The only worse thing than being spammed…

imageNow I have a very cute eight month old daughter and sometimes (thankfully rarely) when she’s tired, she gets cranky and has been known to throw her rattle/bottle/toy out of her high chair/car seat/pram. But you see she’s eight months old.  She is frustrated she can’t communicate.

So, what’s the story with all these adults who can’t communicate – adults who are communicators?

Now you may be wondering what I am dribbling about this time. God knows I often do, but bear with me.

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It appears that a PR person – now please, prepare to be shocked – spammed a group of people about a forthcoming (admittedly social media) book.

Well all hell broke lose.  In fact you couldn’t move for all the rattles being tossed online.

How about this blog post headline: “How a single email killed a PR firm”.

Pardon me?

As we often say in Ireland, would ye ever cop yourselves on.

All this chest beating from PR people… you know folks I operate this blog under the greenhouse code. Mistakes happen, yes I know it was pretty dumb, but mistakes do happen.  The guilty party has gone public  responding to the blog posts.

The funniest part for me was a comment on one of the indignant PR blog posts that says (and I am paraphrasing to protect the guilty):

“… he is the pot calling the kettle black.. I get spam from him constantly..”

 

You know the thing that really galls me is that none of these people have the right to feel indignant.

Nope. None of them.

It’s people like me who didn’t even get the spam that should be indignant, because the only thing worse than getting the spam, is not getting it.

Sigh….. I’m such a loser.

Is the online world growing up? What about PR?

Interesting news from New York that a supreme court judge has ruled that Liskula Cohen is entitled to information that would help her to identify an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank”.

If she follows through that could be a very interesting development indeed.

Meanwhile Mark Creaser is pondering if PR agencies are redundant in 2009.

Digital Agencies are already elbowing PR aside, and within a couple of years, a traditional PR agency will be fairly niche. Times change, and in 2010 people will want to feel increasingly engaged with the brands and people they choose to do business with.

Now I think Mark makes some interesting points, but I don’t buy it – his argument that is, not PR agency services. I do buy them.

If there’s been one consistent PR-related theme on the interweb over the past five years it has been the death of PR and the death of PR agencies.

From what I am observing, there is a lot of innovation taking place inside PR firms, probably not enough, but it is happening.

Yes I am also seeing “digital” agencies stepping in and driving online campaigns, which in my opinion, is a huge missed (revenue and mindshare) opportunity for PR firms, but if PR agencies are smart and continue to develop their services and skills, then over time you could see PR firms taking back much of that budget.

Great communications is all about understanding your audience and engaging with them.  The idea that we’re facing into a time where we do all our outreach in-house just isn’t credible in my opinion.

Firstly let’s not forget that online is one (albeit a strong growing) element of the communications mix.  Secondly, while I am not by any means a apologist for PR firms, they do bring a range of benefits to companies from an outside-in perspective, to reach, expertise and much more.

PR firms aren’t going anywhere.

Communications in an age of social media is arguably more important now, than ever. Firms who invest in their people and their expertise, who spend time understanding the impact of online and how it sits with traditional channels (not just media folks) will continue to thrive.

Of course that’s just my opinion. I’d be much more worried about the future of “social media” gurus than PR firms…. but that’s for another day.

PR gives PR a bad name..

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Welcome to Tuesday. 

I had a lovely week off (thanks for asking).  Travelling around the North Cascades is to be highly recommended.

Of course returning to civilization also means dealing with a backlog of post, e-mail and voicemail – and for you cool social media kids, loads of unread RSS feeds. (I remained joyfully unconnected for the week – something I would also heartily recommend).

It is of course ironic, and often humorous (but in a sad way), that PR people are the single greatest cause of negative perception for this “profession”.

Skimming my RSS backlog threw up loads of examples.  My favorite is Phil Gomes’ account of e-mail correspondence with a PR spammer.

Sammy: Thanks Phil, it would just take me ages to find your addres in our database.

