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Some thoughts and opinions on the Public Relations profession and industry
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1/31/2003
PR OPINIONS HAS MOVED!!! PLEASE VISIT http://www.natterjackpr.com
After a couple of evenings spent feverishly working on PR Opinions, I have moved the blog to http://www.natterjackpr.com. Please update your bookmarks! There won't be anymore additions to http://tmurphy.blogspot.com, though I will leave it here. I have also managed to migrate all the archives to the new site. Thanks Tom 1/30/2003
The beatings will continue until...
The media landscape continues to be ravaged with more and more layoffs. But you know things have really got out of hand when an entire editorial team puts itself up for sale on eBay. Although the eBay entry now says "Complete former staff of Z---- T--- U-----" following some obvious legal wranglings, it originally said the "Complete staff of ZDNet Tech Update". The offer includes staff on the East and West coast including:Executive editor, Senior editor/producers (All San Francisco) Executive editor / columnist, Managing editor / copy editor, Senior producers, Senior editor / producers, Senior content management developer / Vignette programmer (All Boston). The auction ends on February 5th and the current highest bid is $2.25.... 1/29/2003
Public Relations news round up...
THE AUTHOR OF "THE DEATH OF SPIN", George Pitcher has an article on Corner Bar PR discussing how good public relations can't substitute good business practice. PR WEEK HAS AN INTERESTING story on the current health of technology trade shows. BURSON-MARSTELLER HAS BEEN appointed as the agency of record for Stellar Internet Monitoring - whose products monitor the "misuse" of a firm's Internet resources. ahem. KETCHUM AND DDB (Omnicom siblings) have merged their French operations. BROADGATE CONSULTANTS A NY BASED corporate communications firm has joined up with the global PR firm network Public Relations Organizations International. THE PR MAESTRO AT leading UK football club, Manchester United, is grilled by the public online! If you've any PR news or views let me know. Two clients for the price of two clients.... Can anyone spot the similarities between two Public Relations announcements (1, 2) made for two clients by the same PR firm? I'll grant you there are some differences. :-) Do you use that phone for Public Relations? A colleague yesterday pointed out that weblogs will never become mainstream until people forget about how they work and what they offer and just use them. His analogy was the telephone and I thought he's absolutely right. However, given that weblogs have barely leaked outside the global community of technology enthusiasts we probably still have some way to go. Last week during a course I was giving to non-technology people, I polled attendees on who had heard of or used weblogs or blogs and the answer was 0.00%. Now granted this isn't a scientific study, but weblogs aren't prime time.... yet. There are signs they are getting there however. The Register has a story today on a guy in Washington who was fired for his blog. There's proof, if it was required, that weblogs are growing in importance! 1/28/2003
Barging in...
The New York Post stopped an article by Manhattan-based PR Jeff Barge in which Barge accused his industry of being in the "deception business". The Post says they dropped the story becuase it was too "self-promotional". Thanks to Deborah Branscum for the link. PowerPoint...Death by any other name Karlin Lillington has an interesting entry today on the evils of PowerPoint and references John Naughton's recent piece in the UK Observer. We've been trying to avoid what we call here "Death by PowerPoint" for some time. There are pros and cons from a communication perspective. The conversation is by it's nature more natural and engaging without slides, however because people are so conditioned to "watch" PowerPoint presentations, sometimes a non-PowerPoint based session is clearly a struggle for them. On a personal note, when you are two weeks on the road meeting analysts and journalists, "UnPowerPointed" meetings are far more interesting than the same twenty slides over and over again. Of course, PowerPoint can be useful for communicating complex concepts but to use it as a crutch can make for truly horrendous meetings. Additional links: John Naughton's Blog and The Gettysburg Address as it would appear in PowerPoint! 1/27/2003
XPRL appoints new chairperson to guide Public Relations standards...
