Day: August 19, 2003

There’s a lot of RSS-related opinions online this week with impacts for the PR profession, but I’ll get to that later.

Talking with some colleagues recently, it struck me that one of the inhibitors to adoption of RSS by PR practitioners is that people are unsure how to get up and running.

As a result I have put together what I hope will be a useful and easy introduction to getting up and running with RSS, from downloading a news aggregator to subscribing to RSS feeds.

If you aren’t already using RSS, why not take five minutes to find out how to get set up.

RSS 101 – Getting up and running

Feedback is very welcome. Now onto the RSS-related content.

Wired has an interesting piece on RSS and its impact, though I’d like to re-iterate that RSS isn’t going to replace e-mail!

Last, but not least, Dan Gillmor discusses the growing popularity of RSS.

“I wish public-relations people would get with the program, too. If they’d only start creating RSS feeds of releases, journalists and the public at large could see the material they want, and the PR industry would be able to stop blasting huge amounts of e-mail to people whose inboxes are already over-cluttered. Of course, there will continue to be a use for e-mail in PR, but the volume could be cut substantially.” 

Now I know many people will not agree with this posting, but hey you can always add your comment to it!

I have a problem with the commonly abused term “Branding”. 

As far as I am convinced a brand is the sum of a person’s experiences with an organization.

You can’t buy a brand, rather a brand is built over time through working with employees, customers, partners and other third parties.

It’s not about nice colors, it’s about good business practice.

Too often I have seen new CEO’s or VPs of marketing arrive and their first port of call is the company’s “brand”. To me it’s simply re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If your company is broken, no amount of nice design and guidelines is going to save you.

The Internet start-ups all threw millions of dollars at “building a brand” and they proved for once and for all you can’t buy it.

My advice to any company is focus on your business.  I do agree that a company should have a common look and feel across locations, collaterals etc. but if your business is right your brand will follow.

Dave Jung over at B2Blog forwarded a link to a post on Fast Company’s weblog about Palm’s new “brand”. I think Kevin’s right on the money!