Google, the all-knowing, sent me an email promoting its service, Adwords. Google wants me to try and then buy its contextual advertising.

Google (the all-knowing), emailed me this promotional email to my gmail account. (For the Rip van Winkles in the crowd, “gmail” is a web-based email service created by and provided by Google.)

But does this important email message from Google show up in my gmail inbox? No. Instead, gmail identified this email, from google as spam, and shunted it into the spam folder.

Algorithm uber alles? You decide.

Well, I might yet be able to make it. Still trying to get there. Last year’s was interesting and fun. So, we’ll see. There’s so much else to do. Projects. Chores. Responsibilities.

(And, for all you search engine spiders, I’m talking about WordCamp in New York City, where bloggers and techies who have devoted themselves to the WordPress blogging platform come together to talk about what’s going on with WordPress, learn new tricks, new substantive knowledge about the inner workings of WordPress, how to make one’s blog better, how to do what you want to do better and more easily.

Charming visionary Matt Muhlenweg, who created WordPress showed up last year and talked for a while.

In sum, last year’s Wordcamp was insteresting, fun, and informative. Plus I met good people. It would be nice to do it all over again this year.

With Game Four of the 2009 World Series now in the bottom of the fourth inning, I’m multitasking, watching the game, listening to announcer Tim McCarver and crew, and looking over notes I made recently about bond-trader-turned-journalist Michael Lewis’s stupendous book, first published in 2003, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

In Moneyball, Lewis chronicles the efforts of Billy Beane, renegade general manager of the Oakland As, to make his team competitive even though he had only one-quarter of the money to hire and pay salaries of players, as compared to top competitors like the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

To accomplish this difficult task, Beane rejected the conventional wisdom about how to evaluate players and predict a player’s future performance and success. Instead, going far beyond the RBI and the ERA, he drew on the studies of far flung math geek baseb all fanatics to apply arcane statistical analyses which no other professional baseball team used.

One of the things Lewis talks about is how certain statistics describing a player’s performance are so meaningful, predictive, and telling as to “have the power of language.”

Meanwhile, following the author’s lead on this, the book as a whole demonstrates that some writing has more of the power of language than other writing.

Lewis, a masterful story-teller, captures the language of the players, the baseball scouts, the managers who inhabit the world of professional baseball; he describes in compelling, can’t-put-it-down, page-turner prose, the completely weird, arcane statistical analysis concepts which were at the root of Billy Beane’s unconventional yet effective strategies for putting together an unexpectedly competitive, frequently winning team at fire-sale prices.

In lesser hands, this unusual story of a daring strategist who epitomized outside-the-proverbial-box thinking, would likely be eyes-glaze-over gobbledy-gook.

Moneyball is a powerful, persuasive, and controversial book. In fact, when it was first released, it caused an uproar and downright anger within the insular society of professional baseball (see Lewis’s discussion of the angy, almost bitter, nearly violent reactions to it in the 2004 paperback edition’s new Afterword).

Negative reactions from inside baseball aside, along with the simple pleasure of reading great writing and compelling storytelling, anyone interested in how writing can persuade, provoke and sell, can benefit from this book. And, as British novelist Nick Hornby, who admits to knowing nothing about baseball, points out, you don’t have to know anything about baseball to appreciate and enjoy the book, its story, and its writing.

What follows are excerpts which show some of my favorite passages, which serve as examples of what makes this book so very powerful, persuasive, fun, and, at the same time, controversial:

1. The title of the first chapter, “The Curse of Talent,” which is intriguing and compelling in its counterintuitive promise: I thought talent was a good thing. Why is it a curse?

2. Setting the scene, on page 16:

On draft day the Oakland draft room was a ceremonial place. Wives, owners, friends of the owners—all these people who made you think twice before saying “fuck”—gathered politely along the back wall of the room to watch the Oakland team determine its future.

3. An ear for hearing, and capturing on paper, the spoken word, like novelist Hubert Selby, Jr., (Last Exit to Brooklyn) idiosyncratic styles of speaking in the secret language and vocabulary of a specialized world, baseball, on page 24:

Lark is a high school pitcher with a blazing fastball. He’s a favorite of one of the older scouts, who introduces him in a language only faintly resembling English. “Good body, big arm. Good fastball, playable slider, so-so change,” he says. “A little funk on the backside but nothing you can’t clean up. I saw him good one day and not so good another.”

