Month: September 2002

PR Industry…errr…enjoys robust growth?
Amidst the doom and gloom surrounding the PR business in the current downturn, here’s some research that bucks the trends.

The tenth annual Thomas L. Harris/Impulse Research PR Client Survey which surveyed 1,540 participants across twenty four industries found internal PR budgets up twenty four percent, whilst budget for external agencies grew nineteen percent.

Other good news is that internal PR owners satisfaction with their agency is up five percent.

A very interesting and IMHO worrying statistic is that spending on Internet communications is down from thirteen percent in 2000 to five percent.

Finally the top read industry publications are PRWeek, Advertising Age, ADWEEK, O’Dwyer’s Newsletter and PR Strategist. [Comments]

The ultimate press release…..
Now there are some basic requirements from a press release. I’m sure you know them. The “When, Who, How, What and Where’ yardstick is always a useful place to start. But not everyone follows these guidelines. Oh no. For some people keeping the news a mystery is what’s important.

On Friday I happened upon one of the best examples of “confusion” as news. The press release in question was issued by Corum Group and it’s definetely worth a read, in the same way you are tempted to glance at the wreckage of an accident on the other side of the road…and don’t forget to check the quote…it’s a masterpiece.

Newly discovered PR & Marketing Blogs….
I’ve come across some PR and marketing blogs recently, John Mudd has a regularly updated PR blog…. Rick E Bruner’s Internet marketing/advertising weblog…. Robert Loch’s Internet Marketing Strategy and News… bBlog, “the sales, mktg and business weblog” and of course Anne Holland’s SherpaBlog

“Are webloggers journalists or just writers?”…
That was a question posed as part of a very interesting panel discussion which recently took place at the University of California Graduate School of Journalism. The panel included three journalists, Dan Gillmor, Scott Rosenberg and J.D. Lasica, two long-time bloggers, Rebecca Blood and Meg Hourihan and an audience of over seventy people. A report on the panel is available at the always excellent Online Journalism Review.

How is your IR and PR mix?…
With the ongoing corporate scandals, the focus on governance and communications has never been tighter. So how do you manage your IR? How do you integrate your IR and PR activity? Yesterday I happened upon a study [PDF] conducted earlier this year by Businesswire and Investor Relations Business magazine, which found that 71 percent of companies hadn’t consolidated PR and IR. More surprising (to me anyway) 16 percent of companies said that their PR function reports to the head of IR. Have a read of the study, it’s clear the need for co-operation between IR and PR has never been greater.

E-mail isn’t dead yet…..
The advent of e-mail has changed the professional lives of PR people irrevocably. It’s faster, more efficient and easier to manage than phone and fax, but it has also brought additional pressure, information overload and spam. Spam is the big worry, as the volume grows, so E-mail’s effectiveness is reduced and it becomes harder to rise above the noise. (By the way Cloudmark continues to impress!)

But the spammers haven’t won yet. A survey just published by Digital Impact Inc. (excuse their Flash) shows that that 79 percent of respondents have a neutral-to-positive view of e-mail marketing and 71 percent have purchased a product or service based on e-mail marketing. Rather than killing e-mail, spam is benefitting those who utilize permission marketing techniques and target e-mail commuication at people who care. There are lessons there for PR.

On a related matter, MarketingSherpa have published “The E-Mail Marketer’s Guide: Hard Data for 2002” that looks at the use and success of e-mail marketing. Among the findings, e-mail marketing accounted for 15 percent of online sales last year – an increased of 12 percent year-on-year. 64 percent of Internet users check their e-mail at least twice a day and about one third of all e-mail is spam. You can purchase the report here.

“The secret to lying is telling people what they want to hear…”
Thanks to Dave Winer for a link to a very interesting story from the San Francisco Chronicle on the dot.com craze. Nothing new there you might think, but this one looks at the role the media played in the hype. Very interesting piece.

Unspamming yourself…
If you put your e-mail address at the end of a press release, or if you are on mailing lists or have your contact details on a web site, you are, no doubt, getting spammed.

There’s nothing worse than coming into the office and spending half and hour adding another fifty addresses to your junk filter. At the same time you have to be careful, because as a communicator, any legitimate e-mail is important.

What are you to do? I’ve found Cloudmark and although not perfect, I have to say I am impressed by it. It’s easy to use, free (so far!), and has already caught all my existing spam and is very good at catching new spams as they arrive.

It works by monitoring the spams you are getting and matching those with the spam lists of other users. So without doing anything you are getting an always up-to-date spam net.

You can download it for free from the Cloudmark web site.

Different strokes for different folks..
If you ever wanted a graphical illustration of the diversity of the PR business, then the latest issue of the New Yorker is just for you. “This is going to be big” is a feature on Hollywood’s PR mavens. It’s an intriguing insight into a world of PR that doesn’t come close to the work and challenges I face every day – but it’s all the more interesting because of it, and you might even pick up something useful from it. It’s not available online, and it’s in the current issue (September 23, 2002). Recommended >

Audio Blogging….
It had to happen, Jeremy Allaire of Macromedia fame, tests Blogs you can hear.