Category: General

You know there’s a bubble coming.

In “Interweb time” the bust was a long time ago and the frenzy of “Web 2.0” start-ups and services would seem to predicate an Internet Boom 2.0.

This is particularly obvious when you look at some of the new services.

How about a press release distribution service that offers to send your press release to bloggers.

Feel free to read that line again, it is what it says.

Now a service like that could only be set up by someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time blogging. Because believe me, after a couple of months of blog posts the PR spam e-mail will start to arrive promoting irrelevant companies and products that you have no interest in.

Why would you sign up to recieve these releases? Let me re-phrase that. Why would anyone in their right mind think that you, a blogger, would sign up for the service? Beats me.

According to themselves, The WeblogWire came about following a challenge to:
“build a viable web startup in 1 week, while spending no more than $500.”

I hope they gave the $450 they had left over to their investors.

Darren Barefoot put his $50 where his sarcasm was and posted a press release over the wire entitled:
“Marketer Intends to Write Blog Post Criticizing The WeblogWire”

The press release was duly published but was pulled soon after. He’s still waiting for news of his $50….

Come back Tom Foremski all is forgiven 🙂

Greetings. Busy July so far. Hence slow posting.

Doing some thinking about this blog, but more about that anon. In the meantime, here’s some interesting stuff I’ve been reading recently:

• David Parmet illustrates why PR will always have image issues.
• Jim Horton has a link to to an article that looks at the changes taking place in our “audience”. Meanwhile John Wagner advises you’ll need a customer plan for potential blog issues.
• The Hobson and Holtz Report continues, podcast 152 is now online.
• Philip Young asks what is New PR?
• Piaras Kelly has a link to a video of a really interesting presentation from Guy Kawasaki on start-ups.
• Stuart Bruce reports on the CIPR’s Northern Conference.
• Brian Oberkirch is now blogging at: http://brianoberkirch.com/.
• Derek Miller has some great resources on Presentations.
• Congratulations to Stephen Davies on his new role at Edelman. In fairness they are walking the walk and with Stephen they’ve landed a great guy.
• Oh an of course congratulations to the Azzuri..

Greetings, just back from a much needed week’s vacation, so I’m currently fighting a backlog of e-mail, tasks, calls, messages, comment spam and RSS feeds. Normal service will resumed shortly.

In the meantime, one interesting announcement today is a free download (from my employer) that will enable you to add a Creative Commons license to your Word, PowerPoint or Excel document.

Well I thought it was interesting…

• Jeremy Pepper is in Seattle this week, but unfortunately due to conflicting schedules it looks like we won’t be able to meet up. He reports on a very interesting story from Information Week that press releases have overtaken trade journals as a source of information for information workers – and without any XML I bet. Are you listening Tom Foremski?
• Another senior agency blog. Frank Shaw, president of Waggener Edstrom has a blog.
• Keith Jackson over at Trevor Cook’s Corporate Engagement blog shares the nine best practice indicators for effective issues management according to the Issue Management Council.
• Charles Arthur of the UK Guardian shares some pointers on feature writing.[Thanks to Stuart]
• Todd Defren has a great example of someone cutting off their nose to spite their face agency style… life is too short for this.

Lauren Vargas takes me to task for my post on PR 2.0.

She believes that what’s required when it comes to PR, and the new brave world of online services, is a revolution:

“While tools may be evolving, a revolution in the communicator’s mindset must first occur. We do not have time for a gradual change of a communication professional’s thinking. Thinking is our problem! However ironic this might be for our creative industry. Part of the existing toolset is the mind and this needs an overhaul. Techniques/tools are a symptom manifested from our thinking. Scary concept.”

Mmmm. I’m still not buying.

The only thing that matters here is your audience. How is your audience finding, sharing and using information? Are they exclusively doing that all online? Maybe some very small sub-niches are doing that, but the majority are not… certainly not yet.

