Category: General

Trevor Cook has spotted my favorite newspaper correction (PDF) in quite some time.

Fantastic.

Jay Rosen is hosting a session at Bloggercon on April 17 at 9am on “What is journalism”.

As a preamble to the session, Jay has written a “background” essay entitled “No One Owns Journalism”.

As PR professionals many of us are tightly involved in media relations, as a result I think it’s important we keep up to date with the latest

I’ve written quite a bit over the past few weeks about the “Internet reality distortion field” and the dangers of extrapolating online findings to the world at large, a-la Howard Dean.

However, away from the hype, the Internet is continuing to grow nicely.  Research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that two thirds of online Americans have purchased products and services over the Internet, while Forrester estimates that $120 Billion worth of goods will be sold online this year.

Unfortunately it’s four years too late for the Internet boomers… c’est la vie.

The story in the New York Times has a lot of very interesting statistics if you’re interested in the changing online demographics.

Footnote:

Thanks to MarketingVox/MarketingWonk/Up2Speed for the link.

Pew Research also did some recent research on Blogs.

Credit where it’s due to PR blogger Constantin Basturea who has put together the ultimate aggregated PR blog RSS feed using BlogDigger.

 

Bacon’s (nee Mediamap’s) monthly newsletter is out with tips on writing opinion articles, getting good speaker engagements, and Al Ries promoting the importance of PR.

 

Kevin Dugan has been out evangelising RSS with PR Newswire’s Media Insider.

“RSS has a wide range of applications in public relations, from communications with employees and customers to keeping media posted on company news. RSS makes it much easier to track the large amounts of information available online.”

 

PR blogger Trevor Cook has written a fascinating piece on blogging. 

It takes a balanced look at the potential for blogging and has been published in the Australian Financial Review.

“Blogging attracts people because it is cheap and easy, great fun and informative. It offers a heady mixture of individuality and community participation yet it is much more than this – it is changing the way we share information and opinions.”

Jon Udell over at Infoworld has previously provided some interesting insights into how he sees PR in the age of blogs playing out.

On Monday he posted some really interesting thoughts on how blogs impact his work as a technology journalist.

“The basic pattern is simple: a story gestates in blogspace, appears in print and online, and then matures in blogspace.”

“Of course in the trade magazine business, there is a whole profession dedicated to helping me do that. When a story appears on the editorial calendar, I’m swamped with phone calls and emails from PR folk who want to supply me with analysts, executives, domain experts, and customers. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I sometimes accept these opportunities, and in some cases, I learn from them. It’s dangerous, though, to be led down the path of least resistance. So I rely on the blog to find other people who have important things to tell me. As you can imagine, this makes PR folk really nervous.”

Recommended Reading.

The problem with a well executed, well financed marketing/PR campaign is that your success can often be counter-productive if the product or service doesn’t meet expectations.

One of the best examples of this was the 1985 launch of New Coke.  Here was one of the world’s most loved brands launching a newer, and according to taste tests, better product. It got saturation media coverage around the world and the launch was executed to perfection. Only one problem, consumers hated it.

It was launched in April and by July it was pulled. People didn’t like it and the story of the failure of New Coke got more press inches than the initial success. Coke spent millions and learned an important lesson… or did they?

Now Coke is facing it’s Tylenol crisis.  After a successful, �7 million launch of its Dasani bottled water on the UK market, it has had to pull the water because traces of bromate, a cancer-causing chemical have been found in the water. Furthermore it has transpired they were simply taking common tap water and putting it through a “purification process”. This process which at the launch was described as a “highly sophisticated purification process based on Nasa spacecraft technology”, was in reality the same process found in the most popular domestic water purification units

This is clearly the nightmare situation for the PR professional, particularly when the tap water doesn’t have bromate and there’s a cost differential of  0.03 pence for the tap water and 95 pence for a half litre of Dasani.

It’s also an interesting example of how the geographical barriers for crises are falling, this story has been covered all over the globe: UK Story, US Story, Australian Story, New Zealand story, African Story.

From the BBC:

Judith Snyder, brand PR manager for Dasani, confirmed “municipal” water supplies were used but said the source was “irrelevant” because it “doesn’t affect the end result… We would never say tap water isn’t drinkable….It’s just that Dasani is as pure as water can get – there are different levels of purity.”

It looks like Dasani has a different level of purity alright. Another example of how good PR and marketing can be wasted if the product doesn’t live up to expectations. A true PR nightmare.

 Constantin Basturea has a great collection of links to some recent thinking on blogs and their impact.

 Phil Gomes also has some interesting blog links including some recent research on the accountability of bloggers

 Jim Horton points to an interesting story on how the growing use of search engines can have negative, as well as positive effects on your business.

 A story from the San Francisco Examiner on how Sutter Health is trying to tackle its image problems

 The Detroit News profiles local PR firm Clear! Blue

 Meanwhile it looks like MarketingWonk has had a major redesign.