Murphy's Law

Disclaimer: This is Tom Murphy’s personal weblog.  The opinions I express on this blog and the associated web pages represent my own personal views and not those of my current, prior or future employers.

• Murphy’s Law is my blog about Public Relations and technology.
• PR Opinions, is an archive of all my PR posts from March 2002 to August 2006.
• tpemurphy.com, is the general home page and includes an eclectic mix of technology, family and stuff – not for the faint hearted.

Comments on any of these blogs are moderated. Any comments I deem inappropriate for this blog will be not be posted – I will however flag that decision with the person who submitted the post.

Comments on the PR Opinions blog are closed.

My name is Tom Murphy and I live and work in Dublin, Ireland where I look after PR and Corporate Social Responsibility for Microsoft Ireland. I’ve been working in PR around Europe and North America for the past fifteen years or so.

You may notice a category on the blog called “He would say that” – anything that falls in that category may cover a Microsoft product or service – that’s my formal disclosure category!

I’m married to the long-suffering Sorcha and we have the world’s best son, Cillian.  When I’m not working or spending time with the family you can find me out in the garden cleaning up after a Golden Retriever that sometimes answers to the name: Holly.

If you want to get in contact:

E-mail: tpemurphy -AT- hotmail.com

Mobile: +353-87-121-55-56

MSN IM: tpemurphy -AT- hotmail.com

I’ve been trying to catch up on loads of orphaned RSS feeds and stuff I filed to read later and most of it I’ve just deleted but some things I did enjoy…

• You can’t beat common sense.  It’s a commodity often in short supply, but I really like this video post from Shel Holtz on how to blog in a regulated environment.

 

• One of the downsides of tardy RSS management is that often you miss little gems.  Kami points to a blog called NakedPR by Jennifer Mattern which takes a pretty… how do I put this.. pragmatic look at PR and especially online PR. There’s some really interesting opinions but unfortunately it looks like Jennifer is calling it a day. [On the plus side Bill Sledzik looks worth a read]

 

• Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on identifying the top blogs in a niche is also worth a read, it’s the first question people have.  "How do I find these people?" Of course I also recommend that people get off their backside and go talk to their audience….

 

• If like me you’re struggling with your day job and haven’t quite got around to mobilizing social networking for your campaign yet, then Todd Defren’s post on Social Networking is recommended. It’ll definitely get you thinking.

I attended my 20 year school reunion last week. A really fantastic night meeting a lot of people I hadn’t seen over the intervening period and whom, bar more weight and less hair, had not changed in the intervening period.

Late in the evening I was talking to a young man attending the event and he asked me what year I had left the school.  I replied and he asked me if I wanted to be depressed. Due to the effects of alchohol I nodded and he told me that that was the year he was born and that this was his second year at the reunion. 

Sigh.

This getting older stuff is hard.

I also gave a talk to a group of Masters students this week. 

It was very interesting.  They all view social networking (and their pages) as something they use a lot right now, but also something that’s transient.  They don’t see their pages on these sites as something they’ll always have. They believe they’ll move on.

I was talking to the group about the concept of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. 

Interestingly they don’t see themselves as digital natives, but believe that the next wave of new students, just coming to college now, will be.

My favourite Digital Native cartoon – from the Cincinnati Enquirer, courtesy of Kevin Dugan

 

Of course the students of today are the mainstream audience of tomorrow, so understanding how they share, find, and use information is important to anyone interested in communicating with them.

The University of Melbourne has published a paper titled: "First year students’ experience with technology: Are they really digital natives?" . It’s an interesting look at the changes in how students are using all types of technology. 

Expect more changes.

Interesting post from Neville in the relationship between PR and Journalism.

Nearly two years on and I see little to change my core view, which is that if PR and journalism are nothing more than channels or conduits which distort and manipulate the original message, they will become irrelevant to the people out there – the so-called audiences or publics.

He points to a really interesting post written by the BBC’s Jeremy Hillman on Journalists and PR.

If you’re in PR you now have the opportunity to take your message direct to the public in a hundred new ways, at least if you understand the technology well enough. Blogs, vodcasts, podcasts, Twitter streams and social networking are all there to exploit and there’s more every day. And you’ve got to be brave enough to let your content be shared and messed around with. With all this happening, we ‘traditional media’ are still too important to ignore, though, as Nick Davies points out in his book, we’re often too busy to take the call or read the e-mail.

Read the full post..

Following on from my post last week on cleansing your reputation, last Sunday’s UK Times has a follow up written by Rosie Millard on her personal travails with someone hijacking her online reputation.

Rosie goes and talks to some "online reputation management" experts.

Seriously folks, this shouldn’t be a standalone business. 

Online reputation management (clear, above board, no shady practices) should be a standard service offered by Public Relations consultants everywhere. If you’re not convinced… according to the article the daily rate for these services is £900.