And, further discussion about whether to draft this high school pitcher, Lark:

“There might be some, uh, family issues here,” says the old scout. “I heard the dad had spent some time in prison. Porno or something.”

No one on either side of the room seems to know what to make of that. You can see thirty men thinking: is porno a crime?

4. On the question whether a ballplayer under consideration to be drafted is “too stupid for the job”: “So is this guy a rockhead?” (p. 24)

5. As one facet of a central theme in the book, a piece of the baseball establishment’s view of how to recognize talent included baseball scouts’ view of young players’ records (p. 36):

The scouts don’t see the point of history. In their view history isn’t terribly relevant when you’re talking about kids who haven’t become who they will be.

6. After one of the character’s careers of playing professional baseball is described through his own statistics, accumulated over several years, the book puts these numbers (e.g., including “11 walks and 80 strike outs”) into perspective: they “told an eloquent tale of suffering.” And in series of eight short phrases, he tells that “eloquent tale of suffering”: without even knowing this player,

You only needed to read his stats—to sense that he left every on-deck circle in trouble. That he had developed neither discipline nor composure. That he had never learned to lay off a bad pitch. That he was easily fooled. That, fooled so often, he came to expect that he would be fooled. That he hit with fear. That his fear masqueraded as aggression. That the aggression enabled him to exit the batter’s box as quickly as possible.

(At p. 52)

7. Among a small but growing group of scientists, statisticians and other math geeks who took refuge from their day jobs by honing their considerable mathematical skills to unraveling the mysteries of baseball through statistics was one Pete Palmer, who “worked as an engineer at Raytheon, on the software that supported the radar station in the Aleutian Islands that monitored Russian test missiles. At least that’s what he did for money; for love he sat down with his charts and slide rule and analyzed baseball strategies.” (P. 80)

Lewis explains further:

Palmer really was a gifted statistical mind, and he had done a lot of work, just for the hell of it, that demonstrated the foolishness of many conventional baseball strategies. Bunts, stolen bases, hit and runs—they all were mostly self-defeating and all had a common theme: fear of public humiliation.

“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than pick a strategy that is most efficient,” said Palmer. “The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

(Ibid.)

8. On the weight of remarkably overweight player, Cecil Fielder:

Cecil Fielder acknowledges a weight of 261,” Bill James once wrote, “leaving unanswered the question of what he might weigh if he put his other foot on the scale.

(109)

9. Regarding the Oakland As’ unconventional draft picks:

They [opposing pro baseball teams] will make fun of what the A’s are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

(115)

10. Seeking the reverse doppelganger:

Billy Beane was a human arsenal built, inadvertently, by professional baseball to attack its customs and rituals. He thought himself to be fighting a war against subjective judgments, but he was doing something else, too. At one point Chris Pittaro said that the thing that struck him about Billy—what set him apart from most baseball insiders—was his desire to find players unlike himself. Billy Beane had gone looking for, and found, his antitheses. Young men who failed the first test of looking good in a uniform. Young men who couldn’t play anything but baseball. Young men who had gone to college.

(117-18)

11. On closers:

Established closers were systematically overpriced, in large part because of the statistic by which closers were judged in the marketplace: “saves.” The very word made the guy who achieved them sound vitally important. But the situation typically described by the save—the bases empty in the ninth inning with the team leading—was clearly far less critical than a lot of other situations pitchers faced. The closer’s statistic did not have the power of language; it was just a number. You could take a slightly above average pitcher and drop him into the closer’s role, let him accumulate some gaudy number of saves, and then sell him off. You could, in essence, buy a stock, pump it up with false publicity, and sell it off for much more than you’d paid for it. Billy Beane had already done it twice, and assumed he could do so over and over again.

