Category: General

Elizabeth Albrycht has an interesting take on how this Social Networking stuff might help smaller companies promote their wares in a more equitable manner, much in the same way that Google Adwords has.

How will PR adapt to social networking?

It’s been a short while since I mentioned RSS. 

In the unfortunately fickle world of hyped technology, a mention from Rafe Needleman creates a lot of interest, so when I saw him writing about RSS and in particular ‘RSS readers’ I paid attention.  However I found myself disagreeing with him.  First of all, I don’t like tracking RSS feeds in Microsoft Outlook.

I have a hard enough time managing e-mail, tracking my contacts and schedule without adding RSS feeds into the already complex mess. I prefer my RSS reader standing on it’s own thanks. Secondly, I think there is a lot of merit in a non-Microsoft RSS offering.

Let’s face it, they’re most likely to wedge it inside Outlook and look for an upgrade to Office 2008 where your fingerprints and voiceprint will be needed to verify you are the actual registered user of the software… eh no thanks.

Then there’s all this stuff about Google choosing to ignore RSS…. zzzzzzzz

 Elizabeth Albrycht is doing some great work looking at Social Networking and its potential impact for small business.

 Bill Stoller gives his take on the four Seasons of PR. It’s MarketingSherpa so the usual ten day lifespan for the link applies.

 Jeremy Pepper reports on the news that Lizzie Grubman is to star in a reality show on the PR business.  Of course that raises the question of exactly which reality we’re talking about.  In case you don’t know Lizzie has a very colorful public profile. [Thanks to Jeremy!!]

 Phil points to a new weblog designed for editors around the planet to address professional issues.

 James Horton has a great post on how Public Relations concerns every facet of your organization not just your media face.

 John Cass links to an article on Crisis Management – Internet Style

 Robb Hecht points to a brief piece on online pressrooms.

 Trevor Cook has found an interesting story from USA Today on blogging.

 Kevin Dugan is out of action this week for medical reasons – we wish him a speedy recovery.

When a firm starts to get a little to wrapped up in their own importance, you should begin to worry about them.

Following the Mikerowesoft.com debacle, Microsoft (not to be confused with Mike Rowe) is at it again and they’re picking on another poor Canadian.

According to ZDNet, this time they’re after Mike Morris and his http://www.mikerosoft.ca/ web site.

You see I would have thought that the appalling security issues around Windows (which I use every day and have to add hundred to patches, bug fixes and anti-virus updates), the emergence of Linux and Billg’s recent promise to solve spam in two years (no laughing down the back) would have been plenty for them to focus on.  But no.  It seems not.

While many Microsoft employees are doing a good job putting a human face on the company, the ‘ole corporate legal team are funding the Canadian legal system with suits against teenagers – who are making little or no reference to Microsoft or its products on these websites.

If they were then I’d have some sympathy for Microsoft.  But they’re not.

Lighten up

You see, I am but a mere humble B2B PR practitioner.  I have grown up on years of promoting “speeds and feeds”, features, customer endosements and corporate interviews.  In summary, I am but a humble PR soul.

This reality is constantly reinforced by the continuing spiral of sense and sensibilities being showcased by my (and your) brethren in the world of entertainment.

You see cheap stunts have never been really my bag.  Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not adverse to some clever thinking for tactical gain, but the stunts we’re seeing now are so brain-numbingly predictable that I am losing the will to live.

We have pop stars marrying and getting it anulled hours later and now we have B-list pop singers ripping each other’s clothes off at the biggest TV event of the year. (I don’t want to get into a debate about whether it was a mistake or not).

So the more lewd we go, the more column inches we get for a week or so. Is that it? Whose next to drop their drawers on TV? When will the first celebrity murder happen live on TV? (We’ve had the subsequent chase already….)

When I read a story in AdAge with PR reps praising the stunt I really begin to wonder. I’d love to see the PR plan for her Superbowl appearance:

“Objective: Clearly position Janet Jackson as the foremost bare-breated performer in North America“

On that basis it was a success. And I know I’m extending the legs of this story by writing about it… that doesn’t make me feel any better.

