Category: General

Phil Gomes over at the G2B Group has been one of the early advocates of distributing PR information over RSS. (For more information on RSS here’s a previous post)

Whilst I don’t believe e-mail is dead, certainly RSS feeds offers a useful alternative means of providing corporate and personal information. Journalists can subscribe to your RSS feed and as you push news out, they are automatically updated. This is a powerful means of diseminating information.

Phil has posted a great piece on why RSS is going to be increasingly important to PR professional. He includes a link to an article by Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News that was published in Computerworld:

“The best reason so far to adopt RSS in a big way is its effect on the technology that we all once loved but is now so polluted: e-mail. Sending marketing messages and newsletters via e-mail has become a fool’s errand; the obvious work-around is RSS. I’d much prefer to get public relations materials this way.”

When we undertake marketing or PR programs for a client or employer, one of the first steps is finding out how the organizations’ audiences percieve the client.

This takes many forms but one of the mainstays is the interview.  We talk with journalists, partners and customers to get a better view of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.

So how is PR faring?

Last week I linked to an article by Loren Pomerantz that attempted to tackle the divide between PR and the media. The response (from the media) has been illuminating and depressing.

It’s best summed up by Mitch Wagner, who among other things works over at Internet Week.

Here’s how Mitch sees PR:

“Here’s what most of the PR people I deal with are like:

• They do not know much about technology.
• They don’t know much about the industry.
• They know hardly anything at all about my publication.
• Their main interest is not in having me write an article about their client. Their main interest is in having me INTERVIEW their client. I have been told that this is because (1) the interview makes more of an impression on the client than the actual article and (2) they can bill the client by the hour for sitting in on the interview.
• In general, most of them are 22-year-olds straight out of  college, with little experience in the technology industry.
• They behave very much like telemarketers. They have a script which they are not authorized to deviate from, or which they are unable to deviate from. And if I say I’m not interested in a story, they will ignore me and keep talking until I get them off the phone.

There are many exceptions to these rules, but these rules do apply to about 95 percent of the PR people who contact me.”

Wow. Now if you got this response from a survey of your clients, you would (rightly) believe that there was a lot of very hard work ahead.

It’s clear that we as a profession are failing on one of the most important aspects of our job.

It’s time to take control of your media relations.  It’s time to make sure that media facing staff, know their clients, know their media, know their publications and know the market.

Now, this all sounds very obvious.  But it’s clearly not being done.  I think this is a useful wake up call. Thanks are due to Mitch for his honesty.

Chris Pirillo, the mastermind behind Lockergnome kindly stopped by yesterday to comment that e-mail is dead.

In the Inc. feature on E-mail marketing he states: “E-mail is a polluted medium… it’s dead.”

Now while I completely agree there is no question that e-mail is polluted, I don’t agree it’s dead.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m a big fan of RSS, and while it does solve some of the problems, it’s not a replacement for e-mail, in my ever humble opinion.

Spam is a pain in the ass, as are adverts on television and radio. But that doesn’t change the fact that e-mail is still hugely productive (and I get over three or four hundred spams a day).

While TV may not provide a perfect analogy, it does illustrate the point that we rarely get anything for free. But we do learn how the minimize the disruption.

E-mail still has legs. The response rates we get from commercial and non-commercial e-mail marketing are still high.

I think E-mail is “just resting” albeit in a very congested state.

 Jim Horton points to a Cyberjounalist.net article on sixty ways to improvide your news site.

 Phil Gomes over at the G2Blog  links to a feature in Inc. on how marketers are trying to manage effecitive (legitimate) e-mail marketing amidst the volume and the spam filters.

 On a related topic ClickZ provides a checklist for a B2B E-mail-shot.

Loren Pomerantz, a partner at PR agency Combined Forces, is performing what can only be described as a public PR service.  She’s writing a column over at MediaBistro that addresses some of the myths that surround PR.

In her first column she raises an issue close to my heart, namely why in the majority of PR agencies is media relations merely a stepping stone to senior management?

“The way it works in most agency settings is that the more senior you get the less contact you have with reporters and editors. These higher-level people�the ones with the intelligence and experience�spend most of their time managing staff, clients, budgets, and strategies.”

