Has there ever been a better time to work in PR?
Posted Monday, July 31, 2006 at 10:03am in PR General | 10 Comments
It seems, to me at least, that the public relations profession is on the up. Would I be correct in thinking this? Or is it the way it’s always been? Now, I’m not just talking about the large global agencies here but in every aspect of the profession including education - it is said that PR is one of the most sought after professions among students and there are now more universities offering courses than ever before.
Regional PR also seems to be going through a large growth period. It seems like everyone is hiring and everyone has “got lots on”. Just Saturday I was talking to my old boss who has taken the plunge and bought the small agency he was director of and he told me that the work they’ve won has surpassed way past his expectations. In fact, he was a little irate that he hadn’t had a break for so long.
And, for a profession that until recently only had one trade title to one that now has three must be adding to my notion. Right? Which reminds me; the latest issue of PR Week has a feature on the large agencies that are breaking into the Chinese market which, again, only backs up my argument of tremendous growth. Disclaimer: Edelman was one of those agencies. Did I really need to disclaim that?
I’ve heard tales about the early 90s and the ‘ab fab era’ when client spend was high and the profession was awash with parties, champagne and ‘dahlings’. But now organisations are realising that **real** PR plays a pivotal role in strategic management and good communication is fundamental to enhancing and protecting reputation. Be it in full PR campaigns, crisis management and now blog crisis communications.
Remember around eight months ago when the “PR is dead” meme was the topic of conversation among bloggers? It was laughable at the time just as it is now and it seems to me that there’s never been a greater need for PR and communication.
Take a look at the PR blogosphere; there’s a whole load of hiring going on humbly including myself. Now, I doubt if these bloggers got hired solely because they had a blog but, as of yet, I’ve never heard of no PR blogger being laid off (touch wood).
So my question is this: Are we going through a PR fest of roses or are we seeing a PR bubble forming? Or, quite simply, has there ever been a better time to work in PR?
Technorati tags:
pr, public+relations, stephen+davies,
Side note: Last post for a while as I’m moving to London tomorrow. I’ve decided to keep my car and drive down… I just hope the old girl makes it. 
That way I get to take all my worldly possessions which, to be honest, aren’t very much. 
Dell rocks
Posted Thursday, July 27, 2006 at 8:54pm in Blogging, Technology | 6 Comments
I love my Dell laptop. I’ve had it around 15/16 months now and it’s been nothing but great and, as humble as it is (it’s an Inspiron 5160 model) it’s stood the test of time. And spurred on by a recent post from Neville I thought I’d tell you why. 
First, the customer service is fantastic. While it was still under warranty I received two phone calls from Dell asking me if everything was okay with it. At first I thought it was some kind of sales call trying to persuade me to upgrade or extend the warranty. But no, it was a genuine call asking me if I was indeed happy with it. Not once but twice I received this kind of call.
Again, another great customer service example is when the shoulder strap on the laptop case I bought from Dell suddenly snapped. I immediately called the customer services department, told them about the issue and in less than a week I was issued with another one free of charge. In fact, they didn’t even ask me to send the broken case back and days after receiving the new one I received a call from a Dell manager asking me if I was happy and if there was anything else he could do.
Another reason Dell rocks is their products’ durability. Now, admittedly, I have only had one Dell computer so this is based off my one experience but what an experience it has been. This laptop has been at my side at home, work and, when I was studying, uni - on average it’s turned on 10 hours a day.
It gets bounced around in the back of my car, I’ve dropped it a couple of times and I’ve downloaded and/or installed so many different software apps that its brain should be fried. No honestly, I used to try any piece of software that I could get my grubby hands on, including beta and alpha versions. Not to mention the various hardware that’s been stuffed in its USB ports.
Finally, Dell has ‘joined the conversation‘ and I say well done. They’ve received a lot of criticism but it seems to me they’re in a no win situation at the moment with some bloggers. They don’t blog they’re criticised, they blog they’re criticised. Go figure.
I’ve even heard criticisms about the Dell call centres being based in India. How dare they! My reply is, welcome to the flat world … how safe will your job be in 10/20 years time?
I would recommend Dell to anyone who’s wishing to buy a good solid reliable Windows computer. Personally, I fancy a Macbook Pro for my next piece of kit. ** Drool! 
** But I hope it lives up to my now high expectations.
Technorati tags:
dell, dell+rocks, stephen+davies,
My top five social media tools
Posted Saturday, July 15, 2006 at 8:58pm in Blogging, Technology | 11 Comments
Stuart’s tagged me with the latest meme, ‘your top five media tools’, so I’m game. Although, I must admit, I don’t think the majority of tools I use help me a great deal with regard to PR. I do, however, think they help me become a better blogger and user of the Internet.
1. WordPress. Goes without saying but WordPress is a state of the art semantic personal publishing platform. It has too much functionality, too many plugins and, being open source, there’s too many developers and designers cranking out useful addons and beautiful designs to make any competitor come close. You know the Apple cult? Think of WordPress as the blog platform equivalent. Oh, did I mention it’s free?
2. Bloglines. I’ve been using Bloglines for around eight months and I believe there’s no better RSS reader out there. And I’ve used a lot, including Newsgator and FeedDemon. Why is it so good? Well, it’s not a desktop reader (which puzzles me why anyone would want to use a desktop reader anyway), which means I can read my feeds from any computer with an Internet connection. But that’s not all, thanks to Bloglines Mobile I can read also read my feeds anywhere I have a phone signal. There’s a whole load of other great things about Bloglines too like the Hotkeys function and how it allows for Flash based content such as YouTube videos (see my Flickr pic). Did I mention it’s free?
