Search results matching tag 'Public Relations'

‘Professional bloggers’ - the the PR people of tomorrow?

2545541 — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:38:00 GMT

Fellow Cow Ella forwarded me on this piece by Fuat Kircaali from Web 2.0 all about how PR people and consultancies are marketing dinosaurs due for extinction.

Sure, the guy was trying to push his Utilizer news publishing platform with a fairly up-front plug in the article. However, it’s this quote that caught my attention:

“Companies with the Largest Number of Professional Bloggers will win. Tomorrow's (and I mean tomorrow, not the next decade) marketing game will be played on professional corporate blogging platforms. The companies with the largest number of well-read and respected corporate bloggers will win the marketing and propaganda games.”

Will the PR people of tomorrow simply be glorified bloggers with brands employing an army of scribes to send pearls of wisdom into the online ether?

I can see some logic in this argument. News is increasingly online first and in print a distant second, everyone is connected, and blogs directly help your search engine rankings. Nevertheless, I would have thought that the need to disseminate more news online and engage with people means professional (and trained) communicators are more and not less necessary.

So - “The new job description of "professional corporate blogger" will be a very popular one”? Well that depends. Companies like Kodak do have people present in this sphere, but what they do works as they actually add value to customers (in Kodak’s case via a photo blog).

Assembly line blogging where announcements are blasted out however is just online noise, something we have plenty of already.

Image - Barely Fitz

PR moves from push to pull

917990 — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:18:00 GMT

We wrote a press release for a client recently on quite an obscure area of email marketing but it happened to contain some research information which revealed something nobody in email marketing knew about, which was of obvious practical value.

It ran in a couple of well known marketing portals to start with but the ripple effect was quite extraordinary, picked up on so many blogs and related company sites that we literally gave up counting. It was like throwing a heavy stone into a lake and watching the ripples flow out.

The implications for online PR is that story content is progressively king online, especially when you bear in mind that it is very tricky if not impossible to pitch to blogs. Add to that the SEO implications of all those mentions and we should all be looking on our client’s beach for the heaviest stone we can.

Obama’s ‘Message of Hope’ and what this means for us here in the UK?

628994 — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:56:00 GMT

It’s easy to become cynical about politics and politicians. I was in conversation with Sir Paul Judge on this subject just this week.

High up on the 18th floor of his magnificent London pad that overlooks the River Thames in Pimlico Sir Paul was waxing lyrical to me about the need for politics and politicians to get back to what really matters – what’s best for the UK and for the constituents who elected them rather than the direction of a political party.

And this is coming from someone who was Chairman of the Conservative Party!

But I couldn’t help thinking Sir Paul had a point.

Do we really need to indulge in discussions about the allowances claimed by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for her second home rather than thinking how many low income families will be able to afford to pay the rent next month?

Very quickly our conversation turned to the film I made for a special event at the House of Commons commemorating the inauguration of Barack Obama. You can view this in high definition by clicking on the following link:

Made in a record-breaking five days I was still rendering the film at the London College of Communication before I jumped in a taxi to the House of Commons for the live link with Obama’s inauguration, viewed on a sporadic web link via the BBC web site!

Despite the challenges this posed – including losing part of Aretha Franklin's performance! – the experience of witnessing history in the making will live with me forever.

What was interesting was the way in which people responded to Obama’s message of hope and where now everything is possible in much the same way that he has demonstrated.

Ardi Kolah is the founder & CEO of Guru in a Bottle (www.guruinabottle.com), a sales and marketing training and mentoring company that launches in a few weeks’ time. He can be contacted on 077100 77941 and ardi@guruinabottle.com

There is a light and it never goes out.

917990 — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:56:00 GMT

The Citigroup logo I’m used to seeing blazing proudly at night atop their Canary Wharf office block has been extinguished this week, perhaps out of respect for the 50,000 redundancies announced on Monday and what with Lehman’s once proud sign now unscrewed and lying in the liquidator’s skip, Auden’s words ‘pack up the moon and dismantle the sun’ seem weirdly apt for the financial sector these days.

However, in other areas of the economy we may be over- gloomy. “It’s a recession not Armageddon” said the CEO of Next, Simon Wolfson today in Drapers and the belief that financial journalism must bear some responsibility for talking us further into recession is something also spotlighted this week in a timely report from POLIS – the LSE think tank which analyses the affect of media on society. They say:

“Whilst the root causes of the crisis appear to lie in the behaviour and regulation of banks and other investors, many have asked what role financial reporting may have played in the crisis, and whether the crisis would have been so sudden and deep if a different approach to the practice of financial journalism had been taken.”

