Posts by tom.foremski

Watch that horn...

Not all Unicorns are created equal. The VC terms can be onerous — founders are either sitting on the back of the galloping horse or running ahead of the horn...

Good points. But about trusting Google software over GM etc, Google's culture of beta is good enough would give me pause. Plus the Google self-drivers require $250K conversion kit, the route has to be mapped anew every day, and a qualified driver to take over at a moments notice of failure, seems more stressful than driving.

Salesforce is building the tallest office tower in San Francisco...

If the "Salesforce Tower" became the "Microsoft Tower" it would not feel right. It would feel as if a giant hand was scratching a giant chalkboard, 24/7. SF is not an outpost of Redmond.

Benioff would make a great Oracle CEO. Many people have no idea Oracle has two CEOs, or can name them. The Oracle culture needs strong, flamboyant leadership, imho.

Thanks Chris!

Thanks for the coverage Chris! BTW I'm not head of PR as the headline says, and I love PR people, they help me get my job done by offering interviews, invites to events, etc.

I'm not anti-PR but I am against doing things the old way when new media technologies can rewrite the PR industry in the same way they have with the media industry.

I'm also making a distinction between the current trend of "content marketing" which is problematic because it is trying to produce editorial content but comes out looking like marketing. Editorial comms needs to be editorially lead, not run by marketing or PR comms otherwise that's what it will look like. I prefer to use the neutral term "corporate media" as a full-spectrum term that includes all the content published by a company, such as white papers, press releases, etc, and content marketing.

There's an opportunity to define a new segment within corporate media as editorial communications. There's a twist to my "Every company is a media company" mantra. "Every company has a media company," an organization internally that helps to honestly represent a company through editorial communications of various kinds.

It's an experiment and it might not work out. I think it can work if that media organization can be built as a peer organization to the other corporate departments. The Media Org has to be lean and organized in a similar way to a newsroom with editors, sub-editors, etc so it can be dynamic and of the moment rather than tied up by excruciating slow processes. We'll see how it goes.

The media industry is continuing to struggle with an unstable business model in which ads don't pay and paywalls cut you off from the best feature of the Internet: free, unlimited distribution.

Corporate media is interesting because it has a business model and so it doesn't have to resort to awful click-bait headlines, and try to stand up half-baked stories, or pander to the popular trends of the masses just to get enough traffic to pay the rent. But can corporate media also produce editorial content that does't look like marketing/PR or look like it has been written by committees. We'll see.