GM Vice Chair Bob Lutz is doing good PR for himself, but watch those hyperlinks!

The Financial Times  noticed Bob Lutz at General Motors doing something most of the rest of us bloggers also do. We all promote our other articles and activities.

 

A short item in the FT today notes that "General Motors' vice-chairman and blogger-in-chief Bob Lutz devotes the latest entry on his FastLane blog to three reading suggestions for the summer holidays."

 

One is a first-person piece in Information Week describing his experience as an executive blogger.

 

Another is in AutoWeek, which I only found by reading one of the comments on Lutz's blog, and then linking to a related article in AutoWeek that had a referral link to the Lutz piece, but the direct link on the GM FastLane Blog doesn't work.

 

The third one is a link to Edmunds.com that doesn't work either, unless you copy and paste it.

 

So even though the FT found it necessary to take a tartly worded parting shot, "No prizes for guessing who is in charge of designing GM's new vehicles," I say, "Go Bob!"

 

But here's a tip to the people supporting every blog, including Bob Lutz's blog: Please make sure to have reprints of the articles PDFed and linked to your blog because these things are frequently only available to subscribers at the publications' websites, or, more commonly, they go offline completely. Two of the three links Lutz provided yesterday are already not working correctly from the GM Blog.

 

Dynamically published websites like magazines and news services don't make it easy for bloggers to publish links that remain active, but we need to be careful that the links we send our readers out to scarf up remain active.