Month: June 2003

 MediaMap’s Expert PR has hit the wires.  This month they look at Client Retention, the Los Angeles media landscape and Media Training amongst other topics.

 The New York Times is churning out a lot of inches on blogging.  Here they discuss “business blogging” and the Boston Globe follows suit.

 Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute has urged publishers to look for journalistic talent among the blog community, drop the pop-up ads and revisit subscription only content.

 The Inluminent weblog has posted this sharp retro quote from the New York Times twelve years ago, which I had to post:

“DOS Computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use wordwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form.”
— New York Times, November 26, 1991

I’m sure most of you have read by this stage that the Supreme Court has referred the Nike case back to the courts in California.  The case concerns whether communications from Nike (and therefore any corporation) are protected by the first amendment or not.  Of course that’s a very simplified version of events!

Here’s the (ahem) Guerilla News Network‘s take on the decision.

Comical Ali or  Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf as he is named is alive and well.  I am sure a sigh of relief will sweep over the PR community as our highest profile practitioner is back in circulation.

According to an interview with him he is planning on writing a book on the fall of the Ba-athist regime, however, if he has a sense of humour, and an eye for the commercial world, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the: “Essential Handbook for Communicating in Difficult Times” hits the bookshelves.

Of course, he must be mortified that he was simply questioned and released.  It’s just so typical, they never give PR people the respect we deserve.

Postscript 1: Wow!! What has happened to his hair? I think some male hair color marketer has an opportunity there.

Postscript 2: The New York Post looks at the commerical opportunities for him.

Related Links: | The Daily Telegraph | The Washington Post | The Scotsman | Toronto Star | Reuters |

At least it is in Dilbert’s world….

Recently I posted about how blogs are not mainstream.  From talking with other PR professionals (not those who read this blog obviously) there is still widespread misunderstanding among our profession. This is a lifecycle issue.

A sizeable chunk of PR pros still don’t dig online communications, so it’s not surprising many of them don’t know what blogs are. Michael O’Connor Clarke was talking with PR students the others day and they had never heard of blogs.  That’s the norm right now, rather than the exception.

That doesn’t of course lessen the importance of blogs.  And it certainly doesn’t excuse us from understanding how blogs are indeed another media for us to interact with. But that is the reality.

OK, this post is a little unfair, but I’m going ahead anyway. Many of you will be aware of the Lizzie Grubman affair. I covered it back in August.

Lizzie is a high profile New York society PR who backed her new SUV into a crowd outside a nightclub and drove off. She got a two month sentence for her trouble and many people were outraged.

Anyhow, I read on Gawker that Lizzie is now giving a PR course in New York and at $49 a session that has to be worth a visit. 601am outlines some suggested course content. 

As predicted by Rafat Ali back in January, blogs are beginning to get bought.

News has leaked out that MarketingFix a collaborative blog focused on marketing, has been snapped up by Andy Bourland. Andy is the founder of ClickZ.

The MarketingFix blog will be re-packaged with another Bourland purchase, Adventive which hosts marketing related discussions and the combined entity will be launched in July as: Up2Speed.

So what does it mean? Well there was always going to be commercial interest in blogs that are popular with some clearly defined sector. There is a clear challenge for Bourland in how he’s going to wring profitability from the venture, but it’ll be interesting to watch.

I’d expect a small number of other prominent blogs will follow MarketingFix, particularly in the technology area where the publishers (other than Infoworld, CRN and a few others) are struggling with the blog thing – the bloggers will probably become staff members, and for PR this will certainly make reaching them easier.

I wouldn’t expect a huge amount of consolidation however.

There’s nothing to stop companies creating and fostering their own successful blogs without pulling out a check book. It’s simply a matter of application.

But I wish the folks at MarketingFix a lot of luck.

Back in May I had a little rant about a PR-services firm that kept spamming me.

Now I actually like PR newsletters, as long as there’s some value in them. I happily receive newsletter from 10-15 firms.

Where I get antsy is when there’s no value or all the links are to subscriber-only content.  Then I have to ask why are you sending this to me?

Well KD Paine & Partners insist on sending their newsletter “the measurement standard” to my inbox and guess what, all the links require me to pay.

I held off naming them in my rant in May, but as they feel free to spam me, I am now implementing my right to name and shame.

I have asked KD Paine & Partners three times to unsubscribe me and I still keep on getting their newsletter.  Furthermore, and far more worryingly, the latest newsletter came in via an obscure e-mail address on the Cape Clear website, so that means KD Paine & Partners are clearly spamming PR and marketing people.

Can I use this forum to suggest that KD Paine & Partners review their e-mail policy.

Does anyone else spot the irony that a self-styled PR measurement guru doesn’t even measure the response to their own newsletter?

I welcome your thoughts and if anyone is talking to them, feel free to point them here.  That might be one way of getting off their mailing list…. maybe

 e21 has published a good opinion piece on the 7 deadly sins of media relations. “Good PR essentially comes down to hard work by smart people.”

 eXubrio, a marketing firm has put together a good whitepaper on “The ABCs of Public Relations”

 Kevin Dugan has spotted how Forbes think a good media profile is the essence of stardom. [Stardom = Earning Power + Media Hits]

 The Capital newspaper in Annapolis looks at the relationship between PR people and the media.

 Fortune has a fantastic profile of Hasso Plattner, chairman of SAP.

This is a very very clever web application that uses a series of questions to guess what you have thought of. It’s amazing.