Now before you start giving out, I know a lot of agencies don’t follow this practice, but in my experience it is the norm.  I myself remember gazing up the organizational structure and longing for when I wouldn’t have to “do” media relations.

Now that I’m older and more boring, I realize I was mistaken.  Good media relations skills are a blessing. It’s not something to be given up for spreadsheets and meetings.  The ability to work closely with journalists serves many purposes, but first and foremost it means you have a connection with the coalface.

Good media relations should be cherished by PR companies, not used as boot camp training. I know this first hand, I went away and came back.  And I found I missed it.

I couldn’t resist this quote from JP Morgan Chase on their SEC settlement over the Enron scandal. (Courtesy of the ever-dependable Corporate Babble):

 “JPMorgan Chase has neither admitted nor denied the SEC�s allegations, but has consented to the order sought by the SEC enjoining the company from future violations of the antifraud provisions of the securities laws and requiring it to pay a total of $135 million, consisting of $65 million of disgorgement of revenues, $5 million of interest, and $65 million of penalties.”

I have just finished reading boo hoo, the inside story on Boo.com.  You might remember them as the “urban fashion” dotcom that managed to burn through $185 million in under two years.

It’s written by Ernst Malmsten one of the co-founders and it’s a staggering read.

The founders, Ernst and Kajsa Leander, successfully founded and sold an online bookstore before venturing into the world of high fashion.

You have to give Ernst respect for putting the history in print, because he does not come out of this account with glory. Of course, it would be unfair to take the book out of context.  When you are reading it you have to remember back to the height of the dotcom madness.  A time when managing costs was for wimps.

The first thing you realize reading the book is that Ernst is a fashion snob. He spends a lot of the book commenting on the dress sense of advisors – I kid you not.

It’s like watching a trainwreck as you read mistake after mistake – one of my favorites is when they started evaluating new business lines BEFORE the site even went live!

But what was of most interest from a PR view was Ernst’s experience with PR.  He is the nightmare client.  He expects his agency to set up interviews with Vogue and every other leading fashion magazine even though they are unheard of.  After a meeting with his agency he makes the caustic comment that he would have been better off doing it himself. Sound familiar? Of course the nice part is he realises in hindsight, his agency did a fantastic job. And they did.

Its a little ironic that the Ernst Malmsten domain is actually owned by a disgruntled boo.com supplier.

Best dotcom trainwreck book I’ve read to date. And he needs the cash.

Other links:

• Here’s the transcript of a talk Ernst gave post-Boo

Jeremy Pepper has launched a blog to document the start of his new PR firm. Pop! Public Relations.

 Adele Ravella over at productmarketing.com has a good piece on removing marketing speech from your communications.  (Thanks to B2Blog for the link)

 Entrepreneur magazine – which has been promoting PR a lot recently – advises its readers to take PR seriously.

 The latest winner of the “Turkey voting for Christmas/Thanksgiving” award goes to Wally Roberts whose job was promoting and enhancing Barre’s (VT) central business district.  It’s reported that he has resigned after being quoted saying that Barre’s downtown was �dying slowly�.

I have been catching up on my e-mail and after my post yesterday on the I-PR anti-blog discussions, I see there were even more negative posts yesterday. 

I really don’t understand PR people’s problems with blogs.  Get over it.  If you don’t think they matter, ignore them.  There are loads of clients who will benefit from your ignorance. (The discussion has even descended into “well blogs are just a web page”).

But it’s not all bad news.  Along with you, who by reading this are already participating in the blog world, Larry Weber, the driving force behind what is now Weber Shandwick [FLASH Warning] thinks that there’s some gold in them there hills.

In an interview in the Boston Herald, Larry unveils his plans for providing marketing services built around the new tools and techniques for reaching and building relationships with audiences.

He (Weber) talked about “viral communication,” or using virtual communities to spread a message. “That’s what blogging is,” Weber added, referring to the Web’s proliferation of open but focused bulletin boards called Web logs, or simply blogs, that anyone can use to post a message. “You really can’t underestimate that,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a consolidation of marketing,” Weber said, as enterprises seek better ways to use technology to reach target audiences.

Amen to that Larry.