XPRL.org the organization established to propose a common XML standard for the Public Relations profession has appointed a new chairperson, Alison Clark. Alison, based in the UK, is a self-employed public relations consultant who previously held a variety of roles with Edelman, Wessex Water and Shandwick. For anyone not aware of XPRL.org I recommend a visit to their website. It promises a new opportunity for standardizing the various documents we use in the PR process from press releases to clippings. Easier isn't necessarily better... the Public Relations lesson As we all know just because something is easier it doesn't necessarily follow that it's better. For example. It's certainly easier to watch a football game on TV, it's cheaper, the toilets are close-by, you have the benefit of expert opinion and have the best views of the action. But you know it's still far superior to experience the atmosphere youself, to be in the stadium. The same can be said of e-mail. It has many positive attributes. It's fast, easy to use and can provide a rich source of information with links, attachments etc. It also can help us be more productive. However on the flip side it also has many negative attributes. We are overwhelmed with the volume of information we get on e-mail, it promotes laziness where people manage by e-mail rather than talking with others and in many cases people use e-mail in place of good working practices. But for Public Relations practitioners one of the major problems with e-mail is that is can be shared around the globe in seconds. Organizations honed good human resources techniques for many years, are we ready to throw them all out in favor of e-mail? The answer should be no. There are of course circumstances when you must communicate over e-mail. However you should always write it with the assumption that it will be distributed outside your firm. The advent of sites such as Internal Memos.com mean any electronic communication must be carefully crafted and must take into account how it communicates to people outside the initial distribution list. This was prompted by a story found by Richard Bailey in last Saturday's UK Guardian. The story tells how Julie Meyer, a prominent figure in the UK's dotbomb period and a founder of the UK's First Tuesday club for Internet entrepreneurs is facing issues around leaked e-mails about the ill-health of her latest venture. The memo's purport to represent communications between Ms. Meyer and her staff, though she adamantly denies their authenticity. This raises serious PR issues. It's one thing to have an internal memo leaked, but what about a faked memo? 1/24/2003
How are you coping with the growth in content?
The Internet has spawned the largest content creation boom in the history of personkind. This explosion of news and views among professional journalists and consumers has serious implications for practitioners whose job it is to monitor public opinion as well as monitoring what's being written and debated in the public domain. Given that search engines only index around 40% of Internet content and there's only so many pages of links you can trawl through in a day, what are the alternatives? There are aggregated search applications such as Copernic which help, but still face the same issues as what they're aggregating. Then there are monitoring applications such as WebClipping or EWatch which trawl the web looking for mentions of your company or client - but anyone who uses them knows these have severe limitations. Today, you are probably using a combination of these approaches. However there is an additional helper application for PR pros trying to stay on top of the news. RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication - depending on who to talk to!). RSS provides immediate news feeds which can be aggregated inside an RSS news reader. Why are these useful? Well in an 'e-mail type' application you can subscribe to feeds from most of the major newspapers, magazines and blogs and the headlines are all automatically downloaded, making it far easier to monitor news stories as they happen. RSS won't replace web browsing or our other monitoring applications, but they can definetely lighten the work load of keeping on top of all the latest news. It's also much much faster, no waiting for loading web pages, no pop-up ads etc. Big tech firms like IBM and SAP are now publishing their press releases as RSS feeds - a growing trend. Why not take a look. Some of the most popular RSS readers are FeedReader (PC), NetNewsWire (Mac) and Headline Viewer (PC). I'm currently using Syndirella. And of course PR Opinions now provides an RSS feed as well, just add http://tmurphy.blogspot.com/rss/tmurphy.xml into your RSS reader for the latest news as it happens! The American Press Institute and JD Lasica at the Online Journalism Review both have recent stories on the impact of RSS on journalists and publications alike. 1/23/2003
United States and Europe diverge on trust...
In a survey of over 850 "opinion leaders" in the United States and Europe, Edelman found that there are significant differences in corporate trust between the continents. The survey found that while trust in corporations had fallen in Europe, it had risen in the United States. This seems a very strange finding to me :-) Trust in the US government is slipping however and remains very low in Europe. In terms of corporate trust, Americans trust producers of consumer durables and consumer packaged goods most. In Europe, it's healthcare and airlines. The biggest difference between the United States and Europe is in the most trusted brands. In the US the most trusted brands are Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Ford. In Europe its Amnesty International, World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and Oxfam. If you ever needed to convince your boss that PR is different in Europe, here's your proof!! The Edelman presentation is online here. 1/22/2003
PR news from around the Internet...
