Month: March 2004

For me, the essence of good web design boils down to understanding your visitors and enabling them to access relevant, well written content as quickly and easily as possible.

Nothing revolutionary there.

This practice includes avoiding the dreaded Flash infection which impacts usability and hurts search engine optimaization.  It means using standard HTML navigation that visitors are comfortable with.

Gerry McGovern in a recent opinion piece stated that the press release is “awful web content”. He continues:

“Maybe you have to put press releases up on your website for legal reasons. Just know that they are not the reason any sane person would decide to come to your website.”

You see while I agree visitors may not come to the site for press releases, I disagree they don’t serve a valuable function online and offline.

First of all, if we base our navigation on providing the information people need in places they expect to find it, then your press room should provide a full archieve of the company’s press releases. (Press Room design is a separate topic)

The poor Press Release is not always the most effective means of communication, but it serves a purpose.  Journalists know what to expect with a press release. It provides a company’s version of a news event with the factual information, corporate quote and links to more detail.

It’s not always exciting, the reader may not always find it interesting, but it does provide a useful repository of information for website visitors in a format they will expect and can therefore find, navigate and use.

That’s good web content practice.

Gerry also believes that press rooms are less than effective:

“Let�s say I�m a journalist and I�m thinking of doing a story on your organization. Where is the last place I�m going to look? You guessed it! The media/press section. I�m going to root around your website to try and find something interesting. I�m certainly not going to be corralled into your media section and fed the story you�d like me to write.”

I think Gerry (who was a journalist in the deep past) is getting confused with Woodward and Bernstein here. Most corporate websites do provide useful product or service information but they are rarely the receptacle of dark corporate secrets.

Getting back to the basics of good navigation and providing visitors with the information they want in the place they expect.  The press room serves an important purpose.

If a journalist is looking for PR contacts, artwork, the date a product shipped, the raw details on a product such as features and price, they’ll head to the press room.

Good press rooms provide contact details, artwork, background information, forthcoming events, links to relevant background materials etc. In essence it can provide a useful portal for visitors (and journalists) who wish to find out the basics, check information and then delve deeper.

That’s good.

What’s the alternative? No press room? No standard repository of information and resources? Endless searching for contact details? No standard means of providing information on what the company is doing and has done?

Steady on. The press release and the press room are alive and well and both serve a purpose.  In fact our press room is one of the most popular sections on the website – someone’s visiting it.

Yes there are improvements to be made and yes we can all probably apply our skills to making press releases more effective, but let’s make sure the baby doesn’t fall out of the bath.

Good online communication is not simply about innovative formatting and wacky new ways to deliver information. It is the marriage of good online practice with tried and tested traditional techniques.

Of course, that’s only my opinion…

Jayson Blair‘s new book may be the PR/Media meme of the moment but I won’t be contributing to his comfortable retirement.

I have to say, I am becoming sick and tired of people, who through dishonesty, laziness and an innate belief that they shouldn’t have to work hard like the rest of us, get rich promoting their dishonestly. (That was a long sentence but it has released some of the pressure from my chest so that’s a good thing!).

Don’t buy his miserable book, you’ll learn nothing and will help reward someone who clearly thinks they are better that you and me. No thanks bud.

Richard Laermer, in the latest issue of RLM’s newsletter, gives some first hand examples of how this leech operated. What more do you need to know? I wouldn’t read this book if it was handed to me. 

Now whilst one of the benefits of RSS has been its ability to circumvent e-mail overload, many people actually like RSS updates delivered by e-mail.

A former colleague of mine, Andy Grove (not that Andy Grove) has been toying around with RSS and is offering a free service “My RSS Alerts” which delivers the latest RSS feeds from your favorite sources directly to your inbox.

The service is still in its early stages but it’s really simple to subscribe, try it out.

The past three years haven’t exactly been a walk in the park.  The Internet bust hit business and the PR industry very hard. The latest issue of Ketchum’s Perspectives newsletter takes a look at the lessons we’ve learnt from the past three years.

It includes the thoughts of executives from Home Depot and Fedex, the eternal debate on measurement and what’s hot and not for 2004.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, one of the failures of “raw” RSS is that it’s difficult to track usage over time.  How can you discover who is using your RSS feed, how often they are reading it etc.

Cliff Allen from Coravue has been in touch to inform me that they are launching a trackable RSS service in the Content Management component of their CRM software.

According to Cliff, “Being personalized, the feed contains only the headlines and links related to a person’s interests in their profile.  And, since the feed is trackable, a marketer can tell who retrieved headlines and which Web pages they read.”

Now I haven’t tried it myself but this sounds more like a solution to tracking RSS. Cliff offers personalized RSS off his personal website and Coravue also offer a similar service. 

Thanks to everyone who took the time to drop me a line on the survey, I’ll incorporate the feedback into the next survey.

Thanks.

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.”

Trevor Cook is changing the focus of his PR blog to more tightly focus on the issues around communication in the workplace and Corporate Social Responsibility – areas he is passionate about. 

Trevor has already starting delivering some excellent thinking on the complex challenges facing workplace communication.

The diversity of the PR business means that many of us are focused on specific fields without an in-depth understanding of the issues faced by our fellow practitioners.  The PR community is made up of thousands of professionals who have a completely different set of challenges and expertise. 

This is one diverse profession and although the public perception of PR is spending every hour of every day on the phones with journalists, for many PR people it’s the exception rather than the rule.