Day: January 6, 2005

In response to my post yesterday regarding the need for blogs to be adopted by all practitioners and not placed in a “special” group as the Internet was in the past, Niall Cook informs me that Hill & Knowlton’s “interactive” division is still alive and kicking and indeed is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year:

“The main reason for this is exactly as you say – because PR is about communications. We have somehow managed to be the “ivory tower” and the internal awareness raiser. As a result, more of our practitioners have the basic knowledge needed to create programmes that work across both traditional and online channels.”

I agree with Niall’s sentiments, though I still maintain that many of these divisions were established in the past as part of a desperate attempt by agencies to latch onto something they didn’t (and didn’t want to) understand. I have no problems with specialist groups within PR firms, as long as it doesn’t hamper other practitioners gaining a strong understanding of techniques and tools that are important to the success of their clients.

Blogs are one of those tools (oops I used the tool word).

I recently came across another PR blog, this time from high tech PR firm New Venture Marketing.

They have a two really interesting posts on Cisco’s newsroom which has been leading the way for online press rooms for a long long time.

These posts are definetely worth a read for anyone interested in building compelling online press rooms: Part 1, Part 2.

“The company also uses the RSS feeds to provide security alerts. While RSS syndication is passive (customers must sign up for your feed), it is a robust technology, highly granular and customizable.

Moreover, the company gets triple the value from its content: First, when the material is released as news. Second, when it is archived as part of a rich resource of searchable information, and the third, in the form of links to the site which help drive search engine rankings.”