Day: November 7, 2002

The economic downturn causes a number of issues for PR. Obviously the large reduction in magazines and staff is one result but so is the explosion in telesales advertising/conferences/supplements calls – particularly for the in-house PR people.

Now don’t get me wrong it’s a very hard job and I wouldn’t fancy it, but after your fifth pushy telesales call of the day your sympathy levels fall below zero.

Recently we’ve started having some fun wth the pushy reps using the telesales ‘counterscript’. It’s a bit of fun, though your ‘assailant’ may not enjoy it.

The Counterscript is here.

– Marketing Sherpa has an interesting case study on how MAPICS, a software firm, re-engineered their PR activities..
– Technology Marketing always has some good articles, currently they’ve a number of interesting opinion pieces on…three tales of analyst influence…why trade shows are still important…
– MarketingProfs has an interesting piece on the art of using a human voice in online communications

The currency of Public Relations is information. That’s why most of us have contracted Information Glut Overload or IGO. 🙂

I have thousands of documents, notes, bookmarks, contacts and e-mails. I like to think I can mine those files for relevant information when required. In fact streamlining that process is something I spend a lot of time working on, but to the best of my knowledge there’s no single cure for IGO – none that I have found anyway.

To reduce the symptons of IGO I use a myriad of different information management tools and although it takes longer then I’d like, they work OK.

That doesn’t mean I have stopped searching for the cure for IGO of course. I am always looking for a cure.

As I was reading Dan Gillmor’s weblog, his piece on tools for connecting information grabbed my attention.

He wrote about a new company called Groxis who are about to launch a new software product that builds graphical relationships between documents, websites etc. It’s an interesting idea, so I visited their site. I read up a little and signed up to be informed when the Preview release was ready.

This morning I got an e-mail from Groxis. To download their preview release I have to pay $99. There’s no trial version. Now I am relatively tech-savvy and if playing with information management tools has taught me anything, it’s taught me that the majority of them suck. That’s fine when I discover this fact through the trial version. But asking me to discover this after forking out $99 to a company with no track record… mmmmm.

I don’t think that this is the best sales strategy for a start-up software vendor. If it does what it promises then it’s worth every cent…..

How do you manage IGO? Any recommendations?