Murphy's Law

PR Week has an interesting lead this week on what’s in store for 2003 – predictions from some industry luminaries.

Challenges for 2003 include better understanding clients’ pain, ethics and accountability, getting clients to pay for value, diversity, shrinking budgets, managing public scrutiny, working with alternative media, demonstrating PR’s deliverables, demonstrating value, ‘relevant’ media relations, strategic counsel and last but not least credibility and ethics.

There’s a lot more in the article itself. Have a read.

OK something completely unrelated. Marketers aren’t traditionally the most technically proficient of professions. However if someone warns you that you’ve published your confidential account login and password information on your website, it’s normally a good indication that something’s amiss.

According to a story in Wired, advertising agency Carmichael Lynch [BIG Flash alert] posted those details on their jobs page and although warned by a visitor to the site in June took no action until December. According to the firm there is no sign that anyone did try and use the password though if they had they would have had access to internal documents and client databases belonging to a number of clients including Porsche.

It’s a good reminder to us all that security is vitally important and while accidents happen it’s essential they’re addressed fast!

Rafat Ali has a very interesting article on why 2003 might end up being the year Weblogs get bought up.

He suggests that rather than even being bought, a small number of very very popular webloggers might be taken on as salaried employees of some of the larger publishing houses. He also suggests some possible link-ups in the piece.

If you aren’t already looking at weblogs that are relevant to your industry or market segment, now might be a good time!

Boing Boing one of the most popular link weblogs, recently published their visitor numbers [Excel spreadsheet] – and any publisher would be very proud of similar readership numbers.

According to the numbers, Boing Boing gets over 200,000 unique visitors a month…. not bad for a web page.

This morning I was reading Dave Winer’s Scripting News as I do most mornings, and he had a post on an opinion article written in the New York Times by James Ledbetter.

Ledbetter is the business editor of Time Europe but is better known as the editor of the Industry Standard, a now defunct magazine that covered (and promoted) the New Economy. Dave’s post recommends we read Ledbetter’s piece “to to be reminded how the business press excused themselves and still do now, for the abuse of trust of their readers during the dot-com boom.”

I thought that he was being a little harsh on Ledbetter, particularly since I really enjoyed the Standard. But when I read Ledbetter’s piece, I felt myself agreeing with Dave. Ledbetter’s not apologising for misleading people with poor editorial judgement, instead he’s pushing the blame around the table and the usual suspects get a good kicking namely; his competitors, bankers and of course PR people.

I think Ledbetter made a mistake writing this piece. If you have a few moments compare his op-ed with a piece written by Joyce Slaton on the media’s role in the dot.com bubble. Her piece is honest, interesting and insightful. Ledbetter should have just published a link to it. [Comments]

On the eve of another year, it’s always interesting to look back on the past twelve months and to try and build a picture of what’s happened and what’s coming next.

2002 on the whole was another tough year for the PR business. But while many agencies cut numbers and even closed their doors there was some good news. In particular some research pointed to better days ahead but these were soon countered with research that found things will only get worse – the truth as always is somewhere in between!

Blogs were obviously the hottest topic in the online PR world and there was plenty of good advice on how to tackle them. Meanwhile our colleagues in the media were looking at how blogs might change their world.

Of course there was plenty of off beat PR news during the year, consultants were pushing their luck on expenses, innovative services were launched, plain talking was championed and one of our number was even incarcerated (1,793 days of probation left seemingly).

2002 was also the year that PR was strongly promoted as a tier one marketing discipline, journalists did some soul searching on the dot.com crash, and last but not least, PR became a commodity that could be tenedered over ebay…

So a tough year, but not the worst, and fingers crossed the positive indicators for 2003 hold steady. Happy New Year and here’s to a great 2003.

Well postings will be a little sparse during the Holiday period. So let me take this moment to wish you all Merry Christmas (or your own alternative!).

To finish off for the moment, PR Week have a review of 2002, and their look back at the year makes depressing reading! Enron and Worldcom destroying corporate reputations, Agencies baring the brunt of a slowing economy with widespread lay-offs and closures. That pretty much sums it up…farewell 2002!

PRWeek have also published their PR lists for 2002 (Adobe Acrobat required) which is a fantastic look at the year. Highly recommended.

Till next time!

