Human content aggregators
Posted Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:53pm in Blogging, Media | 2 Comments
You may have noticed by a few previous posts that the ridiculously high-priced property market was on my mind. It still is. I still believe Tony Blair has left a legacy of little hope for first time buyers - excluding those who have the privilege of financial help from family or those that have made 000s on their own (fair play) to put down a sufficient deposit. It’s angering, it really is. Although most FTBers have accepted it.
Anyway, I digress.
The UK media is (quite literally) obsessed with the property market. Every day it’s a given that you will find at least two property related stories in any publication. Probably excluding the tabloids but the broadsheets can’t get enough of it. They lap it up. The common theme we’re hearing of late is that the market is slowing, property is 20% over-valued, buy to let agents are quivering and, indeed, we could see a house price crash.
Each newspaper usually tells a different story. One says we’re heading for a bust while another says there’s still room for price growth. Seriously, you would have to spend half of your day reading all these publications to make your own mind up about the state of the market. And you know why there is such a varying array of opinions? Because economics is an art and not a science as my accountant-by-trade boss, Adam, told me today. Meaning, they are all merely predictions.
So, as a consumer, you can either do three things. 1. You can stick with one paper of choice and rely on the opinions of the journalists or columists writing for that particular publication. 2. You can do as I said above and read every single one, or 3. You can subscribe to the House Price Crash blog.
In short, the House Price Crash blog aggregates all the property news from the day’s newspapers. Not only the nationals but the regionals too. You can sign up to the RSS feed and you’ll receive the link to the article and a couple of lines of commentary. This is a perfect demonstration showing the advantages of technology with human intervention. It’s also beneficial for helping those looking to buy a property and wondering what the hell is going on. 
I think we could see a lot more of these types of these human aggregations on niche topics as they seem like a valid solution to the attention problem we all seem to be going through.
technorati tags: human+aggregation, human+aggregators, house+prices, property+prices
Tips on creating a successful presentation
Posted Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 12:33pm in PR General | 2 Comments
Disclosure: I am by no means a presentation expert. In fact, I would say I’m hit or miss. This blog post is a means to hopefully provide readers with a few tips on presenting and also as a way for me to collect my own thoughts on the topic. You might want to save this page to del.ico.us and read it when/if you need to. It’s quite long at nearly 1600 words.
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It’s a great buzz when you’ve pulled off a good presentation. The adrenalin’s flowing, you’re feeling confident about yourself and, who knows, if the right people are there it could end up leading to a new business lead or job offer. Thing is though, there is a considerable amount of work that goes into carrying off a good presentation both before and during. There are many factors to take into consideration and this blog post doesn’t cover them all but I’ve noted some of the most important ones.
PREPARATION
Like most worthwhile activities, preparation and planning are necessary tasks to ensure your presentation runs smooth and you’re not left panicking at the last minute. In short, the more you prepare the more likely your presentation will be a success. If you are fully prepared then you are probably a lot more confident in delivering a sound presentation and thus increasing your chances of success further. Confidence is half the battle, as they say.
Preparation questions to ask the event organisers:
How many people are attending?
Presenting to 20 people is different than presenting to, say, 200. And, again, presenting to only 2 people is different than presenting to 20.
What time am I up?
Assuming you’re not the only person presenting you need to know what time you’re up. If it’s first thing you then you need to be there before the conference starts to set up. If you’re one of the last ones speaking then it’s a good idea to sit through and take notes of your fellow speakers’ presentations. Well, for one reason, it’s polite and for another, you might be able to take something from those presentations to add to your own.
You don’t have to rearrange your whole presentation or anything but if you can relate a part of your own presentation to one of the other speaker’s it helps the audience and also looks like the presentations are more of a collective.
How long do I have?
For obvious reasons your presentation shouldn’t last only 15 minutes when you’ve been allocated 30. On the flipside, and probably even worse, it shouldn’t last 50 minutes either or you may find the event organisers dragging you off stage.
Your presentation length is important so it’s worth timing it prior to the conference/event day as any presentation that goes well under or over the allocated time looks unprofessional.
What kind of mic will I be using?
A small but important question. Conferences and events generally use either a lapel mic or a static mic. If it’s a static mic then you will usually be speaking behind a lectern and thus won’t be able to walk around on stage. If it’s a lapel mic, however, then you have the freedom to walk around until your hearts content. Although, mimicking circus clowns is not recommended.
