Category: General

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, one of the failures of “raw” RSS is that it’s difficult to track usage over time.  How can you discover who is using your RSS feed, how often they are reading it etc.

Cliff Allen from Coravue has been in touch to inform me that they are launching a trackable RSS service in the Content Management component of their CRM software.

According to Cliff, “Being personalized, the feed contains only the headlines and links related to a person’s interests in their profile.  And, since the feed is trackable, a marketer can tell who retrieved headlines and which Web pages they read.”

Now I haven’t tried it myself but this sounds more like a solution to tracking RSS. Cliff offers personalized RSS off his personal website and Coravue also offer a similar service. 

Thanks to everyone who took the time to drop me a line on the survey, I’ll incorporate the feedback into the next survey.

Thanks.

The results of the first PR Opinions survey are now available.

As you would expect with a survey conducted via a weblog, the majority of the respondents are technologically advanced with E-mail, Websites and Weblogs the most popular online PR tools.

Other findings include:

• Over 65% of those surveyed believe that the Internet has enhanced the relationship between PR practitioners and journalists.

  

   

•  There is no consensus around a common approach to PR measurement. Most respondents use a combination of measurement tools, which differ widely from one practitioner to the next

   

• The most popular trends effecting Public Relations over the next three years are a rise in the number of individuals publishing content, growth in the number of media outlets
  and generally more noise in the marketplace.

My sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to complete the survey. If you have any comments on the report you can e-mail me or post your comments below.

 

You can download a PDF of the survey results here.

 

When I heard AdAge was taking a swing at the PR business, I was ready for a rant, but reading Jonah Bloom’s editorial was a pleasant surprise.

I and many others have felt for a long time that the PR business suffers from a poor image.  I think this is the result of a number of factors if you’ll excuse the gross generalizations:

• There is still widespread confusion among business people about what exactly PR is. (My web statistics are full of Google searches on the subject)
• The business is so diverse that standard descriptions do not suffice
• Agencies often use difficult, abstract terms to describe and differentiate their services
• We often shy away from the business value of our activities
• We are slow to innovate, react to changing business practices and opportunities
• Practitioners in a small set of industry sectors define PR in a manner which is foreign to the majority
• There are a lot of cowboys out there…

“But as a business PR has sent mixed messages about its purpose and strengths. Last week in a letter to Ad Age the president of the Public Relations Society of America described PR as being “about building relationships between people and organizations, opening and maintaining multilayered communications channels and helping organizations and individuals avoid or manage controversies.” What is that? It may be a definition of the role of a corporate-communications department, but it isn’t a good sell to a busy marketer looking to position, brand or sell product.”

What’s the answer? I don’t know, I wish I did.

I think the growing number of PR bloggers is an opportunity for the profession. There is a lot of good thinking taking place with PR people discussing the issues that effect their employers and their businesses. PR has a lot of value to bring to any business, we need to work together to identify how we can make that value understandable.

Jim Horton, as always, has an interesting view..

The Internet’s reality distortion field fools many of us on a regular basis.

Ideas, technologies and applications that fly around the web as the new new thing about to revolutionize the world, often die from boredom before they hit the outside world. Some survive and thrive, most don’t.

CNN has a story on a new study released by Pew Research on Internet usage in the United States. The research has some interesting findings (see below) but the finding that CNN latched onto, was that only 2-7% of Internet users host blogs and that only 11% of the Internet population have read weblogs.

“The impression out there is that a lot of the blog activity is very feverish,” said Lee Rainie, the Pew project’s director. “That’s not the case. For most bloggers, it’s not an all-consuming, all-the-time kind of experience.”

I think that’s a higher level of usage than I would have anticipated.

You see, the fact that you are reading this post (you’re probably the only one) means you have heard of weblogs. But the vast majority of people haven’t.

It took E-mail (in my estimation) at least five years to get serious mainstream momentum and E-mail is the most obvious incarnation of online communications. The grandaddy of blogging software, Blogger, was only founded in 1999, which means that blogs have only become “popular” in the past couple of years.

Weblogs certainly don’t pass my “does your mother know” test, and over the past couple of weeks I have given a number of talks about “PR and technology” to about 120 students and practitioners.  Out of that 120 people only one had heard of weblogs.

That’s the reality.

The weblog pioneers are already talking about blogs changing the fabric of the human existence…..

For what it’s worth, I believe weblogs will stand the test of time.  I believe they do shift the balance of communications a little and are a great example of the changes that the Internet promises to the world of communication.  However, we need to be realistic. It will take time.  In that context, the fact that 2-7% of US Internet users are hosting blogs is fantastic progress in a very very short period of time. It’s very encouraging, but it’s not mainstream.

Pew’s study also found…

21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.

17% have posted written material on Web sites.

13% maintain their own Web sites.

10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.

8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.

7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.

7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.

6% have posted artwork on Web sites.

