Day: May 26, 2004

Colin McKay re-posts some caricatures of the typical election candidate, PR and journalist. (Full size images are available at Colin’s blog). 

Tom Mangan points to a very amusing discussion on the dreaded copy mistakes…

“In college we ran a story in the campus daily talking about “alcohol usage in pubic areas,” which the campus adviser circled in red and scribbled, “I hear this is good at getting rid of crabs” or words to that effect.”

Elsewhere at Ad:Tech there was some good hands-on advice on how to convert  visitors to your website into revenue. 

• Focus on content, ease of use, performance, brand value, and customer satisfaction.
• Eliminate distractions that could lead visitors out of the buying process.
• Avoid giving unpleasant surprises such as a high shipping cost revealed deep into the checkout process.
• Address potential deal breakers early in the process.
• Focus on building trust throughout the relationship

Footnote:

Thanks to the Ad:Tech blog (again).

At the Ad:Tech conference this week,  Ed Keller, co-author of The Influentials, gave a talk on the power of a small group (>10%) of people who exercise disproportionate influence over others in sharing information and making recommendations.

This trend, and the need for companies to identify and have conversations with these people, is a real opportunity for Public Relations.

If you can find and communicate with these people, they can have a profound influence on the success of your product or service. It’s a really interesting area and one we should all be investigating.

Heath Row has an extended transcript on Ed’s talk.

Footnote:

Link courtesy of the Ad:Tech blog.

Trevor Cook, the mastermind behind Global PR Blog Week is getting participants to answer some questions to add some color to proceedings.

Here are mine…

Why do you blog?
* I fell into blogging about two and a half years ago when I was looking for a means of collecting together all the various PR web links I had.  I put them all on a website and low and behold people starting reading and commenting on them.
 
Over a thousand posts later, the PR blog landscape has blossomed with over thirty PR practitioners regularly writing and musing on the business and the challenges facing us.
 
I blog to cater for my love of the sound of my voice 🙂 and also because it challenges my thinking about PR, marketing and online communication.
 
And why is blogging important for PR?
I think that Blogs are important to PR for two reasons. First of all they provide a great medium for looking at the changes and issues facing the profession and secondly they illustrate how the practice of PR is evolving.
 
We are moving toward a time when PR people will be increasingly communicating directly with the audience, when PR people will be using a host of new tools alongside the tried and tested techniques to help organizations communicate more effectively with their customers and prospects. As the Cluetrain Manifesto claimed nearly five years ago: ?Markets are Conversations?
 
What do you hope to see come out of this event?
* I think this event provides a great opportunity to bring together a wide range of people to discuss Public Relations and more importantly an opportunity for a large number of PR practitioners in different industries, markets and countries to learn, share and discuss how the profession is changing, developing and performing.  That?s an exciting prospect.
 
What issue(s) will you be focusing on in your contribution and why?
* I along with a number of others will be focusing on the state of public relations.  In particular I?ll be looking at how PR is reacting to the changing communications environment, how people feel PR is developing and any other area that readers or participants want to cover.