Phil: Probably no more time than it took for me to fish your note out of the trash and find the link, I’d imagine.

Read it.

 

Also raising a smile is Nick Blakin’s guest post on the ever-reliable Bad Pitch blog.

Speaking of lessons, these are absolutely the only ten you’ll need throughout your entire professional life. Remember, PR isn’t all smoke and mirrors, and name dropping, and hot parties, and lookin’ good while you sip your free martinis at the lowliest dive on the block. That’s only 95% of what we do. To make it in this business you have to one day get your hands dirty. And that, I’m afraid, is the one really ugly truth.

Read it (and read the comments, they made me laugh).

 

Shel Holtz has some nice common sense on why PR and Marketing remain as relevant as ever.

If your reading was restricted to social media purists, you’d think that PR and marketing had no role left to play, that the rise of the trusted peer has so marginalized the communications profession that agencies everywhere should just fold up their tents and encourage their employees to learn a new trade.

Read it.

 

Typical isn’t it?  You go away for just one week, turn off the WiFi and… well nothing changes…

PR, Blogging, RSS and Twitter…

Wow, it’s August. I must be getting old, because the weeks, months and years are beginning to fly by.

It’s been quiet on this blog for a while and (in tandem) my RSS reading has been sporadic at best.

Of course I have a defense. I’ve been pretty busy.  Egypt was an experience, and I’ve moved to a new role at Microsoft (Corporate Citizenship since you ask).

Yesterday I installed the latest FeedDemon beta and rediscovered why RSS is such a great way to track news and opinions about anything you’re interested in.

Revisiting your RSS feeds is like re-discovering old friends, it’s fantastic. It’s also interesting to find out there are so many people still talking out the back of their trousers but then that’s one of the great things about the Internet and social media – the diversity.

Couple of posts to consider:

I will be back.

New Microsoft Corporate VP of PR..

You probably have already heard that yesterday we announced some changes at the helm of PR at Microsoft  (obviously I use the word ‘we’ in the broadest possible sense 🙂 ).

Simon Sproule has left Microsoft (or will at the end of August) to take a new role with the Renault-Nissan alliance in Paris.

Frank Shaw has been appointed as the new corporate vice president, and he’ll start at the end of August moving from PR firm Waggener Edstrom. 

Of course the wonder of social media is that you can read Frank’s own thoughts (he is a long time PR blogger) online at his blog here.

And the good news is that he’ll be keeping the blog going after his transition.

Ragan Conference at Microsoft

For those who might be interested, there’s a Ragan conference on best practices in internal communications, PR and social media planned for November 16-18 2009 at our corporate headquarters in Redmond, WA.

You can find out more details and register here.

To blog or not to blog…

One of the constant questions since the advent of blogging has been the thorny question of whether a CEO/Executive blog should be only written by the individual in question or can be ghost written. Personally I tend to favor the former.  Blogs are about the human voice.

There’s some interesting discussions taking place across the Atlantic on this very subject.

Neville Hobson kicked it off with his post: “Blogging requires personal participation”

Whether or not you think ghost blogging is a good idea – and, for the clear record, let me state my view: I think it’s a terrible idea (although I had a very different view in 2004 when I was still trying to figure out this business blogging malarkey) – you could argue it’s ok as long as there’s open disclosure.

So everyone would know that when you read Executive A’s blog posts, they’re really written by Flack B: The ideas may be A’s but the words are B’s.

And I’d agree – as long as you disclose, there’s no perception of pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes and your risks of reputation damage when you’re found out (there will be nothing for anyone to find out) are minimal.

Whether it’s an effective form of communication and relationship-building is another matter entirely.

Paul Seaman followed up with a post titled: “Corporate blogging: now it’s personal?”

