Category: General

As she nears the court room expect a snow storm of coverage on Martha Stewart over the next couple of days.

Is Martha winning the PR war? After a very slow start  some seem to think so.

Kevin Dugan has more.

PR Week is a fantastic weekly PR business journal.

However, regardless of this fact, this is probably the last time you will see any reference to PR Week on this blog.

Why?

Well up until now they provided limited access to a small number of their stories each week on their website.  But they have decided to remove the general access to those few stories and restrict it to subscribers.  As a result there’s no point referencing it – just as when O’Dwyer’s did the same there was no point referrring to them either.

It’s a pity and personally I think it’s unwise but they’re in business to make cash. So we bid them a fond farewell.

 

Richard Bailey points to some research from the UK IPR (they’ve been very busy recently I must check if the PRSA have been doing any interesting research) that found that 83% of PR undergraduates in the UK are female. Furthermore, on post graduate PR courses that figure rises to 92%.

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone working in PR that the majority of PR students and practitioners are female but the margin is staggering. It appears that my minority status in this business is safe.

Of course as Elizabeth Albrycht pointed out last November, this numeric superiority has yet to assert itself in the PR blogging world, where by my calculations nearly 90% of PR blogs are written by males. Hopefully that anomaly will be addressed in the near future.

“Undergraduates were well informed about the industry and were keen to make a change. A PR education, they thought, provides sound understanding of the practice, thus enabling them to do a better job than others. Several mentioned that they would like to use the knowledge and skills gained positively in order to contribute to society.”

Jeremy Pepper and Colin McKay have some very interesting posts about the growing diversity in the PR business and how many smaller and mid-size agencies are undertaking very successful and public PR campaigns.

I think this is a good example of the fragmentation taking place in the PR market.  As PR professionals, we are faced with an environment where people have become far more sophisticated in how they make decisions.  A single reference is no longer enough to drive the agenda or the sales process, instead PR folks are faced with the challenge of reaching out to a multitude of media (and non-media) sources.

This is accentuated by the fact that while on one hand media such as the Internet are making the world a smaller place.  It seems to me that the smaller the world gets, the more people are looking for relevant local information and content.  It’s a message the local US TV and newspapers learned a long time ago and explains their success covering local issues.  I think this trend will continue.

Finally, the PR business has never been as fragmented.  There are thousands of individual consultants, a growing number of smaller specialists agencies and then the usual mix of mid- and large-size agencies.

There’s nothing to stop larger firms successfully undertaking these campaigns – they already are.  But the fragmentation in the agency business provides clients with a much richer choice of services… and that’s a good thing.

The one downside to all this change is that it requires a number of things from PR practitioners.  Firstly it’s essential that PR people understand their client’s audience intimately.  Who are they? Where are they?  What are they doing and where are they going?

Secondly this change means that we need to understand practice areas that we might have previously considered outside our remit. These include Search Engine Optimization, Online Promotion (Overture), Direct Marketing etc.

On the one hand all this change presents great opportunities for everyone in the profession and on the other hand we have to make sure we’re in a position to take advantage of it.

Never a dull moment..

The Christian Science Monitor has a story today on the challenges facing prosecutors in cases against celebrities such as Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson.

“They are getting their message or theme out to the general public, who could well be sitting members of the jury,” says Mike DeMarco, a former state prosecutor in Boston and now a partner with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. “They are also getting the message to the courts and judges because, whether we like it or not, they read papers, see the news, and develop opinions or bias.”

Martha hasn’t exactly been setting the world on fire with her canny PR strategy. For more on Martha’s case (from a PR perspective) check out Kevin Dugan’s “Martha Stewart and Public Relations” blog – I don’t think I can give you a more specific link than that!

Baseline magazine has a short piece on the possible impact of blogging on your business.  It uses Microsoft as an example, but doesn’t cover much new ground. If you’re interested in more on business blogging click here.

Rainier PR, a UK PR company, undertook some research on how PR agencies were faring in meeting the needs of the UK media.  The findings are here.

Of course the major finding here is that there is no new finding. 

Journalists still have the same age old issues with PR people.  It seems to be the same in every country and every industry sector – though some are worse offenders that others.

And the bad news is we don’t seem to be getting any better or listening to the advice.

To highlight the common themes that run through all these surveys read Mitch Wagner’s comments from last August and compare it to the Ranier research.  Spot the similarities?

Every industry needs effective crisis communications plans and the US BSE scare is illustrating the importance of learning from history and the difficulty in managing a crisis in a highly fragmented market ecology.

Following on from the post on Tuesday, Business 2.0 has a very interesting story on the BSE scare that looks at how the various industry parties from the US Dept. of Agriculture to the Fast Food outlets are handling the scare.

Of course the UK Beef industry has been dealing with this issue for some considerable time and their experience provides a useful reference point for the US industry. In particular the biggest mistakes they made. It’s a great example of how all PR people should learn the lessons of the past so as not to make the same mistakes in the future.

Thanks to Laura Goldberg for the link.

You have to take notice when the man responsible for many of the world’s largest PR agencies gives his view on the business.  Sir Martin Sorrell is the CEO of WPP the marketing group that owns amongst others Burson Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, Cohn & Wolfe and Ogilvy PR.  He recently gave an interview to PR Week on what’s in store for 2004.

Sorrell on the outlook for 2004:

“We had high hopes, following the recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that PR, because it had become more specialized, would be insulated. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I’m not clever enough to figure out why. It may have to do with the fact that PR – a lot of my colleagues get very upset when I say this – is less global”

Sorrell on what’s important for the PR agency business:

“Focus is important. What has tended to happen is that these businesses have become too big and too sprawling. You can see that through some of the consolidations that have taken place. I’m not just talking about public relations here, but also advertising and design, all of the consolidations I have seen.”

Sorrell on what he’s like to see from his PR brands in 2004:

“More focus, less dilution. More specialization. I still think if we know more about a topic, we will succeed. I think it’s organization. Having fewer, better people at the top, and bringing in better young people who can do the implementation and learn the business over time.”

Whilst the interview obviously drives the agenda for the consolidated PR super groups, it’s interesting to see what the big boys are thinking.

 Jeremy Pepper shares his views on what’s in store for PR in 2004.

 Colin McKay has some interesting thoughts on the issues surrounding the BSE (and SARS) crisis (and its similarities to Jaws – the film 🙂

“The first death is swift, savage and out of the blue. Public officials blame it on a fluke. They predict a speedy and inexpensive resolution. When more deaths occur, the officials shift to denial and damage control. They’re concerned about bad publicity, how it will hurt tourism and trade. The menace suddenly halts and the officials rejoice: “Everything will soon be back to normal,” they say. Then the deaths start happening again … “

 Elizabeth Albrycht points to an interesting story on how the US Navy is looking at blogs as a real-time collaborative tool for teams in different locations (and different organizations).

 I’ve been reading the B2B Lead Generation blog for quite some time and it is an interesting read for anyone concerned with the business of delivering quality leads for the salesforce.

 Trevor Cook believes that employee communications should be at the top of every PR person’s priorities for 2004.

“Employee communications often get the most desultory treatment in organisations falling well behind customer, media, investor and government relations in terms of strategic focus and resources. Yet a strong case can be made for putting employees at the top of our priorities.”