Murphy's Law

In response to my post yesterday regarding the need for blogs to be adopted by all practitioners and not placed in a “special” group as the Internet was in the past, Niall Cook informs me that Hill & Knowlton’s “interactive” division is still alive and kicking and indeed is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year:

“The main reason for this is exactly as you say – because PR is about communications. We have somehow managed to be the “ivory tower” and the internal awareness raiser. As a result, more of our practitioners have the basic knowledge needed to create programmes that work across both traditional and online channels.”

I agree with Niall’s sentiments, though I still maintain that many of these divisions were established in the past as part of a desperate attempt by agencies to latch onto something they didn’t (and didn’t want to) understand. I have no problems with specialist groups within PR firms, as long as it doesn’t hamper other practitioners gaining a strong understanding of techniques and tools that are important to the success of their clients.

Blogs are one of those tools (oops I used the tool word).

I recently came across another PR blog, this time from high tech PR firm New Venture Marketing.

They have a two really interesting posts on Cisco’s newsroom which has been leading the way for online press rooms for a long long time.

These posts are definetely worth a read for anyone interested in building compelling online press rooms: Part 1, Part 2.

“The company also uses the RSS feeds to provide security alerts. While RSS syndication is passive (customers must sign up for your feed), it is a robust technology, highly granular and customizable.

Moreover, the company gets triple the value from its content: First, when the material is released as news. Second, when it is archived as part of a rich resource of searchable information, and the third, in the form of links to the site which help drive search engine rankings.”

 

PR Pro Catherine Helzerman has put together a “Communications Wiki” to provide a place for people to share information, advice, knowledge and of course opinions on PR, communications and all associated subject areas. 

Catherine points out there’s no commerical angle here, just an online place where anyone can read and share their experiences and knowledge.

 

An online survey on media monitoring from Slipstream Group has some interesting findings:

• 62% of respondents currently use paper clipping services
• 42% use online monitoring services
• The median budget for media monitoring is $10,000 per year
• No surprise that missed clips and slow delivery are the most common problems
• Newspapers remain the #1 monitored media
• On average, practitioners use 3/4 different tools/services to monitor media coverage

You can read an executive summary of the report here.

The full report costs $195.

First and foremost, congratulations to Interpublic’s MWW Group* who have announced the formation of a new “specialty” practice called Blog 360 which will “work with clients to develop proprietary blogging strategies, from creation and marketing to sponsorships and advertising, geared to increasing relevance among target audiences”.

Kudos to one of the larger PR firms who have recognized the value of blogs and blog expertise.  From a marketing perspective the news has already been widely covered across the PR blog community – which while not necessarily the most read Internet segment – reaches a relevant audience.

However, if the creation of this group is anything more than a marketing ploy it does raise a concern. This is the same tactic that saw the creation of many “interactive” divisions back in the boom days.  Groovy offshoots and departments of people solely focused on online tactics, measurement and influence. How many of those “divisions” are still around? The majority have disapeared or been folded back into the mothership.

The reason is this.  Public Relations is about communications.  Therefore all your practitioners should have knowledge of the channels, techniques and approaches to those channels.  It’s no good having an ivory tower in the corner of one of your offices, this knowledge must leak across your entire firm.

So let’s give MWW Group their (in my opinion) deserved moment in the sun and then let’s get back to the more important business of raising awareness and understanding of blogging, podcasting, search engine optimization etc to all practitioners.

*Notes:

• I’m not providing a link to MWW’s website because to be honest the Flash navigation is so bad it upsets me
• I notice that the firm hasn’t actually posted the press release to their (awful) website yet… damn difficult to get those scrolling flash news headlines changed I bet.
• Finally with this new division of blogging experts, did they actually target any PR blogs with the news? Not me anyway….

Public Relations, at its most basic, is concerned with the most effective means of reaching and communicating with relevant audiences.  Along with traditional avenues from townhall meetings to fliers, press releases, editorial and analyst meetings, new outlets such as search engines and blogs are providing additional channels for a growing number of companies. 

The mass usage of search engines by people researching products, services or ideas online means that it is foolish to ignore the power of search engine optimization. At the same time the sheer volume of information online can confuse or frustrate users and prevent them from finding the information they want.  There are already some tools available to help reduce the noise, but you can expect major steps forward in this area over the coming years.  Of course that presents new challenges for PR people attempting to reach online audiences – what if you’re filtered out?

Trevor Cook has an excellent article for the Australian Financial Review which looks at how technology can reduce the noise overload and includes digestible introductions to the tools that are becoming available to help people reduce the noise and increase the relevance.

“On the other hand, as one participant said, we may need to adopt a more Zen-like approach to the problem and just accept that we will (shock) miss some good information from time to time. We may need to get off the technology-driven information treadmill and occasionally �catch a sunset�.”

 I recently wrote about the growing movement of PR people from agencies to in-house roles and vice versa.  The Financial Times has a story on the trend, reporting that Microsoft, PepsiCo, Woolworths and Accenture have all recently hired PR people from the agency world. Some of the quotes in the piece illustrate some of the age old prejudices I referenced in my earlier post.

