railroad track and provides overflow for jailed drug smugglers when the local brig is full.  I immediately take to the Afghan owners — warm, generous people.  Notwithstanding the column of soldier ants that march across the floor day-long, the room isn’t bad, either.  Some things you learn to step over and ignore.  Other things just hit you,  like it being the beginning of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset and so do you in their midst.

In the village Steve is greeted like a lost son. The “chief” leads us to his clay home where we’re set on a dais and served hot tea. The entire village piles into the house and children hang over the window sill to peer at the alien visitors. The chief has the one radio in town and it’s tuned to the BBC. With every news flash of an Israeli air strike, wild cheers.  These people are Christians from Baluchistan and there’s no love lost between them and the Sunnis.

Strolling down the beach surrounded by village children. A boy jumps and lets out a whoop. I’m wearing mirrored Ray-Ban sunglasses and he realizes he can see the ocean’s reflection in the lenses. The bigger miracle follows when for the first time in his life he sees his own face. Now they all crowd around for a glimpse. Imagine going through life with no idea what you look like, when your only clue to how you appear to the world is how others react to you.

Some companies are like that. They act out of response to external inputs and remain blind to who and what they are. What might unfold if they stopped to consider their own reflection and took action on what this first-time vision revealed?  The inspiration might be to care less what others think.

True, it’s good for IT and the economy that larger enterprises are back in the game and opening their purses to replace worn out desktops. I guess. Never mind that half of the PCs are junk after a year or two and burden companies with heavy maintenance costs. CIOs know this and are simultaneously trending toward disposable netbooks. Looked at in this light, Intel’s breath of fresh earnings air is more like a last gasp.

The real buried news in Intel’s earnings announcement is the other revenue driver: sales of chips to data centers, where the brunt of tomorrow’s serious business communications activities — including cloud computing — are rapidly migrating. Consider, as an example, that remote electronic trading posts (”dark pools”) now control 80% of all equities transactions, relegating traditional stock exchanges to window dressing.

That, in similar scenarios replicated by a thousand industries, is the way the entire business world is headed. Wake up.

Instead of boo-hooing about the recession and grasping at every hopeful market signal, see financial disasters as the healthy destruction of the antiquated. Something much better is on the way.

Don’t get too jazzed about netbooks. They’re just the razor. Private, end-to-end fiber optic networks connecting data centers that support financial, industrial, media, social media and all other business activity — and the BSS/OSS systems that track and bill for all this high margin activity — they’re the blade where serious money will be made.