PR Pro Catherine Helzerman has put together a “Communications Wiki” to provide a place for people to share information, advice, knowledge and of course opinions on PR, communications and all associated subject areas.
Catherine points out there’s no commerical angle here, just an online place where anyone can read and share their experiences and knowledge.
An online survey on media monitoring from Slipstream Group has some interesting findings:
You can read an executive summary of the report here.
The full report costs $195.
First and foremost, congratulations to Interpublic’s MWW Group* who have announced the formation of a new “specialty” practice called Blog 360 which will “work with clients to develop proprietary blogging strategies, from creation and marketing to sponsorships and advertising, geared to increasing relevance among target audiences”.
Kudos to one of the larger PR firms who have recognized the value of blogs and blog expertise. From a marketing perspective the news has already been widely covered across the PR blog community – which while not necessarily the most read Internet segment – reaches a relevant audience.
However, if the creation of this group is anything more than a marketing ploy it does raise a concern. This is the same tactic that saw the creation of many “interactive” divisions back in the boom days. Groovy offshoots and departments of people solely focused on online tactics, measurement and influence. How many of those “divisions” are still around? The majority have disapeared or been folded back into the mothership.
The reason is this. Public Relations is about communications. Therefore all your practitioners should have knowledge of the channels, techniques and approaches to those channels. It’s no good having an ivory tower in the corner of one of your offices, this knowledge must leak across your entire firm.
So let’s give MWW Group their (in my opinion) deserved moment in the sun and then let’s get back to the more important business of raising awareness and understanding of blogging, podcasting, search engine optimization etc to all practitioners.
*Notes:
Public Relations, at its most basic, is concerned with the most effective means of reaching and communicating with relevant audiences. Along with traditional avenues from townhall meetings to fliers, press releases, editorial and analyst meetings, new outlets such as search engines and blogs are providing additional channels for a growing number of companies.
The mass usage of search engines by people researching products, services or ideas online means that it is foolish to ignore the power of search engine optimization. At the same time the sheer volume of information online can confuse or frustrate users and prevent them from finding the information they want. There are already some tools available to help reduce the noise, but you can expect major steps forward in this area over the coming years. Of course that presents new challenges for PR people attempting to reach online audiences – what if you’re filtered out?
Trevor Cook has an excellent article for the Australian Financial Review which looks at how technology can reduce the noise overload and includes digestible introductions to the tools that are becoming available to help people reduce the noise and increase the relevance.
“On the other hand, as one participant said, we may need to adopt a more Zen-like approach to the problem and just accept that we will (shock) miss some good information from time to time. We may need to get off the technology-driven information treadmill and occasionally �catch a sunset�.”
Murphy's Law 