(125)

12. On top batters like Jason Giambi, who not only can hit, but also wear down the pitcher, which is hugely valuable:

Giambi has all the crude offensive attributes—home runs, high batting average, a perennially high number of RBIs. He also has the subtler attributes. When he’s in a lineup, for instance, the opposing pitcher is forced to throw a lot more pitches than when he isn’t. The more pitches the opposing starting pitcher throws, the earlier he’ll be relieved. Relief pitchers aren’t starting pitchers for a reason: they aren’t as good. When a team wades into the opponent’s bullpen in the first game of a series, it feasts, in games two and three, on pitching that is not merely inferior but exhausted. “Baseball is a war of attrition,” Billy Beane was fond of saying, “and what’s being attrited is pitchers’ arms.”

(144)

13. On the significance of the count; it’s effect on the likelihoods of hitting, getting on base, or getting out:

The odds depend on who is pitching and who is hitting, of course, but they also depend on the minute events within the event. Every plate appearance was like a hand of blackjack; the tone of it changed with each dealt card. A first-pitch strike, for instance lowered a hitter’s batting average by about seventy-five points, and a first-pitch ball raised them by about as much. But it wasn’t the first pitch that held the most drama for the cognoscenti, it was the third. The difference between 1–2 and 2–1 in terms of expected outcomes is just enormous,” says Paul DePodesta. “It’s the largest variance of expected outcomes of any one pitch. On 2–1 most average major league hitters become all-stars, yet on 1–2 they become anemic nine-hole hitters. People talk about first-pitch strikes. But it’s really the first two out of three.”

(147)

I could probably keep on picking more compelling snippets, but perhaps this is enough to give you a flavor for this book. Rumor has it that the book is now being made into a major Hollywood movie, with Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane. It might be a good movie, or not. Either way, the book itself is worth reading.

Novelist and philosopher, Alain de Botton, author of On Love: A Novel and How Proust Can Change Your Life has a talent for out-of-the-ordinary interpretations of what is visible to all. For example, he reports the following headline to describe Oedipus:

“Sex With Mom was Blinding!”

And, pity the Ferrari owner: he suggests that “the next time you see someone driving a Ferrari, don’t think of  them as greedy, but as someone incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.”

In the following presentation, courtesy of ted.org, Botton offers a kinder, gentler view of “success” and “failure.”

Anyone a little bit interested in professional tennis knows Roger Federer. He is the most recent best of the best. He was untouchable. Two years ago he tied, or was about to tie, former best of the best’s Pete Sampras’s record, and was heading toward beating it.

And man was he cool. He’d play, he’d win, he was always cool and calm, poised and charming, confident, magnanimous and easygoing.

Then came the 2009.  In February, at the Australian Open, Rafael Nadal, of Spain, beat Federer.

And formerly cool and collected Federer cried during the award ceremony after losing to Nadal,

Then, a couple months later, at the Sony-Ericsson Open in Key Biscayne, Florida, after blowing a forehand in match against Serbian contender, Novak Djokovic, Federer threw down his racket in frustration and broke it.


Suddenly, Mr. Unbeatable-cool-and-poised-on-and-off-court was being described by tennis pundits as being a “very emotional player.” Even, “he was always a very emotional player.” Always? Really?

My memory is a little different. He was not “always a very emotional player” — he was clearly into it, but he was unbeatable, untouchable,  and cool. Like James Bond. My name is Federer. Roger Federer.

And, I don’t recall him being called emotional until after he choked up when Nadal beat him.

But win or lose, and even where the going gets very rough (though, then one must wonder, how rough are things when you’re only the second-best tennis player in the world, rather than the first best?)

Let’s assume, though, that it is in fact rough — as suddenly second-best, and subject to being beaten by lesser mortals — it’s got to be rough for the guy who has so dramatically dominated the field for years.

But, as rough as it is, he continues. It’ll be really interesting to see what happens next. Will he pull out of this funk and rise again to his untouchable first-place-ness? or will he be a battling titan who wins some and lose some, like Sampras and Agassi were a few years ago?

Is there a lesson in this, somewhere? One of those, life is hard, doing is hard, keep on doing is the thing to do? Maybe.

