Day: March 3, 2004

The results of the first PR Opinions survey are now available.

As you would expect with a survey conducted via a weblog, the majority of the respondents are technologically advanced with E-mail, Websites and Weblogs the most popular online PR tools.

Other findings include:

• Over 65% of those surveyed believe that the Internet has enhanced the relationship between PR practitioners and journalists.

  

   

•  There is no consensus around a common approach to PR measurement. Most respondents use a combination of measurement tools, which differ widely from one practitioner to the next

   

• The most popular trends effecting Public Relations over the next three years are a rise in the number of individuals publishing content, growth in the number of media outlets
  and generally more noise in the marketplace.

My sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to complete the survey. If you have any comments on the report you can e-mail me or post your comments below.

 

You can download a PDF of the survey results here.

 

When I heard AdAge was taking a swing at the PR business, I was ready for a rant, but reading Jonah Bloom’s editorial was a pleasant surprise.

I and many others have felt for a long time that the PR business suffers from a poor image.  I think this is the result of a number of factors if you’ll excuse the gross generalizations:

• There is still widespread confusion among business people about what exactly PR is. (My web statistics are full of Google searches on the subject)
• The business is so diverse that standard descriptions do not suffice
• Agencies often use difficult, abstract terms to describe and differentiate their services
• We often shy away from the business value of our activities
• We are slow to innovate, react to changing business practices and opportunities
• Practitioners in a small set of industry sectors define PR in a manner which is foreign to the majority
• There are a lot of cowboys out there…

“But as a business PR has sent mixed messages about its purpose and strengths. Last week in a letter to Ad Age the president of the Public Relations Society of America described PR as being “about building relationships between people and organizations, opening and maintaining multilayered communications channels and helping organizations and individuals avoid or manage controversies.” What is that? It may be a definition of the role of a corporate-communications department, but it isn’t a good sell to a busy marketer looking to position, brand or sell product.”

What’s the answer? I don’t know, I wish I did.

I think the growing number of PR bloggers is an opportunity for the profession. There is a lot of good thinking taking place with PR people discussing the issues that effect their employers and their businesses. PR has a lot of value to bring to any business, we need to work together to identify how we can make that value understandable.

Jim Horton, as always, has an interesting view..

The Internet’s reality distortion field fools many of us on a regular basis.

Ideas, technologies and applications that fly around the web as the new new thing about to revolutionize the world, often die from boredom before they hit the outside world. Some survive and thrive, most don’t.

CNN has a story on a new study released by Pew Research on Internet usage in the United States. The research has some interesting findings (see below) but the finding that CNN latched onto, was that only 2-7% of Internet users host blogs and that only 11% of the Internet population have read weblogs.

“The impression out there is that a lot of the blog activity is very feverish,” said Lee Rainie, the Pew project’s director. “That’s not the case. For most bloggers, it’s not an all-consuming, all-the-time kind of experience.”

I think that’s a higher level of usage than I would have anticipated.

You see, the fact that you are reading this post (you’re probably the only one) means you have heard of weblogs. But the vast majority of people haven’t.

It took E-mail (in my estimation) at least five years to get serious mainstream momentum and E-mail is the most obvious incarnation of online communications. The grandaddy of blogging software, Blogger, was only founded in 1999, which means that blogs have only become “popular” in the past couple of years.

Weblogs certainly don’t pass my “does your mother know” test, and over the past couple of weeks I have given a number of talks about “PR and technology” to about 120 students and practitioners.  Out of that 120 people only one had heard of weblogs.

That’s the reality.

The weblog pioneers are already talking about blogs changing the fabric of the human existence…..

For what it’s worth, I believe weblogs will stand the test of time.  I believe they do shift the balance of communications a little and are a great example of the changes that the Internet promises to the world of communication.  However, we need to be realistic. It will take time.  In that context, the fact that 2-7% of US Internet users are hosting blogs is fantastic progress in a very very short period of time. It’s very encouraging, but it’s not mainstream.

Pew’s study also found…

21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.

17% have posted written material on Web sites.

13% maintain their own Web sites.

10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.

8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.

7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.

7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.

6% have posted artwork on Web sites.

5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.

4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.

3% have contributed video files to Web sites.

2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs

Update:

Trevor Cook points out that even if only 2% of Internet users are hosting weblogs that is still a huge amount of new content appearing on the Internet every day. Too right.

He also refers to a great article from Editor & Publisher about the issues Editor’s face when their journalists start blogging…

“But what happens when professional journalists enter this often contentious world? In many cases, their employers get uncomfortable. In a few cases, reporters have been fired or punished because of their personal blogs.”