Murphy's Law

PRNewswire is now delivering its newsfeed via RSS.  If you ever needed a great example of how RSS can simplify research, this is the one.

[Source: ResearchBuzz]

Eric Arnold over at PR Week has kindly been in touch with me following yesterday’s post regarding their move to a subscription model.

He points out that you can still subscribe to their excellent daily newsletter free of charge from the web site.

I’m happy to point out the correction!

Since I started working in marketing in 1991 it has always apparent that the biggest problem with marketing is that everyone believes they can do it, and in most cases that they can do it better than the marketing professionals.  Every department has their opinion, sales people, engineers, HR managers they all have their opinions.

But if you thought marketing people have it bad, the problem for PR people becomes even more acute. Just write a press release and send it out, what’s hard about that?

That’s when the trouble starts.

PR is about effective communication with your audience.  It’s not simply about whacking out press releases. If it was we’d all be a lot less stressed.

This has been a particular problem for smaller companies who can’t afford to employ a PR person in-house or a pay a retainer for a big agency but still need to communicate with the media, their partners, customers etc.

The good news for smaller companies is that they have never had a better opportunity to get the benefit of savvy PR counsel.

There are thousands of PR consultants now offering affordable PR counsel and helping smaller companies to build effective communications programs.

There’s no excuse for careless mistakes that can cost your business your reputation, your customers and your revenue.

By investing a reasonable amount of budget, smaller companies can avoid potential catastrophic mistakes such as this, while building credibility and profile.

You wouldn’t ask your plumber to fix your brand new car so why would you risk your firm’s reputation? 

Thanks to Robb Hecht for the link.

You may have already read about this, but I missed it.  It’s a clear warning to anyone tempted to play around clients’ time sheets.

Earlier this month, two Ogilvy & Mather executives were indicted for conspiracy for allegedly overbilling the U.S. government for a campaign on behalf of the Office of the National Drug Control Policy.

One of the executives, CFO, Thomas Early has since resigned.

 

 The Fast Company blog discusses PR invitations in the wake of an invitation from Porter Novelli on behalf of Gillette.

Here’s the follow up on the original piece with an explanation of the media event, it’s for the launch of a new razor (the M3).  Interestingly while they spent some cash on the invite they didn’t give attending media any samples.

 I am all in favor of companies protecting their brand but sometimes I think companies become over zealous.  Mikerowesoft takes its brand very seriously particularly online.

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!