THE FOUNDATION FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS has conducted a study of 115 major US companies and found that ninety eight percent of CEOs took part in some political activity in the last year. A particularly alarming finding was that over twenty five percent of the companies surveyed had no crisis management team in place! Read more here. IN OTHER NEWS, OVER NINETEEN Public Relations organizations (yep that's nineteen) have come together to urge corporate America to take steps to restore the much damaged element of trust. The nineteen organizations are: Arthur W. Page Society, Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, Corporate Communication Institute at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Council of Communication Management, Council of Public Relations Firms, Global Public Affairs Institute, Institute for Public Relations, IPR's Commission on Measurement & Evaluation, International Association of Business Communicators, IABC Research Foundation, International Public Relations Association, National Investor Relations Institute, National School Public Relations Association, Public Affairs Council, Public Relations Society of America, PRSA Counselors Academy, PRSA Foundation, Women Executives in Public Relations, Foundation of WEPR. The press release is here. You can find the URL's yourself! :-) You can't hide behind Public Relations.. There's a story on the UK-based HR Gateway website about how PR can't hide poor HR practice. The story is in advance of a free e-book being offered by Nicola Hunt on "Communications & HR" which is being released on February 3rd. More glory for Public Relations Following on from the story I posted about PR men slipping money to politicians in return for favors, a "PR" consultant (the BBC's description not mine) has been found guilty of insider trading in the UK. The consultant, Tim Blackstone, has enjoyed a number of "customer service" positions during his career as a former journalist with the UK Sunday Times and a porn actor. According to the BBC story, Mr Blackstone was fined £1,000, ordered to pay £16,000 prosecution costs and told to hand over the £3,000 profit he had made on the shares. Analyst Consolidation Continues Last year the Hurwitz Group closed it's doors, the highest profile casualty in the technology research business. Today news reaches us that Forrester Research has purchased Giga Group. More detail at Computerworld. 1/20/2003
PR Round-up
Reed Bolton Byrum has been appointed as the 2003 President and CEO of the PRSA. Byrum is an "independent strategic communications consultant" for Trilogy and other technology companies. PRSA's publication PR Tactics has an interview with Byrum...... A debate between PR people and the media in Dubai got a little heated last week. Young and Rubicam has closed it's PR subsidiary in Australia with the loss of 14 jobs. The agency had billings of around AUS$2 million. A survey of Canadia CEO's by Hill & Knowlton found that they believe print and broadcast criticism is a bigger threat to their organization's corporate reputation than the ethical behaviour of their firms. In more sobering news, three PR staffers at HSR Business to Business, Cincinnati, were killed in a car accident last Thursday on their way to a client meeting. The victims were Barbara M. Conry-Dressman, Patrick J. Cunningham and Kevin J. Pfirrman. Details of the arrangements are on the HSR website. Ketchum delivers outlook for 2003 I just received the latest installment of Ketchum's "Perspectives" newsletter. Some interesting opinions in there. A roundtable on what's coming up for communications came up with the following areas: - On the legal front, the worldwide ripple effect of corporate scandals and the election of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress explain the fresh interest in litigation and proposed legislation affecting it. - Market research climbs in value as a persistently weak economy forces companies to demand a return on their investment in communications. - Interest in multicultural marketing is propelled by the population strides that Hispanics, Asians and other minority groups have made in many countries, especially the U.S. - The outlook for the media remains of paramount interest to all public relations practitioners, across all specialties. A personal review of marketing in 2002.. Anne Holland who looks after the SherpaBlog has released "Marketing Inspiration for 2003" which includes insight from over 600 marketing professionals on the lessons they learned during 2002. It includes a section on PR and more general marketing areas. How are your professional morals? Welcome to a new week. To kick off, here's a professional dilemma. You work in an agency, you have a long standing client, very run-of-the-mill, a relatively small business but profitable business. They've been a happy client for a long time - and you're happy to have them as a client. However, one day all hell breaks loose. The owners are arrested on child pornography charges. As their PR consultant they turn to you for support. PR support. You find out the charges are correct, your client is guilty. Do you persevere or do you walk away? What do you do? This mirrors a recent case where the PR in question did defend their client in the court of public perception, I'm don't think I would. What about you? 1/17/2003
