Category: General

• Mason Cole points to two very interesting articles. One is written by Shel Israel on what PR must do and the second is from Steve Rubel on what PR needs to do online.

• Matthew Podboy shares some knowledge and tips on the press tour.

• The Edelman/Technorati blogging survey has generated (as expected) LOADS of comment – too much to track here. As always we can rely on Constantin Basturea to keep us up-to-date. Constantin also has some in-depth and thoughtful analysis on blog surveys…

• Tim Dyson bemoans the bait-and-switch that often takes place in PR new business pitches. The lesson here is that you should always demand that the proposed account team does the talking greeting and meeting.

• Fair play to PR Week who have launched a new monthly column by the ever excellent Dan Gillmor. The first missive talks about the growing importance of conversation over control. Amen.

• Elizabeth Reid over at Voce gives a first person account on her first year in PR.

• While Blake Barbera shares some tips on coping with your first media pitch.

• Andy Lark aggregates some useful PR advice.

• Robb Hecht points to a very interesting post over at ZDNet written by Dana Gardner (ex-Infoworld, Aberdeen and Yankee Group) on how PR people are finally figuring out blogs.

• Deborah Branscum writes about the recent H&M snafu over paying for journalists to attend a media event in New York.

A few more PR blogs…

• David Rossiter has kicked off a second blog dealing with IT PR
• Anthony Mayfield has started a new blog called Open…

• Caroline Wilson at UCE Birmingham has started a blog called Public Relations for students on the BA Media and Communications (Public Relaltions) degree.

There’s been some heated discussion recently among the PR blogging community following Stephen Baker’s description of Steve Rubel in the BusinessWeek blog as the ‘doyen’ of PR bloggers.

It appears the comment has raised the ire of some. I think it’s no more than a storm in a teacup, a nitpick on language, and it’s possibly a good time for a reality check.

Why has the comment caused so much angst? Mr. Rubel is without doubt the most widely read, quoted and heard speaker on the intersection of PR and blogging. He has attained this position through a lot of hard work, networking and spotting a need for a specific focus on PR and blogging. Fair play to him.

That’s not to say from time to time I don’t have issues with the often incestuous relationship between the A-list bloggers, I do, but the idea of dedicating myself to the sole subject of PR blogging fills me with dread, PR is a diverse subject with many facets and I prefer the diversity. Furthermore, I’m not sure I’d match Steve’s passion or commitment!

So let’s not begrudge Steve’s success, he is after all a positive evangelist for the profession.

Now let’s get back to work!

The job of managing reputations has definitely got more interesting. While there was a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt when the Internet first emerged and people got very worried about rogue web sites (acmesucks.com) and a couple of people posting items in newsgroups, the Internet has matured very quickly meaning the threats to an individual’s or organization’s reputation has become far more sophisticated.

With search engines indexing every piece of information they can find on the Internet and millions of people using those tools every day, there’s more transparency now than ever before.

This is particularly true for individuals. We all know (and probably do it ourselves) the practice of checking someone out on a search engine before meeting or talking with them. Do you know what people find out about you before they meet you?

This online reputation ecosystem was brought home to me recently in a personal way. My parents, God bless them, weren’t the most imaginative when deciding on my name. It’s a proud family name, but Tom Murphy isn’t exactly exotic. Indeed a quick search finds a playwright, the mayor of Pittsburgh and thousands of other similarly named individuals. We all have the same problem. There was an analyst at Meta Group (R.I.P.) called Tom Murphy and for years we used to receive each other’s media queries. It’s funny we now both work at Microsoft and the confusion has continued unabated.

But in the past week or so, the media in Ireland and the UK have been focussing in on an unsavoury Tom Murphy or to give him his full title, Tom “Slab” Murphy (no relation). He is the alleged chief of staff of the IRA and has been linked with some dodgy property dealings in the UK amongst other things. The story has been on every TV news bulletin, radio bulletin, broadsheet, tabloid and online news service over here. A friend of mine joked that soon I’d be getting a lot more “respect”. Although there’s little likelihood that we’d be mistaken for each other, and of course he could take major offence at being mistaken for a PR practitioner, it illustrates the vagaries of online reputation.

So here’s the question for this morning. Are you managing yours?

I’ve had a few e-mail and comments wondering if I’m still alive – this message should clear that up 🙂

Thanks for everyone who has been in touch. As you can imagine I’ve been a little busy lately getting my feet under a shiny new desk, hence posting has been slower than I’d like.

I’ll hopefully be back posting more regularly in the coming weeks. Also a big thanks for everyone who took some time to comment on the PR Hype Cycle, I’m planning to make some changes to the diagram based on that feedback and will hopefully re-publish it in the near future.

I’ve also had some correspondence discussing whether I’ll be talking about life at Microsoft and the answer is yes and no. In my previous existence I only wrote about Cape Clear when I thought there was something relevant to discuss for the PR world. I am planning to take a similar line now.

Thanks again to everyone who has been in touch. Hopefully the power of RSS will let you know I’m alive an kicking!

