Day: September 28, 2004

Just found a new PR blog called LibTalk, which deals with PR and communications for library communicators.

It’s fantastic that we’re beginning to see PR blogs catering for different markets.

Hot on the news that Silicon Valley PR firms are scrabbling for bodies to meet a strong growth in demand, another indication of recovery in the technology market comes from a research report on technology marketing from IDC.

The report finds that technology marketing spend grew 6% this year and now accounts for 3.2% of revenues, though while everyone’s talking about “branding” marketing is still measured on hard leads….

“The report reveals an interesting conundrum for technology marketing professionals. Although brand building is their top priority, it is not the most common metric measuring their performance. Lead generation statistics are most frequently reported to the CEO, with brand awareness ranking just fourth.”

The recovery continues (hopefully)…

Given the importance of internal communications to many practitioners this item should be of interest.

Shel Holtz has launched the Employee Communications Manifesto Wiki:

“Our goal is for the community of employee communications professionals to work collaboratively to establish the baseline of knowledge and skills every internal communicator should have.

In order to make this collaborative effort possible, the Manifesto resides on this wiki. Anybody can edit an existing page to enhance the material already there, add new thoughts or correct mistakes. In addition, anybody can add new pages or even sections.”

Don’t worry if you don’t know what a Wiki is, it’s effectively a website that can be edited by any visitor through their web browser. It’s a great initiative and already has a lot of content online looking at the various types of communication.

Shel has built it as a Wiki to encourage practitioners to contribute as well as learn.

There are a number of issues around the practice of Public Relations that seem to come around again and again and again.

Top of these issues is the ability, or lack of it, of PR practitioners to properly use the everyday tools of the profession. It never ceases to amaze me that a small number of practitioners in the year 2004 still don’t know how to use the most basic tools.

If you hire a plumber or a mechanic you expect them to be au fait with ratchets, spanners etc. Surely a client expects that their PR consultant is similarly familiar with the basic elements of Public Relations?

It seems not.

It seems incredible to me that there is still misunderstanding on using word processors, virus software and e-mail. I’m not even including relatively new inventions such as blogs, RSS and Instant Messaging.

Mike Manuel points to a post on TechDirt, which in the past has documented a wide number of PR mis-steps, concerning a press release sent to them by a PR, which included marked-up changes from the original Word document….

“This time, however, the PR person had taken a word document with an old press release and just dumped in the new stuff while thinking she had deleted the old. She then let Word “save as HTML” and sent out the press release as an email. Unfortunately for her, I don’t let my email client display HTML email, so what I got was nearly unreadable — but just readable enough to note that when Word saves in HTML, apparently it includes all the changes. So from what I could see, I have a “mash up” of two press releases, complete with random strike-throughs and insertions, showing all of the edits made on the existing press release. So, for example, I can see that whereas they originally described the company’s solution as “unique,” that was later crossed out. Not that I would be writing about this announcement anyway, but now I’m left wondering what happened that this company’s product is no longer ‘unique’.”

Oh my word (scuse the pun)….

Of course mistakes happen. That’s the same in every walk to life.  But we work in the reputation business and while it’s hard to build a reputation it’s very easy to destroy it. 

The Internet is an inforgiving medium. Once you press the “send” or “publish” button it’s live and it’s too late.

We need to understand the medium and understand the implications of sloppy practices. Put in place stringent quality control mechanisms, invest your time and money in understanding how to use these tools effectively and safely. If you don’t then do not be surprised or upset when your mistake comes back to haunt you.

As part of my contribution to helping reduce these errors, here are some useful links:

• Back in 2001, Alcatel was one of the earlier victims of Word “spam”.
• Microsoft has fallen foul of its own Word product in the past.
• A brief guide to using the correct tools for posting PR information online.
• Microsoft provides a free utility that removes all previous edits from Word files.
• Here’s some other observations regarding Microsoft Word.
• Avoiding E-mail-related crises.