Midas Oracle .ORG » PR

BetFair continues to be lambasted by The Guardian, and for all the good reasons. — [LINKS]

Chris F. Masse — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:44:48 +0000

One, they are losing all their good people. Two, they’ve banned the media from their stockholder assembly, which is a guarantee to get horrific press.

Thanks for our faithful reader for the links.

MicroSoft stole BetFair’s marketing idea. — [PHOTO]

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:15:36 +0000

- June 2000, BetFair paraded the streets of central London with a coffin in a mock-funeral, to mark “the death of the bookmaker”.

- September 2010, MicroSoft employees celebrated a mock iPhone funeral, to commemorate the launch of Windows Phone 7.

Chief Economists = PR People

Chris F. Masse — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:30:28 +0000

“This is why economists are always on TV and not in boardrooms.”

Mark Davies leaves BetFair —but the SEO cretins stay.

Chris F. Masse — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:58:36 +0000

One month ago, I reported that BetFair silenced their PR chief (Mark Davies) by moving him to regulation affairs and asking him to shut up his voluble gob. Office politics played against him. Too bad.

Well, as Mark Davies can’t live in the dark (away from the limelights), he has resigned, and started off his own company, Camberton —so as to do what BetFair was recently forbidding him to do (PR). I wish him good luck, with 2 caveats.

#1. Mark Davies’s true love is in fact journalism. But it doesn’t pay, unless you do TV prominently. If Mark had bollocks, he would go into journalism.

#2. Mark Davies is a SEO virgin (“Camberton” is of course notably absent from Google), who was taking tips at BetFair from the world’s crappiest SEOs. Mark Davies will have to learn web marketing. (I am not even sure Mark knows what “SEO” stands for.) And there’s the WordPress factor. Mike Robb got it, but Mark never did.

Leaving BetFair is a good thing —provided he can learn in the open what he couldn’t learn while at BetFair: Marketing 2.0.

Pre-IPO BetFair silences its PR chief Mark Davies.

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:21:49 +0000

Mark Davies:

The reason is that with my job at Betfair having recently changed so that I have responsibility for regulation but no longer for our public positioning, I have been asked not to blog about industry and company issues. Rather than stop writing completely, I have only been publishing things which cannot be construed to be a Betfair view.

Why did BetFair demote a brilliant spin doctor?

Makes no sense at all. Absurd.

DOCUMENTED: How Mark Davies joined a small startup called BetFair —when it was just an Excel spreadsheet file

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:37:51 +0000

Read the whole thing, it is entertaining.

Goldman Sachs’s $500-million PR trick

Chris F. Masse — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:42:35 +0000

Goldman Sachs announces a program to give $500 million to small business.

A senior exec fired from MicroSoft… hired one week later by Google… and who is dumping every MicroSoft software for their Google equivalent…

Chris F. Masse — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:54:33 +0000

Thanks Microsoft, Hello Google

He was in charge of PR towards the developers at MicroSoft (“evangelism“). Does now the same at Google.

Midas Oracle reads the interviews of the exchange executives… —so you don’t have to.

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:34:20 +0000

BetFair’s P.R. honcho:

- A successful campaign is one that fulfils the original brief; one that delivers our key messages to the target audience.

- Itâ€™s all about having a positive effect on the bottom line.

You can’t disagree with that.

The best way to raise awareness for your prediction market startup is to create a long-term relationship with the Midas Oracle blogger and other web acquaintances (a.k.a. “online friends”).

Chris F. Masse — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:09:50 +0000

Loic Le Meur:

[...]

#2 – Do not pick a PR person, be the spokesperson of the company.

The best person to represent the company is not a PR person and even less an external one. It is YOU. You, the founder, you the CEO. Look at Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, they are the PR machines. Does Michael Arrington himself need a PR person to represent himself get TechCrunch known? If you launch your startup, you need to be the one representing it because you have the vision and the passion. If you are shy, get over it. Get training. Try a daily video for example

#3 – Participation is NOT marketing.

The most important asset that a startup CEO has or should build is his community. It has nothing to do with marketing. [It] took me 8 years since I started blogging in 2003 to have a community and it is no marketing. It is about sharing every day thoughts, tips, advise, learnings with the community. It is about a continuous dialog with thousands of friends that will gladly help you building the company if you do not consider it as marketing. Of course, you can talk about your products and it may be good marketing at times but it should not be artificial. Marketing fails in communities.

[...]

#6 – Do not see bloggers and journalists as target either, they will ignore you.

Make sure that the PR team DOES NOT RESEARCH individual preferences for contact before they reach out, they will tell you what everybody knows about them and you will contact them in the most boring way possible. Take bloggers. Everybody tries to pitch Scoble and Arrington. They are tired of the same formatted boring pitches that come to them exactly the same. They are my friends and if I had tried to pitch them like hell they would have never have. Relationships with journalists and bloggers are the same as real life. They take years. Approaching them artificially with a strong sales pitch is the best way to make sure these relationships will never happen.

#7 – Do not measure success and traffic from PR.

It’s like if you tried to measure your relationships with your friends! Build strong links with your community, learn from them everyday, enhance your product. If you get coverage from the smallest blogger go and comment to thank him. Do not be obsessed by numbers and results, it is long term relationships that matter.

Excellent.

When I read Loic Le Meurs post, I thought to myself, “Nigel Eccles read that post months before I did.”