Day: March 19, 2004

Julie Daniel provides some useful tips on managing your inbox and boosting your productivity – something we can all do with. (Thanks to John Pocaro for the link).

“But, if your in-box makes your brain hurt, do yourself a favour� go through and delete the things you don�t need and file away the things you may want to refer back to later.”

On a related subject, Dan Gillmor re-iterates the importance of the e-mail subject line if you want to avoid the delete key. 

With Spam levels continuing to rise, the subject line could be the single most important element of successful e-mail marketing – focus on it!

Phil Gomes points to a story from the New York Daily News that reports Jayson Blair’s book has only sold around 1,400 copies.  Hurrah the purchasing public is getting sense!

Phil is also quoted in an article in eContent Magazine on how RSS can reduce information overload.

Gomes says, “RSS is incorruptibly opt-in. No one can force an RSS feed down my throat. I’ll simply unsubscribe.” The RSS model puts the subscriber in complete control of the subscription process. You only subscribe to the feeds you want, then you can unsubscribe by simply deleting the feed in your news aggregator.

Dan Gillmor, as most of you will know, is a very influential technology writer who hosts an incredibly popular weblog. He had over 3 million readers of his blog last year.

He also happens to be one of the most thoughful people on the impact new technology, such as weblogs and RSS, will have on journalism.

If you’re working in Public Relations his thoughts are hugely relevant.  While obviously the effects of new technology on journalism are important for media relations, these same technologies will also impact other areas of the PR profession from Internal Communications to Community Relations and beyond.

He is currently writing a new book called Make the News and in the best traditions of interactive journalism, he is requesting feedback on the book as he’s writing it.  He currently has four chapters online and is looking for readers to identify areas he’s missed or correct any factual errors.

Dan is eating his own dog food.

Take a few minutes to visit, read and participate. 

Thanks to the ever prolific Colin McKay over at Canuckflack for the link.

John Cass has an interesting post regarding the issue of negative publicity on the Internet.

In particular he looks at the fact that now you can quickly and easily (through web sites, weblogs and RSS) provide your own version of events.  Then, if or when a crisis or negative issue arises, people have a ready source of information reflecting your views.

I think one of the major reasons that the Internet and weblogs provide such a valuable PR avenue is that you can reach your audience directly and to paraphrase the Cluetrain, build conversations with them. If you can successfully cultivate that relationship with your audience, then you will be in a much stronger position should an issue or negative comments from a third party arise in the future.

Prevention is far better (and more profitable) than cure.

“I think that just as people can throw mud at you, you don’t have to wait for more. Companies that react quickly to bad publicity and crisis communications can mitigate such bad postings.”

Constantin Basturea has created an excellent aggregated RSS feed that publishes the latest postings from practically every PR blogger (except those without RSS feeds or those using Atom).

Unfortunately PR Opinions isn’t in there, like its author, its RSS feeds aren’t well formed 🙂

Check out the RSS feed it’s a useful summary – but don’t forget to come back here!