If you are using crib notes to help you in your presentation then it’s best to work out how you’ll be using them should you be wearing a lapel mic. You don’t want the likely scenario of standing in front of the audience reading your notes word for word with your head down.
Preparation questions to ask yourself
Who is my audience?
The more you know about your audience the better you can tailor the presentation to them. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself these questions: Why are they there? How much do they know abut this subject? What is their attitude likely to be to you and your presentation topic? Are there any decision makers present?
What key messages do I want to say?
You work in PR, right? Then you probably know all about key messaging. Be it in news releases, interviews, white papers etc. Same applies in presentations too.
Before you start creating your presentation work out what key messages you want to get across to the audience and how you want them to react to them. The whole point of a presentation is to get a point across so, with this in mind, devise three key messages and structure your presentation and content around them.
And remember, it doesn’t do any harm to repeat these key messages during the presentation on more than one occasion. Make them subliminal if you’re smart enough. 
Preparing the content of your presentation
Create a narrative
People like being told stories. It’s human nature. Presentations can be stories too and, like most stories, they should have a beginning, middle and an end. If you can give your presentation some sort of narrative which grabs the audience then you’re onto a winner. Very few people enjoy being presented with slides and slides of facts and figures so, if this is the case of your own presentation, it’s up to you to tell the story within them.
Use images and diagrams
A picture paints a thousand words but it probably paints two thousand in a presentation deck. Now, I’m not saying you should have multiple pictures flying around or fading in and out of each of your slides. A definite no no. But if you can add one image to signify the point you’re trying to illustrate in one go then your audience will have far less trouble absorbing it than they would if you have, say, eight bullet points of text.
Don’t use too many slides
There’s nothing worse than death by Power Point. We’ve all been there. Reams and reams of slides; endless bullet points and, by the time it’s finished, you’re pretty much ready for a nap. If you haven’t fallen asleep already, that is.
For an example of how many slides to use in your presentation take a read of Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule of Power Point. Must admit, I tend to use more.
THE PRESENTATION
So you’re fully prepared for your presentation. It’s the day of the conference and you’re up next.
Dealing with nerves
Everyone including CEOs and other senior staff are nervous to some degree prior to presenting. It’s only natural to get nervous and the day you don’t feel the butterflies to some extent is the day you shouldn’t bother presenting again.
Nerves are the body’s way to help keep you sharp, on your toes and alert. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that nerves and adrenalin were the body’s way of stopping us getting eaten by much larger animals with much larger teeth than ourselves back in the Neanderthal days. It’s a natural reaction.
Unfortunately there is no wonder cure to stop nervousness. Well, none that I know of. However, there are ways to help combat them. As an example, I was given some presentation training when I was at Edelman and the trainer told me you can look at doing a presentation two ways.
The first way is thinking of it as a ‘performance’ where your every move is watched and every mistake is criticised. Or, you could look at it as a means of ‘communicating’ where your success is measured by how well the audience understands the message.
So, in effect, you can make a couple of mistakes and the chances are the audience probably won’t notice them. They’re too busy COMMUNICATING with you. Think about it, when you’re watching someone present is it really such a big deal when he or she mixes their words?
Cracking a joke
If you can get your audience to laugh then your confidence during the presentation will rise tenfold. Thing is though, do you want to take the risk? They might not laugh and you may be left in total silence. Worse yet, they might throw a couple of rotten tomatoes at you.
Cracking a joke during a presentation is entirely up to you. If you’re confident enough that the audience will find it funny then by all means. And if they do you’ll feel much more relaxed, confident and, to a certain extent, authoritative. On the other hand you might want to ask yourself if it is really necessary and will it allow you get your key messages across more effectively? Maybe not.
If you’re announcing the loss of 500 jobs internally then your mother in law jokes should be best left at home, thanks.
Body language
What’s the saying? 30% of communication is done orally and the remaining 70% is done through body expressions. You could write a whole book or three on body language and many people have. So, in short.
Do
* Make eye contact with as many of the audience as possible
* Stand with good posture
* Make ‘sincere’ hand gestures
* Smile
* Make facial expressions that are consistent with what you’re saying
Don’t
* Focus your attention on your notes
* Look at the floor or the ceiling
* Have a defensive stance. E.g. crossed arms
* Touch your hair, face or mouth and don’t put your hands in your pockets
And that’s it. What would you add? What works best for you in presentations?
