Category: General

Hot on the heels of my post yesterday about copy editor’s nightmares comes this gem from Michael O’Connor Clarke.

The Financial Times ran a story about Irish budget airline Ryanair and their ongoing snafu with Belgian airport authorities.  It seems the Belgians paid Ryanair subsidies to encourage to company to use its airport and now they are looking for the money back.

In the current version of the story on the FT website the story reads:

“Michael O’Leary, Ryanair chief executive, said on Tuesday that the Belgian authorities had written to the airline demanding the repayment of around �3m.

Mr O’Leary said the company had written back making clear it did not intend to repay the money.”

However a quick Google search reveals the original version of the story:

 “Michael O’Leary, Ryanair chief executive, said the Belgian authorities had written to the airline demanding the repayment of about �3m (�2m).

“We have written back to say ‘fuck off’,” he said yesterday.”

My first point here is that you can understand why they re-edited the story!  But this illustrates another interesting point.  Ryanair are currently in what I call the “PR immunity” zone. 

Ryanair are a “no frills” airline, modeled on the South West Airlines business plan but cheaper and nastier.  This is no Jet Blue.

They offer cheap flights to hundreds of destinations, their planes are dirty, their customer service is appalling and everything (including rental of a wheelchair) costs extra.

Their CEO Michael O’Leary is outspoken (see quote above) and in Ireland no company has ever received as much negative publicity as Ryanair. No company. 

There are negative stories in the newspapers, on the radio, on the TV every single week ranging from lost bags, ignorant staff and stranded passengers etc.  Now, where prolonged (three years or more) negative publicity like this would be a major issue for most businesses, it has no affect on Ryanair’s growth (Current market cap: $4.6 Billion, Income: $1.26 Billion Gross Profit: $448 Million.

I think there’s a number of reasons:

1) Honesty.  Ryanair don’t pretend to be anything other than a cheap, nasty, we’ll get you there airline, don’t ask how. When people complain, they are always consistent on their cheap message.

2) Anti-establishment. Ryanair have become one of Europe’s largest airline by competing with and beating all the incumbent (and in many cases State-run) airlines. They consistently portray themselves and fighting on behalf of the consumer and defending open competition.

3) Value. Ryanir has forced a revolution in European air travel.  I personally have had a couple of flights with them at a ticket cost of less than $1. (The airport tax is $30 but the ticket costs $1)

Simply put Ryanair have found a sweet spot where the value of their cheap fares (and they are the most on-time airline in Europe) outweighs the negative stories about their customer service and business practices. People realize they are taking a cheap option and are happy to put up with inconvenience to take advantage of cheap fares. In fact in Ireland, most people resign themselves to the fact that should there be a delay or a problem it’s their own fault for going Ryanair.

A couple of years back a flight from Paris to Dublin had to be postponed overnight.  (Ryanair don’t actually fly into Paris, they fly into an army base miles from the French capital.) The ground staff apologized to the passengers and then took them to their overnight accomodation. No not a Holiday Inn, the passengers spent the night on bunk beds in an army barracks.

Now that’s value….

Will Ryanair continue to enjoy PR immunity? Who knows? But it’s an interesting PR case study.

Footnote:

Practically every Ryanair flight is booked through their website.  However rather than retain a proven web development company to build the online booking system, they hired a couple of students to build it. It’s still running.

Colin McKay re-posts some caricatures of the typical election candidate, PR and journalist. (Full size images are available at Colin’s blog). 

Tom Mangan points to a very amusing discussion on the dreaded copy mistakes…

“In college we ran a story in the campus daily talking about “alcohol usage in pubic areas,” which the campus adviser circled in red and scribbled, “I hear this is good at getting rid of crabs” or words to that effect.”

Elsewhere at Ad:Tech there was some good hands-on advice on how to convert  visitors to your website into revenue. 

• Focus on content, ease of use, performance, brand value, and customer satisfaction.
• Eliminate distractions that could lead visitors out of the buying process.
• Avoid giving unpleasant surprises such as a high shipping cost revealed deep into the checkout process.
• Address potential deal breakers early in the process.
• Focus on building trust throughout the relationship

Footnote:

Thanks to the Ad:Tech blog (again).

At the Ad:Tech conference this week,  Ed Keller, co-author of The Influentials, gave a talk on the power of a small group (>10%) of people who exercise disproportionate influence over others in sharing information and making recommendations.

