Can Apple win at Macworld?

Macworld is clearly an important event for Apple. The City watches.

I recently blogged about the casual format of Apple's press releases about Steve Jobs' health, how they didn't follow usual best practice for an online press release and highlighted some of the initial confusion that caused. In that post I suggested Apple had a mountain to climb when it came to coordinating offline and online release.

Let's turn to Twitter to see how well they did at Macworld this year

In back to back tweets Danny Whatmough of Wildfire PR points out that you could check out the new Macbook Pro via Apple's website about 30 minutes before it was even announced at Macworld. In the others, Apple stole their own scoop.

However, just before that Joost de Valk also noticed that while APple where trying to sell you the merits of iWork 09 at Macworld that the website was still trying to sell you iWork 08. Who'd buy that when iWork 09 was now available? In this case Apple's website wasn't up to date with what was being announced at Macworld and for the case of iWork was a waist of space.

Its easy to see just how hard this scenario is for Apple. Macworld really crystalises the timing problems - Macworld is covered in real time by bloggers and micro-bloggers. Twitter stalled last night because of it.

In 2009 we're going to see website change speed being a bigger issue for big companies. When X happens in real life it will be increasingly important to ensure that the website reflects X as quickly as possible.

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