Micro-Marketing

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Something I’ve been thinking about recently, and talking to clients about, is the ability Web 2.0 and the idea of the social Web gives them (and us) the ability to track conversations about them and their industry.

It’s not that this sort of peer-to-peer chatter hasn’t happened before, or that companies haven’t been trying to generate buzz around them before – in fact many companies spend huge amounts of marketing dollars on companies such as Bzz Agent and Agent Wildfire to build up excitement – it’s the fact that every online conversation is indexed and is searchable.

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How to give a good interview

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It seems simple enough. Reporter contacts you for a quote or two to beef up an article he’s writing on a friend and business partner. All you need do is give the reporter your phone number and he’ll call you at an agreed time, you’ll have a friendly chat and he’ll try and draw something printable from your conversation.

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Perfect Planning Prevents Piss Poor Public Relations

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Let me tell you a couple of stories. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The Athlete
There was once an athlete who was great at training. He could thrash his personal bests, decimate the opposition and make his peers believe he was a superman.

In training.

On the day, he was a mess. His diet was wrong, he had no idea what the opposition was planning to do or what they did in any particular situation. So he did what everyone else did. He hired a coach and started to perform infinitely better. Perfect planning prevented a piss poor performance. [Read more…]

Bloggers: An invaluable communications channel

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If you’re a blogger with a decent readership and a prominent search engine ranking, you’ve probably encountered someone like me. Someone who sends you emails asking you to write something nice about one of my clients.

If you’ve got a huge readership you probably get a truck load of these requests.

Why?

PRs already have access to huge databases (formal and informal) of pretty much all the media in their country/market that could write about the client. Most of them have to speak with the media and have good relationships with them as well.

Why would they want or need to go to the trouble of finding a blog like yours, reading it for an hour or so, finding your contact details and then “pitching you” on their client?
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PR: The Lying Profession?

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I was shocked and appalled to hear that back in my native UK, the truth lost to subterfuge lies and deception. PRWeek, the industry trade publication, was hosting a debate where the motion discussed was PRs have a duty to tell the truth.

The motion was defeated by 138 votes to 124.

In my first post for the Blog Herald, I opined that social media is bringing a seismic change to the PR industry. We’re moving away from a top-down, spin heavy, heavy handed control of the message to openness, honesty, transparency and spin free messaging.

Clearly I was wrong. Clearly PR is, indeed, the lying profession. [Read more…]

Does PR need media relations?

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In my last posting, about the “New” News Release, I alluded to a sea-change in the job descriptions of the flackus desperandi (PR professional). In the past PR was predominantly “media relations” based – sending spam and harassing journalists.

Sure there was some internal communications thrown in, communicating on behalf of the government) communicating to the government (lobbying), investor relations for the financial specialists and physician communication from the healthcare group.

But underneath a raft of very high-level strategic counsel, media relations essentially underpins the business in the same way that media buying underpins the advertising industry.

But social media has changed that on its head.

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The “New” News Release

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Introduction
Is social media changing the way you work? My job as a PR/online communications consultant has changed an awful lot since I started as an intern cutting articles out of a newspaper or transcribing entire electoral rolls into an Excel sheet. There are a metric ton of examples I could use (monitoring, who we reach out to, client based initiatives) but the biggest one is, I believe, the communications vehicle formerly known as the “press release”. [Read more…]

How do they do that? Celebrity PR

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In my first column I discussed what PR is, from a corporate standpoint without really addressing the publicity, or celebrity, business ‘€“ which is what most readers will be exposed to the most.

While I would never be called upon to give expert testimony in the area of celebrity publicity, I feel I know enough to lift the curtain a little and show you one dirty little trick that can be used.

This oft used trick is the one that magicians learn first ‘€“ misdirection. Let’€™s say I’€™m your client, a highly paid sports stud like Ladainian Tomlinson who is enjoying a record breaking season ‘€“ not too far from the truth (!).

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