Life is rarely that simple. People still read newspapers, still listen to the radio, watch TV, talk with friends etc. Why are we in such a hurry to throw all that away for the online alternative?

I don’t buy it.

For some PR practitioners there is an increasing online element, for others it’s very limited.

If we can agree that successful communication is about the audience, and I am assuming we can, then our focus should be on building better insights into how those audiences want to communicate. It’s about being pragmatic about how we communicate, whether that is in townhall meetings, direct mail, media relations, face-to-face, by telephone, e-mail, instant messaging – whatever.

Talk of a revolution reminds me of the boom, and the boom failed because people thought of revolution rather than evolution.

Let’s all relax. Let’s focus on getting a better understanding of how our audiences want to communicate and then let’s focus on doing that well.

Rushing off to the shiny new new thing isn’t the answer. Effective, pragmatic communication is all about taking the best of what we have and merging that with best practice online. I realize that this may not by sexy, cool, hip or ground breaking, but it’s likely to be far more effective. That’s what pays the bills.

• Currently in Seattle for the second time in as many weeks. That flight from Copenhagen (where I fly backwards for two hours before I start) isn’t getting any shorter… Used the flight to catch up on my PR podcast listening. There’s a lot of great content out there. [For Immediate Release, Phil Gomes’ earShot, Inside PR, Across the Sound, Spinfluencer, and that’s just a few…] Get listening….
• You know Colin McKay’s post would be very funny if it wasn’t so close to the bone. Which do you identify with?
• Given the continuing, and many would say increasing importance of the written word, I’m always on the look out for interesting content whether it’s the fantastic Eats, Shoots & Leaves, or Bill Bryson’s Made in America. Ilja van Roon has brought together his writing experiences into one tome which is available for free download.
• PC World has published a list of the worst twenty five technology products of all time. Though as Jim Horton reminds us, behind every bad product is an enthusiastic PR person!
• One of my alma maters, Text 100 now has a blog edited by Georg Kolb, well they’ve had it since last October but I’ve only just found it. Sad times when you can’t even make the blogroll at a former employer, though like Aedhmar’s they seem to be going for the jet set.
• Finally everyone keeps asking me for a list of the Web 2.0 products and services I use to remain at the cutting edge of blogging, PR 2.0, Web 2.1 (2.0 is so yesterday)… no I’m lying, no one has asked, however since I see more and more people writing these ridiculous posts as if they’re gatekeepers to a secret underworld I had to write this paragraph. It’s interesting that none of them have included Kool-Aid in their lists… I think this paragraph probably confirms which of Colin McKay’s categories I fit into.

There’s a lot of talk about the death of press releases, new formats for press releases, press releases in XML, with RSS… it’s enough to send you back to the typewriter.

Leave the press release alone. If we get rid of it we’ll never have these wonderful stories.

The Bad Pitch Blog has a doozy about a Greenpeace press release where they left a reference for a future proof point. Unfortunately no one removed the reference (or replaced it with the salient fact) before it hit the wires. So it read:

“In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].”

Oh dear.

PS: I really wish Kevin would stop using that ugly dog… uurrghh..

Brian Oberkirch has a very well written post titled “Why your big agency won’t get social media”.

I found myself nodding in agreement through most of the post.

I agree with the vast majority of Brian’s points such as:

• There are new tools emerging that will impact communications – CHECK
• Consumer behaviour is changing along with their expectations – CHECK
• The ‘churn and burn’ agency model is unsustainable – CHECK – in fact it could be argued that the traditional PR agency production line model is at the heart of many of our profession’s ills… but that’s for another day

However, while I agree with many of his points, I still don’t agree with his conclusions.

I still don’t see this communications big bang happening. I still think we’ll see an evolutionary change.

Our business is changing – witness the growing number of in-house practitioners and sole traders – many refugees from the agency world. But I don’t believe that the world is or will change as quickly as many online gurus are projecting.

