Thought this was an interesting perspective on Ballmer’s leadership of Microsoft and the communications strategy deployed at CES. The basic message, if you believe you are the leader you are, don’t let others or the river of news dictate your communications agenda.

Ballmer was right not to make any major tablet announcement, showing off something that wasn’t ready. Any zealous tablet push would have led to bloggers, journalists and Wall Street analysts making iPad comparisons. By staying away from Apple and iPad, Ballmer kept the message pure, which is good marketing. Ballmer set the keynote agenda on his terms rather than taking the position of following a competitor. Surely there was temptation, and pressure, to directly respond to iPad. Ballmer showed leadership by waiting.

I was also surprised by the tone of the Muglia announcement. Ok, we tend to read too much into these things, but it really did two things – asserted who was in charge while demonstrating that assertion.

Bob Muglia and I have been talking about the overall business and what is needed to accelerate our growth. In this context, I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB…In conjunction with this leadership change, Bob has decided to leave Microsoft this summer. He will continue to actively run STB as I conduct an internal and external search for the new leader. Bob will onboard the new leader and will also complete additional projects for me.

Here the message is clear. And the message isn’t just that someone is leaving. Too many companies miss this opportunity in their communications – that is, to say what is actually going on.

Liked this presentation from the Dell Team on social media metrics:

Tom is right, the lack of links in press releases is astounding. Equally astounding is how few companies and agencies have adopted the social media release format in its truest sense.

Where I am not so sure is around Tom’s suggestion that they don’t do it because they aren’t rewarded for it. While true  – I’ve yet to see PR people embrace search performance and relevancy into their metrics and strategies – I don’t think it is the reason they aren’t included.

Sadly, I think it is probably just laziness coupled with the usual editing anarchy that surrounds getting a release out.

I used to be puzzled about why PR people are so miserly about including links into their news releases and emails. Even those PR people that know that they should…often don’t.

Yet links are a key Internet currency. Why don’t they understand this?!

And I’m fed up of adding links to my posts about their clients and other relevant material because they are absent from the background materials.

I’ve come to the conclusion that since PR people aren’t putting links into their communications then I shouldn’t need to put those links into my posts. Clearly, if it were important to them, then the links would be there in the source material.

I used to be puzzled about this behavior but now I think I know why: The reason for the lack of the hyperlink — the most fundamental element in a digital document — is that PR people don’t get any credit for it.

PR people are paid for story placement — which is just one side of the story. The SEO benefits from a well-linked story are worth much more.

A link from high-ranked news site will provide far more than a momentary boost in traffic to a company’s web site. It provides a high degree of trust that Google uses to determine rankings in key search results.

This is much much more valuable than the actual news or feature story itself because it affects Google’s ranking of the company web site for a very long time.

Absolutely. This is worth a watch.