Poor economy still a concern, but PR still the most effective
This is according to the Patrick Marketing Group's study on Marketers' Outlook for 2003. Based on responses from 400 marketers across a wide range of industries during December, the study finds that: 1) Generating leads is the #1 priority for Marketing in 2003 2) The biggest trend affecting Marketing is lower budgets (closely followed by Internet Marketing) 3) The major Marketing-related challenge is the poor economy 4) And responsdents feel PR is the most effective tool for branding (closely followed by print advertising) What are your biggest challenges for 2003? Let me know... Media Update - Inc. Magazine MarketingSherpa interviews the new Editor-in-Chief at Inc Magazine John Koten who has some interesting views on what makes a good press room and some tips on pitching stories to Inc. 1/16/2003
The upside of the downturn
Some firms are getting a benefit from the downturn. According to the Denver Business Journal, the harsh economic climate has forced local companies to move their PR and Advertising accounts from firms in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York to local firms who can provide better value and better service through proximity. "People no longer have as much time as they had before because they have smaller budgets," Jane Dvorak CEO of the Denver-based JKD and Co. Inc. public relations firm said. "The reality is that things can almost always be done locally. It's just a matter of time and cost." 1/15/2003
The brown bag PR men
It's been a bad couple of months for political PR people caught giving and taking bribes. In Bridgeport Connecticut, Leonard Grimaldi, a public relations consultant testified that he has provided Mayor Jospeh P. Ganim with "cash, fine wines, expensive clothing, meals at upscale restaurants, massages and fitness equipment" and in return Ganim would push contracts to Gimaldi's clients. Meanwhile over the past few months in Ireland, former government PR, Frank Dunlop has been testifying how he handed over cash in return for favorable planning applications. Not good, not good at all... Blogs ain't what they use to (pretend to) be. Brendan O'Neill has an excellent piece on Spiked about how blogs are not going to change the face of journalism. It's a well written piece and makes very valid points. I don't believe that blogs will change the entire media business, they are rather another piece of the jig-saw - not the whole picture.... Blogs are another line in our to-do lists...so to speak. Having said that, certain blogs provide widspread exposure to online users and they need to be monitored and targeted by practitioners. Interesting to see that Jupiter Research now has blogs from its analysts online. Some light reading material Thanks to Richard Bailey for the link to an interesting article in the Financial Times about how journalists have got on after jumping ship to the world of PR... of course it hasn't all been plain sailing... Phil Gomes is back among us... The Inlumient weblog has a link to a Publicity Primer 1/14/2003
The old Internet
It's clear that the Internet is maturing (thank God). In the aftermath of the hyped dot.bomb 'entrepreneurs' and their over the top visions of a world where no one gets dressed, but instead just surfs from their bedroom we have a global infrastructure which is currently connecting over 500 million users. Now it's all settled down, how is the Internet affecting journalism? Well just as radio didn't kill print and TV didn't kill radio, Internet is taking it's place alongside the other traditional media outlets - but with a difference. The Internet is allowing journalists to become more interactive. Without doubt Dan Gillmor at the San Jose Mercury News is the leading thinker on how the Internet is changing his profession. His latest installment "Here comes we media" is published in this month's Columbia Journalism Review. Have a read and have a think as to how PR fits in this new media landscape. 1/10/2003
Mediamap.. credit where it's due
We all know that there is very little free PR-related content on the Web (yes I know I'm cheap) as many of the best sources have moved to a subscription model - and good luck to them. So it's great to find a regular rich source of PR opinions (sic). Mediamap the online media database firm, through their ExpertPR site consistently publish well-written PR opinions pieces every month. And this month is no exception. First up, the folks at Birnbach communications provide some predictions for 2003 across a wide range of areas including the economy, security, healthcare and the media amongst others The guys at RLM PR provide a wry view of the off-beat news during 2002. My favorite quote from their article is from a spokesperson at Nintendo: “Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” Meanwhile, Claudia Sawyer takes a look at what happened to the newspaper business in 2002 - not a pleasant sight! Sue Duris at M4 communications gives some tips on building successful media relations plans And finally, Mediamap include a very interesting range of views on 2002 and a host of predictions on what's going to happen to PR in 2003 from some of your PR brethren. In the spirit of not asking what your industry can do for you, etc. etc. why not get in touch with Mediamap and offer some of your own opinions - you know you want to! 1/08/2003
So, are you in it for the money?
