Category: General

The UK’s tech zine The Inquirer often spends a disprorportionate amount of time slagging off the PR people (or in their terminology ‘PR Bunnies’) it interacts with on a daily basis.  However, their latest installment struck a chord with me. 

They examined the usability of PR firm websites.

Now regular readers will know my concerns with PR websites.  In fact, I have pinned my colors to the mast with my own little campaign around the Flash Hall of Fame which showcases some of the worst Flash excesses.

Why is it that so many (not all) PR firms have so little knowledge about web design? Here’s a very brief crash course:

1) *Standard* Internet navigation is standard because people expect to use it. (You see this isn’t rocket science) While veering away from standard navigation (think top toolbar for sections and left-hand column for information in a given section) may be ‘cool’ it reduces the effectiveness of your website. People don’t have the time or the inclination to search around your site for the right click

2) Search Engines and people both prefer plain HTML text on a webpage.  While images are lovely, they stop people cutting-and-pasting text. If you don’t want people to cut-and-paste from your site, don’t put the information there in the first place.

3) What is it with Flash? The people who designed and built Flash warn against Flash intros AND Flash navigation on websites, yet a ridiculously high proportion of PR firms insist on using it. Why?

4) Understand how websites and search engine optimization work.  While PR firms should be able to consult with clients about effective web design, it seems to me that many of them need to learn the basics from their clients.

For the record, The Inquirer highlight the following UK firms:

• Red Consultancy
• Bite
• Cohn & Wolfe (New entry in the Flash Hall of Shame)
• Text 100
• AugustOne
• Henman Communications

You can read my tirade against Flash here and view a full listing of the Flash Hall of Shame here.

For the love of all things holy, please do some research on good web development practice and/or send your web staff on a course. Flash, bad navigation and poor design reflect badly on your business and your understanding of online communication – not to mention the industry as a whole. It’s all about communication… seriously.

Update: Bad to Worse

I just noticed that the Red Consultancy has taken their website down (the holding page is a Flash file) – I’m not sure if this is because of The Inquirer story or otherwise, but once again a PR firm is demonstrating a complete lack of understanding on the web. You don’t take down your website during a re-design…. well not since 1996…. oh dear… next they’ll have the construction workers online…

 A short article from the Pharmaceutical Business Review on the PR challenges facing AstraZeneca and its drug Crestor which reduces high cholesterol:

“Analysis of Crestor prescription trends in the US shows that each Public Citizen statement causes a slight drop in the number of weekly prescriptions. However, once the publicity recedes, prescription growth continues. It seems unlikely that Public Citizen will stop its attacks, but AstraZeneca’s PR machine seems to be overcoming these difficulties as growth of Crestor continues.”

AstraZeneca have released a public rebuttal of Public Citizen’s claims.

 Interesting story from New York Lawyer on the growing demands on legal firms to provide PR advice:

“Every once in a while, when a client doesn’t have any PR staff or when they are unavailable, I’ve thrown something up on the PR newswire for them, or when they were in a pinch, I’d give them some starting advice on crisis management. My first advice is to get a good PR firm,” says Petri Darby, public relations and marketing manager for Dallas-based Jenkens & Gilchrist.”

Time for PR firms to start offering legal services perhaps?

 Nothing illustrates the diversity of this “profession” better than the inside track on how some practitioners work in high profile fields such as sport or entertainment. 

In the UK at the moment there’s a feeding frenzy around the sexual high jinks in the headquarters of the governing body of English football – the Football Association (FA).  It turns out the national coach and the head of the FA were having an affair with the same employee. The FA’s PR man offered one of the tabloids the dirt on the coach if they held back on the story about the FA’s CEO. Unfortunately for the PR guy, the journalist taped the conversation and ran with both stories…

“The transcript of what the News of theWorld called the “tape of shame” detailed Gibson’s attempt to trade information about the England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson’s relationship with an FA secretary, Faria Alam, in return for the paper’s silence about her affair with Mark Palios, the association’s chief executive…. Still, it is no revelation that PRs try to stop stories appearing by offering others – or the prospect of others – instead. Such horsetrading may not be the norm in mainstream public relations but killing a story is a key service offered by the small number of “independent media brokers” (as one of them calls their trade) who try to massage press coverage of the various celebrities they represent.”

 

I just came across Klaus Eck’s German language blog “PR Blogger”. Klaus is based in Munich.

