Month: September 2003

Rupert Goodwins over at ZDNET UK is providing a free masterclass for any UK PR pros who may have forgotten good media-relations practice over the Summer.  The series which runs all week has the added spice that he’ll name the culprits at the end of the week but you’ll have to match the Vendor/PR with each “crime”.

His kick-off lesson is as follows:

“When a publication runs a story saying your client is Number One by a long way, and then talks about the changing fortunes of numbers two and three, get on the phone to the journalist responsible and complain vigorously about how they didn’t say enough bad things concerning number three. Of course, this in no way alerts the journalist to any company you might see as a particular threat, nor does it encourage them to contact the object of your affections and ask, “just what is it between you two?”

The folks over at Up2Speed have re-launched the site as MarketingWonk. It seems there was a trademark issue with the name Up2Speed.

I like their response to what could’ve been a crisis, it happens to us all at some stage.

 

Robin Good has posted an article on how blogs can help in PR programs.

 

The Wall Street Transcript for their fantastic headline:

“Director of Public Relations says ATI is the
strongest company in mobile “

Shock and horror, ATI’s Public Relations Director says his company are the best. I wouldn’t have thought that headline required an interview though.

I sometimes wonder about our profession.  I really wonder.

Hot on the heels of our last story on how not to pitch blogs another story has emerged but this time discussing PR people hiding their identity in their pitches. Except of course that their identity becomes very apparent from their pitch and their follow up.

Is this the basis of good communication? I don’t think so.

TechDirt has published a thoroughly depressing story entitled “Sneaky PR People Discover Blogs” which details attempts by PR people to place stories as neutral third parties.

What’s going on with that?

PR people must live and die by their credibility.  If you are a credible source it opens great opportunities for you and vice versa.

The problem here is that when these “practitioners” try and be clever, they hurt everyone in the profession through their stupidity.

I think it’s time to call an end to this rubbish. Do your job properly and you’ll find there’s no need for cloak and dagger tactics. It’s “practitioners” like these that make all our jobs harder.

Give it a rest.

“I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the past year or so with PR people discovering – but not quite understanding – blogs. Some have a handle on it, but others miss the mark by quite a wide margin. This all became very clear last month when a PR person tried to convince me to write a story about a company he worked for – without identifying the simple (and important) fact that he worked for them.”  

More from Dan Gillmor and G2Blog.

Given writing is a key component of most PR practitioners’ daily lives, writing for the web is an obvious extension.  However, how many of us change our writing style for an online audience?

There are some basic rules.  For example typically people don’t read online, they scan. As a result your word count should be one third of the equivalent printed text.

If you’re writing a long and detailed piece, provide an abstract and let the reader download a PDF or at least provide a printable HTML page.

Ryan May over at the excellent Minnesota PR blog points to a short MarketingProfs article by Gerry McGovern (of Nua fame) on the Seven Deadly Sins of Web Writing.

The great thing about new areas of technology like RSS, is the amazing innovation that takes place in the early stages.

RSS Readers is no exception.  I had been using FeedReader as my RSS application of choice (and it’s the product I use in the RSS tutorial) but in the past week I stumbled across FeedDemon and it’s fantastic.

The product is still in beta, so all the usual warnings apply, but I strongly urge any Windows users out there to download and try it today.

Also PC World have a nice introduction to RSS here.

I know I revisit topics here, but what can I say.  These topics are very popular at the moment.

The latest is the debate between RSS and E-mail. And in particular, that because e-mail is struggling under the strain of viruses and spam, RSS is the obvious alternative for publishing newsletters.

(We’ve an introduction to RSS here)

RSS obviously won’t replace e-mail for everyday communications, because in its current format RSS is a publishing medium, it doesn’t allow interaction as such.

However, RSS does provide a useful means of communicating with your audience.  The downside is the chicken and egg situation with RSS.  Although it’s an ideal way to communicate news, the number of RSS users is still relatively small.

My advice is that you should be offering your audience a choice of RSS and e-mail.

Given that you are probably already using e-mail, that means you need to look into how you can publish your press releases, newsletters etc as RSS and then how you will promote those feeds to your audiences.

We might cover that in the near future if I get around to it!

Just remember that there’s rarely one solution to a problem and if something sounds to good to be true…. it usually is.  If you remember that when researching new technology you won’t go far wrong!

When most PR practitioners think of a successful PR case study in crisis communications, we think of Tylenol.  I think that’s fairly universal.

Now when we think of failed PR in a crisis, I think it’s safe to say most of us think of the Exxon Valdez disaster – the worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States.

True?

Except it seems that the Valdez disaster was far from a disaster from Exxon’s point of view. 

In fact they continue to aggressively fight their victims in court, happy that their corporate coffers can easily outlast those of their victims (SCO versus IBM anyone?).

Now while I do know a small number of people who still refuse to purchase anything from Exxon (now Exxon Mobil Corp.), the fact that they are generating $3 million of cash flow per hour, highlights that it hasn’t exactly hurt them and guess what, that makes Wall St. very happy.

Interesting Reuters story.

Regardless of your political affiliations, your beliefs or your nationality, Alastair Campbell, the UK’s most high profile PR practitioner and former advisor to British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has changed the face of British PR.

I don’t like the term spin and I regularly flinch at how political PRs twist the truth and generally give this profession of ours a bad name.

However, Campbell is a smart operator. Much of his success was down to good strategy, amazing tactical planning and many of the best elements of a successful PR campaign.

Even his departure from government has been well positioned and executed.  I would not be surprised if the spin on his departure, see this story in the UK Guardian, was created by Campbell himself.

Smart, savvy, not without reproach but a consumate showman all the way. And even in adversity, UK journalists were publicly admitting they liked him.

Now that’s an exit strategy.