Meanwhile, his hanging in is starting to show results. Two weeks ago he beat Nadal at the Madrid Open, and took the title, the first of the season (NYTimes, “Federer Wins Title at Madrid, Overcoming a Run-Down Nadal 5/18/09 p. D6, col. 2; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/sports/tennis/18tennis.html.)

And now after a hard-fought match against 45th-ranked José Acasuso, of Argentina at the French Open, Federer advances. (See “Roger Federer Averts Embarrassment,” Neil Harman, TimesOnline.)

Is the moral to this story a hang-in-there moral? Like, when the going gets tough, the tough cry, and smash and break valuable things out of frustration, but then keep going? That seems to be what Roger Federer’s done — best of the best, now rated second best, is, despite his difficulties, is keeping on keeping.

It is perhaps an example of both the frailties of humanity and tenacity, in action.

First things first: we’re not talking about pitching like Roger Clemens or anyone in major league baseball. We’re talking about pitching stories to reporters.

Most reporters are inundated with thousands of pitch phone calls and emails from business owners and publicists every day.  At some point, reporters stop reading pitches, or at best, give them very slight attention.  Against these odds, getting your message to stand out from the crowd can seem like a near impossible feat.

Ask Yourself: Why Should the Journalist’s Readers Care?

The secret is to think carefully and creatively about what you are going to pitch a reporter.  Don’t waste the reporter’s time, and most importantly, don’t waste your own.  A reporter will bite on only the most compelling of pitches.

The most important part of an email pitch is the subject line.  If this fails to capture the reporter’s attention, it is unlikely that your email will even be opened.  A truthful, but attention-grabbing subject line is essential.  The subject line should contain the most compelling reason the reporter should read further and consider writing a story o n your subject and client.

Imagine You’re Shouting Good News to a Neighbor Across the Street

When creating a powerful subject line, I tell my young associates to imagine that they are yelling some wonderful news across the street to a neighbor.  The key here is to communicate the most interesting and newsworthy part of your story in the most concise manner.

Furthermore, do some research on the publication and the journalist before drafting your email pitch letter.  If your news would be a perfect fit for a column that is regularly assigned to the reporter, this would be important information that should be included in the subject line and in the beginning of the email.  If this reporter covers your topic or has written about it in the past, demonstrate your knowledge of her past work to lay the groundwork for both your personal credibility and to build a strong relationship with the journalist.

Ask Yourself Again: Why Should the Journalist’s Readers Care? What is Uniquely Interesting?

The pitch should then explain why your subject would be of particular interest to the journalist’s readers at this time.   Is your pitch announcing an innovation or new wrinkle on a subject of interest to this outlet’s audience?  Does the topic have an interesting local connection to the geographic region in which the publication is distributed?  Moreover, a pitch that is tied into the breaking news of the day will vastly improve its chances of scoring ink.

I discourage the use of attachments unless the pitch hinges on a particular visual.  Attachments are often difficult to open and sifting through them requires additional effort on the part of the journalist.  Our goal is to serve the journalist by streamlining the process and supplying additional information only after it is requested.

Conclude the pitch with a one or two sentence description about the company, along with the company’s website.   This will give a reporter, who is very likely to be conscious of the clock, the option of learning more only if she is sufficiently intrigued by the information already presented.

Finally, include your name, email, title, location, and cell phone number at the end of the pitch.  Supplying the reporter with your cell phone number demonstrates your ability to deliver information on deadline and your awareness of the time-sensitive nature of the news business.

Spending that extra three minutes to put yourself in the reporter’s shoes can give you all the “leg up” and insight you need to create a pitch that not only gets attention, but develops into the placement that will l raise awareness and heighten credibility for your products and services.

oOo

Note on contributor: DeAnne Merey, President and Founder of D M Public Relations (http://dm-pr.com), is a public relations veteran with over a decade of experience.  DeAnne graduated from Barnard College and holds a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School.  Founded in 2007, D M Public Relations is a full-range, public relations company whose services are designed to help its clients compete more effectively both in the U.S. and abroad.  D M Public Relations builds brand-name recognition for clients and leverages positive visibility to enhance profits, attract and retain customers, and expand new business opportunities. A few examples of media outlets Merey has gotten placements for clients include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post.