I rarely hear PR folks talking about this issue and we should be.

“Sometimes this happens to reasonably high-profile people because there are those out there who will buy the domain, put up a site and then snag any casual traffic associated with your name to get ad revenue,” says Michael Fertik, 29, who runs Reputation Defender in California. “And this one looks like a strong site. More than 30,000 people have already visited it, and the longer it stays up, the stronger it gets, because Google prefers legacy over immediacy. We see cases like yours all the time.”

The article references some interesting resources:

• World Intellectual Property Organization Guidelines on Domain Name Dispute Resolution
• Attenalert – keyword monitoring
• Trackur – online reputation montitoring
• Nominet – UK domain dispute resolution
• IEDR – Irish domain dispute resolution

The Bad Pitch blog has unearthed a fascinating site I hadn’t heard of before: AngryJournalist.com which provides a welcome facility for journalist to vent about what’s bugging them.

While there’s plenty of venting about PR, I was actually surprised there wasn’t more.  Unfortunately the site is anonymous and there’s no tags or categories so you just have to wade through the comments, but it’s an interesting browse…

PR people who don’t do their research. They insist on wasting my time to promote their pathetic story which if they knew ANYTHING about our paper would know that we’re not interested at all. As well as asking if I would like to meet with a representative from their organisation when they visit a town four hours away from me.

They’re probably getting paid more than me too…bastards.

#1091

Kevin Dugan who runs the Bad Pitch blog, has also pulled together an incredibly detailed list of links to resources and tips on Twitter.  The depth of the tools, tips, workarounds took me a little by surprise, but then I’m still struggling with twitter.

Just in case your were feeling all happy and content, two UK bloggers had the misfortune to ask me my opinions on the state of PR and blogging recently…

 

Sarah Stimson: "I met my latest interviewee, Tom Murphy, about 18 months ago when he was delivering part of the "Delivering the New PR" conference…."

 Link

 

 

 

 

The last Friday I had a very interesting chat with Brendan Cooper of the famous PR Friendly index…

 Link

Earlier today I had the pleasure of attending Croke Park for the Ireland-Scotland Six Nations match.

Sitting in the Hogan stand we had a fantastic view and as usual there was vociferous support for both teams.  Everyone was having a great time except that is for the poor woman sitting in the row ahead of us.

Three times during the match she looked up from her newspaper to glare at someone in a row behind her who had obviously shouted too loudly and made it hard for her to concentrate on her paper. She didn’t watch one minute of the match.

Two things:

Why oh why would you waste €70 on a ticket for a match you’re not going to watch? Surely you’d be better off finding a nice warm bar?

Secondly if you’ve no interest in watching the match why bother going when you are denying someone who would love to watch the match live?

Sometimes I really wonder… below is one of the tries she missed.

 

As long as I have worked in PR there has always been an uneasy relationship between those that practice in an agency and those that practice in-house.

As someone who has spent time in both roles, this doesn’t really surprise me.  After all working in an agency and working inside are in many respects very different jobs. I always tell students they should try and get experience of both sides of the profession, because at the very least, it will provide them with a broader perspective.

Over the past couple of weeks I met with a number of friends and former colleagues and I was stunned.

On a number of occasions I heard working in-house referred to as a type of nursing home for those no longer able to work in a "real job" i.e. the agency.

The comments were prefaced with: "no disrespect Tom but…"

The interesting things was that these comments came from people with little or no in-house experience.

There is no doubt that the differences between agency and in-house are many fold, but just in case anyone is looking at moving in-house as part of their end of career wind down process, I’d think again. 🙂

Working in-house isn’t a retirement plan…

Just stop for one moment. 

Think about where people go to find out about your company, your client, your product, your service or your industry.

It’s pretty straightforward.

They use a search engine.

Search Engines are incredibly important in ensuring that your company is top of mind among current and prospective clients.

I’m always amazed at how few PR people think about search engines. Understanding Search Engines, IMHO, is central to understand how you manage online reputations – and drive business.

But there’s another side to Search Engines….

There was a very interesting story in yesterday’s UK Sunday Times entitled "Smeared on the internet? Call in the cleaners".

Firms such as Reputation Defender (US), Tiger Two (UK) and Distilled (UK) offer services which promise to ensure that the top search results about you are positive.

This isn’t just simple search engine optimisation however. 

 

The services ensure that only friendly entries appear on the first few pages of results when a client’s name is run through search engines such as Google.

 

It’s reputation cleansing.

Reputation Defender charges $25,000 per year for the basic service rising to $300,000 for the premium version..

 

Michael Fertik, chief executive of Reputation Defender, said one of his clients was an academic psychologist in London anxious to “bury” the fact he had written about his own depression.

“Demand for the service is extremely high. Almost all our customers are private individuals and our top clients are high-pro-file business people,” said Fertik.