When a PR agency partners with a media company

Posted Sunday, August 27, 2006 at 9:36pm in Blogging, Media, PR General | 11 Comments

I’ve made the journey back ‘Oop North’ for the bank holiday weekend and since my copy of PR Week is still being delivered up here I decided to catch up on the three or four weeks I’ve missed. Pretty much the first article I read (sub required) is an interesting one. Dated 4 August, PRW reports that the Red Consultancy has teamed up with UK blogging media company, Shiny Media, “to form a new media company called Shiny Red.” The article goes on to say that “the joint venture is believed to be the first of its kind between an agency and a blogging outfit, and will see a ‘Shiny Red’ office manned by a mixture of Red and Shiny staff…”

I could be wrong here but doesn’t this raise the question of ethical practice on both sides when a PR agency and media company join as one? Would similar questions not be raised if a newspaper organisation and a PR company joined to form a copywriting agency? Just asking.

The article does go on to say that Shiny Media will retain complete editorial independence and the new consultancy will be offering its services to all organisations and not just Red’s clients. But Red has a consumer tech practice and Shiny’s most popular blog is dedicated to consumer tech. Again… just asking.

Side note: For every action there is a reaction and it seems there has been quite a reaction by a number of PR bloggers with regard to certain comments inside the latest Profile magazine. Notably from David Brain then Neville Hobson and followed by Stuart Bruce which is agreed with by Antony Mayfield.

Side note two: I’ve been following this story for the last couple of days. Claire Zulkey of MediaBistro Toolbox wrote a post on five signs your blog post is going horribly wrong. Six days later it ends up on a Telegraph blog written by Melissa Whitworth in all its entirety except with a headline change. Bloggers find out and aren’t too happy. The original Telegraph post gets pulled down (cached version here) and an apology follows from Mrs Whitworth claiming that she forwarded the blog post to her editor as she thought it was funny but it somehow got confused as her latest blog post. Some commenters believe her and some aren’t buying it. Very interesting though.

Thoughts on Gmail’s domain hosting

Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 at 11:39am in Technology | 3 Comments

Some time ago I signed up for Google’s Gmail domain hosting service which is still by invitation only at this time. I’ve since received my invite and have been toying around with it using this blog’s domain (prblogger.com) as my Gmail domain. I.e. (stephen at pr blogger dot com)

I’ve been a Gmail user for over a year now and have to say I’m pretty impressed with the new developments Google’s doing with its email service. I’m considering shifting my regular personal Gmail account over to this one. However, there are one or two niggling issues which I’ll mention later.

Included in the invite are the instructions to change the MX records within your blog’s hosting service. Google has made the set up process pretty straight forward and by following the instructions you should be up in no time.

Once you’re up and running the administrator is given a dashboard from which they can carry out a number of tasks such as creating a new user, add email addresses, enable/disable chat, set up catch-all addresses and a few more.

Creating an email list

Once you’ve set up an email address you can view it by pointing your browser at http://mail.google.com/hosted/YOURDOMAIN.com. There, you’re prompted to enter you login details which then takes you to your account. Nothing different from a regular Gmail account except you’re given an option to upload your own logo which replaces the regular Gmail one.

I just did a simple crop of this blog’s header. Looks ok though.

From the administration you can also keep tabs on how many addresses there are, what each individual’s storage space is and the last time they logged in.

I only have two addresses set up so far. One is for me and the other is for… ahem, me.

In the domain settings you can carry out a number of tasks like uploading your logo, change your sign in box colour (this is my sign in page), adjust time zones and enable/disable contact sharing.

Gmail also integrates your own Google Calender too. Not sure if you can synch dates, notes etc with other users but if you can’t now, I imagine Google will do it in the future. Here’s my calendar page:

All in all I like it and think it’s got a lot of potential particularly to small organisations. But as mentioned, there’s one or two issues. First, is mobility. I’m a frequent reader of my Gmail emails using its mobile service. However, I can’t log into my hosted domain account using my phone. This, for me, is a big deterrent. It does say in my inbox that I can but no success yet!

UPDATE: Success. I just pointed my phone’s browser to the my regular sign in page and it redirects to a mobile version. Once signed in my custom logo is viewable too. Cool.

The second is that it doesn’t work with the Firefox extension, Gmail Manager. I have a couple of Gmail accounts and this alerts me to incoming emails in multiple accounts perfectly. Shame it doesn’t include hosted Gmail accounts too. Maybe the developer will update it so it does.

I don’t know if Google plan on making this a paid service or for free? Doesn’t say anything on the homepage.

I’ve seen some blogs actually asking visitors to make their own Gmail address using their domain, but I’m not entirely sure I’d want just anyone using my domain to send emails.

Pretty good though.

technorati tags: gmail, gmail+hosting, email, stephen+davies

How Web 2.0 is your newspaper?

