Day: June 25, 2004

When I was studying marketing, the last practice area I wanted to work in was Public Relations. 

The image of Absolutely Fabulous, glitzy parties and widespread “air kissing” was too much to bear. How I ended up in PR is a longer story but suffice to say my ignorance was a barrier to entry.

Richard Bailey has posted a short essay explaining what Public Relations is about, written by one of his first year students Katherine Shenton. 

I wish I had known about this all those years ago…

“As I mentioned earlier, PR is not always sexy. You may find yourself working in a political PR agency or working within a pork pie factory’s in-house PR department; you�ve just got to focus on what you want to do and be determined. PR is a difficult industry to enter so you�ll need to be enthusiastic and confident. People don�t understand all the work that goes into organising a trade show but I hope you do now.”

Hurrah it’s been a full week since I posted anything about blogs.  Fantastic. My neck has nearly recovered from the awful cramp I got from all that navel gazing :-).

But now my neck has recovered sufficiently for me to dip back into the navel (so to speak).

Mike Manuel, Elizabeth Albrycht and Jeneana Sessum are debating whether you should “announce” your blog with a press release.

Now first of all let me say up front that I don’t buy all the anti-press release sentiment that is around today.  I think press releases serve a specific purpose and continue to have some value – even if it’s only that it provides a standard format for communicating news – regardless of how sloppy it is.

But I don’t think press releasing a new corporate weblog is a great idea and here’s why.

The whole point of a weblog is to provide an informative source of first person information that hopefully offers a human face to your organization.  It should try and engage your audience, inform them, promote debate with them and in general communicate with them.

A blog, IMHO should be launched organically.  You should absolutely promote it on your website (ideally by pointing to some interesting posts), use the content from the blog to provoke discussion in your newsletter(s).  Engage other bloggers in your sphere of influence, target journalists with relevant postings.

But there’s a clear disconnect between those activites and a press release.

If you build it (think a lot about it, write honestly, add real value and get involved in open debate) they will come…. really they will.