Recently this blog spilled electronic ink on the importance of giving good service (see http://marketingandprlab.com/service-matters/ ).

And just today, I had what looked and felt like really good service from a company on which I rely  — the web hosting company, Hostgator, which makes this website visible.

What happened was this: I tried to surf over to here, Marketing and PR Lab. Instead of seeing this page, I got “page load error” and “website can’t be found” messages, and in two different browsers.

I was on a conference call at the time and so could not telephone the support line. Instead, I sent a quick cry-for-help email to Hostgator’s support dept.

Six minutes later I received an email acknowledging receipt of my message and assigning a case number.

After another six minutes a support staffer sent a second email reporting that they identified the problem, fixed it, that my site should be visible again, and to

Please check to confirm.
If you have any questions, just let us know.

In fact the site was up and running again. It was really a relief to get such a quick response and resolution. While it is certainly possible that an outage could last longer, this treatment really inspires confidence. What a difference from the company discussed in “service matters” (below), who lost a sale by being so very unresponsive.

So, as a thank-you for Hostgator’s good service, I’m posting a little banner link of theirs here, in this post, right below. They’ve been good. I appreciate it, and, if you’re looking for a good web host, hostgator should be considered.

The old question: How can you be in two places at once? Makes you think of Schrodinger’s Cat — it’s alive and dead at the same time? Hmmm. (See Wikipedia’s discussion.) Or the Firesign Theatre’s album, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?

Where ever you may or may not be, you’re on Facebook, and Twitter, and Linked-in, and Plaxo, and who knows how many other social networking and social bookmarking sites. All or most of them have the micro-blogging function which asks you to answer the question, “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.

If you happen to be updating your blog, you might want to be telling your friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, Plaxo, etc., that you have a new blog post, like, “My New, Slimming Burrito” or “Get Paid Interest to Carry a Balance On Your Credit Card,” or whatever.

Rather than type in your 140-character-post two, three, seven, twelve, or more times to tell each of your social networking sites, type it once into this cool little aggregating tool, Hello Text, at http://hellotxt.com, to be in 40 or more places at once.

Just join once (it’s free), link it to some or all of your social networking sites, and then enter your update at HelloTxt, and it will automatically post your one update to 40 or more different sites.

Should your website be a blog, or blog-based, or a regular static, web 1.0 site?

When I first heard of “blogs” a few years ago, back in the old days when they were still sometimes called “web logs,” (and a friend took a look around what’s now called the blogosphere and emailed me, thoroughly unimpressed, referring to what she saw as “blahhhgs” – though that was before politico.com was born), I thought, what is the big deal? – I’ve already got my website for my law practice, and it’s not a blog.

I created and maintained it with Microsoft FrontPage, and it’s easy to make quick, little changes using this “web-authoring” software, so why bother with a blog? It is also easy, technologically, to make not only quick, little changes to the website, but also big ones as well with the authoring software. (Question: when did “author” become a verb, and why? Is this really an improvement of the English language? Or an impoverishment of it?)

Admittedly, the look I came up with on my own, left to my own devices with MS FrontPage was pretty ugly — if you clicked on the link above, you saw the new, made-over, better looking version of my site. You can see a screen-capture of the earlier, ugly-ducking version – my old, homely, homemade homepage is here.

Only later did I decide I needed a cleaner, more professional, and pleasing look, with better, easier navigation.

When I did, I hired a professional designer to do the coding to carry out my idea, which it did, very well, I think. (A plug for this excellent designer: It’s a company called Cranvas (the name comes from a blending of the word “crayon” and “canvas”) – and they were excellent, professional, and cordial. I was very happy with their work.

Back to the main event: Back then, in the old days, the advantage of a blog seemed to be that you didn’t have to do coding or worry about maintaining, or even organizing your website. All you had to do was worry about creating your content, telling your story, describing your message, articulating your opinion. The software in the blog platform took care of everything else, the look, the organization, and it had click-a-button controls to modify the look as needed.

But it turns out to that a blog does more than that.

