Facebook and flackery

Last night, I watched 60 Minutes — more to hear what Ben Bernake had to say about the economy than about what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about Facebook. But since Bernake didn’t have much new to say about the economy, I’ll talk about the big (overhyped) 60 Minutes story on Zuckerberg and Zuck’s big announcement of the Facebook profile redesign. Or rather, I’ll share what a few other bloggers had to say about the segment from a PR perspective.

1. In How Mark Zuckerberg Fooled ’60 Minutes’, Paidcontent.org deconstructs the non-event, pointing out how the venerable news magazine “overplayed a purely cosmetic change” — or rather, how Facebook’s PR team played 60 Minutes to “placat[e] the older demographics most likely to have the kind of reflexive resistance that always accompanies any alterations to Facebook visual design.”

2. Another PR analysis — this one from Forbes’ Mike Isaac — hails Zuck’s 60 Minutes interview as the best piece of Facebook PR yet. The post captures how Zuckerberg came off as polished and positive.

3. In A tense look at Facebook on ’60 Minutes’, Cnet’s Caroline McCarthy moves the spotlight away from Zuckerberg to shine it on CBS. Her story summarizes how 60 Minutes approached the story as “an optimistic, yet sinister portrayal of the future of Facebook and its rising power around the world.” Yet she, too, makes note of the way Zuckerberg expertly handled the situation. “But it was Zuckerberg who maintained a dose of levity, showing a remarkable change since his days as a famously press-shy young CEO.”

In the final analysis, Zuckerberg and Facebook managed to look good. Which is not always an easy thing to do with 60 Minutes.

Friday Five: Creative distraction

I was planning to write on a different topic for this week’s Friday Five. But I got distracted.

easily-distracted-by-shiny-objectsWhat did me in was this Guy Kawasaki tweet directing me to an article about how easily distracted people are more creative than those who are more focused.

Being easily the easily distracted type, I was naturally happy to hear this and immediately approved of this finding, which apparently was from some study conducted at some university somewhere. I don’t know. I didn’t bother to read beyond the headline, though, because…

1. Can you believe these high-quality videos were all shot on an iPhone 4? Pretty awesome, eh? Not that I bothered to watch all of them, because…

2. … I had a sudden urge to check Gmail, and there I found a note from Paste linking to the music mag/website’s list of the 50 best albums on 2010. Which reminded me that…

3. … I and several of my fellow higher ed music lovers are about to embark on my favorite year-end distraction: creating a list of favorite albums from the year almost finished. We’re going to compare notes and compile our collaborative effort on this blog we created last year for the purpose of counting down the top albums of the past decade. Stay tuned for more about that. But first…

4. … You should check out some of these 220 videos from PopTech. They’re educational, I think. (Hat tip: @LenKendall.)

5. What were we talking about again? Oh, yeah… WEEKEND!

Image from Loving My Add (post).