I leave you with these thoughts…

78% of voters on AdAge.com believe the Janet Jackson stunt was brilliant PR.

From the Ad Age story:

For James LaForce, partner in New York PR agency LaForce & Stevens, the Jackson episode was “extremely successful. … We love stunts at our agency and she opened the door for more people to take risks,” he added. “It raises the bar for all of us.”

Said Andy Morris, principal at Andy Morris & Co., a New York PR firm that works closely with the music industry: “It is the ultimate stunt. I don’t see any downside for her. It fits perfectly with the new CD that’s about sex.”

I hope Michael Moore doesn’t go for a similar stunt that “fits perfectly” with his next book about the gun laws…..

And yes, I am a grumpy old man well before my time 🙂

Thanks to BL Ochman for the link

As a communicator, the tools you use to reach your audience are of vital importance.

Over the past ten years we’ve all moved more of our communication to e-mail, but the rise of e-mail’s popularity has been matched by it’s infection with spam and viruses.  We’ve actually reached a stage where the balance of communication is swinging back towards the old reliables like the telephone.

This of course isn’t exactly new.  If you really need to contact someone in a timely manner, the phone is my first port of call.  I suspect it’s the same for most people.

E-mail isn’t dead but I suspect the type of communication being carried over e-mail is changing – more background information and less conversational communication.  Enter Instant messaging (with a log) and RSS.

What’s amazing is some of the statistics being published about just how broken e-mail is.

PC Magazine have a feature entitled: “Can E-mail Survive?“:

• Postini, an e-mail� filtering service which processes 150 to 200 million messages a day, reckons spam accounts for more than half of all e-mail traffic.
• MessageLabs trapped more than a million SoBig messages in the first 24 hours and they estimate that the volume of e-mail infected with viruses is growing at 85%. Furthermore they estimate that over 60% of spam is now being sent by computers infected by viruses unknown to the user….

“We’ve seen a trend back toward voice mail,” says Tony Scott, GM’s CTO for information systems and services. “[People] know that urgent e-mail messages can get lost in all the spam.”

The Arkansas News Bureau has a very interesting story on the trend amongst corporates of creating new job titles in an effort to address specific corporate issues.

You’ve probably seen examples of manufacturers who have destroyed rivers appointing a “Chief Environmental Officer” or the firm with a series of descrimination lawsuits appointing a “Chief Equality Officer”.

Of course creating these titles is a little like putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.

One of the major reasons that I never wanted to get involved with Public Relations when I was in College, was the idea of spending endless evenings kissing butt, calling everyone “dahling” and pandering to the outrageous demands of spoilt people…. I term this the Ab-Fab effect.

While that lifestyle is desired by many, it’s not my bag and luckily PR has more to offer than practically any other career.  Why?  Diversity.

You would be hard pressed to find an industry that can be so diverse amongst practitioners in different industries.  Entertainment PR and Business to Business PR are in effect two different businesses.  Sure they share some common tools, but their execution is, in my humble opinion, fundamentally different.

PR has a perception problem, I think we all know that. While government spin doctors, Hollywood PRs and ridiculous films such as Phone Booth (awful Flash warning!) grab the headlines, these icons bear little resemblance to my daily professional life or yours.

Guess what, the PR discipline is getting harder all the time.

There’s more competition, more practitioners, and according to some recent research from Delahaye less space.

The research which covers the Fortune 100 in 2003 found there was 23% less coverage of these firms during the year.  Microsoft, which remained at #2, enjoyed a 31.4% fall in their coverage across newspapers, magazines and television.

Disney, which came in at #1, bucked the trend, increasing their share by over 17% and the only other gainer in the Top 10 was Wal-Mart. Merrill Lynch lost over 50%, IBM and Intel lost over 40% each and AT&T lost 37%.

