In retrospect, the PR strategy for Cuil.com's launch wasn't so cool

Operators of the new Cuil.com site say it searches three times the pages Google does.

Shooting down a launch. The highest-profile website launch in a long while was last Monday's unveiling of Cuil.com (pronounced "cool.") The new search engine was built by former Google and AltaVista engineers, who say it searches three times as many pages as Google. But by the end of the site's first day, many bloggers and journalists seemed to have found something to dislike, whether it was a prominent site missing from a set of search results or Cuil's propensity to match photos of one person with Web pages related to someone else. Public relations executive Todd Defren of Boston's Shift Communications had some advice on how things could have played out differently.

The [PR] agency should have insisted that Cuil slap "BETA" all over the site and any other outbound communication. I checked lots of different sections of the Cuil site, and never saw any hint from the company that they might not be ready for prime time. The messaging is marked by ambition and (in retrospect) arrogance. The agency should have enlisted the search community's aid. There are plenty of search algorithm experts, [search engine optimization] experts, online marketers, etc., who might be willing to offer free advice for such an ambitious start-up. Taking on Google is a big, hairy, audacious goal: this community could have gotten excited about collaborating on something so audacious. This longer-term, inclusive approach could have cushioned the launch with some built-in compassion for the Cuil engine's lapses.
www.pr-squared.com

Hasbro the bully? Another local PR exec, Chuck Tanowitz, offered some advice for Pawtucket, R.I.-based Hasbro, which last month demanded that Facebook ban a game called Scrabulous, which bears a more than faint resemblance to Hasbro's classic Scrabble. Hasbro also sued the game's developers, two brothers who live in India and managed to attract 500,000 players a day to their online word game.

Instead of shutting down the game, Hasbro could have started to market its board game to the Scrabulous players. Some people have said that playing the online game renewed their interest in playing the board game. They could have used the online game to boost their tournaments and meet-ups. They could have tried harder to purchase [Scrabulous] or invite the developers to help them create an official version. They could have used the Scrabble brand and extended it to Boggle and Upwords, two other games. They could have developed a series of word and letter-based games on the Scrabble brand, all building on the viral success of a game they didn't create.

All of that would have been a better PR move than shutting down the game, which now has people trying to boycott the company.
www.schwartz-pr.com/crossroads

Taking the iPhone back. Even Apple's new and improved iPhone isn't for everyone, it seems, despite its speedier 3G Internet access. Paul English, cofounder and chief technology officer of the travel site Kayak.com, enumerated the reasons he returned the much-ballyhooed iPhone after just three days of use.

No cell connection in my house or on my way to work, even though I always had great connection with my AT&T blackberry? (I'm told that the 3G iPhone coverage is not that great in many areas.) The battery lasts less than a day? (I'm told 3G consumes batteries.)

I could not tell which part of the phone was the top vs. bottom each time I picked it up.

The keyboard [isn't good]. (Most Apple lovers will first say they learned to type almost as fast on the iPhone as their prior QWERTY phone, until you challenge them to a typing contest, at which point they say, "Well, you really shouldn't type that much on a phone anyway, because we enlightened Apple lovers learn to smell the roses (when we're not playing games on our iPhones.)"

The iPhone kept crashing. Really? The iPhone is a toy. It is not for someone who treats mobile productivity (phone, email, contacts, calendar) seriously.
paulenglish.com

Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com.