Sidenote: Piaras pointed out this presentation from Guy Kawasaki some time ago. This is a great example of a confident speaker and a very interesting presentation too. I’ve watched it around four times now.
technorati tags: presenting, presentations
SMNR update
Posted Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 11:36am in Blogging, Media, PR General | 17 Comments
It’s been a little over four weeks since we launched our version of the social media news release and, I’ve got to say, I’m now more convinced of its potential than ever before. In honesty, I was previously, but since I’d never seen a true social media release in action it was just a case of relying on the notion. And by **social** I mean a release with comments and discussion, and not just additional multimedia.
We’ve since done five SMNRs and, through these trials, we feel we have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Although, there’s still a long way to go and no doubt we’ll have a few more “why I never!” moments as we continue to do them. I’d love to name the companies that have been involved but as of writing this we haven’t received anyone’s permission, apart from the Converseon release, of course.
Anyway, here are a few observations we’ve taken from the SMNR.
Not everyone links, not everyone references
I guess, in hindsight, I’m stating the obvious but just because you think you’ve got an uber cool, bleeding edge news release it doesn’t mean bloggers do too. All they care about is the content and, although blogging etiquette is about links, not all link back to the SMNR itself. I guess they don’t deem it absolutely necessary to reference a news release of any kind. In all honesty, I’m not sure if I do too.
That said, if you want to track all the discussion around the content of the release then it’s imperative to have a monitoring process in place. Take the Converseon release for example. The Technorati ‘view blog reactions’ link shows only 13 blogs linking to it. Which is accurate. In reality, however, there were many more blogs that had taken content from it; they just hadn’t linked to it.
We found similar results on another SMNR we did too. Most notably, two very high-profile and well-read blogs didn’t link to that particular SMNR although they did use its content.
Something to bear in mind.
People are comment shy
Well, they are on the SMNR that’s for sure. As of yet, no one’s left a comment on any of the five we’ve done. Sure, there has been plenty of discussion on the blogs referencing it but none on the release itself. I see it in two ways. Either no one feels there are any benefits in commenting directly on a news release for whatever reason. Or not many people are accustomed to idea of commenting directly on a news release. My thoughts are it’s the latter. Why? Well, put it this way, if I knew my comments would get through to Company X’s comms department about their new product or service then I’d sure enough leave a comment - if I was passionate enough about the product or service that is.
A SMNR is not for all news
Again, stating the obvious but it is interesting to see which SMNRs pick up more traction than others. We don’t feel we can give a conclusive definition of what would make a good SMNR but here are three pointers:
* News that’s relevant to the online audience - Obviously some sort of tech and telecoms news will always be popular in the online space as there are many blogs focusing on those areas. I guess it’s a case of defining your audience beforehand and discovering how much discussion is taking place already.
* High end news - News that is new, unique and pretty significant to the audience you’re targeting and not just some afterthought to try and “get some online coverage”. Much the same as a traditional news release, smaller businesses will find it harder to generate coverage than, say, a FTSE100 or Fortune 500 company. Unless, of course, the smaller outfit has news of significance.
* Something that will generate a discussion or debate - Again, a bit of a no brainer but, hey, that’s what should make a good SMNR.
PR people get the concept
I really don’t want to sound like we’ve been trying to teach our granny to suck eggs but the people we’ve spoke with get the SMNR concept straight away. Excluding Paull and Constantin as they could write SMNR releases standing on their heads, but the other people we’ve done a SMNR for (and those who don’t necessarily have a primary focus in online PR) really didn’t need no coaching at all. It was a simple case of providing a link to an example and that was all.
I think this speaks volumes in terms of a potentially high take-up rate and the very fact that PR people are (for want of a better phrase) ‘getting it’ can only add to the cause.
The provision of multimedia is an issue
A few people we have spoke with say that collecting multimedia (mainly audio and video) is a problem. Some folks we spoke with are on tight turnarounds thus making an ‘as and when’ SMNR with multimedia almost impossible to do. Others claimed it’s hard to get the clearance on budget for multimedia content.
But we are living in a multimedia world as this week’s (ahem) PR Week suggests that journalists are looking for more multimedia content. To quote it from Todd Defren’s blog: “Newly published research indicates that 75 per cent of journalists would prefer to receive media-rich press releases than a standard email or Word file attachment.”
