Elizabeth Albrycht bemoans the lack of female PR bloggers.
Her aside amused me:
“I don’t normally go around counting female-male ratios. I approach my business as a “professional,” and don’t often consider gender in any day-to-day activities. But then, something clicks, and I look around me and I all see are males.”
Now she knows how all the guys in PR feel 🙂
It is remarkable, given the gender bias in Public Relations, that more female PR Pro’s aren’t blogging….
Since it was installed just over eight days ago, Qurb has stopped over 3,600 spam messages with a 98% accuracy. [Someone e-mailed me to ask have I shares in Qurb….unfortunately not :-)]
Following on from my previous post, MarketingSherpa also has an interesting interview with Smooch Reynolds, CEO of The Repovich-Reynolds Group about PR recruitment – I bet you’ll remember that name.
Seemingly there’s more hiring happening in the agency world than the corporate world these days.
“But take heart: though hiring in the communications industry has been static throughout the recession, Reynolds says companies should be ramping up their communications departments by the second quarter of 2004.”
According to a story on MarketingSherpa (only available until Nov. 27) over 80% of respondents (the majority of whom were non-marketing professionals) in a recent survey preferred websites without Flash intros.
Seemingly there has a lot of negative feedback to MarketingSherpa over the results.
As many of you will know, I have my own little anti-Flash campaign going.
So here’s a re-cap, Flash intro’s are a bad idea because:
1) They delay your visitor accessing your web site
2) They serve no purpose other than thinly veiled advertising – and if the visitor has typed your URL then you already have them – let them in
3) They are in many cases self-indulgent design projects
4) It confuses visitors who expect to be able to navigate sites using standard HTML navigation
5) Your site becomes unaccessible to users who do not have or want Flash on their computer
6) You are being made fun of by fantastic parodies such as SkipIntro
7) Flash creation is expensive, where’s the ROI?
8) Shouldn’t the time and resources you spend on Flash be better utilized improving your site’s navigation, content etc.
9) The creators of Flash discourage it’s use for these Intros – and they should know – see point #3
10) Does it drive more visitors, help you capture more leads, create business opportunities? If the answer is no, hit the delete button.
Now before I get loads of abuse, of course Flash has useful applications. It’s fantastic for creating demonstrations, tutorials, presentations etc. It’s just not good for guarding your webite or for website navigation for that matter.
Check out some serial PR offenders.
Colin McKay’s excellent Canuckflack has moved to http://www.canuckflack.com and he’s now one of the growing population of Moveable Type users. I would if I could, but I can’t.
Greg Brooks tackles the thorny subject of why journalists hate us.
Robb Hecht over at PR Machine points to a fantastic short piece on branding that was published in Inc.magazine last year. Of course I think it’s great because I completely agree with it. Branding is the sum of your audiences’ experiences with your firm – it’s not a logo, a color or a catchphrase.
Phil covers an interesting survey which found that the quality of your employee communication directly impacts their performance.
Phil Gomes at G2B Group points to a Network Computing expos�A> on the lying statistics technology vendors use to make their products look better!
Jeremy at POP! PR bemoans the Microsoft-Google acquisition story (that wasn’t) from the NY Times.
PR Fuel points to story from Entrepreneur magazine on why you need PR. You do you know.
And last but not least, PR News in Miami covers Mickey Mouse’s 75th birthday!
So there’s a round up and I’ve managed to avoid mentioning Michael Jackson once… doh
Murphy's Law 