Search results matching tag 'PR Week'

The End of the Embargo?

2438628 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:54:00 GMT

Interesting piece in the current issue of PR Week about concerns we could be seeing the ‘Slow death of the embargo’. The Wall Street Journal is believed to have introduced a new policy stipulating that they will only honour embargos on exclusive stories. It’s a change of direction that’s obviously brought on by the pressure to be first with breaking news amid increasing competition from other online media outlets especially bloggers who traditionally have been more cavalier with embargos.

Certain newspapers may feel that they can’t afford the niceties of sitting on embargoed stories when specialist blogs are prepared to ‘publish and be dammed’. News has moved on it’s no longer written up today printed tonight and read in papers tomorrow, it’s available instantly & constantly via multiple formats.

The walls have come down and the means of news production are now available to anyone. In that light embargos can seem antiquated, but they still have a place, they just need to be used with care and not as a ‘catch all’ control mechanism.

PR Week editor Danny Rogers talks about embargoes as being “a lazy means of dealing with the media.” The WSJ and the blogs have stirred things up & if that stops these ‘lazy’ embargoes it’s probably no bad thing.

So what could this it mean for photos? I always feel the best way to handle a press PR photo is to use embargoes as sparingly as possible. Basically, ‘take it, get it out, get it in!’ Getting your pictures in the press is always hard enough without making it harder for yourself by putting embargoes across the top of them unless they’re really necessary.

Obviously certain photos because of logistics or availability need to be be taken beforehand and held back. Journalists will understand that and personal relationships, trust and exclusives will always play a role in this business. But maybe the shake up in attitudes towards embargoes generally will make people look at picture embargoes a bit harder too. Using embargoes where they aren’t really appropriate, such as on pictures taken in public places or of stunts that are open knowledge may start to become a thing of the past.

In this climate when the media is crying out for good, free to use PR copy, it’s unnecessary to shackle every story & picture with an embargo. Nobody can really control the media, instead we just need to continue to work with it making content that the press will want to use now, not next week.

Social Media Library – swapping reading glasses for shades

2505572 — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:11:00 GMT

Very much in the style of a Librarian, we launched Social Media Library quietly and discreetly in October last year.

Since then, Social Media Library has quickly grown a base of clients that includes some of the heaviest hitting PR & marketing agencies and brands in the UK.

We’re now preparing for our well overdue fanfare launch. Social Media Library is the UK’s first intelligent directory of influential social media sites. As such, we hold an immensely rich and revealing insight into the proliferation of social media in the UK.

We’re taking off our reading glasses to swap for some shades!

To launch Social Media Library to the UK press, we’ve prepared Social Media Insight 2009 – the first ever detailed analysis of social media in the UK. The report will analyse how social media varies across industry sectors – from consumer, b2b, finance, healthcare to technology. How the uptake of blogging, forums, podcasts and social networks compares with the more recent Twitter phenomenon. And how this use is spread geographically across the UK.

An early glimpse into the report appeared recently on the front-page of PRWeek. We’ve got lots planned in the press over the coming month. I will be keeping you posted here, together with sharing analysis and content from the report. Please keep with us!

Public Relations, Ethics & Sardines

917990 — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:11:00 GMT

There was a time, before the rise of social media and user generated content when organisations could get away with scurrilous acts of consumer extortion safe in the knowledge that the muted customer had few ways to hit back other than writing to Watch Dog.

Then came user generated content, forums, websites like ‘ihatedell’ and this week the magnificent ‘www.trainsardine.org’ a platform for commuters to complain about the million pounds a week they pay to travel like sardines in this country.

As a result, ethics suddenly has an elevated place at the board room table because a lack of them can now seriously damage a company’s profits.

A point Danny Rogers makes in PR Week this week, underlining the now close association of ethics and PR. He says: “Ultimately, comms staff can tell the wider world about what has been achieved. Indeed they can do so more effectively if they were involved all along. They can even inspire others organisations to do likewise. In other words, PR can be a force for the wider good.”

Makes you proud doesn’t it.

Kaplinski in PR suicide (blog)

917990 — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:29:00 GMT

As little as six years ago the majority of press releases still came by post. On DM Week, we used to have huge piles of them typed up so we could edit them on our trendy orange macs. How archaic that now seems. These days they arrive in unprecedented numbers by email and I’ve often wondered, as an agent now responsible for quite a few of them, how this change in volume and format has affected their impact.

Unable to find any research on the area I recently conducted my own small survey of B2B journalists. The results were surprising – at least to me. They show the average number received to be 35 a day (far less than I’d anticipated) of which 50% were considered irrelevant or poorly targeted (better than I’d thought actually). The main complaint (apart from targeting) turned out to be a lack of clear labelling.

On this basis even if your press releases are relevant and clearly labelled, you’re still competing with around 17 other emails a day for a journalist’s attention. These are not great odds.

Your chances lessen even more if you happen to email the likes of Five News’s editor David Kermode who in the latest issue of PR Week says this:

“One of my biggest bugbears is when an email arrives in my inbox that is obviously PR crap – it gets immediately deleted. One sure-fire way of not getting my attention is a bog-standard email. What irritates me about PR is the blanket nature of it.”

So the effectiveness of emailed press releases seems to lie somewhere between ‘not very’ and ‘suicidal’.

Note to self, best call Natasha direct.

Gordon Brown on You Tube

917990 — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It's good to hear I'm not the only one who thinks Labour's spin doctors are letting the PR side down. No less than Colin Byrne, Weber Shandwick’s chief and former Labour party chief press adviser says in PR Week today, “there’s no way these mistakes would have happened when Alistair Campbell was there.” He also compliments Conservative comms chief Andy Coulson for outmanouevering his opposite number.

Meanwhile, the client, no doubt fed up with the state of his public image, has escaped online, bypassing journalists altogether to commune direct with the electorate on You Tube. Good idea this, especially as press relations don't seem to be improving much under the charge of Labour's special press adviser whose approach is, according to Byrne, “just phoning up people and shouting at them.”

Perhaps with enough personal phone calls and vodcasts The PM can cut out the troublesome middlemen altogether. Might be easier to employ an effective PR though.