Category: General

MarketingSherpa’s Blog Awards have been announced.

The winner of the best PR blog, as voted by MarketingSherpa readers, is Colin McKay’s CanuckFlack.

Runner up in the best PR blog category was Robb Hecht’s ever present PR Machine.

Kevin Dugan’s Strategic Public Relations was chosen as the Reader’s Top Blog.

Well done to all the winners, the awards are well deserved.

Alice Marshall over at Technoflak predicts that privacy violations will constitute a major part of future crises.  I think she’s right, as more information moves into a digital format then there will be more breaches.

Of course there have already been a number of the issues, from software companies tracking users’ PC usage to online stores having their credit card records hacked.

No doubt more will follow.

Love it or loath it, most of us spend a large proportion of our working days in our chosen e-mail application. 

Whether it’s writing or reading e-mails or searching in vain for that e-mail from someone which had that data that you knew would be useful at a later point so you carefully filed it away and now your folder system isn’t quite as effective as you thought it was (big breath!).

Wired has an interesting report on the Inbox e-mail conference which is currently taking place.  They point out that e-mail is practically unchanged in thirty years and unless there are some radical changes it’s going to implode.

They quote Google’s forthcoming GMail service as an example of some innovation.  Wouldn’t we all love the power of a Google search in our e-mail. I can’t wait until Google ship a product for my documents and my e-mail.

“E-mail technology has remained virtually unchanged since it was first developed in the early 1970s. But as more and more individuals and businesses have begun to rely on their inboxes to manage important documents — and as marketers have begun to fill those inboxes with spam — the system has begun to show signs of stress.”

Mark Weiner, CEO of PR measurement firm Delahaye Medialink penned an article (PDF) in the January-February issue of the IABC’s Communication World on the use of Six Sigma techniques to improve PR activties and their return.

Six Sigma is quite complex, but in essence it is a method for identifying defects in a process and thereby helping you to remove those defects to create more effective processes.

Mark includes a case study of how GE used this approach to measure their PR efforts.

“Essentially, the purpose of Six Sigma is to gain breakthrough knowledge on how to improve processes to do things better, faster and at lower cost.”

Footnote:

Thanks to John Porcaro for the link.

Guerilla marketing could be defined as marketing programs that attempt to achieve successful outcomes through using innovative, non-traditional tactics that attempt to encourage “buzz” or word of mouth communication.

It became a hugely popular pursuit towards the end of the 1990’s to the present day, though the vast majority of “guerilla” marketing could be filed in the “what were they thinking category” from beautiful people using mobile phones to artwork on the pavement.

Of course clever guerilla marketing can be tremendously effective, but like most marketing disciplines, the greater the volume, the lower the quality and the less effective they become.

A colleague, commenting on my recent post about JBoss and their attempts to promote their products anonymously on message boards, pointed out that such ham fisted attempts at Guerilla marketing should really be called “Gorilla Marketing” because of its unimaginative fumbling efforts at creating buzz (a term I’m not hugely fond of).

That got me thinking and I am delighted to announce that JBoss is the first winner of the sporadic “PR Opinions Gorilla Marketing Award”.

All nominations welcome.

 

Steve Rubel points to an article written by Scot Petersen, News Editor at eWEEK on blogging and journalism.

I wish there were plants as hardy as this old chestnut. If there were, gardening would be a far simpler pursuit.

My views on this “conundrum” surrounding blogs and journalism are well documented on this blog, but indulge me while I revisit the topic one more time.

I personally don’t believe that blogs are a replacement for journalism.  I’m wary of claims that there is widespread disenchantment with mainstream journalism.  There is some, I’ll grant you that. But I think that the people with strongest feelings against journalism are the same people who have a distinct agenda that doesn’t mirror that of the editorial writers.

That’s all good right and true. Each to their own. But it doesn’t add up to the end of journalism as we know it.

Let’s look at Public Relations by way of illustration.

On the top right hand side of this weblog there are over thirty PR-related weblogs.