 

If you ever needed to understand the changing nature of communications then the current melee around Jonathan Schwartz�s blog is as good a place to start as any.

 

Jonathan is the number two at Sun Microsystems and a good example of a corporate blogger.  He�s opinionated, well spoken and not afraid to share those opinions.

 

In case you missed it, an entry Schwartz made on his blog over the weekend, coupled with some remarks to the media managed to move the stock markets.  On his blog he was propagating some FUD (Fear, uncertainty and doubt) around IBM�s ability to deal with the growing popularity of Linux. It�s not the most insightful, nor sustainable competitive argument I�ve read, however at the end of his post he wrote:

�Me, I’d keep a close eye on the Novell/SuSe conversation. If IBM acquires them, the community outrage and customer disaffection is going to be epic… but where else does IBM go?�

People drew the conclusion that Schwartz was hinting that Sun may be looking at Novell as a potential target.  Both companies stock rose on the entry and it�s been widely covered.

 

An illustration of the power of voice.

 

Just like the Wizard of Oz, the executive blog provides visitors with a glimpse of the human behind the machinery.  Of course this is a double edge sword.

 

Properly implemented it can open your organization to new audiences and make compelling arguments in favor of your products and services.

 

However it also creates risk.

 

Following Schwartz�s blog entry, which I believe is innocuous to say the least, Matthew Podboy raises the issue of how closely should PR people be involved with the blogger.

 

�The question I ask you – the PR community – is how involved should PR be in the maintenance of what I call “executive blogs” – they aren’t a corporate blog but they aren’t a personal blog either – especially if that person is an officer of the company.�

 

Here�s my take.

 

For an executive blog to be authentic and by inference useful, it must be written in the first person.  It must be honest, it must be relevant and it must be regular.

 

When you think about an executive in your organization as a potential blogger you must be sure that they have something interesting to say, they can provide readers with value, they are committed to regularly writing and they are cognizant of what they can and cannot disclose in terms of company secrets, legal disclosures etc.  Should a candidate not meet these criteria, then they aren�t suitable.

 

I firmly believe the most important part of executive blogging is the preparation. 

 

When the blog is up an running, let it ride.  Over-cautious PR intervention will remove the authenticity. 

 

It�s fine to meet with the executive bloggers and discuss discussion areas, but ad hoc editing and approval is simply counter-productive. 

 Heather Lindemann writes for the Advertising and Marketing Review on the new role for PR in B2B Marketing:

“Public relations is far more than writing and pitching press releases. PR builds trusted relationships, educates, and wins credibility.”

 Sharon Haley Linhart, writing for the same site offers ten consumer PR tips that always work (ahem). This PR stuff is so easy….

 Finally, Pete Webb warns that you shouldn’t rely on charisma in a crisis:

“Many organizations plan for crises; others do not, or expect that they will never have to deal with a crisis. Companies in the first category obviously are better prepared, but unless they�ve actually rehearsed their crisis plans, they will also falter until they can get their act together.”

  Over at Entreworld.org, Bruce Kepper writes that Public Relations offers marketing leverage for entrepreneurial companies:

“In the service business, I�ve learned that credibility trumps creativity, that a writer’s recommendation carries more weight than a copywriter’s unique selling proposition, and that a third party endorsement is more meaningful than a primary participant’s pronouncement.”

 After yesterday’s news that Robb Hecht is going to broaden the scope of his PR Machine blog, Jeremy Pepper has been following up on a story that MediaBistro is looking for a PR blogger. Now there’s no excuse folks you don’t even have to set up your own blog 🙂

 PR Lesson #3,455: You can’t choose your family, or your fellow professionals.

 Well I’m covering this particular item not because it’ll brighten your day with laughs, pearls of wisdom or the secret to PR success. Nope. For those elements you’ll have to click elsewhere, but at least it’s a different form of online promotion for a PR firm.  Shift Communications, which if my memory serves me correctly, emerged from the ashes of Sterling Hager PR, has created a Flash promo themed around superheros called, surprisingly enough: The Shift Squad.

 Finally, here’s a link to that Chime Communications story in the UK Edition of PR Week that I mentioned last week. They undertook a survey of 100 PR executives on the challenges presented by the information age.

Dan Gillmor was one of the earliest members of the mainstream media to embrace blogs and do some serious thinking on how they intersect with our traditional media.