Nestle has a long and proud history of regularly shooting itself in the foot.

It’s most virulent opponents have seized Nestle’s attempts to aggressively market infant food in the third world and turned it into a global lobby.

There are many strategies for dealing with Non-Govermental Organizations (NGOs) but I don’t think making ridiculous financial claims on disadvantaged countries would be one of the first to jump to mind for more PR people.

But that’s just what Nestle is doing. It is demanding a payment of $6 million from Ethiopia for the nationalization of one of its subsidiaries back in 1986.

Ethiopia is on the brink of another savage famine. Nestle is a wealthy, multi-billion dollar, global conglomerate. Anyone see the disparity.

Not content with hurting their reputation through this claim, Nestle are now saying it’s a point of principle!!!! To put this all in perspective, according to a CNN report, the average person in Ethiopia makes less than $2 a day, while the Swiss giant makes about $6 million every hour.

There’s some great content on the web around this, check out CNN for the latest news. And the UK Guardian has two excellent pieces looking at this disaster from a PR perspective. They are written by journlist Julia Day and a second story from PR-consultant Mark Borkowski.

Maxim?

According to a survey carried out by Media Life Magazine, over 50% of respondents picked Maxim as the magazine that has the greatest influence on other publications. US Weekly came in second with 21% of the poll.

Unsurprisingly, Martha Stewart was chosen as Media Villan of the Year with 56% of the vote.

Season’s Greetings. Although PR Opinions is *not* a blog about blogs, there is some interesting stuff on blogging in general which I’ve found over the past couple of days. I simply post it for your perusal!

The Washington Post has a piece on Blogging Going Mainstream. It references a recent article in the UK Independent that asks if the current popularity in blogging has anything to do with the higher than usual unemployment rates in Silicon Valley and a lot of technical people with lots of time on their hands. Interesting, but I think that’s wide of the mark.

Infoworld has a reader poll on blogs this week that has some interesting findings (particularly given Infoworld’s “technical” readership). The question they asked was:

“Do you or your company publish a blog (Weblog)?”

3.6%. A. Both. My company and I both maintain Weblogs.
7.2%. B. Yes. My company publishes a Weblog.
4.8%. C. Yes. I maintain a personal Weblog.
43.4%. D. No. Neither I nor my company publishes a Weblog.
41.0%. E. None of the above, “what’s a Weblog?” or “why should I?”

We’ve come to that time of the year again when the planning process rears its ugly head.

Planning is indeed a challenging �science�. So here�s a welcome distraction.

For the more technical amongst us, you may have noticed recently the formal death of IBM�s PC operating system OS/2. OS/2 was once touted by IBM and industry pundits as the product that would take the wind out of Microsoft�s sales (sic).

While reading about the formal demise of OS/2, I happened upon a detailed history of the operating system (bear with me there is a planning angle here!) and there were some very interesting details on the assumptions IBM made while planning the launch of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981:

1) IBM expected to sell 275,000 Personal Computers over the five year product life (They received 250,000 orders before the product was formally introduced and another 250,000 the day it launched)
2) Small business would be the predominant purchaser of the PC
3) Large business would stick with mainframes and dumb terminals
4) A few departments at large firms would use PCs for local, non-connected work
5) The PC would be used for one task only � all day long � never more than one.

So the moral is, no matter how badly you plan, you�ll probably have a better batting average than IBM at the launch of the PC. And I think you could say they were very successful!

As we begin to wind up yet another year. It’s always a good time to evaluate progress and look forward.

In this spirit, Euro RSCG Worldwide [Flash Alert! Flash Alert!] have cleverly published their “Top Trends for 2003” which is a very interesting look at some possible trends that will affect marketers over the coming year(s). (Thanks to Richard Bailey for the link)

On a related note, the Knowledge Capital Group, a firm that specializes in analyst relations services, publishes a regular newsletter with news and opinions called AR Insider.

If you are working with analysts it’s worth getting. Their latest missive looks at the annual review of analyst subscriptions and has some solid advice. [Though as a side note, I think their ratios which states that if you’re selling a product for over a $1M then you should be spending five or ten times more on AR than PR is a little inaccurate!]

I particularly like their article this month on OMBs (One Man Bands) or those analysts/pundits who set themselves up as industry experts.