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say that blogs get indexed by search engines faster than non-blog, static, web 1.0 sites, and of course, the sooner your blog is “indexed,” the sooner someone might find it. It seems that this is not just a function of google’s or yahoo’s or MSN’s or Ask’s robots crawling the web are giving higher priority to blogs (if they are doing that), but also that blogs more proactively and more interactively push the news out that your blog has been updated.

For example, using a service called pingomatic, wordpress-based blogs automatically notify up to 28 different search engines every time you update your blog, including Google Blog Search, Technorati, Feedburner, My Yahoo, and Newsgator.

Now for a real life experience: a few weeks ago, on March 16th, I posted a video on my Life Law and Taxes blog, showing what looked like an interview between a television journalist and an Australian senator, talking about oil tanker spill. In my post, I asked if any viewer could tell me who the journalist was, and who the Australian senator was.

The next day, March 17th, someone from Australia left a comment on this blog post, answering my question. He told me that in fact the video was of an Australian comedy duo, John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, who are well known down under, while not particularly well known here – up and over – in New York.

I emailed this fellow, thanking him for the information and I asked him how he found my blog. His answer: “Via a Google everyday search on tanker crashes. Oil spills rollovers  etc.”

Remember, this is a very new blog, started at the beginning of February, with updates made generally once or twice a week. Last I checked, it had a minimalist page rank. Yet, despite the newness and the newcomer’s low page rank, in less than twenty-four hours, this post was showing up in a Google search. That’s pretty impressive.

And I think it has to do with the added interactivity of the website as a result of the blogging platform software. Let me say it again, as if I were Alan Alda as the quintessential “interested layman” host of that PBS science show where again and again, he’d say “Wow!”:

Wow.

Or should the title simply be “Duh!”?

Such a one-syllable title might be fun, but, channeling my inner editor, it’s probably not quite enough information to really work as a title.

However obvious the statement, service matters, this may seem, – good service is good business, good service makes customers happy, so they’ll come back for more and tell their friends that your business is good to do business with – occasionally life steps in to dramatize that what should not have to be said, has to be said; that the obvious needs to be belabored; and what should go without saying sometimes just doesn’t go without saying and has to be said.

Like one or another of Tony Soprano’s crew used to say, “I’m just saying….”

I’m just saying:  Service matters. Paying attention matters. Not being attentive can make you lose sales and kill your business.

Why belabor the obvious now? Here’s what happened:

After some frustrating hunting around for an increasingly rare computer part (an old school, IDE internal hard drive, if you must know – in 2004 it was the thing, now, less than 2000 days later, its already going the way of the pterydactyl), my computer tech guy called me up and said:

“Get thee to Datavision” – a brick & mortar computer store in midtown Manhattan, to get just the thing I’m looking for – a big, new hard drive of this increasingly rare species, at a good price, and made by a reputable company.

I went online, found the store’s website, found the item on the website, and I tried to order it online. But this item was marked “phone orders only.”

So I called the store’s 800 number. I listened carefully as their options had changed. I selected the option to speak to a salesman. I got a voicemail. I left a message. And down the rabbit hole I went.

• No one answered the phone when I called.
• No one returned my call when I left voicemail messages asking for a callback to place an order.
• I left messages for two different salesmen; but still, no callback.
• No one called me when I filled out their online form requesting a callback to place a phone order.
• No one called, even when I told their online instant messaging live support that I wanted to buy an item which was marked “order by phone only” and no one answered my calls — IM support took my number, said somebody would call — but, no one did.
• I tried ordering online n/w/s the “phone orders only” warning.

Oddly, that seemed to be the one thing they got “right”: they wouldn’t let me place an order online for an item that “had to be” ordered on the phone. God knows why. Why only over the phone?

Shouldn’t a store dedicated to selling things be trying to make it as easy as possible for a customer to buy? By land, by air, by sea? Online, offline, on phone, by carrier pigeon?

This store made it impossible to buy this thing from them. Whatever happened to Alex Baldwin’s admonition in the movie of David Mamet’s great play about a real estate sales office, Glengarry Glen Ross, “ABC — Always Be Closing”?

Then, I found the this item at Datavision’s local competitor, J&R.

Borrowing an old, mangled saying, Datavision snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They really blew it. I would’ve bought it from them if they’d just answered their phone. Or returned my call.