Part of this thinking is now available in Dan’s book – “We the Media – Grassroots Journalism by the people, for the people.”

Dan has a blog accompanying the book, and the San Jose Mercury News carried an edited version of the book’s introduction over the weekend.

“But newsmakers also have new ways to get out their message, using the same technologies the grassroots adopts. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign failed, but his methods will be studied and emulated because of the way his campaign used new tools to engage his supporters in a conversation. The people at the edges of the communications and social networks can be a newsmaker’s harshest, most effective critics. But they can also be the most fervent and valuable allies, offering ideas to each other and to the newsmaker as well.”

 Robb Hecht is planning to expand his PR blog and is looking for contributors to PR Machine. You can contact Robb directly via e-mail.

 Richard Bailey has reviewed a new book “Hitting the Headlines in Europe” which takes a country-by-country look at the differences in PR practice in different countries around Europe.

 Steve Rubel has an interesting post on how Mozilla is kicking off an “old” style evangelism campaign for its free web browser Firefox. If you’re not aware of Firefox you should take a look –  it’s generations ahead of Internet Explorer and definetely worth the download.

 BL Ochman profiles ten companies who have missed out by ignoring the use of blogs as a tactic in recent campaigns.

 Jim Horton points to another example of sloppy PR practice highlighted on the TechDirt site:

“Just two weeks after we wrote about idiotic PR people submitting press releases to us when we clearly ask them not to, one company has sunk to a new low — and it’s making me wonder if PR pitches are officially spam under the law.”

 

I have purposely avoided discussing the blogging taking place at the Democratic convention, as there are a lot of people focusing closely on it and they’ll cover it a lot better than I.

However, it was fairly inevitable that the number of bloggers at the convention would raise a red flag to the never ending debate around blogs and journalism.

A New York Times article profiling some of the bloggers at the convention has raised the temperature once again.

Stowe Boyd comments:

“We are taking the remote control out of the hands of the editors, and they don’t like it. It will eat into their advertising, big time. It is no wonder, given what is at stake, that the established priesthood will rail from their pulpits, and make light of what is a truly profound power shift in the making.”

This debate drives me mad. But let’s take it back to first principles for Public Relations. Our job is to effectively communicate with a given audience.  If the most effective means of doing that is via journalists we do that, if it’s bloggers we do that.  Sometime it’ll be both. That’s all that matters from a pure PR perspective.

Is blogging journalism? In my opinion it is not.

Is blogging a communication medium? Yes it is, if it is being read by your audience.

What annoys me about this “debate” is that both sides treat their audiences as if they are too simple to make up their own minds. That’s not the reality.

The reality is that audiences are becoming more sophisticated and are making their own choices as to what they will and won’t read. They can differentiate between journalism and bloggers.  They often read both to get different perspectives.

Please for our collective sanity let it go.

Further reading from the PR Opinions Archives:

• Are Blogs replacing journalism as we know it? Nah…
• Blogs and Journalism the debate continues…
• How blogs, PR and journalism intersect…
• Weblogs and Journalism
• The balance between new media and old media….

 

John C. Dvorak, the grumpiest of grumpy old men, defender of the IT consumer, curmudgeon and all round Microsoft baiter has taken a swing at Global PR Blog Week.

“I can�t imagine a worse combination of ingredients: PR and blogging! That said, I can�t tell if these folks are on to something or if they are just complainers who can�t get work.”

Anyway, that’s hardly a surprise and our fellow professionals take John to task so I don’t intend to make any further comment. So why this post?

Well Trevor Cook’s comment made me laugh out loud this morning:

“Trashing other people�s professions is of course one of the popular pastimes of modern life. We all know lawyer jokes by the hundred. In fact, we used to call the IT guy �mirrors� because everytime we pointed to a problem he said �I�ll look into it”.”

I’ve already used it with our IT guy and he doesn’t like it. Fantastic.

Footnote:

Thanks to Matthew Podboy for the link.

Canada’s Marketing Magazine has a feature on the growing importance of Public Relations in the marketing mix.

“For the last two years, Diageo Canada has run a successful program around St. Patrick’s Day called the Guinness Party of Canada, a pseudo-political group aimed at turning the Irish festivities into a new national holiday. The effort may make a lot of sense for the purveyor of the Guinness brand, but more than that, it speaks to a growing number of companies that are embracing public relations like never before.”