Instead I think it’ll take time and that will give everyone time to adapt and move on.

Of course I don’t know what the future holds (if I did I wouldn’t be writing for the likes of you) but that’s my guess.

Read Brian’s post. I think he has a lot of great points. And if there’s one thing we agree about. You can never stop learning….

This is an old chestnut that comes up with enjoyable regularity.

We are talking about the PR imposter…

The sweaty, overweight, 30+ PR ‘professional’ posing as the “rad”, “cool” and “hip” student in an online forum.

The slim 21 year old PR ‘professional’ sending e-mails posing as a concerned 65 year old.

How long before we all realize that:

a) Transparent communication isn’t recommended, it’s essential

b) Your activity online can be tracked and identified using free, easy to use online tools.

Concentrate on communication rather than subterfuge and you’ll do much better.

Danny Goodall sent me a recent example. He’s a fan of English soccer team Southampton. There growing pressure on the club’s chairman and he’s recently hired a “PR Firm”. Rather than engage in dialogue they ‘cleverly’ posed as a ‘fan’ and went posting supportive messages on Southampton’s message boards.

Only problem was, the messages were tracked back to the PR firm’s web address. Doh!

Good job. Where did they learn about communication? Good ROI on those billable hours though.

News that a conference organizer in Ireland was hit with a ‘cease and desist’ by CMP Media over the usage of the term Web 2.0 in the title of an event they are running in Cork [Disclaimer: Microsoft are the event sponsor] is a good illustration of the danger of monikers. What have CMP done to deserve the legal right to the term “Web 2.0” as it applies to conferences? Nothing. But then the term Web 2.0 is loaded. Part of me thinks it’s a clever collective term for some really exciting online developments, while the cynical part of me sees “Web 2.0” as simply a marketing play to focus excitement around those same Internet technologies for a run at “Internet Boom 2.0”.

Something that concerns me far more however is the term “PR 2.0”. Now this is a far more heinous development. PR 2.0 is a bad thing. Why?

Well first an foremost let’s define PR 2.0. I assume that the term is meant to be used as a collective term for the impact that many of the Web 2.0 technologies and channels will/are having on communications.

The danger of a term like PR 2.0 is manyfold.

First it equates PR with the technology. This is, in my opinion, incorrect. This isn’t about technology, this is about how people are/will use the technology. It’s about how these technologies change how people communicate. But it is NOT about technology per se.

Secondly the moniker 2.0 implies that something is coming that replaces what went before (and by extension implies that what went before was not effective). This again is incorrect. What we’re seeing is evolution not revolution. Tried and tested techniques such as face-to-face meetings, conference calls, e-mail, post and even the much maligned press release aren’t going away. Traditional media relations, internal communications, investor relations etc. these continue to grow today. What we’re seeing is the gradual addition of some new tools and techniques to our existing toolset… not a replacement. Show me the practitioner only using new tools and I’ll show you an unhappy client…

This was brought home to me from a load of PR conferences that I’ve recently being attending and speaking at. There’s a lot of interest in these new technologies, there’s a lot of interest in how our audience is changing. However, there is also reality. The fact is that outside Silicon Valley and the technology business our traditional tools remain king. In my opinion now is the time for practitioners to learn about the new tools, to understand how they might effect their audience, to trial, measure and review the tools. But we are years away from these tools being given equal billing alongside the tried and tested PR tools. That’s the reality.

PR 2.0 represents a worrying growth in the echo chamber effect of the PR blog community. There’s too much inward facing debate and not enough pragmatism.

PR consists of a wide diversity of audiences, tools, grographies, cultures and languages. If we’re serious about providing guidance on how new tools fit with our existing services then we need to be realistic.

So let’s stop looking to throw the baby out. Instead let’s focus our energy on how people are changing how they find, use and share information. Let’s focus on how we make the most of these new tools alongside the daily grind.

PR 2.0? I wonder how long before I get the cease and desist… bring it on.