If you are a freelance consultant do you use a personal e-mail such as jondoe99@aol.com?
Well you can now get a more PR-centric address free of change. Log on to PRMailBox and you can get an address like tmurphy@prmailbox.com.
The e-mail service is provided by the UK website http://www.prfinder.com
Correction: Tracey Hopkin was in touch to kindly let me know that the service is actually provided by the PR Press Network. You can find them at: http://www.prpn.com
A survey carried out with over 700 Business-to-Business marketers by MarketingSherpa found that E-mail marketing to an in-house list (45%), Public Relations (36%) and Postal mail to an in-house list (28%) were the most successful marketing tactics in their current programs.
Respondents were also asked where they would be increasing spend in the second half of 2003 with E-mail (37%), Search Engine Marketing (28%) and PR (27%) the top gainers.
The Internet has created an environment where information flows freely and anyone can quickly and easily research most topics. That has inherent risks for organizations. Your ability to control information has been significantly reduced.
We are also seeing new phenomena such as the Educated Consumer. Your customers are now able to research your product or service from every angle. They know what you’re saying, what the media are saying and even what your competitiors and customers are saying.
We are reaching a point where consumers may even know your product better than you. That’s a huge challenge for any organization.
However, there is an upside. Research has never been easier or more cost-effective. You can reach customers and partners online and conduct detailed desk research in a fraction of the time. Harnessing the tools of the trade is a step in the right direction and iMedia has an article by Underscore Marketing on the Future of Online Research.
The promise of videoconferencing in the 90’s and online conferences since then has fallen well short of expectations.
The simple fact is that face-to-face communication is the single most effective means of communicating. A former client of mine had a situation a couple of years ago where they had two phone briefings with a prominent analyst. The calls went extremely well but when they met with him face-to-face a month later, he wanted to know what they did!
Where online events do hold the upper hand is in cost-effectively reaching a larger number of people and of course reaching people unable to make a physical event.
Of course online events require a lot of preparation and a lot of promotion. Channel Seven have an excellent article looking at online events and what makes them successful.
MarketingProfs has an article on adapting weblogs for corporate e-newsletters. It’s an interesting take and has some good links to more blog-related articles. They also have a piece on “Everything you need to know about Search Engine Optimization”. Have a read of it. I believe SEO will become an important service for PR companies to offer to their clients. If search engines are the window to the web, then getting high rankings is key to reputation management. [Thanks to MarketingFix for the link]
Know thine enemy, Ben Edeleman a Ph.D student at Harvard has written a paper investigating The Gator Corporation. You know them, they are the company that proliferate many of those horrendously annoying pop-up ads that crowd our online experience. Urrggg. Have a read.
Our advertising brethren have their own issues from the online world. The terrible twins of accountability and ROI.
Finally, CNET reports that newspapers are increasingly posting recruitment listings online in an effort to stave off online competition, now if only they’d put their archives online. “..newspapers have watched their listings businesses decline over the past few years also because of online competition and economic factors.” 
Dot Journalism has a story on the rosy future for online journalism.
eMarketer has an interview with the doyen of technology marketing – Regis McKenna.
Dan Gillmor has discovered Correspondences.org which is aiming to provide a forum where eye-witnesses can tell their own personal account of events. In their own words: “No one can tell a story better than the people who participated in events. Whether you witnessed a crime, suffered a catastrophe or sat through a performance, you’ve got something to say about that experience.“
In other news, the Guardian tackles the subject of blogs clogging up Google.
The Daily Yomiuri explains why Japan’s top executives must recognize the role of PR.
AdAge reports (as mentioned previously) that the Financial Dynamics MBO from Cordiant is expected to close in the next few days for $41 million.
An interesting color piece on how PR impacts the working lives of US racing drivers.
Inc. has an article on how blogging can be used by smaller firms for marketing purposes.
Now that Phil Gomes is back blogging, I’ve also managed to find two other PR bloggers.
Jeneane Sessums formerly of Ketchum and now out on her own and Michael O’Connor Clarke of Weber Shandwick. Michael has an interesting post on the response of media organizations to their journalists’ blogs.
They both contribute to Stir… 
BtoB magazine has named its Media Power 50, the top fifty venues for BtoB marketers online and offline. The top ten includes; The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Google, Lou Dobbs Moneyline, Fortune, Aviation Week and Space technology, Business Week, Wsj.com, Information Week, The O’Reilly Factor (Fox News). No surprise Google and WSJ.com top the online list.
The Onion has taken aim at Pfizer’s Zoloft medication with a new “ad campaign“…
Further to some blogging stories last week, there are a number of interesting new blog-related articles appearing.
The New York Times documents the perils of blogging both for the blogger and their subject matter.
Dave Pollard has some interesting thoughts on how blogging can be used for knowledge management. This is an area of huge potential for the PR profession, given the importance of information, both in areas like media relations and also in managing accounts.
Meanwhile the discussion on how blogs and the traditional media intersect continues. This time the discussion concerns how weblogs are getting higher Google hits and rankings than traditional media stories. While I don’t believe that blogs will replace journalism, I have to admit that I do find myself agreeing with the authors that publishers have to wake up and compete on a level playing field by releasing their online archives. If they withold them then they only have themselves to blame if Google favors freely available content.
More on this subject, and a great illustration of why blogs are an important element of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in this article from Wired. 
The New York Times has an article on how George W. Bush’s handlers are promoting his presidency.
The UK Observer looks at how corporate speak can be counter productive. They use this quote by way of illustration: “The solutions uniquely offered us the integrated planning, robust supply chain optimisation and execution capabilities needed to support our store level, integrated planning and replenishment initiative.” Thanks to the wonders of the Internet we can reveal that the offending party is none other than Manugistics in a press release last February 🙂
A new biotech magazine, the Acumen Journal of Sciences, has been created by some of the Red Herring alumni. Jason Pontin, former editor of Red Herring is heading up the new magazine. His aim: “I don’t ever want to create a magazine that becomes so dependent on advertising and rising circulation, like the Red Herring was.”
Kudos to Biz360 a software company that offers data analytics to PR professionals, and their PR firm Spark PR. They have managed to secure a gushing article in Business 2.0.
In related news, I had read somewhere that ECCO, a global network of PR firms has announced an initiative for new PR measurement techniques, but there’s nothing on their website.
Johnny Angel, the West coast editor of the ever excellent Technology Marketing has linked to PR Opinions. He starts out pondering the nature of blog link referral, so in the true spirit of link referral, I’m returning the favor. He posts that “Murphy seeks to defend the plight of the poor misunderstood PR person. And you know what? They are misunderstood.” Amen to that.
Murphy's Law 