Each of these weblogs offer a slightly different take on Public Relations.  Each includes insights into the personal views of its author and each is an amatuer effort at publishing PR-related links and content.

Are the PR blogs good?

Absolutely, I read every single one of them.

Do they remove the need for O’Dwyers or PR Week?

Nope.

Those magazines are professional publishers, with wide resources and huge readerships that do a great job covering the PR business at large. If you want to keep up to date on everything that’s happening in the business, you should be reading them.

The PR blogs bring additional, and very valuable, insights into the profession.  They act as online repositories of information, views and links to PR-related content.

But they don’t replace the professionals, they supplement them.

There are also a growing number of “professional blogs” such as MarketingVox which have a team of people bringing together loads of marketing content and opinions in a weblog format. But I don’t consider these sites as blogs, they are online marketing news sites. Their competition is AdWeek etc. and they provide a valuable online alternative.

But for me personally, a blog is about individuals writing and linking information that is of interest to them and their readers. 

When you begin to put procedures, house style and agreed publishing practices in place, which you need to do in a collaborative publishing process, then you are moving down the road to journalism.

There are millions of blogs. Some will survive, many will die and many new ones will emerge.  They present alternative views and content which is very valuable.  But although I read them, I still read my magazines, my newspapers and listen to the radio.

We always rush to the new shiny object in the full expectation that it will replace what went before, but history teaches us that such dramatic shifts are rare.  Usually these new shiny objects represent a subtle shift, a supplemental change.

If journalism takes some inspiration from weblogs then that is a great development for everyone.  Many journalists are already thinking along these lines.  Look at Dan Gillmor’s “Making the News” or how EWEEK and Infoworld are using blogs to supplement traditional journalism.

My one word of advice is that we should leave the baby where it is and remove the water using traditional methods!

Footnote:

Jon Udell on High Tech PR in the age of blogs and how blogs impact his day job.

 

Chad Dickerson on how Infoworld are using blogs. 

Further to the post last week on Corporate Blogging Guidelines, Billy McCormac has unearthed some additional guidance on setting up a corporate blog provided by IMN Inc. (formerly I Make News).

You can download the guidelines here (PDF).

“Allow the weblog to have a distinct voice and use it to strengthen the brand. One of its key advantages is the quick, constant exchange of bits of information that may not be substantial enough to belong in a newsletter. In doing so, the bond with clients is strengthened and new voices are heard.”

 

One of the great things about the Internet is that most things are measurable and trackable.

This electronic paper trail regularly catches out “clever” people who surreptitiously promote their products, companies or services online.

According to Slashdot, one of the more recent perpetrators is JBoss, a “professional” open source provider of software technology known as middleware.

It seems that staff have been posting wonderful things about their products on various message boards, the only problem is that all the posters have the same IP address which is located at JBoss HQ.

Very clever….natch.

This was widespread a couple of years ago and it seems to be continuing. It’s not exactly building a conversation with your audience is it? It’s dumb.

Pamela Parker over at ClickZ tackles the growing momentum and importance of blogs.

“That means an approach from your company that offers exclusive, early information would likely be welcomed. A recent Blog Search Engine poll of 610 bloggers found 74 percent of bloggers are open to receiving information from companies and organizations, though 91 percent have never been approached. As with any PR effort, understand you can’t control what bloggers say. Their brutal honesty is what appeals to their readers, after all.”

I am personally amazed how often journalists give out about how badly PR people use e-mail.

Every PR-journalist event I have attended since around 1998 has included a journalist giving out about PR people and e-mail.

The etiquette of PR e-mail is well established.  There is no dark science, no secrets, yet it continues.

I recently gave a talk to some PR students and when I raised this issue and explained to them to do’s and don’ts, a number of them actually started arguing with me that I was wrong and it was perfectly acceptable to send unsolicited attachments, HTML e-mails with nice fonts and colors etc.

It’s not.

Ben Silverman over at PR Fuel provides an overview of his pet e-mail peeves (just in case you think I’m making it up).