Murphy's Law

The media landscape continues to be ravaged with more and more layoffs. But you know things have really got out of hand when an entire editorial team puts itself up for sale on eBay.

Although the eBay entry now says “Complete former staff of Z—- T— U—–” following some obvious legal wranglings, it originally said the “Complete staff of ZDNet Tech Update”.

The offer includes staff on the East and West coast including:Executive editor, Senior editor/producers (All San Francisco) Executive editor / columnist, Managing editor / copy editor, Senior producers, Senior editor / producers, Senior content management developer / Vignette programmer (All Boston).

The auction ends on February 5th and the current highest bid is $2.25….

THE AUTHOR OF “THE DEATH OF SPIN“, George Pitcher has an article on Corner Bar PR discussing how good public relations can’t substitute good business practice.

PR WEEK HAS AN INTERESTING story on the current health of technology trade shows.

BURSON-MARSTELLER HAS BEEN appointed as the agency of record for Stellar Internet Monitoring – whose products monitor the “misuse” of a firm’s Internet resources. ahem.

KETCHUM AND DDB (Omnicom siblings) have merged their French operations.

BROADGATE CONSULTANTS A NY BASED corporate communications firm has joined up with the global PR firm network Public Relations Organizations International.

THE PR MAESTRO AT leading UK football club, Manchester United, is grilled by the public online!

If you’ve any PR news or views let me know.

Can anyone spot the similarities between two Public Relations announcements (1, 2) made for two clients by the same PR firm? I’ll grant you there are some differences. 🙂

A colleague yesterday pointed out that weblogs will never become mainstream until people forget about how they work and what they offer and just use them. His analogy was the telephone and I thought he’s absolutely right.

However, given that weblogs have barely leaked outside the global community of technology enthusiasts we probably still have some way to go. Last week during a course I was giving to non-technology people, I polled attendees on who had heard of or used weblogs or blogs and the answer was 0.00%.

Now granted this isn’t a scientific study, but weblogs aren’t prime time…. yet.

There are signs they are getting there however. The Register has a story today on a guy in Washington who was fired for his blog. There’s proof, if it was required, that weblogs are growing in importance!

The New York Post stopped an article by Manhattan-based PR Jeff Barge in which Barge accused his industry of being in the “deception business”. The Post says they dropped the story becuase it was too “self-promotional”. Thanks to Deborah Branscum for the link.

Karlin Lillington has an interesting entry today on the evils of PowerPoint and references John Naughton’s recent piece in the UK Observer.

We’ve been trying to avoid what we call here “Death by PowerPoint” for some time. There are pros and cons from a communication perspective. The conversation is by it’s nature more natural and engaging without slides, however because people are so conditioned to “watch” PowerPoint presentations, sometimes a non-PowerPoint based session is clearly a struggle for them.

On a personal note, when you are two weeks on the road meeting analysts and journalists, “UnPowerPointed” meetings are far more interesting than the same twenty slides over and over again.

Of course, PowerPoint can be useful for communicating complex concepts but to use it as a crutch can make for truly horrendous meetings.

Additional links: John Naughton’s Blog and The Gettysburg Address as it would appear in PowerPoint!

XPRL.org the organization established to propose a common XML standard for the Public Relations profession has appointed a new chairperson, Alison Clark.

Alison, based in the UK, is a self-employed public relations consultant who previously held a variety of roles with Edelman, Wessex Water and Shandwick.

For anyone not aware of XPRL.org I recommend a visit to their website. It promises a new opportunity for standardizing the various documents we use in the PR process from press releases to clippings.

As we all know just because something is easier it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s better. For example. It’s certainly easier to watch a football game on TV, it’s cheaper, the toilets are close-by, you have the benefit of expert opinion and have the best views of the action. But you know it’s still far superior to experience the atmosphere youself, to be in the stadium.

The same can be said of e-mail. It has many positive attributes. It’s fast, easy to use and can provide a rich source of information with links, attachments etc. It also can help us be more productive.

However on the flip side it also has many negative attributes. We are overwhelmed with the volume of information we get on e-mail, it promotes laziness where people manage by e-mail rather than talking with others and in many cases people use e-mail in place of good working practices.

But for Public Relations practitioners one of the major problems with e-mail is that is can be shared around the globe in seconds.

Organizations honed good human resources techniques for many years, are we ready to throw them all out in favor of e-mail?

The answer should be no.

There are of course circumstances when you must communicate over e-mail. However you should always write it with the assumption that it will be distributed outside your firm.

The advent of sites such as Internal Memos.com mean any electronic communication must be carefully crafted and must take into account how it communicates to people outside the initial distribution list.

This was prompted by a story found by Richard Bailey in last Saturday’s UK Guardian.

The story tells how Julie Meyer, a prominent figure in the UK’s dotbomb period and a founder of the UK’s First Tuesday club for Internet entrepreneurs is facing issues around leaked e-mails about the ill-health of her latest venture.

The memo’s purport to represent communications between Ms. Meyer and her staff, though she adamantly denies their authenticity.

This raises serious PR issues. It’s one thing to have an internal memo leaked, but what about a faked memo?

The Internet has spawned the largest content creation boom in the history of personkind.

This explosion of news and views among professional journalists and consumers has serious implications for practitioners whose job it is to monitor public opinion as well as monitoring what’s being written and debated in the public domain.

Given that search engines only index around 40% of Internet content and there’s only so many pages of links you can trawl through in a day, what are the alternatives?

There are aggregated search applications such as Copernic which help, but still face the same issues as what they’re aggregating. Then there are monitoring applications such as WebClipping or EWatch which trawl the web looking for mentions of your company or client – but anyone who uses them knows these have severe limitations.

Today, you are probably using a combination of these approaches. However there is an additional helper application for PR pros trying to stay on top of the news. RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication – depending on who to talk to!).

RSS provides immediate news feeds which can be aggregated inside an RSS news reader. Why are these useful?

Well in an ‘e-mail type’ application you can subscribe to feeds from most of the major newspapers, magazines and blogs and the headlines are all automatically downloaded, making it far easier to monitor news stories as they happen.

RSS won’t replace web browsing or our other monitoring applications, but they can definetely lighten the work load of keeping on top of all the latest news. It’s also much much faster, no waiting for loading web pages, no pop-up ads etc.

Big tech firms like IBM and SAP are now publishing their press releases as RSS feeds – a growing trend.

Why not take a look. Some of the most popular RSS readers are FeedReader (PC), NetNewsWire (Mac) and Headline Viewer (PC). I’m currently using Syndirella.

And of course PR Opinions now provides an RSS feed as well, just add http://tmurphy.blogspot.com/rss/tmurphy.xml into your RSS reader for the latest news as it happens!

The American Press Institute and JD Lasica at the Online Journalism Review both have recent stories on the impact of RSS on journalists and publications alike.

In a survey of over 850 “opinion leaders” in the United States and Europe, Edelman found that there are significant differences in corporate trust between the continents.

The survey found that while trust in corporations had fallen in Europe, it had risen in the United States. This seems a very strange finding to me 🙂 Trust in the US government is slipping however and remains very low in Europe.

In terms of corporate trust, Americans trust producers of consumer durables and consumer packaged goods most. In Europe, it’s healthcare and airlines.

The biggest difference between the United States and Europe is in the most trusted brands.

In the US the most trusted brands are Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Ford. In Europe its Amnesty International, World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and Oxfam.

If you ever needed to convince your boss that PR is different in Europe, here’s your proof!!

The Edelman presentation is online here.