Category: General

In my opinion, Business 2.0 continues to hold dear some of the better elements of the Internet years, it addresses the technology and business audience with an interesting mix of innovative in-depth articles and what’s hot (or not) out in the market.

I think they’re breaking some new ground in the December issue with an analysis of the success of the PR around the launch of Handspring’s Treo 600 .

That’s certainly a feature I haven’t seen before! Luckily for the PR folks at Handspring (which is now part of palmOne) the results are positive. Over 207 stories with only one negative mention.

On the downside, the article also provides a $ value for the advertising equivalent -even though in fairness, they stress that the return on PR can’t be measured by that method – I wish they had left it out…

Elizabeth Albrycht bemoans the lack of female PR bloggers.

Her aside amused me:

“I don’t normally go around counting female-male ratios. I approach my business as a “professional,” and don’t often consider gender in any day-to-day activities. But then, something clicks, and I look around me and I all see are males.”

Now she knows how all the guys in PR feel 🙂

It is remarkable, given the gender bias in Public Relations, that more female PR Pro’s aren’t blogging….

Since it was installed just over eight days ago, Qurb has stopped over 3,600 spam messages with a 98% accuracy. [Someone e-mailed me to ask have I shares in Qurb….unfortunately not :-)]

Following on from my previous post, MarketingSherpa also has an interesting interview with Smooch Reynolds, CEO of The Repovich-Reynolds Group about PR recruitment – I bet you’ll remember that name.

Seemingly there’s more hiring happening in the agency world than the corporate world these days.

“But take heart: though hiring in the communications industry has been static throughout the recession, Reynolds says companies should be ramping up their communications departments by the second quarter of 2004.”

According to a story on MarketingSherpa (only available until Nov. 27) over 80% of respondents (the majority of whom were non-marketing professionals) in a recent survey preferred websites without Flash intros.

Seemingly there has a lot of negative feedback to MarketingSherpa over the results.

As many of you will know, I have my own little anti-Flash campaign going.

So here’s a re-cap, Flash intro’s are a bad idea because:

1) They delay your visitor accessing your web site

2) They serve no purpose other than thinly veiled advertising – and if the visitor has typed your URL then you already have them – let them in

3) They are in many cases self-indulgent design projects

4) It confuses visitors who expect to be able to navigate sites using standard HTML navigation

5) Your site becomes unaccessible to users who do not have or want Flash on their computer

6) You are being made fun of by fantastic parodies such as SkipIntro

7) Flash creation is expensive, where’s the ROI?

8) Shouldn’t the time and resources you spend on Flash be better utilized improving your site’s navigation, content etc.

9) The creators of Flash discourage it’s use for these Intros – and they should know – see point #3

10) Does it drive more visitors, help you capture more leads, create business opportunities? If the answer is no, hit the delete button.

Now before I get loads of abuse, of course Flash has useful applications.  It’s fantastic for creating demonstrations, tutorials, presentations etc. It’s just not good for guarding your webite or for website navigation for that matter.

Check out some serial PR offenders.

 

 Colin McKay’s excellent Canuckflack has moved to http://www.canuckflack.com and he’s now one of the growing population of Moveable Type users. I would if I could, but I can’t.

 Greg Brooks tackles the thorny subject of why journalists hate us.

 Robb Hecht over at PR Machine points to a fantastic short piece on branding that was published in Inc.magazine last year. Of course I think it’s great because I completely agree with it.  Branding is the sum of your audiences’ experiences with your firm – it’s not a logo, a color or a catchphrase.

 Phil covers an interesting survey which found that the quality of your employee communication directly impacts their performance.

 Phil Gomes at G2B Group points to a Network Computing expos�A> on the lying statistics technology vendors use to make their products look better!

 Jeremy at POP! PR bemoans the Microsoft-Google acquisition story (that wasn’t) from the NY Times.

 PR Fuel points to story from Entrepreneur magazine on why you need PR. You do you know.

 And last but not least, PR News in Miami covers Mickey Mouse’s 75th birthday!

So there’s a round up and I’ve managed to avoid mentioning Michael Jackson once… doh

Baseline magazine analyzes how the Howard Dean presidential campaign is successfully using technology to drive his nomination.  From his blog  to online community sites, Dean’s campaign is a fantastic story on how communication over the Internet is becoming more important for every sector.

“The marketing of presidents and even state and local political candidates may never be the same. By early November, the Dean campaign claimed 500,000 online supporters, up from zero at the start of the year. Only 4 percent of Democratic primary voters said in March they would cast their lot with Dean; now, he is backed by 15 percent of likely voters, according to an early November Zogby poll. That puts him ahead of every other Democratic candidate, by at least five percentage points.”

And he’s raised over $7.4 million online along the way. 

Forget your politics, this is an intriguing case study. 

Of course, traditional tactics remain vitally important, but the ability to effectively use the Internet for communications is becoming a critical element of every marketing campaign.

Jim Horton has some interesting thoughts on this very topic.

 PR Week’s US Edition is celebrating its fifth anniversary and has published a special issue which includes a look over the interesting trends over the past five years. It has also re-published an interview with Walt Mossberg of the WSJ from April this year.

  Meanwhile PR Week UK looks at the changing mobile phone market and a look at the problem of spam.

 Slashdot is a phenomenon. One mention on it’s boards will send tens of thousands of visitors to your website. But PR beware, any meekly veiled attempts at ghosted PR postings won’t cut the mustard. LinuxWorld has an interview with Slashdot’s founder Rob Malda which tackles how companies can deal with the volume of traffic you get from a mention on Slashdot.  However, there’s also some interesting background on the site and Rob’s thoughts on the Internet and some tips on what stories get posted and why.

 Interesting story from Florida on the importance of PR fostering more diversity by encouraging minority groups to participate in the profession.

The Thomas L. Harris/Impulse Research Public Relations Client Survey, besides having a long title, is a hardy annual for PR statistics.

Now in it’s eleventh year, it tracks the satisfaction of PR clients and gives some interesting insight into trends between PR firms and their clients.  This year’s report includes responses from 1,263 internal clients.

The full report is available free online and is definetely worth a download and print.

Some interesting figures from this year’s report:

PR Firms’ Performance

Overall there’s great new for PR firms, whose performance (in the eyes of their clients) has increased by twelve per cent over the past twelve months with the greatest areas of improvement: creativity (+26%) media placement (+24%) and specialized services (+20%)

The lowest evaluations the firms got were: international capabilities (-41%) Internet capabilities (-44%) and fair compensation (-56%) – I think this reflects well on some of the mini-rants I have been on for the past two years and Rick Bruner will be in heaven!

Budgets

The bad news is that PR budgets (including internal and external spending) were down this year – I doubt that comes as a shock to many of you.

(The report includes a lot more detail on budget breakdown)

PR Publications

Finally, PR Week, Advertising Age and PR Strategist are the most widely read PR publications.  Interestingly 38% of respondents don’t read any trade magazines – that’s high.

Tom Mangan’s blog Prints the Chaff is a recommended read.

He has recently been discussing the marraige of newspapers and blogs in terms of delivering up to date (and locally relevant content) to the reader.

There’s been some interesting feedback to the discussion.

This interconnection, which takes the best of “traditional” journalism and adds the benefits of hyperlinking offered by the web and the speed of blogs is worth thinking about for every PR professional. This could work in designing a client’s website to provide visitors with better data and of course it could have implications for how PR people target features. Interesting…

By the way Tom also includes a plethora of links to other Editor blogs.