Day: July 20, 2005

PR Miscellany – July 20, 2005

  • In response to growing levels of PR spam, Yahoo blogger, Jeremy Zawodny is proposing to possibly create an add-in spam filter to blacklist PR agency domains…
  • Robb Hecht takes an entertaining look at how the new film Charlie & the Chocolate Factory can teach us some lessons around the brave new world of communications!
  • If you are in Santa Clara on July 27th you could attend the Northern California Business Marketing Association event on “The Role of PR in the Electronic Era” with speakers from Maestro Marketing & PR, Agilent Technologies Semiconductor, Electronic Engineering Times, Hayes Marketing and Hoffman Agency. It starts as 11:30am and you can register online or call 650-631-4262. It’s $48 for non-members.
  • Congratulations to Christopher Graves, President of Ogilvy PR, Asia Pacific who has published a very well written and researched ‘Executive Blogger’s Guide to Building a Nest of Blogs, Wikis & RSS’. It’s a great introduction. You can download it here (PDF 2.8MB). [Thanks to Niall Cook for the link]
  • John Wagner explains why the role of Public Relations is about more than writing press releases.
  • David Parmet offers some advice for effective PR at trade shows.

Really Simple Statistics

At this point, all PR people should, at the very least, be evaluating RSS feeds. For PR people working in technology organizations (or their agencies) RSS is fast becoming a core component of that standard communications mechanism.

It’s interesting that RSS, without much of the fanfare afforded to other online communications tools, is continuing to proliferate. According to the New York Times visits to their website via RSS feeds jumped from 500,000 a month in 2003, to 7.3 million in April 2005.

As communicators it’s part of our job to provide information to our audiences where and when they want it and RSS is increasingly part of that mix.

If you don’t know much about RSS, I’ve included some links below. There’s also some interesting new content on RSS such as:

If RSS is nothing more than another TLA (three letter acronym) to you, here’s some useful links that will hopefully explain it’s potential

How can IT firms reach Small and Medium Sized US Businesses?

Forrester Research has released an interesting report looking at how small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the US find out about technology and what factors influence their purchase decision. It makes for interesting reading.

Forrester categorizes firms with six to ninety nine employees as small and firms with one hundred to nine hundred and ninety nine employees as medium sized businesses.

The number one source of information for small and medium sized companies on technology decisions is trade publication articles (47%). That is followed by consultants (44%), conferences (41%), vendors salespeople, online search engines, research firms and traditional media (TV, Radio and Newspapers) respectively.

When comparing and selecting IT vendors the top three sources for small and medium businesses are word of mouth (54%), consultants (41%) and trade publications articles (38%).

It’s an interesting report. Trade publications remain a vitally important element in communication – which must come as a shock to many of the gloom and doom brigade. Also the importance of independent consultants continues to be key in the SMB sales cycle for organizations that have limited technical expertise.

You can find out more at the Forrester website.

Report: How to Reach SMBs, Meredith Morris, © Forrester Research June 2005