PR Opinions

Further to the post last week on Corporate Blogging Guidelines, Billy McCormac has unearthed some additional guidance on setting up a corporate blog provided by IMN Inc. (formerly I Make News). You can download the guidelines here (PDF). “Allow the weblog to have a distinct voice and use it to strengthen the brand. One of its [...]

One of the great things about the Internet is that most things are measurable and trackable. This electronic paper trail regularly catches out “clever” people who surreptitiously promote their products, companies or services online. According to Slashdot, one of the more recent perpetrators is JBoss, a “professional” open source provider of software technology known as middleware. [...]

Pamela Parker over at ClickZ tackles the growing momentum and importance of blogs. “That means an approach from your company that offers exclusive, early information would likely be welcomed. A recent Blog Search Engine poll of 610 bloggers found 74 percent of bloggers are open to receiving information from companies and organizations, though 91 percent [...]

I am personally amazed how often journalists give out about how badly PR people use e-mail. Every PR-journalist event I have attended since around 1998 has included a journalist giving out about PR people and e-mail. The etiquette of PR e-mail is well established.  There is no dark science, no secrets, yet it continues. I [...]

Hot on the heels of my post yesterday about copy editor’s nightmares comes this gem from Michael O’Connor Clarke. The Financial Times ran a story about Irish budget airline Ryanair and their ongoing snafu with Belgian airport authorities.  It seems the Belgians paid Ryanair subsidies to encourage to company to use its airport and now [...]

Colin McKay re-posts some caricatures of the typical election candidate, PR and journalist. (Full size images are available at Colin’s blog). 

Tom Mangan points to a very amusing discussion on the dreaded copy mistakes… “In college we ran a story in the campus daily talking about “alcohol usage in pubic areas,” which the campus adviser circled in red and scribbled, “I hear this is good at getting rid of crabs” or words to that effect.”

Elsewhere at Ad:Tech there was some good hands-on advice on how to convert  visitors to your website into revenue.  Focus on content, ease of use, performance, brand value, and customer satisfaction. Eliminate distractions that could lead visitors out of the buying process. Avoid giving unpleasant surprises such as a high shipping cost revealed deep into the [...]

At the Ad:Tech conference this week,  Ed Keller, co-author of The Influentials, gave a talk on the power of a small group (>10%) of people who exercise disproportionate influence over others in sharing information and making recommendations. This trend, and the need for companies to identify and have conversations with these people, is a real [...]

Trevor Cook, the mastermind behind Global PR Blog Week is getting participants to answer some questions to add some color to proceedings. Here are mine… Why do you blog? * I fell into blogging about two and a half years ago when I was looking for a means of collecting together all the various PR web [...]