The good news is that the overall “esteem” of corporate America improved by over 200% in 2003 compared with scandal ridden 2002.

“Among other things, it means the top U.S. companies had a more difficult time getting their messages out in the news media, and may have to look more deeply at advertising and other communications options for making up the gap.”

So if you were in any doubt that you were in a tough business, these figures should remove those doubts. If you’re looking for challenges, PR delivers!

 

For most PR people, media relations remains an important part of the job. Getting a client in front of an influential editor still gets the blood pressure rising.  But what about when the tables are turned?

What about journalists who want to try and land an interview with a big fish?

Tom Mangan points to a story in MediaBistro that gives advice on how a “no-name” journalist can get an interview with the big name.

“Earlier this year, I was having trouble scoring an interview with Senator John Kerry for an article I was writing about him. My chances decreased even more when he went into the hospital for a prostate operation. I put together a list of quotes from people�including the editorial director of a competing publication�vouching for my ability to get the story straight. The next quote I got was from Kerry’s hospital room.”

 

It’s said that Steve Jobs has a “reality distortion field” around him.  In effect, when you’re in his presence, his ideas seem to make perfect sense and you ignore any plausible issues regarding the potential success of said ideas.

I know a few people with a similar skill.  When you listen to them, the only thing that stops you from agreeing that a bridge from South Africa to Brazil is a fantastic idea. Think to the tourism…. is that you know the power of their persuasion.

What has this got to do with PR? Well give me a chance.

I have noticed that in the past two weeks the Internet meme of choice has been “social networking”.  I’ve been getting a reasonable volume of networking requests all of a sudden.

Now, I know these “social networking” websites, where you can connect with friends and/or colleagues, have been around for quite a while, but in the past couple of weeks they seem to have taken off.

For anyone unfamiliar with these sites, you sign up to the service (normally free at this stage), then you invite your friends and colleagues to join up and link with you. 

The clever part is that when your contacts join the network they bring a whole range of other people on board and in a short space of time there is a massive network of people.  Ultimately, the theory goes, that you can then use the network to keep up with people or you can use it to try and drive some business through this virtual network.

OK?

Seems like a fairly good idea.  But what if there are forty of these networks? Do you have to manage forty subscriptions?

This is where the reality distortion filed kicks in.

You see (notice my seamless link to my introduction) I think the Internet’s “reality distortion field” is the most powerful of all. We live in the time of “Now”.  We don’t want to wait, we want it and we want it now.  As a result people get excited by new developments without considering their downside or their potential barriers.

I have joined some of the networks and indeed have re-connected with past colleagues and clients. But it’ll be interesting to see how they fare in the longer term.  Of course in a business such as PR, where relationships are very important, these tools could help….. could.

It seems to me that the Internet, because of it’s scale and speed, is creating an environment where innovation takes off and a certain audience (gadget nerds like me for example) get all excited.  But this happens independent of the normal population, who may or may not adopt the idea in three years time.  Take Blogs as a perfect illustration of this conundrum.  Very popular online and still growing, but probably not Main Street USA just yet.

This new “adopter audience” is growing and they (we?) clearly enjoy their role as guinea pigs. It might represent an interesting new sub-audience for many companies.

I hope you enjoyed my free-brain ramble…. it’s been one of those weeks..

More on Social Networks*:

• Deborah Branscum on Orkut
• Elizabeth Albrycht on Orkut
• Jeneane Sessum on Orkut
• Michael O’Connor Clarke on Orkut
• Boston Globe Story on Online Social Networking
• Rick Bruner on Orkut

*There’s a lot of hype around Orkut at the moment. Firstly it’s affiliated with Google, therefore instant buzz! and secondly it’s invitation only.  You can’t just sign-up like the other networking communities (see below) you have to wait until your asked.  It’s the the online equivalent of the Freemasons I suppose.

Links to some Social Networks:

• Friendster
• LinkedIn
• ZeroDegrees
• Ryze
• Orkut