“It’s driving everyone mad,” one senior PR consultancy executive complains. “It’s happened to us three times in the past 12 months and we ended up losing business as a result. There’s a real shortage of creative talent on the client side, in my view, and the way this is being dealt with is unacceptable.”

 Fineman PR have published their annual list of the top ten PR blunders. [The last time I posted an entry on Fineman’s list I pointed out their own little blunder – they don’t make the list available on their website – no change.]

 Interesting AP story on how the spate of corporate scandals continued in 2004.

 South Africa’s Marketing Web has a story on the uneasy relationship between advertising and PR

 Bacon’s has acquired PR measurement firm Delahaye Medialink beefing up their PR measurement services alongside their media databases…

 

You go away for a couple of days and the biggest analyst story of the year breaks. 

As you have probably already read, a year after Forrester acquired Giga Group, it turns out that Gartner is acquiring Meta Group for $162 million.

One of the signs of a maturing market is consolidation and this move from Gartner has a major impact on the number of large standalone analyst firms. They’re dwindling.

However, while the bigs boys merge, the absolute number of industry analysts continues to grow rapidly.  Just like the PR business, the analyst business has seen a huge growth in the number of small boutique firms.  These are typically one or two people businesses  – this category doesn’t include well established firms like Aberdeen, Yankee, Nucleus, Current Analysis etc.

Many of these boutique firms focus tightly on specific markets and are generating a lot of revenue from their specialization.

The problem for PR practitioners of course (I include Analyst Relations practitioners in the Public Relations category) is that this fragmentation in many ways makes effective communication with relevant influencers more difficult, particularly if the boutiques in your market segment have attracted a strong end user client list.

Some boutiques provide real independent advice, whilst others have a business plan around attracting revenue from all the vendors in a given market: pay-for-play.

The best advice I can give is that it is more important than ever to understand your market, clearly define your audience and be pragmatic.

The likelihood is that unless you’re a very large company you have a lot of potential firms and very limited budget to share between them. Focus on the firms who can give you value and firms that are successfully reaching your target market. Unfortunately there will always been some boutique firms that will insist on pay-for-play and while these firms are typically fantastic self promoters, if they’re not retaining clients in your target market you may have to turn the other cheek.

These decisions are difficult and important, but like any other business decision they should be based on a clear understanding of your business objectives. That at the end of the day is the most important consideration.

So to finish in full Gartner style:

1. Absolute number of industry analysts to be reduced by this merger (0.2 probability)
2. This merger to reduce the total number of analyst firms by more than one (0.1 probability)
3. Number of small analyst firms to continue to grow (0.8 probability)

Stories on the Gartner-Meta merger:

• Gartner-Meta Deal Part of Ongoing Trend – Information Week
• Gartner Buys Meta Group – The Inquirer
• Gartner buys research rival Meta for $162 million – The Register
• Gartner Snatches Meta Group for $162 Million – NewsFactor
• Gartner Makes a Move – Motley Fool

If you have undergone the traditional ‘on the job’ PR training then it’s very likely you have at some stage (or regularly) been told to ring up every journalist you send a press release to, with the most helpful question “did you get the press release”.

This practice, which I am ashamed to admit I did on a number of occasions, is simply the most ridiculous piece of work I ever had to do. I’m sure the motivation for following up the postal system and the fax machine (this was a long time before that new fangled e-mail system) had some basis in sound thinking.  After all it’s the telemarketing approach to PR, ring 200 people and surely someone will bite. You can also tell the client that you’ve been in touch with 200 journalists for their announcement.  But was it successful? I don’t believe so.

One of the common defences of this practice was “the client wants it done”, yet I can never recall a client requesting it or asking had we done it.

Of course if you were an innovative young buck like myself you soon tailored your follow up to ask if they needed photography or something similar…..

Charles Arthur is the technology correspondent of the UK Independent newspaper.  His has written a post on this practice on his blog:

“I made the point that one of the least useful phone calls they make is the one where they say �Did you get that press release I emailed you?� If I�m getting 200 emails a day, I can�t be calling people up to tell them; nor dealing with the phone calls arising from those emails. I need to do some work some time, not just acknowledge receiving the raw information.

�But,� said one, �we get required to make those calls by our clients. They want to get feedback on whether the release was useful to you.� It�s part of �measuring� PR�s effectiveness.

Ohhh, I said. Right. But it still doesn�t make sense. Here�s why. Most emails, I�m not going to act on. They�re just content in the wrong context; they don�t make a story. (On average, 1 in 500 emails generates a story directly.) So if you send it and then ask if it was useful, I�m probably going to say no.

But who knows how useful it might be in a few days, or weeks, or months? I archive my email, and search it on subjects; or read it and note the subject. That can come in useful later. So should I then ring the PR company and say �Mark that one down as useful!”

 

‘Tis the time of year for dusting off the crystal ball and making some predictions for the coming twelve months.

Speaking for myself I’ll be sticking by my predictions for 2004, I think they’re all still relevant for the next year.

• Andy Lark offers ten ways communications will change in 2005.
• Mike Manuel offers five predictions for 2005
• The Corporate Blog is Neville Hobson’s hot prediction for 2005.