Day: March 1, 2006

Kicking the dead dog… new "meme"

Many strange phrases have entered into the Interweb consciousness, think of “jump the shark”, “the long tail”, “markets are conversations”, so I have a new one: “Kicking the dead dog”**.

“Kicking the dead dog” describes the preponderance of people online to continually talk about the same thing over and over and over again. Given this is my phrase I’m giving it two meanings. It also describes the continual wave of posts that declare something is now “dead”.

In the world of PR there are two topics that have people kicking the dead dog. The death of PR and the death of the press release. I struggle to generate the energy to read these posts and whenever I do I need strong coffee and painkillers.

The latest person kicking the dead dog is declaring that the press release is… sorry I’m too bored to go into any more detail, I’ve added some links below, the first link is the offending post, the subsequent posts I’m glad to say have some common sense.

Let’s just post a single phrase from the original post:
“I have a disruptive role to play in mainstream PR”

Okey dokey… I … errr have a … emm.. narky, angry role to play in dealing with silly blog posts.

Follow the first link at your peril, read it, then forget it. The press release is alive and well folks, in fact it’s “walking the live dog” so to speak. I’m swimming in press releases, you can have them anyway you want them, in e-mail, on a website, in RSS, by fax, by post, by courier, I’ll even read it to you. But it ain’t dead…

**Long-time readers (hello mum) will remember that I’ve tried in vain to create a massive Internet groundswell around new terms in the past. I think I’m missing the money element. Most of the others promise loads of cash. Mine doesn’t. That explains it then.

Loads of links just for you….

In the latest of my vain attempts at keeping up to date with all the interesting content appearing online, here’s the latest miscellany of links…

  • The folks at Media Orchard point to an interesting story in the latest edition of the PRSA Strategist Newsletter looking at the growing trend of journalists moving to the dark art.
  • Uber-blogger Neville Hobson has moved to a new dedicated web presence at http://www.nevillehobson.com/ [Of course I should also mention that Nicky Wake the organisational brains behind our recent UK new media seminars has also joined the online cloud.]

  • On a related topic, Gary Goldhammer looks at the new rules for journalism.
  • Philip Young, Colin McKay and Andrew Smith both report on Julian Henry’s piece in the UK Guardian which suggests that PR is overrun with “strategists” and that “publicists” should be talking to journalists regularly or should go take a job in advertising. Publicists mmmmm… [Addendum: Simon Collister also covered it.]
  • The RSS Pundit picks the ten most interesting PR blogs – and in case you think I’m being a self-“publicist”, no I don’t make the cut 🙂
  • Paul Holmes looks at how GlaxoSmithKline are turning to PR.
  • Trevor Cook points to an interesting post on The Flack looking at the question of exclusives.
  • Trevor has been busy, here’s an interesting transcript from a recent radio discussion he was involved in.
  • PR is about more than media relations and communication, it’s about the customer, it’s about the audience. Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there are great examples of good and bad PR everywhere. John Wagner has a great common day example.
  • New York magazine has a feature on those new fangled blog things.
  • Tara Smith at the MarcomBlog reports that Gartner estimates that 70% of leads are wasted. Probably not a surprise for most marketers who have tried to follow leads through the hopper..
  • I see that WordPress are now offering a free blog hosting service.
  • Richard Bailey ponders whether the centre of gravity for PR is moving in-house.

Podcastic

Well the world of PR podcasting is following in the footsteps of “boring” old blogs with a whole range of new blogs to kill time on your commute…