Blog Relations a UK-based “content consultancy” run by two business journalists Matthew Lynn and Hugh Fraser, have published the results of an informal survey they undertook on Blogging and PR with sixty respondents. You can read the full report there, it’s a small sample (ten respondents) though one finding that caught my eye was that 14% believe blogs don’t pose a threat.

Meanwhile Jessica Morris at Boston University is currently undertaking her thesis project on PR and Blogging. She’s looking for online participants to her study. If you have a few minutes why not help out by taking the study here.

Finally in the online research area, Roger Signer is conducting an online poll on weblogs as a marketing tool, you can participate here.

I recommend you take a couple of minutes to participate. These studies can add to our understanding of how these new tools will impact the profession.

As part of the Global PR Blog Week I have contributed an article entitled Pragmatic Public Relations which suggests that we, as a profession, need to take a long look at how we undertake PR programs today and how that might change over time based on our audience and the tools and channels that are becoming available.

As anyone who has read this blog in the past will know, I’m not shy coming up with advice 🙂 But as part of the preparation for the article I started trying to see how I could map the intersection between all our existing tools and the newer developments.

I came up with the idea of using Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle. Gartner put this graph together to illustrate the maturity of any technology in a given market. I thought it might be a useful, if very subjective way of looking at the technologies PR practitioners will be using today and tomorrow. This of course is terribly non-scientific and very subjective….

I’m very interested in getting people’s thoughts on it. Is it a waste of time and space? Is it accurate or irrelevant?

Gartner Hype Cycle

Here’s the empty hype cycle

There’s a couple of things to note:

• New technologies start on the left hand side of the graph and typically travel from left to right.
• Following their introduction tools can be subject to unrealistic hype bringing them to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. Once reality sets in these tools then fall into the “Trough of Disillusionment” before emerging at the right hand side where they finally begin to deliver some of the benefits that were originally promised
• Not everything travels the full cycle, some new technologies simply reach their peak and then disappear without trace
• It’s not sequential, some new technologies move along the cycle faster than others
• Finally some technologies will remain at a given level forever

The PR Hype Cycle

So based on that here is the PR Hype Cycle:

 

The first thing to notice is that our traditional tools such as press conferences, press releases, telephones etc. are mostly collected on the right hand side of the diagram in the Plateau of Productivity section. They all provide well understood features and returns and are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Some traditional elements such as message control or the fax machine are in all probability becoming less important for many practitioners however they do still exist and can be more important for some practitioners than others.

On the extreme left of the diagram you’ll see a whole host of new tools that many believe will have a fundamental impact on Public Relations. These include Citizen Journalism, RSS, Podcasts, and Wikis. As previously mentioned this is where you’ll begin to see differences between industries, for example in technology PR blogs are probably further to the right.

It may surprise you that I’ve put well established tools such as e-mail and databases only emerging from the trough of disillusionment but I have my reasons – we still don’t use them effectively.

Rubbish?

So does it make any sense? Is it of any value? There have been a couple of comments so far, I’d be interested to hear what you think.

With all the content being generated around blogging – from debates on how blogs are going to replace the media to why blogs are a fad, and everything in between – I fear that people are losing sight of why the blog could be an important addition to corporate communications – namely it provides a better means to building relationships and providing better customer service.

There was a fantastic example of this with the re-launch of the new look UK Guardian newspaper last week.

As you may know, the Guardian has been at the forefront of offering their readers new innovative online services and they were early adopters of editorial blogs – but in the past week they’ve showcased how to incorporate blogging into your core business.

The re-designed Guardian (which includes a new size) has been well recieved and the editors have used their blogs to give an interesting insight into the preparation for the launch of the new format.

However, there was a small problem. Due to the paper’s new size a couple of the traditional items at the back of the paper were dropped or replaced. One such omission was the Doonesbury cartoon. The editors through talking with readers and research had found little objection to removing it. Unfortunately a large number of readers felt differently. And there was a lot of discussions on the Guardian blogs last week with readers calling for its return. And following all this blog-led pressure, the editors have listened to their audience and Doonesbury has returned.

Now I realize this is very small beer in the bigger scheme of things, but it’s a useful reminder that having a corporate blog is all good and well, but if it’s not integrated with the rest of the organization and if you’re not willing to engage in dialogue and act on feedback from your customers then it’s of limited value. The Guardian’s editors have listened and have acted – that’s good blog relations.

Footnote:
Thanks to Fergus Cassidy for the story.

The second annual global PR blog week kicked off yesterday. There’s twelve articles already posted covering mostly blog-related topics from building communities to blogs for non-profits, executive blogging and much more.

As always it’s a recommended visit and read!

Morning all

Well Global PR Blog Week 2.0 is less than a week away. It kicks off next Monday (the press release has gone out so it must be true!) and continues all week with even more content that last year. So it’s definetely a recommended visit for anyone with even a passing interest in PR.

This year’s event has contributors from Argentina, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States and there are over seventy articles being published, which for a volunteer, non-profit event is a staggering achievement.

My only gripe is that to pull off an event of this size takes a lot of hard work from a lot of people and I don’t think they are getting full credit for their work. Hopefully they’ll step out from behind the curtain!

I know posting has been terribly slow, however things like vacation, new job etc. have intervened. I’ll keep you posted.