Inside the world of Rob Mclean, Author

So for those of you familiar with peer-to-peer file sharing, you'll know that torrents are the most popular form of file sharing on the internet. People access torrents via torrent search sites. They visit these sites, search for the files they are looking for, download the torrent (which is just a very small file) and then drag the torrent file in to a download program like utorrent . Then a few minutes or hours later they have the file on their computer. So I visited isohunt tonight, one of the more popular torrent search sites (not to download anything of course, just out of curiosity, wink wink) and I busted out laughing at the job description they had listed on their homepage. It read: isoHunt is the most comprehensive BitTorrent search engine on the interwebs. It comes as no surprise that losers online share links of copyleft and copyright materials which isoHunt indexes, both in indiscriminate amounts. Each possible infringement from such links are worth tens of ...

Well finally got around to creating a new Web site . My original was a best-efforts put together in a couple days. This one is still best-efforts, as I'm anything but a Web designer, but I think it's much better than the original. I think a big reason the site now looks pretty good is the age-old tradition of ripping your work apart. One of the things behind my success in PR has been that I have very thick skin. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I don't take anything personally at all. When I write a news release I get whoever is editing it to be as vicious as they can in their critique. I did the same thing with this Web site and I was glad I did.   Below are the three iterations my site has gone through. This first one is the original. It's not bad, but it lacks flow and polish. The color scheme is nice though and it's fairly easy to navigate. Yet despite the fact that the original site was ok, anyone who knows me, knows that I'm rarely satisfie...

Stumbled on this site the other day and I think it's pretty cool. CareerBliss is a site where people can post their views (annonymously) on the company they work for. They don't even have to work at the company anymore, they can post on previous employers. Now, obviously the first thing that comes to mind is how can you tell if a post is even by someone that actually worked at the company? I mean, what is to stop competitors from posting things about their competition. I don't have the answer to that. I think however that these types of sites ultimately follow some law of averages or something. Sure, some comments might be intentionally malicious. Just like some might be intentionally overly positive (I can see companies posting glowing reviews even if they aren't true). But on the whole, when all the comments get averaged out, you hope to get a rough proximity of the truth. If the site fails in this regard, then it's quickly abandoned by people ...

Stumbled on an interesting tv show out of the UK - Secrets of the Superbrands .  If you are interested in marketing and branding it's worth watching. I think you can watch most of the episodes on youtube (or at least clips from the episodes). I don't think the show is available in North America, but I could be wrong (hey, don't blame me that I'm disconnected from watching tv through a cable provider). I've only seen a couple episodes so far, but what I like about it is that it really shows how marketing is more psychological than creative. When I was deciding what to do after completing my degree in Psychology, public relations seemed like a natural next step. As I've said in previous posts, I don't know how you can be really good at marketing or PR without an understanding of psychology. Despite the fact that neither marketing nor PR are taught if you take a psychology degree, the two functions are based heavily on human psychology. Anyway, kudo...

So looks like the IMF may recruit Lagarde to run it . Personally I think that would be awesome. Lagarde, from what I've seen of her in the media, has her head on straight. She comes across as a down-to-earth pragmatist who is guided by a sense of what is in the interest of the greater good. From a PR perspective she would be a breath of fresh air after the whole Strauss-Kahn fiasco.

For those who watch the Daily Show you'll have seen that recently they did a piece on a Quebec town named Asbestos, which surprisingly actually exports Asbestos. The town came off looking like idiots. I suppose it could have been worse, as they could have come off as looking like criminals fully aware of the health hazards associated with their 'product', which they did not appear to be, they seem to genuinely believe that Asbestos isn't that big a health risk when used properly.  The most staggering element of all this was that the asbestos mine owner granted the interview with the Daily Show without knowing what the Daily Show even was, he thought it was a genuine news outlet. Anyway, I don't know why anyone running an Asbestos mine would be granting interviews anyway. There is no good story here. There is no angle you are going to find that makes exporting Asbestos (because you can't sell it in your own country because no one will buy it due to healt...

A while ago I wrote a blog entry about the 10 ten reasons the recession will never end. Since then, there's been some developments, so I thought I'd go back and see if those 10 reasons still hold. 1) Crashes hurt for a long time - unchanged 2) Until debt do us part - unchanged Standard and Poor's recently put the US debt on a negative credit watch 3) Lowest common denominator thinking - unchanged 4) Eroded Trust - unchanged 5) Anxiety - unchanged -- perhaps slightly better, but not enough to make a positive difference 6) Growth (innovation) versus Replacement Cycles - unchanged Cisco just announced that it will be laying off thousands of employees . Meanwhile Google announced it will be hiring thousands of employees. Unfortunately, Google is the exception. Innovation is not ramping up globally and we are still in a crunch pattern that is more about replacement cycles than anything else.  7) Shareholder model is breaking down - unchanged. The market ...

Interesting story on how Facebook used a PR firm to attempt to secretly wage a bit of a PR war against Google.Basically the brouhaha is that Facebook hired Burson-Marsteller (a PR agency) to reach out to the media and raise the issue that Google was invading people's privacy (without disclosing that the work by the PR firm was being done at the request of Facebook). This story kind of made me laugh. On the surface I don't see anything (morally) wrong with this strategy and Facebook shouldn't have to apologies for how it went about raising an issue - you should be able to raise any issue with the media, it's their job to then go fact check it (if you lie mind you, you will burn your reputation in the end). The reason I laugh is because the strategy was a dumb one (not wrong, merely dumb). Anyone who thinks a reporter is going to take a pitch  from anyone on behalf of a secret, unidentified client and not try to find out who the client is before taking the story ...

So Microsoft recently acquired Skype for $8.5B. I love Skype and I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft, so I've had trouble figuring out my view on this. What was interesting from a PR perspective was how lackluster the coverage was. This kind of announcement back in 2000 would have generated endless feature stories with larger-than-life headlines about whether Microsoft was going to wipe out carriers from around the world. However, while this story was covered just about everywhere, the articles were hum-drum at best, four-or-five-paragraph articles that simply articulated the details around the acquisition. The blogsphere actually had much more interesting commentary where people delved in to what this might mean. The reason for this in my opinion is that Microsoft is a place other companies go to become assimilated (sort of like the Borg from Star Trek). It's the exact opposite of excitement and new possibilities and fulfilling whatever vision or mission they had...