Month: December 2004

For the past while Fleishman-Hillard has been fighting allegations over their dealings with the city of Los Angeles, mostly behind closed doors.

On Wednesday, Richard S. Kline, regional president of Fleishman-Hillard wrote a formal response to these allegations in the Los Angeles Daily News.

“In the 58-year history of Fleishman-Hillard, we have never experienced allegations remotely like those facing us today in Los Angeles…….Fleishman-Hillard is a firm of high ethical standards. We would never knowingly tolerate improper behavior and we will not attempt to avoid our responsibilities in this case. But the DWP had good reasons to seek experienced outside counsel and our firm provided a great deal of value in the six years we worked for the department.”

 Elizabeth Albrycht is looking for people join her to share their thoughts on how communication is changing for a blog-based event taking place in January.

“I have written a lot about how I think communications is changing, and others have as well.  But this information is currently fragmented, anecdotal and spread all over the place.  What I decided I wanted to do was to synthesize this information with theories from communications studies, media ecology, philosophy and science and technology studies, and come up with a new model that people can use, test, improve, etc.”

 Also Kevin Dugan has an interesting post on how companies are using blog for market intelligence.

As you have no doubt already heard Microsoft has launched the beta of it’s new Spaces service. Mike Manuel takes a look at the launch from a PR perspective.

Although RSS will probably play a larger role in the future in how we discover and share information, E-mail remains a vital part of our communications toolbox.

I found a couple of interesting e-mail posts over the past couple of days:

 Andy Lark shares some of his e-mail rules.

“Or, like it has for many, email has become like an arcade game in which we win by shooting the bastards down as they flood our inbox.”

 Amy Gahran shares some advice on how to be smart about communicating with the media via e-mail and also makes some recommendations on good e-mail list software.

“The plague of spam is having disastrous effects on legitimate e-mail distribution lists. Most people � especially journalists � receive such a high volume of spam that they routinely overlook, delete, or filter out many legitimate messages, including mail from opt-in lists.”

Some more e-mail related content:

• Can E-mail Survive? – PC Magazine
• (E-mail) Caught in the Crossfire – Inc. Magazine
• The dog ate my e-mail – PR Opinions blog
• Avoiding an E-mail crisis – e21 Corp.
• Why technology will never replace face-to-face communication – PR Opinions blog
• The E-mail Paradox: Bane and Boon for Journalists’ Productivity – Online Journalism Review
• E-mail Etiquette (again) – PR Opinions blog
• E-mail: Your subject line defines your success and failure – PR Opinions blog

The Internet is a dynamic medium.  Therein lies one of the fundamental challenges for Public Relations.  If you are responsible for comunicating with your audience online, then you have to have a solid understanding of how and where people find information.

Forget the over-hyped “Internet time” mantra, the real online PR challenge is changing behavior.

For example, search engines are now probably the #1 point of departure for people looking for information.  Therefore, it makes sense that PR people should have a strong understanding of search engines and how search engine ranking works.

Of course that understanding won’t necessarily help you to work with all of your audience.

A report just released by Internet research firm, Hitwise has found that Internet users who research travel online are increasingly going directly to travel websites than going through search engines.

Does did mean that search engines are less important for travel companies? 

Not really, they still drive large volumes of traffic, but it does highlight an interesting trend. 

As your industry’s Internet audience matures, their behavior changes. People who are early in the purchase process may use search engines, while more educated customers may use a combination of magazines, search engines and blogs.

In effect the Internet is encouraging greater segmentation of audiences and their behavior. 

Now there’s a challenge….