Here’s the detail. I believe that all corporate utterance is collegiate, not personal. We should not expect that a corporate voice is speaking personally. To that extent, one should steer corporate people away from the appearance of purely personal speech (ie, in blogs) because it’s a falsity. But if there is corporate blogging, then one has to accept that it has a corporate mindset and spin (unless it stays bland and covers nothing much). Corporate blogging isn’t personal and PRs might as well get involved, and probably should.

I think Neville’s point is only a little different. He believes (and I rather agree) that a blog is a personal thing in a special way (it is – as it were – a hand-written note) which is different to a speech (which might – as it were – be a typewritten thing produced by a committee). Thus Neville insists that it is wrong for a CEO to have a blog but delegate it. But Neville thinks that a CEO, say, can speak with a personal voice and that his utterance is personal not corporate at that point. And I think Neville believes that the corporate and the personal can be aligned.

The difference between us may be that I think that corporations (and institutions) should steer clear of pretending that they are people and have personalities that are free of corporate ties. They have qualities, and even aspirations, but these are group things. I resist their becoming too chummy, and so I resist their blogging and tweeting as if they are something they are not; I want to keep the corporate voice authentic. Corporates should be too formal to be capable of the mateyness involved in the ’social media’ world – except as part of transparent marketing.

I’m not sure that I agree that Corporations shouldn’t develop a human voice.  I have long advocated the theory that rather than corporate communications replacing traditional tools and channels, we are probably looking at an expansion of the number of those channels.  For example if you are looking for detailed technical specifications for a product, a blog is of limited use, what you really want is a product sheet or whitepaper.  However, there is also the potential for people inside the company to provide some human perspective. A perspective that customers may well enjoy and/or find useful.

It’s an interesting discussion.

Public Relations… five years on

Five years ago this week, a group of PR professionals with nothing more in common than an interest in blogging and social media, came together from various corners of the world to share their views on Public Relations.

It was an incredibly interesting remote collaboration project that was inspired and driven by a large number of people who put in an incredible amount of work (I recall Trevor, Constantin, John, Jeremy, Elizabeth, Philip, Alice though I’m sure there were more).

small_logo_blue_right[1]This anniversary came to my notice over the past few days as I spotted a number of blog posts celebrating the fifth anniversary of first Global PR Blog Week. (There was a Global PR Blog Week 2.0 the following year but I don’t think it ever quite captured the excitement of the first.)

My first reaction was shock that five years have slipped past so quickly.  Where did that go? My second reaction was remembering the great sense of excitement and community that surrounded pulling together so much content from so many contributors.  I spent some time browsing the archive (there are more than 60 articles) and I was very impressed with the quality and depth of many of the contributions.

I started blogging in 2002 because there was so little PR content online and I wanted some way of capturing interesting things that I found.  This event in 2004 was really the landmark that the PR profession found its voice online, and since that time we’ve seen an explosion of PR bloggers. Of course you don’t have to agree with them – that’s half the fun, but many of the contributors are still sharing their views online today and deserve your attention. You never stop learning in this business.

That first PR Blog Week was organized into five key subject areas. If you have some time I’d recommend a browse, five years may have passed but many of the discussions and issues have remained unchanged.

  1. PR in the Age of Participatory Journalism
  2. Corporate Blogging
  3. Making PR Work: Creativity & Strategy
  4. Crisis Management
  5. The State of the PR Profession

Trevor summed it up well in his introduction:

For PR professionals, it (social media/blogs) is creating many challenges and opportunities – we probably don’t know most of them yet. Through corporate blogging, still very much in its infancy, our clients will have many more opportunities to engage with their stakeholders and they will feel much less beholden to the interpretative whims of media gatekeepers. The flow of information will increase to an extent we could barely imagine possible just a few years ago.

These, and many other issues, will be discussed during Global PR Blog Week 1.0.

I haven’t been blogging as regularly as I was five years ago, but I still read these contributors and many of the bloggers who have emerged since.  There’s a lot of great PR content and opinions out there if you choose to experience them.

Other posts on the subject: