Day: June 3, 2003

The New York Times’ Sherri Day has an interesting story on how firms are facing up to the growing threat posed by Internet rumors.  The piece includes interviews with Starbucks and KFC and has some solid advice:

“Communication experts said that companies should handle Internet rumors by responding quickly to the accusations with information on their Web sites, select the wording of responses carefully and seek an objective party to verify that the rumors are not true.”

BMJ (which was previously the British Medical Journal) takes a very critical look at the
relationship  between Public Relations  firms and the pharmaceutical industry. (The top five healthcare PR
firms took in $300m last year)

“If the invisible ties between pharmaceutical companies
and their public relations companies are what
underpins the power of the “third party technique,”
what can be done to allow doctors and citizens
to make informed decisions? How can the
imbalance between the growing marketing and
public relations budgets of the  pharmaceutical
industry and disparate doctors, consumers,
citizens, and  journalists be made more equal? ^“

The Editorial this month looks at the interdependence of the doctors and the drug companies.

The BBC covers the piece here.

Healthcare PR is not something I am terribly familiar with, if anyone reading has any thoughts, please share them with us.

Thanks to Richard Bailey for the link.

Dave Winer continues to wage his personal campaign on how blogs will replace journalism as we know it.

Any regular readers of PR Opinions will know my views on this supposition.

It’s rubbish.

Blogs are important for Public Relations and there is no question that they provide a useful resource for consumers, but they will not replace journalism. That’s Internet hype resurfacing once again.

Karlin Lillington addresses the issue head on. I agree.

• Subway have just illustrated the perfect art of tactical Public Relations. Mike Smith was stopped by police while unwrapping and eating a subway sandwich.  Subway are paying his $135 fine, giving him some free sandwiches and making him the center of their new ad campaign.
  
• Just found this article by PR firm e21 Corp. on measuring PR effectiveness. Personally I don’t agree with that “Ad Value Equivalency” measure, mainly because the whole point of PR is that advertising can’t reach editorial, but the article does outline some other methods also. 
  
• Arthur C. Clarke gives his views on e-mail to the BBC. “I cannot imagine life before e-mail. Our ancestors live in a tiny limited world, knowing nothing about what was going on beyond the horizon.”
  
• If you are exclusively using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer you are missing many of the new usability gains being offered by other browsers.  Microsoft has gone asleep.  The news that Microsoft will no longer be releasing standalone versions of Internet Explorer, but instead new releases will occur with new versions of Windows, means it’s likely to fall further and further behind.  For any Windows users who are tracking lots of different websites I highly recommend Mozilla.  Mac users have Mozilla, Safari and a host of others.
  
• If you haven’t already seen Corporate Babble then we recommend a visit.  It casts a caustic eye over some of the more obtuse corporate communications.

PR Week has a story on how PR and blogs intersect. Myself and fellow PR blogger Phil Gomes are quoted in the story.

“When weblogs dawned a few years ago, PR experts were largely concerned with monitoring any negative comments they might carry. But now the attention has shifted to using them as positive marketing tools.”