Posted at 9:29am in Media, PR General | 1 Comment

Robin Hamman over at the Cybersoc.com blog has analysed each of the UK national newspapers in terms of their use of the web. Inspired by the Bivings Report which looked at the top 100 US newspapers and their use of the web, Hamman looked at each website for 13 different categories: RSS, RSS sections, Most popular, Videos, Podcasts, Chat, Journalist blogs, Journalist blog comments, Blog roll, Comment on articles, Registration, Bookmarking and Forums/Message boards.

Needless to say the online news powerhouse, The Guardian, scored top marks with 13/13 but, as Shane Richmond from the Telegraph Technology Blog points out, the analysis could have included a few more Web 2.0 characteristics such as tags. Or, if I add my two pence worth, it could have included some citizen journalism features like moblogging.

To quote and agree with Richmond again, a subscription feature isn’t a good thing on a website in my humble opinion so perhaps it could have been marked a “-1 point” for that one?

I’m quite interested to see what the regionals are doing in this space. I know they tend to be a bit further behind their national counterparts in terms of online activity. But when I asked the question of what does the future hold for the regional press in June it prompted some positive comments from Piaras, Richard, Heather, Philip, Richard M and a response post from Stuart on how it’s thriving.

If the regional dead tree versions are doing so well I wonder if they need to embrace it at all at this point in time?

technorati tags: web+2.0, newspapers, newspaper, regional+newspapers, national+newspapers

Online brand monitoring takes time and effort

Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006 at 1:23pm in Blogging, PR General | 11 Comments

You know, the technology in the online world is advancing at a ferocious speed. There’s always a new fangled web ap that’s being introduced that some PR folk will experiment with looking to fit into their day to day roles as practitioners. For example, take a look at Kevin Dugan’s 10 Flickr hacks, Steve Rubel’s 10 Technorati hacks and, boastingly, my own 8 moblog hacks (because I couldn’t think of ten). All very useful… maybe.

But something I’ve been interested in a while now and something I’ve been doing at my new place of work (which is going swimmingly well by the way) is online brand monitoring. I believe there are huge benefits in discovering what people are saying about a particular brand by way of detailed analysis.

Like most things, finding out useful data comes at a price; both in the monetary and time sense of the words. There is no quick fix.

Listening to what is being said online about a global brand will take a whole lot of human resources because, as of yet, there’s no tool that can measure or read sentiment. And that’s where the meat and potatoes of brand monitoring lie.

This is a great post by Mike Manuel from November last year on what he calls (and what I’ve adopted) “mining and monitoring the conversation gap”. Mike describes two types of methods for listening to online conversations:

The first is ‘conversational mining’ which means digging deep into past conversations over a certain period of time. Say, for example, the last six months. As Mike mentions, conversational mining is good for “keeping tabs on big picture trends and sentiment shifts but it’s lousy at capturing real-time issues as they typically bubble up online.” What I would add to that is, conversational mining is a great first start for an organisation that hasn’t typically done any kind of online monitoring in the past. It gives them an idea of the current situation and positioning of their brand and from that they can identify their objectives for any online PR activity.

Depending on the brand (obviously there’s a lot of online discussion going on about global tech brands) conversational mining is very time intensive. No simple graph from Ice Rocket or BlogPulse will do. It’s about digging down and find out where the negative commentary (if there is any) coming from; it’s about identifying issues that have been discussed in the past which don’t necessarily have to come from blogs either. Message boards and forums are still primary drivers of conversation on certain products.

Brand monitoring doesn’t necessarily mean keeping tabs on just blogs.

For some brands, UGC sites like the immensely popular Digg should be searched for past articles relating to their product(s). You’d be quite surprised at the plain derogatory or false remarks from some Digg users.

For me personally, I believe conversational mining is only effective when the conversation sentiment is measured. Knowing the topic of conversation and measuring it as simply as a ticking check boxes for positive, negative and neutral tones. But, as mentioned above, there’s no tool to do this yet. There are, however, some advancements into curing this bane of brand monitoring. Development into sites like Opinmind would help make the process a whole lot easier. (Are there any other sentiment measuring sites?)

The second method of listening is ‘conversation monitoring’ which pretty much means listening to what’s being said in real time. Again, this takes time but the hard part is figuring out what to do if or when it does happen. If your brand is being discussed does it mean you should necessarily engage in the conversation? Or should you continue working in the shadows?

Conversational monitoring is beneficial when you’re already carrying out some sort of PR activity online. That way you have a benchmark from which you can measure the success of your efforts.

One thing is certain though. If the process of brand monitoring is to be made easier and done quicker, then more time needs to be spent in R&D specific for this area. Maybe it’s only a matter of time.

technorati tags: branding, brand+monitoring, conversation+mining, conversation+monitoring, stephen+davies