3. Firefox. Read this post I made in February to see exactly why I love (yes love) Firefox. Yep, free.
4. Google Analytics and FeedBurner. I know that’s two but both help you to achieve one goal: A better understanding of stats … and I might have mentioned in the past I like stats. Google Analytics tells me just about everything I need to know: which corporations have been visiting (you know who you are), how long they’ve visited, which pages they browsed, etc etc. It also tells me the geographic location of visitors too including regions and cities and even tells me their Internet speed, operating system and browser. I particularly like the keyword option which tells you the keywords people have used in a search engine when they stumbled on your blog. There’s loads of other stats but I haven’t figured them all out yet. I use FeedBurner to see how many people are subscribed and what RSS reader they’re using. Both free.
5. BrandPulse. A tool for conversation mining and discovering discussion trends. BrandPulse is the daddy of all online monitoring tools. Not free.
Close but no cigar: del.icio.us (see my QuickLinks), WetPaint wiki (PR Blogger version coming soon … perhaps) and Skype (now with cheap text messaging).
Five bloggers I’m tagging:
My mate from down under, Paull. (Read his latest post - funny!)
My new colleague, Erin.
My other new colleague, Bjoern.
My fellow graduate, Alex. (By the way I’m getting lots of referrals from Alex’s blog lately!)
The one and only, Mr Mayfield.
Bonus tag: PR Monkey.
Side note:
Things will be quiet again. I’m off on holiday and once I’ve returned I’ll be making my move to London. Still looking for a place to live so if anyone can recommend anywhere be sure to let me know.
Side note deux:
Congrats to PR graduate and soon to be Chime employee, Ros, who has just found she got a 1st class honours degree from Cardiff uni. She’s not a blogger but has contributed her thoughts to this blog from time to time. Well done Ros!
UK/US PR blog year-on-year numbers
Posted Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 9:06pm in Blogging, PR General | 7 Comments
Just over a year ago I made a post on the number comparison between UK and US PR related blogs to get a snapshot view to see which country, out of the two, is embracing blogs the quickest. (First let me apologise to none UK and US readers. I had been blogging for two months at the time and did clearly not see the bigger picture.) Needless to say the US was by far the most dominant between the two countries, although the difference between the two with regard to PR educational blogs were nearly on par.
The numbers were originally taken from the Bloglines public PR blogs maintained by the great Constantin Basturea and I thought I’d review them one year on to see what changes there might be. All 2005 numbers were recorded on June 23 of that year and all 2006 numbers were recorded today (July 11).
PR practioner blogs
Last year the UK had 19 PR practitioner blogs and the US had 64. One year on the UK number has risen a mere 32% with 25 practitioner blogs in comparison with a 73% rise for the US to 111 PR practitioner blogs.
Blog consultants
In 2005 the UK had only three blog-consultant blogs with the US having just over eight times that amount at 25. The 2006 numbers show that the UK and US numbers have risen 200% and 60% respectively. Although the percentage increase seems to flatter the number of UK blog consultants which are still at a low nine.
“The percentage increase seems to flatter the number of UK blog consultants which are still at a low nine.”
Corporate PR blogs
Again, the number of UK corporate PR blogs in 2005 was at a low four in comparison with the US which had 33. 2006 brought an extra six UK corporate PR blogs bringing the total number to 10. This number is dwarfed in comparison to the US which has increased by 130% to 76 corporate PR blogs.
PR education blogs
Perhaps a surprising change from last year are the number of US PR educational blogs. Last year both the UK and US almost had the same number with five and six respectively. However, a big change this year with the US increasing its number by 250% to a total of 21 and the UK increasing by 60% to eight PR education blogs.
“Perhaps a surprising change from last year are the number of US PR educational blogs.”
Total number of PR related blogs
Looking at the stats above it’s not surprising that the chart below shows a considerable change in the total number of US PR related blogs with an increase of 94% from 128 to 248. The total number of UK PR related blogs has also increased 68% from 31 to 52.
The total number results show that, once again, the UK PR community is not embracing the medium as much as the US. I wonder why? Any ideas?
New job, new location, new life
Posted Friday, July 7, 2006 at 11:10am in Blogging | 33 Comments
Around four weeks ago I handed in my last piece of uni work and, needless to say, was quite relieved that four years of study was finally over. Well, just last week, I received my overall grade and I’m now the proud owner of a 2:1 BA (Hons) public relations degree from the University of Sunderland. That’s second from top don’t you know? 
So, moving from graduating to employment, I’m delighted to officially announce I’ll be moving from my native North East to begin working for Edelman in London where I’ll be focusing primarily on online communication in the Interactive Solutions department. I’ll also be spending time in each of the company’s practices to keep up to date with traditional PR and to get a better understanding of the business as a whole. Delighted and excited? You bet!
My new boss, Jacqui, is great. She’s climbed the highest mountain in four different continents … or something crazy like that. And the team I’m working in is a mix of different nationalities which is also great as since reading this book, I now believe the world is flat. It’s all about the global perspective nowadays.
I’ll be working on some exciting projects which involve these new ways of communication I’ve been blogging about for the past 15 months, so things may get a little quiet around here as I’ll actually be **doing** as opposed to just writing about them. Which is fine by me. A blog should have objectives and I’m safe to say this blog has met its primary goal in achieving what I wanted … employment.
Although, I didn’t think I’d meet the great communicators I have met in the real world in the process. Stuart, Tom, Neville, Elizabeth, Serge, Drew, Jon, Antony, Justin, Steve et al.
I honestly can’t wait to get involved with it all and looking forward to exploring the great city of London.
That aside, employment means there will be no more shameless self-promotional posts from me in the future. Well, maybe one or two if the appropriate situations arise.
Wine and song will be of precedence tonight as I celebrate with my ex-colleagues from Bradley O’Mahoney PR. Although, I think their reasons for this ‘celebration’ is to make sure I actually leave!