Murphy's Law

• Poor ‘ole Ketchum has been l’enfant terrible in the world of PR blogs for at least the last six months. Some of the criticism has been warranted but some of the recent blog-related bashing has been a little over the top for my liking. After all, how many top tier PR firms have blogs? Not very many in my estimation. So fair play to Adam Brown [blog], director at eKethcum who has responded to some of the more recent criticism over at Constantin Basturea‘s blog.

  After all, if we’re all agreed that this is about conversation and dialogue then Adam deserves our attention regardless of your views.

  More on the recent snafu from Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson.

• Fridrik Wacka has created a free primer on corporate blogging which will be useful to anyone looking at getting a blog initiative underway. Fredrik also reports that there are now more than 3,500 blogs at IBM…
• PR Week‘s Erica Iacono looks at how firms are working with staff in creating blogs and providing relevant guidelines. (Thanks to Neville Hobson for the link and Niall Cook has more comments here.)

  If you’re interested in some top level guidelines check this out.

• Fair play to Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing with the Eclipse Foundation who has posted some forthcoming press releases and is soliciting feedback ahead of their distribution at the JavaOne show in San Francisco. Now that’s something really different!

  More from Alice Marshall, Catherine Helzerman (one of the 3,500) and John Cass.

• Jeremy Pepper has an interview with PR pro, blogger and co-author of Naked Conversations, Shel Isreal.
• Scott Baradell of PR firm the Idea Grove, based in Richardson, Texas was in touch to let me know they have launched an online survey to “help” you evaluate your existing agency and a second printable matrix to help you select a new agency….
• According to AdWeek Miami-based PR firms John David PR and Julio Garcia Marketing and Public Relations have merged to create David & Garcia PR. The new firm covers the financial, real estate and healthcare sectors.
• The fact that the San Francisco 49’ers are now looking for a new PR director probably isn’t news to a lot of people…

• Morgan McLintic reports that Next Fifteen (Home of Bite and Text 100) has purchased PR firm Outcast for $6 million
• Meawhile Publicis has bought into UK PR firm Freud Communications.
• Trevor Cook has an interesting link to a recent offer from car maker Hyandai to Australian journalists at a car launch… Half price cars… They’ve since rescinded the offer..
• Kathy Klotz-Guest looks at the use of humor in PR.
• Andy Lark points to the new Computerworld blogs.

• Duncan Chapple who works for Lighthouse Analyst Relations has started a new blog called Analyst Equity.
• Elsewhere, you are sure to have already read about Ketchum‘s first venture into blogging: Ketchum Ideas.

Well I’m finally back in the office after far too much travelling and the associated scramble to keep on top of everything. Of course, as is often the case after a lot of travel, I now have an assortment of bugs and colds. Fantastic.

Early last week I spend three days at the Gartner conference in Barcelona. It was a fantastic opportunity to talk with customers and prospects and get a real-world understanding of how they see the market.

Often we’re far too busy in our day-to-day roles to stop and talk directly with our audience. This is understandable, we are busy, but nothing is as effective as hearing first hand what your customers and prospects think. It’s a great opportunity to test and review your messaging and your programs.

As part of the IAOC’s European blog week, I posted a brief outline of how we’re using blogs internally here at Cape Clear.

We use blogs internally for three general applications:

• Internal Communications
  Although our intranet was not created using blog software, it has since 1999, been published using the same format as a blog with plain HTML files published in reverse chronological order. The intranet looks like a blog and it inclues entries on everything that’s happening within the organization. It provides a single source of information on every event, press releases, news story, initiative as well as personal milestones such as new babies, weddings etc….
• Collaboration
  Our engineering organization has been using blogs since 2002 as part of their development process. There are a number of active blogs covering a range of subject areas such as discussions on new features and updates on specific projects. The blogs ensure that all our engineers are current on the status of any project and have an opportunity to participate in the engineering planning process. We also have specific blogs for different product releases which are archive once the product is shipped….
• Knowledge Management
  We use a number of internal blogs as central repositories for information on a specific topic. These differ from the development blogs because instead of focusing on a project they act as a single point of access for stories, resources etc. on the a specific technology area….

You can find the full post here.

Matt Foster was in touch about his new blog Citizen Spin which looks at ‘managing reputations in a digital age’.

In my absence there’s been an explosion of content on the PR blogs, I’m not going to be able to get to all of them, but do check on the links on the right.

A couple of quick links to posts that caught my eye:

• Jeremy Pepper has an interview with Julia Hood, Editor of PR Week.
• Mark Borkowski re-publishes a story from the UK Independent newspaper in 2001 where he recounts his experiences as Michael Jackson‘s PR consultant.
• Trevor Cook has been interviewed (free registration required) for an interesting story on blogging the Sydney Morning Herald.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed very soon….

I am sure that every PR blogger has been getting e-mails over the past week from a disgruntled PR practitioner who has been making claims about a certain large global PR agency and their operations in Poland. As I’ve been on the road I haven’t had a chance to look into this in much detail and have chosen at this point not to re-publish these claims – particularly given they are unsubstantiated.

Also the fact that the same e-mail has been sent to all my e-mail addresses, and in some cases multiple times, is creating a number of questions regarding the credibility and validity of these claims.

If anyone has talked with the individual in question or the agency, I’d like to hear from you.

I haven’t been completely quiet on the blog front for the past week, I’ve been contributing posts to Guillaume du Gardier‘s ‘Blogging in Europe’ series which is taking place this week over on the IAOC Blog.

Things have been quiet here lately due to trade shows and meetings in Europe and now travel to the US. Normal service should resume in the next day or so….