Day: October 1, 2004

If ever there was a book about real-life Public Relations that I’d love to read, it would be an account of the PR efforts on both sides of the Peoplesoft-Oracle merger battle.

It has been a titantic struggle with a lot of memorable skirmishes in the media – a struggle Oracle look as though they’re winning. 

In yet another twist, Peoplesoft have just announced that the company’s CEO, Craig Conway has been removed and replaced by company founder David Duffield.

The Peoplesoft-Oracle snafu delivered many entertaining media battles including:

First, Craig Conway, CEO at Peoplesoft came out with this gem about the proposed takeover:

“It’s like me asking if I could buy your dog so I can go out back and shoot it.” [Bloomberg]

To which the ever-quotable Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison responded in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News:

“I think at one point, `Craigey’ thought I was going to shoot his dog,” Ellison said. “If Craigey and Bear were standing next to each other and I had one bullet, trust me, it wouldn’t be for the dog.”

Previous posts:

• PR Firefight – the enterprise software soap opera..
• The dog, the bullet and the media interview….

Colin McKay provides some pointers to when you should resign the account….

A 60 Minutes crew is sitting in their office – and you didn’t invite them.

You just can’t get over the internal motivational video – the CFO and CMO covering Whitesnake’s “Here I go again.”

Whenever you use the word “media,” the aged founder starts chattering about Marshall McLuhan and acid.

The client asks “Can you get us PR but also keep us way under the radar? Thanks.”

A new Internet research report contradicts a popular Internet theory that the media is becoming less influential. According to the report the media remains one of the most reliable sources of online information for consumers everywhere.

That’s one finding in a fantastic new report from the University of Southern California:

 “The Digital Future Report: Surveying the Digital Future” (PDF)

Its the fourth year the report, which includes interviews with 2,000 households on their use of the Internet, has been published and it makes for fascinating reading.

They found that 74.4% of respondents say that information on established media Web sites is reliable and accurate.

Interestingly, the survey also found that the number of users who believe that overall information on the Internet is reliable and accurate has declined. 40% of users believe that only half the information on the Internet is reliable.

The report includes a wealth of relevant statistics on Internet usage and behavior. It estimates that 70.2% of Americans now use e-mail and 62.3% of those users check e-mail at least twice a day.

This is a strongly recommended download!

Footnote:

• Thanks to MarketingSherpa for the link.
• The report was supported by the foundation and corporate partners of the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. They deserve a mention! Accenture, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, National Cancer Institute, SBC, Sony, Time Warner Companies and Verizon.

 

Business 2.0’s Thomas Mucha has a good article on blogs and their marketing implications.

“But in time, and as this latest Web phenomenon becomes more established, blogs will likely become just another standard marketing channel for most companies. “People are only just beginning to figure this out,” Ordahl says. “In many ways corporate blogging issues are just old questions in a new context. I suspect blogs will become less distinguishable from traditional websites and it will all just be — again — about publishing on the Web.”

I think that paragraph sums it up.  In time, blogs will become a standard piece of kit for every organization.  This will be accelerated as companies understand the need to establish dialogue with their audiences. Some blog initiatives will be successful, some will fail, but they will be commonplace and increasingly important for PR.

You’ll notice that the previous paragraph uses the future tense.  Right now blogs are very useful in most technology markets and are an effective tool for communicating with tech-savvy consumers, but I don’t believe they’re mainstream. It seems to me that although blogs are spreading, the biggest concentration remains in the technology sector (as you would expect).

Here’s my prediction: Blogs will become a mainstream component of the majority of web sites and will become a standard communications tactic.  However, until that occurs we can expect loads of people promoting the view that they are “mainstream” – and they are not (yet).

Footnote:

Drew takes a view on Blogs in Europe.

Philip Young has written an article on blogging for the UK’s Institue of Public Relations.

“When web logs first appeared a couple of years ago, they were often dismissed as online diaries – egocentric ramblings from lonely bedroom philosophers – but now many forward-thinking PR practitioners believe �blogging� may have profound implications for their profession.”