This trend, and the need for companies to identify and have conversations with these people, is a real opportunity for Public Relations.

If you can find and communicate with these people, they can have a profound influence on the success of your product or service. It’s a really interesting area and one we should all be investigating.

Heath Row has an extended transcript on Ed’s talk.

Footnote:

Link courtesy of the Ad:Tech blog.

Trevor Cook, the mastermind behind Global PR Blog Week is getting participants to answer some questions to add some color to proceedings.

Here are mine…

Why do you blog?
* I fell into blogging about two and a half years ago when I was looking for a means of collecting together all the various PR web links I had.  I put them all on a website and low and behold people starting reading and commenting on them.
 
Over a thousand posts later, the PR blog landscape has blossomed with over thirty PR practitioners regularly writing and musing on the business and the challenges facing us.
 
I blog to cater for my love of the sound of my voice 🙂 and also because it challenges my thinking about PR, marketing and online communication.
 
And why is blogging important for PR?
I think that Blogs are important to PR for two reasons. First of all they provide a great medium for looking at the changes and issues facing the profession and secondly they illustrate how the practice of PR is evolving.
 
We are moving toward a time when PR people will be increasingly communicating directly with the audience, when PR people will be using a host of new tools alongside the tried and tested techniques to help organizations communicate more effectively with their customers and prospects. As the Cluetrain Manifesto claimed nearly five years ago: ?Markets are Conversations?
 
What do you hope to see come out of this event?
* I think this event provides a great opportunity to bring together a wide range of people to discuss Public Relations and more importantly an opportunity for a large number of PR practitioners in different industries, markets and countries to learn, share and discuss how the profession is changing, developing and performing.  That?s an exciting prospect.
 
What issue(s) will you be focusing on in your contribution and why?
* I along with a number of others will be focusing on the state of public relations.  In particular I?ll be looking at how PR is reacting to the changing communications environment, how people feel PR is developing and any other area that readers or participants want to cover.

Journalism.org has published the first in what it promises will be an annual study on the state of the news media in the United States.

The study identifies eight trends:

1. A growing number of news outlets are chasing relatively static or even shrinking audiences for news.
2. Much of the new investment in journalism today – much of the information revolution generally – is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it.
3. In many parts of the news media, we are increasingly getting the raw elements of news as the end product.
4. Journalistic standards now vary even inside a single news organization.
5. Without investing in building new audiences, the long-term outlook for many traditional news outlets seems problematic.
6. Convergence seems more inevitable and potentially less threatening to journalists than it may have seemed a few years ago.
7. The biggest question may not be technological but economic.
8. Those who would manipulate the press and public appear to be gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them.

“Journalism faces more difficult economic circumstances than it once did. Yet the way the news industry responded has helped erode public trust. How long can the profession of journalism endure if people increasingly don’t believe it? To reverse the slide in audience and trust will probably take a major change in press behavior, one that will make the news more relevant and customizable and at the same time suggest to the public, as it did briefly after September 11, that the news industry is more concerned with the public good than Americans suspect.”

Footnote:

Link courtesy of Hans Kullin, who has some interesting analysis from a PR perspective.

 Robb Hecht points to a story in the Business Review which looks at PR’s growing role in the marketing mix. It leans heavily on the infamous Al Ries book

“This rise of public relations, which has been acknowledged by formerly advertising-driven corporations such as Unilever and Gillette, is creating consternation among those who have enjoyed multimillion-dollar budgets to create award-winning advertising that have little impact on market share.”

 Robb also links to a profile (free registration required) in the Washington Post on UK PR sleaze king Max Clifford.

Clifford cheerfully concedes he makes a good living in part by helping trash the reputations of the rich and famous. “Over here we probably have the most savage media in the world,” he says of the tabloids he works with. “They are destroying far more than they are aiding, helping, supporting.” Still, he insists, he himself is not to blame: “It’s what people want. It’s the British public. It’s what people want to read about.”

 Kevin Dugan has more on his interview with Al Ries this time looking at Procter & Gamble.

