Author: Tom Murphy

My daddy is bigger than yours…
I have held off writing this piece for quite some time, but now is as good a time as any. In a variety of online PR publications recently there have been a series of Big Agency versus Small Agency opinion pieces. These ‘articles’ aim to position smaller or larger (depending on the author) PR agencies as the best choice for companies for a range of spurious reasons.

The only clear take-away for me from these articles, is that any agency who participates will never get my business. Why? Well if a PR professional positions themselves so blatantly, supporting their argument with unsubstantiated generalizations they can’t be relied upon to promote my business intelligently. If this is their idea of thought-leadership be afriad…be very afraid.

So does size matter? Here’s my take. PR is at its core about people. Although agency elders often forget it, a PR firm lives and dies by its people. That’s it. When you extrapolate that out, whether you go with a large or small agency should at the end of the day come down to the people in the firm you’ll be working with. And that argument holds for international PR programs as well.

Over the past decade I have worked on the agency and in-house sides. In both capacities I have worked with single agency networks and a mix of different agencies. It’s clear that the most effective campaigns were not driven by the type of agency but by the people involved. Good people = Good campaigns….size doesn’t matter a jot, whether its big or small.

Flash Hall of Fame #7… Publicis….check out the most appalling navigation known to personkind..

Internet Wire Needs to clean up its act..
In August 2000, a hoax press release was sent over Internet Wire about a publicly traded company called Emulex. The press release, which was sent out by a disgruntled Internet Wire employee, caused a 62% drop in the Emulex share price in one day – costing investors $110 million.

Now Internet Wire have replicated the trick, a hoax press release purportedly from small cap biopharmaceuticals firm, Cel-Sci was sent out June 10 announcing an non-existent partnership in Japan. The result? Trading volume five times the average and a significant share price gain.

It’s time Internet Wire took hold of the situation, it’s not good enough to simply say that staff didn’t follow procedures. The fact that this has happened twice in as many years isn’t good enough.

UK PR Firms in Financial Danger…It seems the continued slow economic recovery is hitting UK PR firms. In a study by Plimsoll Publishing to be released next month one in five UK PR agencies are in danger of closing (based on sales growth, trading stability, profitability, working capital and liquidity) The survey covers 400 UK PR firms and 163 have a financial rating of ‘caution’. More at PR Week.

Regis McKenna: CIO as a Marketeer…Interesting piece from Regis McKenna in Optimize magazine on the CIO’s importance in delivering technology that assists the marketing effort with customers across all departments.

What does your boss think is key to reputation?

Hill & Knowlton along with Chief Executive Magazine and Harris Interactive have produced a report that looks at what CEO’s believe affects their organization’s reputation.

In a survey of 557 executives, the report found that:
42% believe unethical behaviour adversely affects reputation
49% believe negative print and broadcast affect reputation
13% quote rumors on the Internet
36% say disasters
and 35% litigation

Read more on the report here.

Flash Hall of Shame #6.. …..Hill & Knowlton

Update: When PR people let down their industry

Bivings Group have an interesting op-ed on blogging on their web-site. Now that’s interesting…

When PR people let down their industry

A recent story in the Guardian further implicates PR in underhand dealings and stupidity. According to the piece The Bivings Group was retained by Monsanto to undertake a ‘smear’ campaign against the Nature Magazine’s paper on GM Maize in Mexico. Accordingly our friends at the Bivings Group invented aliases and posted to Internet mailing lists.

Now it turns out there are some real, justifiable issues with the findings of the report. But rather than tackle the concerns, Biving’s ‘pseudonyms’ criticized it online.

Then when the Bivings Group were accused by a journalist from the UK Guardian of posting online they agressively denied it – even though it’s clear the postings in question were made by computers from the Bivings Group. More mud slung in our industry’s direction, more lying and more damage to the credibility of every PR professional. Well done all involved, you’ve certainly made our jobs easier and our reputation stronger…not.
(Some more opinion from Brian Kane’s weblog)

When technology bites back

Senator Joseph Lieberman’s (D) office recently sent out an e-mail press release to 400 reporters calling for a national broadband Internet strategy. The only problem was while the release called for more sophisticate technology infrastructure, the hapless Senator’s e-mial system couldn’t take the strain and has been spamming the same release to the same 400 reporters over and over again. You can read the full story on Newsday.