Research from Grady College at the University of Georgia suggests that the common assumption that PR people are better paid than their media brethern may be misplaced. Their study looks at what graduates are doing, how happy they are with their career choice and also graphs the salaries of 2001 graduates across PR, Television, daily newspapers, magazines etc. Warning: If like me you remember back to how much you started on, this survey might upset you :-) 1/07/2003
PR Opinions RSS Feeds
A growing number of people are using RSS readers to read weblogs. In effect the reader brings the latest stories from any weblog you subscribe to into an e-mail type application where you can read them without having to browse from site to site! PR Opinions has had a RSS feed for a couple of weeks and it has been working nicely. If you'd like to subscribe to the feed, point your newsreader at: http://tmurphy.blogspot.com/rss/tmurphy.xml HP Finalizes Global PR... Technology Marketing has a story today on HP's final choice for their global PR roster. Following IBM's moves last year, HP have chosen three agencies to run their PR campaigns globally. The lucky three are Burson-Marsteller (Enterprise Systems Group and HP Services), Hill & Knowlton (Personal Systems Group), and Porter Novelli (Imaging and Printing Group). Web Site Study - Top UK firms.... Richard Bailey points to a new study from the Interactive Bureau London on the effectiveness of web sites of the top 100 public companies on the UK stock exchange. The study found that while overall the web sites had improved over last year, twenty percent of the companies didn't explain what they do on their front page and listen to this, nearly FIFTY percent do not identify a section on their web site for the media..... scary stuff... 1/06/2003
Crystal balls and keeping an eye on your security...
PR Week has an interesting lead this week on what's in store for 2003 - predictions from some industry luminaries. Challenges for 2003 include better understanding clients' pain, ethics and accountability, getting clients to pay for value, diversity, shrinking budgets, managing public scrutiny, working with alternative media, demonstrating PR's deliverables, demonstrating value, 'relevant' media relations, strategic counsel and last but not least credibility and ethics. There's a lot more in the article itself. Have a read. OK something completely unrelated. Marketers aren't traditionally the most technically proficient of professions. However if someone warns you that you've published your confidential account login and password information on your website, it's normally a good indication that something's amiss. According to a story in Wired, advertising agency Carmichael Lynch [BIG Flash alert] posted those details on their jobs page and although warned by a visitor to the site in June took no action until December. According to the firm there is no sign that anyone did try and use the password though if they had they would have had access to internal documents and client databases belonging to a number of clients including Porsche. It's a good reminder to us all that security is vitally important and while accidents happen it's essential they're addressed fast! 1/03/2003
The weblog bounce...
Rafat Ali has a very interesting article on why 2003 might end up being the year Weblogs get bought up. He suggests that rather than even being bought, a small number of very very popular webloggers might be taken on as salaried employees of some of the larger publishing houses. He also suggests some possible link-ups in the piece. If you aren't already looking at weblogs that are relevant to your industry or market segment, now might be a good time! Boing Boing one of the most popular link weblogs, recently published their visitor numbers [Excel spreadsheet] - and any publisher would be very proud of similar readership numbers. According to the numbers, Boing Boing gets over 200,000 unique visitors a month.... not bad for a web page. The Confessional... 2003 style This morning I was reading Dave Winer's Scripting News as I do most mornings, and he had a post on an opinion article written in the New York Times by James Ledbetter. Ledbetter is the business editor of Time Europe but is better known as the editor of the Industry Standard, a now defunct magazine that covered (and promoted) the New Economy. Dave's post recommends we read Ledbetter's piece "to to be reminded how the business press excused themselves and still do now, for the abuse of trust of their readers during the dot-com boom." I thought that he was being a little harsh on Ledbetter, particularly since I really enjoyed the Standard. But when I read Ledbetter's piece, I felt myself agreeing with Dave. Ledbetter's not apologising for misleading people with poor editorial judgement, instead he's pushing the blame around the table and the usual suspects get a good kicking namely; his competitors, bankers and of course PR people. I think Ledbetter made a mistake writing this piece. If you have a few moments compare his op-ed with a piece written by Joyce Slaton on the media's role in the dot.com bubble. Her piece is honest, interesting and insightful. Ledbetter should have just published a link to it. [Comments] |