“That’s why many successful new brands start slowly using primarily PR techniques. Starbucks, Gatorade, Google, Red Bull, to name a few. Entrepreneurs who have the patience to hang in there while the market develops introduced these brands and many others…. Red Bull, for example, took four years to reach $10 million in annual sales and another five years to reach $100 million. Any big company that took a look at Red Bull in its early days would have said, “There’s no market there. We can’t afford a big ad budget to launch an energy drink brand.”

 Dana VanDen Heuvel points to a story on ePrarie that looks at media management.

“Media relationships are founded on a news reporter�s ethical requirement to report factual and unbiased stories. There are also columnists � who are generally very experienced and/or opinionated � as well as feature writers. Expect different approaches from the three, but at the core, expect professionals who fundamentally report the truth they learned when they investigated it.”

 Jim Horton is enjoying his life as a second class citizen (me too!).

“Frankly, I have enjoyed my career as a second-class citizen. It provides me an opportunity to tweak those who are too serious about their jobs. What I do as a PR person is often important. I know that, and those of us who work in PR know that. That’s good enough.”

 Colin McKay links to PR Week’s interview with Gawker’s Nick Denton.

“Blogs provide a filter between PR professionals and journalists. Reporters have been increasingly overwhelmed by pitches. They don’t open their emails or answer the phone a lot of the time. Some of the more savvy journalists are looking at the web as a filter. Smart PR professionals need to start looking at indirect ways to reach reporters and subtle pitches to weblogs or the creation of weblogs for a specific campaign. That’s a good way for PR professionals to get an idea out there in the hopes that it will get to influential reporters.”

 MarketingVox are doing the needful and providing a full service blog on the AD:Tech conference in San Francisco.

 Daniel Keeney of Keeney PR has written a piece on the dangers of NGO’s and others using of “templated” opinion pieces.

Further to Billg’s wisdom on internal blogs, Infoworld’s Chad Dickerson gives an interesting insight into how the magazine’s staffers use weblogs to collaborate.

“Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we�re beginning to see more tangible benefits as we�ve begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors. At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. For each month in the plan, we created a checklist of projects we would be working on and noted which ones would be completed in that month.”

Meanwhile Wired has a story on how Macromedia (who were definetely a pioneer of corporate blogging) use blogs internally.

“The blogs would provide a forum for the managers to discuss the new products, show developers how to use some of the new features and answer questions. Most importantly, the community managers would write like bloggers, with that casual, this-great-idea-just-occurred-to-me tone which sometimes makes weblogs so addictive.”

Footnote:

Thanks for Phil Gomes and Mike Manuel for the Infoworld link.

Thanks to John Cass for the Wired link.

 

Bill Gates is nothing short of a phenomenon.  He has built a company from scratch that has redefined computing through brains, fast thinking, luck and good business practice.  Along the way he has become an Oracle (groan) on what new trends are hot in computing and when he speaks everyone listens.

His comments on weblogs last week at the Microsoft CEO summit, have not surprisingly, garnered a lot of coverage in the blogging community.  In particular Bill focused on the application of blogging in a business environment and centered on the importance of RSS as a sydication technology…

“This (blogging) is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they’ll wonder why I didn’t put their name on it. But, then again, I don’t want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I’m saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.

Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.

And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you’re interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn’t interfere with your normal Inbox.”

It’s a nice summary of how blogs can be used as a communication device.  But there’s nothing new here, I think you’ll agree. What is new is that Gates is promoting this concept to some very senior leaders of corporate America.

Is Microsoft about to embark on a “Netscape style” assault on the blogland? I don’t think so. Microsoft’s interest in blogging (IMHO) is more in the business environment where blogs can be used as a business tool in terms of collaboration, information sharing etc.  This is the area where NONE of the leading incumbent providers of blog software have tried to compete. (I know there are some niche providers!).

I think Microsoft will ship some interesting options (built around SharePoint) for corporations interested in using blogs and some staff in those organizations may even use that software for external corporate blogs. But that’s about it.

Other than endorsing weblogs and blogs to a wider audience, I’m not sure Billg’s speech has any other major aftershock. It’s not an announcement of impending war against the existing blog software providers and it’ll be hard for Microsoft to beat Blogger on price and of course weblogging isn’t necessarily tied to a specific operating system.

But then again, I could be wrong…..

Footnote:

Bill’s speech focused on RSS as the syndication technology of choice rathen than confusing matters with Atom.  This is a good thing, the sooner everyone agrees on one standard the better.