5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.

4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.

3% have contributed video files to Web sites.

2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs

Update:

Trevor Cook points out that even if only 2% of Internet users are hosting weblogs that is still a huge amount of new content appearing on the Internet every day. Too right.

He also refers to a great article from Editor & Publisher about the issues Editor’s face when their journalists start blogging…

“But what happens when professional journalists enter this often contentious world? In many cases, their employers get uncomfortable. In a few cases, reporters have been fired or punished because of their personal blogs.”

Trevor Cook is changing the focus of his PR blog to more tightly focus on the issues around communication in the workplace and Corporate Social Responsibility – areas he is passionate about. 

Trevor has already starting delivering some excellent thinking on the complex challenges facing workplace communication.

The diversity of the PR business means that many of us are focused on specific fields without an in-depth understanding of the issues faced by our fellow practitioners.  The PR community is made up of thousands of professionals who have a completely different set of challenges and expertise. 

This is one diverse profession and although the public perception of PR is spending every hour of every day on the phones with journalists, for many PR people it’s the exception rather than the rule.

Well RSS gots some well deserved attention during the weekend with an AP story  “Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing“.

The story prompted some lively discussion on Slashdot and PR blogger Greg Brooks bravely got involved.

The story is very upbeat and features practically every major blogger on the Internet…

“Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers?” Zawodny wrote in his blog in December. “It’s going to be like that. One day we’re just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we’ll all wonder how we ever got along without it.”

Of course RSS isn’t mainstream, you could argue (in awful 1990’s parlance) it hasn’t even crossed the chasm, but it’s certainly reached the edge.

What does this mean for PR people? Right now it’s still in it’s early stages, but it’s no harm to begin offering corporate news over RSS. You might be surprised with the results.

The job of a Public Relations practitioner can be defined in many ways. One of the better ones is: “Managing the relationship between an organization and its publics.”

In essence, PR is responsible for communications between an organization and its customers, media, staff etc. That’s a nice tight specification eh?

The increasing flood of information, shrinking editorial pages and the rising pressure of our daily lives all contribute to make Public Relations a more stressed occupation. Though as massochists, we obviously still enjoy it.

Rick Bruner has posted a piece which highlights how important it is for PR people to understand the tools at their command and how to best use them.

Rick has berated PR people in the past and we’ve enjoyed some lively back-and-forth. His latest concern surrounds a request from a PR agency for more information on his interests.

His posting raises some interesting issues.

In this day and age, everyone expects to recieve relevant information.  If it’s irrelevant, people consider it as spam. As a result PR agencies need to have an understanding of what areas and issues journalists, analysts and opinion formers are interested in.

That’s simple enough.  But how do you fill in the blanks? Let’s look at Rick’s case.

• The agency in question wants to better understand his interests (good)
• They have sent him four e-mails in six months requesting the information (bad)
• They didn’t acknowledge that he once replied (albeit with a URL of a Google search for him) (bad)
• They state that he “landed in their database” (bad)
• They offer a link to their clients for him to view their market areas (neutral)

The lesson here is that people have less time. As a result anything that isn’t directly related to work is potential waste, this is particularly true for the media. If you want to know more about a journalist for example, use Google, use an online media database and read what they’ve written. That should make it very clear what they need or want.

If none of those techniques work, then it may be worth a quick call.  What you need to avoid is becoming a pest. I think it’s acceptable, if you’ve exhausted other methods, to contact a journalist to find out their interests, but don’t keep doing it a-la Plaxo. If you want to meet a journalist then contact them and say so.

You see, people expect you to be able to use the technology at your fingertips to remove the need for troublesome contact.  Save your media liaison for your clients or serious relationship building. Automated database requests aren’t productive.

Now before anyone gives me grief, I know some journalists welcome an opportunity to meet with PR people for relationship building etc. but there’s a lot of us and we need to make sure we maximize the benefits of our activity.

MediaMap’s ExpertPR newsletter consistently publishes a range of useful PR-related articles written by practitioners.

This month’s content includes Getting Clients to Write, Press Conferences, Measuring PR and Tips on High-Tech PR Success in 2004 amongst others.

RLM PR produces an entertaining monthly newsletter with their opinions on the PR business.  I regularly cover it here and often I disagree with some of their opinions, but I enjoy their writing all the same.  This month’s issue has a story by Erin Mitchell, RLM’s Director of Business Development, on the Melrose Place generation. In effect it bemoans many of the attitudes of our younger colleagues. It’s an amusing piece.

The article reminded me of an off-beat documentary on the BBC called “Grumpy Old Men” where a collection of high profile British men in their forties and fifies moan about how the world is changing for the worse.  It was fantastic series, very funny and illustrated how although we are living longer, healthier and happier lives, we’re getting grumpier at an earlier age.

I know this of course because I’m 33 and I know I’m getting grumpy already!