Not that it’s all the journalist’s fault - PR strategies are seen as one of the four major problems facing financial scribes. I wonder if by PR strategies they mean lack of them. If food companies can stem consumer fears over contamination by announcing immediate action why didn’t the banks and the government? It seems the knee jerk reaction is to keep a low profile, issue as little information as necessary and perhaps even go as far as to turn the light off on the logo of your company headquarters.

Big problem with that is people will wonder what else you’re hiding.

Divided by a common language

917990 — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Listening to Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, I was reminded of Shaw’s quote about how different we are in our use of language. Obama’s genuinely inspiring speech, referencing Martin Luther King in his call for supporters “to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day” while magical in a US context, sadly wouldn’t work for our politicians.

If, for example, David Cameron became Prime Minister and started quoting Churchill in the tone of a US politician on the podium, he’d be derided as pompous, possibly crazed and certainly a bit ‘up himself’.

The differences continue in business language. A favourite US phrase at the moment is ‘reach out’ as in, ‘company x is reaching out to its customers’. I quite like the feel of this phrase but put that in front of a British journalist and they’re unlikely to read any further.

The best a PR can do is write the release in the language and style of the publications they are targeting and in the UK this means free of any hyperbole or blatant self promotion. If this is done well, the release may appear verbatim in the target publication – the ultimate accolade for the anonymous PR.

Incidentally, one other thing that doesn’t always translate is abbreviation. Hearing one supporter referring to Obama as BO was a bit of an eyebrow raiser.

Don't Panic!

917990 — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:19:00 GMT

Back in the balmy financial days of June I was bemoaning on this blog the absence of Mandelson and Campbell and the general decline of the spin doctor. All hell breaks lose politically and financially and suddenly they're back, Campbell masterminding Brown's speech at the Labour conference and Mandelson returning from european exile to number 10. I guess there's nothing like a crisis to make PRs feel needed.

Of course In the business world, many large companies have crisis PR strategies and dedicated agencies for the task in place for if the worst happens - to manage their shareprice and protect their brand. Disasterously the US & UK governments don't seem to have had anything of the sort in place and so we've been treated to an unrelenting tide of negative coverage punctuated by occasional unconvincing statements of action by politicians while the world's stock continues to fall off a cliff.

An hour ago Mervyn King at The Bank of England released a statement designed to ease fears on the PA website. Predictably, his release headlined 'Bank loan move to help ease crisis' became the negative and emotive 'British banks bailed out' on the BBC.

So this leads to two 'systemic' PR issues the government needs to correct if we ever get out of this mess. Where was this statement and others of its kind two weeks ago and how much responsibility does the media bear for talking us into more of mess than we'd otherwise be in.

Gordon’s secret weapon – Sarah Brown

917990 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:47:00 GMT

Having steadfastly refused to ‘do a Cherie’ Sarah Brown has finally stepped out of the shadows today and by introducing her husband at the Labour Party Conference, set the tone for a speech which appears to be doing the impossible in inspiring the party to get behind their beleaguered party leader – at least for a while.

A former Brunswick PR, Sarah Browns appearance reminds us that Gordon is not just a politician but a family man who cares about people and the country. OK, he’s never going to be a charismatic speaker but by demonstrating his human side and his party’s past achievements, he’s going some way to re establish his leadership on a solid footing.

Alistair Campbell had also been drafted in to handle the BBC’s coverage of the speech in a dual with John Sopel and appears to be winning,

Nice to see PRs doing a decent job for Labour at last.

Is It Too Late For PR?

980070 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 06:07:00 GMT

Bigmouthmedia have commissioned some clever research showing up the UK’s Public Relations industry for failing to capitalise on the burgeoning online opportunities staring them in the face.

The report says a staggering 79% have yet to add any online or social media services to their portfolio.

Although London leads the way overall with 28% offering Internet PR to clients, it’s incredible that such a huge amount are sticking to traditional media to keep them and their customer’s afloat in these lean times.

As part of Microsoft’s adCenter Community team I’ve been contributing to the adCenter Blog and using social media such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate news, tips, tricks and best practices to our customers for over two years.

It’s a no-brainer, low-cost way of keeping in contact with your client base and for generating leads too. Making sure blog posts titles are keyword & content-rich and building up authority with search engine algorithms will see incremental traffic coming through exposing your brand to new audiences FOR FREE!

So why are PR companies not embracing this no longer “new media”? Loss of message control? Limited understanding or skill set?

Online should be integrated into any PR campaign right from the start.

How do the majority of journalists do their research? Where do the public check out products and services they’re thinking of buying?

Exactly!

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.