Murphy's Law

Steve Jones from PAN Communications was in touch on behalf of MediaMap to let us all know that MediaMap is adding weblogs to their media database. [Here’s the announcement].

MediaMap should be applauded for this move as blogs become an increasingly important outlet for PR practitioners.

Michael O’Connor Clarke questions whether it’s sufficient that the directory will only include ‘accredited’ journalists. Michael definetely has a point (maybe there’s a new business idea there for someone), though I think MediaMap’s move is in the right direction.

The New York Times’ Sherri Day has an interesting story on how firms are facing up to the growing threat posed by Internet rumors.  The piece includes interviews with Starbucks and KFC and has some solid advice:

“Communication experts said that companies should handle Internet rumors by responding quickly to the accusations with information on their Web sites, select the wording of responses carefully and seek an objective party to verify that the rumors are not true.”

BMJ (which was previously the British Medical Journal) takes a very critical look at the
relationship  between Public Relations  firms and the pharmaceutical industry. (The top five healthcare PR
firms took in $300m last year)

“If the invisible ties between pharmaceutical companies
and their public relations companies are what
underpins the power of the “third party technique,”
what can be done to allow doctors and citizens
to make informed decisions? How can the
imbalance between the growing marketing and
public relations budgets of the  pharmaceutical
industry and disparate doctors, consumers,
citizens, and  journalists be made more equal? ^“

The Editorial this month looks at the interdependence of the doctors and the drug companies.

The BBC covers the piece here.

Healthcare PR is not something I am terribly familiar with, if anyone reading has any thoughts, please share them with us.

Thanks to Richard Bailey for the link.

Dave Winer continues to wage his personal campaign on how blogs will replace journalism as we know it.

Any regular readers of PR Opinions will know my views on this supposition.

It’s rubbish.

Blogs are important for Public Relations and there is no question that they provide a useful resource for consumers, but they will not replace journalism. That’s Internet hype resurfacing once again.

Karlin Lillington addresses the issue head on. I agree.

• Subway have just illustrated the perfect art of tactical Public Relations. Mike Smith was stopped by police while unwrapping and eating a subway sandwich.  Subway are paying his $135 fine, giving him some free sandwiches and making him the center of their new ad campaign.
  
• Just found this article by PR firm e21 Corp. on measuring PR effectiveness. Personally I don’t agree with that “Ad Value Equivalency” measure, mainly because the whole point of PR is that advertising can’t reach editorial, but the article does outline some other methods also. 
  
• Arthur C. Clarke gives his views on e-mail to the BBC. “I cannot imagine life before e-mail. Our ancestors live in a tiny limited world, knowing nothing about what was going on beyond the horizon.”
  
• If you are exclusively using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer you are missing many of the new usability gains being offered by other browsers.  Microsoft has gone asleep.  The news that Microsoft will no longer be releasing standalone versions of Internet Explorer, but instead new releases will occur with new versions of Windows, means it’s likely to fall further and further behind.  For any Windows users who are tracking lots of different websites I highly recommend Mozilla.  Mac users have Mozilla, Safari and a host of others.
  
• If you haven’t already seen Corporate Babble then we recommend a visit.  It casts a caustic eye over some of the more obtuse corporate communications.

PR Week has a story on how PR and blogs intersect. Myself and fellow PR blogger Phil Gomes are quoted in the story.

“When weblogs dawned a few years ago, PR experts were largely concerned with monitoring any negative comments they might carry. But now the attention has shifted to using them as positive marketing tools.”

In an occasional series on best-practice in e-mail newsletters I offer this advice.  If you are going to communicate with your target audience via e-mail, then do not just send them links within the e-mail to content that requires payment.

There is a rant coming…

I welcome newsletter from PR firms, experts and related suppliers.  Many have interesting stories and links and I believe they are a very effective form of marketing.  Indeed I regularly highlight newsletters here, which I’m sure doesn’t hurt their Google rankings.

However, when I get a newsletter – that is well designed and has interesting topics – delivered into my Inbox, I expect to be able to read those same interesting topics.  If you are selling content, the content in the newsletter should whet the appetite of the reader, wow them with your expertise, while still marketing your services.

If all the respondent actually gets is a web page looking for money, then you have provided no value whatsoever and in fact you have wasted their time. 

That is not good communication practice in my opinion, humble or otherwise.

Of course to add insult to injury when I unsubscribed from their “newsletter” they kept on sending it.  That’s spam. I am going to protect the innocent here by not naming the firm in question, don’t worry it’s not a PR firm, it’s a PR-related services firm.

I hope they can “measure” my response.

Interesting heading isn’t it? It certainly got my attention.

The story is from Forbes via Reuters and concerns accusations by the SEC that Roberto Veitia failed to disclose sales of shares in company he was promoting.  Mr. Veitia is president of Stratcomm Media Ltd.

But when you go to Stratcomm’s website they look more like a third world publishing house than a PR firm. One hilarious section of their website covers their code of ethics which is built around:

1. Integrity
2. Accountability
3. Client Disclosure
4. Legality
5. Confidentiallity

I particularly like this line “We comply with the laws governing our professional activities and expect the same from our clients, prospective clients, shareholders and go above and beyond by our labeling system.” Sure you do…

Mr.Veitia certainly sees himself as a PR pro as can be witnessed to his posting to the PRBytes mailing list back in 2001. Though I thought his wording was ominous given the recent SEC problems:

“I have been in the PR racket since 1985”

Racket indeed… 

The “Official” Public Relations Salary & Bonus Report 2003 is out.  The biggest salary gainers over the past year were practitioners in finance and corporate (up 12%) followed by consumer (up 10%) while all us poor technology and public affairs practitioners took a 10% percent dive – no surprise there.

On the agency side, technology jobs are down 15%, with Business-to-Business a close runner-up with a reduction of 14.5%.

Interestingly there are 15.5% less agency senior vice presidents this year… and agency billing rates are down, on average, 8.7%.

The report retails for $199 and you can order it directly from Spring Associates.

• I missed this story but it seems Google is going to add a new blog tab to their search engine. The new tab is in an effort to remove some of the ‘noise’ that blogs are adding to plain web searches.
• Elsewhere, ClickZ has an article on best practices for search engine promotion for business-to-business firms.