A new service called PR Leap promises to “increase the search visibility of press releases, making them more accessible to search engines, consumers, analysts, journalists, newswires, and websites” all for $299 per year. From the press release it seems they are offering Search Engine Optimization for press releases….mmmm interesting.
Technology Marketing has an excellent column by George Parker on the subject on badly-targeted advertising. Very very well written.
If you aren’t already using RSS feeds to simplify monitoring news stories it’s never too late to start. I know I’ve covered RSS before but as my mother once told me you can never say too much about a good thing… well…maybe.
Anyway, for any PR professional, RSS allows you to have all the latest news from the publications (and blogs) that matter to you, delivered into a single e-mail like application where you can read them and follow links.
Of course with RSS, you can avoid many of the ads that accompany the content on a traditional website. Infoworld is trying to solve this by becoming the first publisher to include ads in their RSS feeds. Of course the beauty of RSS is you can unsubscribe so they’d want to be careful…
Interesting profile in the New York Times on Intel’s chief lobbyist, Peter Pitsch, who was previously chief-of-staff for the chairman of the Federal Communications Commision.
According to a story in HR Gateway employees don’t think corporate magazines or videos are a reliable source of information according to UK research firm MORI. The survey found that line managers and team briefings are the most reliable sources.
I could be wrong here, but I’d say Martha Stewart doesn’t get on with her brother. He’s quoted in the ever authorative National Enquirer: “Jail will be good for her, because it will humble her…It will mellow her and instill in her a more sincere, heartfelt experience towards others.” (NY Daily News)
SG Cowen have been fined $100,000 for deleting e-mail.
Whether you have heard of cricket or not, the Guardian’s cricket coverage is without question the funniest real-time sports reporting on the web. I was reminded of Scott Murray’s famous report from India vs. New Zealand during the Cricket World Cup earlier this year in a post from Michael O’Connor Clarke yesterday. It’s fantastic! Now I don’t particularly like Cricket but it’s a great illustration of audience participation and funny too!
There’s a mammoth PR struggle currently taking place at the top of the enterprise software tree.
Back on June 2, Peoplesoft announced its intention to buy fellow enterprise software company J.D. Edwards for $1.7 billion.
Then out of the blue, a couple of days later, Oracle launched a hostile $5.1 billion bid to buy Peoplesoft – and stated that the acquistion of J.D. Edwards would be on ice, until it was examined post-merger.
To add some additional spice to the bid, Peoplesoft CEO Craig Conway is a former protegee of Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison.
Now J.D. Edwards is suing Oracle for $1.7 billion for interfering with the original takeover.
And the 800-pound gorilla in the enteprise software applications market, SAP, is looking to take advantage of what’s going on.
Fantastic entertainment from the outside. But can you imagine the stress their PR departments are under? There are some late nights being put in there.
Background reading:
Doc Searls confirms that journalists prefer press releases on websites to be posted in HTML and not PDF or MSWord. I agree completely with him.
If you post your press releases exclusively in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files (and you’d be amazed at how many companies do) then people can’t re-use the information (Note: there’s nothing wrong with offering PDF as well as HTML).
And as regards Microsoft Word, I personally never send press releases in Word format. There have been too many slip ups in the past thanks to the danger of hidden mark-ups.
Best practice for press releases is plain text for e-mail and HTML for websites.
PR Opinions’ market valuation is moving up nicely 🙂
I’ve had a lot of feedback on the posting about PR Watch. For the most part your e-mails pointed out that they seem to have an agenda all their own.
An e-mail from Virge Randall summed up a lot of your views:
“PRWatch appears to be an attempt to poison the well of public opinion for one side only – presumably because they have a monopoly on the truth and it must be told by any means necessary…. I’m not holding my breath waiting for hypocritical, self-righteous pseudo-watchdogs to turn the high beams on themselves and their beliefs – I’m just grateful our society allows the other side to grab the mike, too.”
My take on PR Watch is that I always treat ‘holier than thou’ websites with a grain of salt. PR Watch is no different. While it purports to save the world from evil public relations practices – and in many cases it does correctly highlight wrongdoing, it inherently has it’s own agenda. Balance isn’t something PR Watch is designed for.
A humorous look at the best-known bloggers..
PR Opinions is a PR blog. The objective of this site is to provide information on Public Relations that is hopefully useful to PR and marketing professionals. Of course, by its nature, this site does cover a lot of blog-related news, but hopefully only as it relates to PR.
This week a high profile conference on blogging organized by ClickZ and Juptermedia took place in Boston. As you’d expect, a lot of the content from the conference has been written up in various blogs and I’ve included a lot of the links at the foot of this posting, please do take a look at it.
However, from reading the accounts and the opinions of various attendees and contributors, one disturbing trend comes through. There is an element of bloggery.
It seems that some of the pioneers of the blog world, to whom we are indebted for facilitating the medium, believe they have the sole rights to what is or is not a blog. In response I thought I’d post some key thoughts on blogging that are my most humble opinions – well maybe not.
Users not innovators define a technology
The enginneers who created GSM cellular phones never foresaw that the number one application of their invention would be short text messages – rather they saw it as simply a better means of providing voice services. Similarly, how weblogs develop from here will be based on how Internet users want them to develop. It’s out of the pioneers hands.
Blogging is not mainstream
It’s widely popular and growing fast, but it is not at this point in time mainstream. Web browsers are mainstream, blogs are not.
Commercial interests are key to it’s success
The small population of Internet pioneers were irked when ‘newbies’ started appearing in newsgroups and were appalled when people started trying to make money from the new medium. But guess what, it was commercial pressure that helped the Internet go global. Blogs will follow the self-same model. (ref: the growth of the PC and hobbyists)
Blogging isn’t owned by anybody
I also say to the purists (who have done us a great favour by pioneering this application) that you do not have a divine right to tell everyone else what is or is not a blog. We don’t care, we’ll decide.
Respect, understand and adapt
When anything includes participation by large numbers of people, there will always be different opinions. Just because someone’s opinion is different does not mean it’s wrong. Get over it.
Blogs are still immature, but are already very useful. I just think we get ahead of ourselves sometimes.
So back to the conference..
Marketing Fix: “What is a weblog, why should we care?”
Marketing Fix: Further comments on the conference
Fellow PR professional Michael O’Carroll Clarke was a panelist at the conference.
Heath Row’s amazing conference transcripts:
The folks over at PRWatch.org (creators of “Spin of the day“) have created Disinfopedia “a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.”
Effectively they are posting all the informatin they have on PR practitioners, issues, campaigns etc. It’s worth a look.
Technical Point: Disinfopedia is a Wiki… Phil Gomes has more on it in this months G2B Group Tapeout newsletter.
Murphy's Law 