If that’s the trend then perhaps businesses should be allocating more money to create audio and video?
That’s pretty much it so far. It’s certainly been a huge learning experience for all involved and no doubt we’ll continue to learn more as time goes by.
Stay tuned!
technorati tags: social+media+news+release, smnr, webitpr, stephen+davies
webitpr’s Social Media News Release for Converseon
Posted Thursday, July 12, 2007 at 10:23am in Blogging, Media, PR General | 2 Comments
The initiative is in partnership with US not for profit, Plant It 2020, and if selected as the winner of the American Express Members Project, Plant It 2020 would plant in excess of one million indigenous trees in endangered rainforest regions.
CEO of Converseon, Rob Key said: “The power of social media is that it can transcend traditional approaches and antiquated structures to rapidly galvanize communities to action and raise awareness for reforestation and other important global issues. We hope others will support this initiative to demonstrate the power of social media to motivate positive, socially-responsible action.”
For other bloggers’ opinions on it you can click here, here, here and here.
How do I know this and where did I get the content and multimedia from?
I got it from the Social Media News Release we created for Conversion of course. Working with my mate Paull Young,(read his post about it) webitpr is playing a small but significant part in helping the initiative to get down to the final 25. Fingers crossed as it is the only initiative using Second Life in the programme. Go and vote for it now.
This is a good example of how a SMNR can work alongside other PR tactics. You can see the inbound links to the SMNR from other bloggers but we’re also tracking other sources that **aren’t** linking to it. Both social media AND regular online media. Remember, some regular online media still has HUGE readership. I think some people (including myself) often forget that.
Cool.
technorati tags: webitpr, social+media+news+release, smnr, converseon, second+chance+trees, second+life
I didn’t get the memo telling me blogging was dead
Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 at 8:09pm in Blogging, PR General | 11 Comments
Around two years ago there was a recurring theme in the blogosphere. Apparently PR was dead. That’s right, the whole PR profession as we know it was finished. Ended. No more. Communicators as professionals were holding on for their dear lives because of a new kind of communication platform. A platform that would eradicate the need for ALL PR tools including media relations, internal communications, lobbying, presentations, speeches, advertorial, whitepapers, you name it, it was finished. Why? Well because blogs were taking over that’s why. Please don’t get in their way either. Oh no!
Now, how ridiculous does that sound? Silly huh? Exactly. But (only!) two years on and I’m beginning to hear an almost identical theme, except this time it’s not the PR profession that’s dead (silly us) it’s blogs that are dying! Yep, you heard it right here folks. Let’s stop paying our hosting company; let’s cancel our TypePad accounts; send Google an email that your Blogger blog’s out the window and come and join us on Facebook.
I’m sorry but what a load of crap. Seriously, just because the A-listers aren’t getting as much traffic as they used to and you’ve got 1,200 ‘friends’ on Facebook, it doesn’t mean a well-written, well-thought out, insightful article (because that’s what blog posts are) with relevant links and SEO capabilities is no longer required. It also doesn’t mean:
* Businesses shouldn’t use a corporate blog to connect with and gain feedback from customers.
* Organisations that have had a bad rap in the traditional media shouldn’t use a blog to put their side of the story across.
* Charities and NGOs shouldn’t use blogs to connect with like-minds or to put the word out about their cause.
* Any other positive reason to blog should be dismissed.
Blogging isn’t the best thing since sliced bread. I know this. But let’s not dismiss it altogether because of a social networking site. In fact, I’ve been thinking lately about how useful Facebook is from a PR point of view and, in all honesty, I can’t see a lot to go at. MySpace is much better.
What Facebook is good for is keeping in touch with friends and reconnecting with old ones. I’ve never built new relationships with anyone in Facebook like I have with blogging. My friends’ status updates are great (sometimes hilarious) to read but I’ve never learned anything from them. Hell, I’ve joined many Facebook Groups but I’ve never really felt part of a community in any of them. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.
You have to find a happy medium. No, blogs aren’t that important and not all blogs matter either but I get the sense there’s a case of the Shiny and New Syndrome going around. It’s fairly epidemic and I believe it was started by a tribe known as the A-list. Take a couple of pills, lay off the Kool Aid and get a good night’s rest.
Meantime, I’ll be in the blogosphere and on Facebook. See you soon.
The Smiths - This Charming Man (classic)