Friday funtime: SMNR outtakes
Posted Friday, August 31, 2007 at 2:57pm in Off topic | 8 Comments
Feedback from the online PR survey results
Posted Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 6:26pm in PR General | 5 Comments
We recently sent out the results of our online PR survey via a social media news release (or should that be ’social media press release’?) to a number of UK PR bloggers and received some pretty decent feedback. In short, we surveyed 101 PR people from agency, inhouse and freelance roles on their opinions of the online PR space.
Some of the results were quite surprising, such as “55 percent of all respondents believe their peers are incapable of performing comprehensive and effective online PR campaigns” and “99 percent of all respondents said that online coverage is either important or very important to their organisation or clients.”
If you haven’t already seen them and want to know more about the results you can view them here.
PR Bloggers such as Richard Bailey, Heather Yaxley, Andrew B. Smith, the guys from Spannerworks, Sherrilynne Starkey, Daljit Bhurji, Katy Howell and even webitpr’s very own Giles Shorthouse covered it. And, as mentioned, provided some great feedback regarding which questions to ask next time. Let’s be honest, no surveys are 100% perfect but thanks to feedback we received, we know it’ll be a better one next time around.
For a few examples, Daljit’s (whose blog is very good if you haven’t read it) key points were that the industry needs to invest more time in training. He said: “What is needed is a longer term view of the bottom line and a belief by agency owners that freeing up staff time for training and collaboration on social media will actually be in the long term financial interests of the agency.”
Katy from Immediate Future put it down to three core issues. These are:
* Investing time in research, development and play
* Open internet access and trust
* Budgets that reflect the importance of online
Katy then goes on to explain in more detail regarding these issues. I particularly agree with this bit “For agencies and in house alike, understanding online PR and social media is time consuming.”
Ain’t that the truth!
Again, Andrew B. Smith mentioned finding out what the comparative importance is of online coverage in relation to offline.
Gratefully received comments and ones we’re going to include in the next survey we do.
See, that’s the beauty of the blogosphere and peer to peer recommendations - you’ll always come out more smarter than you went in.
Brothels update
Posted Saturday, August 25, 2007 at 6:29pm in Blogging, PR General | 10 Comments
I’ve since edited the post of the UK100 influential bloggers with a holding note. I’ve also deleted Tom’s blog from it too. This is what the holding note says:
WARNING PR PEOPLE
First let me say that this list of UK bloggers has NOT been created for you to go and SPAM your press releases to. Please read this post by one of the bloggers who I had included in this list but have since edited out.
Please understand that blogs are not the same as traditional media and some bloggers couldn’t care less about your clients’ news. They just want to be left in peace. Please respect that.
And if your dumb ass still wants to send a spammy press release to these people, I will not be held responsible if you, your agency or your client is mangled online. And believe me, it won’t be the first time it’s happened.
Thanks and check out this post too.
And to keep in tune with the brothels theme, here’s a tune called Harlot by Felix da Housecat.
PR people shouldn’t do brothels
Posted Friday, August 24, 2007 at 4:05pm in Blogging, PR General | 12 Comments
There’s been an interesting discussion taking place in the blogosphere relating to the relationship between PR and bloggers. It all started on Yahoo! employee, Tom Coates’s Flickr page where he added a very striking picture titled “This is not a brothel…”. Tom added seven paragraphs of commentary to the picture detailing his dislike for PR people sending him press releases.
Within the commentary, Tom references this blog, my blog, as the reason why he receives so many releases from PR people. His claim is because of a blog post I wrote in October last year replicating the Technorati 100 blogs but making it UK specific. In short, I created a list of the top 100 UK blogs that were deemed ‘influential’ by Technorati. You can see the global Technorati 100 on Technorati’s website.
Instead of adding my own opinion to this post it’s probably better to direct you to where all the discussion is going on. You’ll see me commenting in some of the comment strings of these blog posts and also on Tom’s Flickr picture. Here they are:
* Tom Coates’s Flickr picture.
* Jemima Kiss at the Guardian.
This probably isn’t a comprehensive list of the discussion that it’s generated thus far and I’m only directing you to the posts I’ve read and/or commented on.
What does anyone else think?
PR manager job going at Openads
Posted Thursday, August 23, 2007 at 6:11pm in PR General | Leave a Comment
prblogger.com Job Board 
Want a PR manager job at cool Web2.0 company, Openads? Well you might be able to have one! Sarah McQuade from Openads sends me this.
Based in London, England, Openads is disrupting the global online advertising industry by offering publishers a simple, independent and reliable way to decrease their costs and increase their revenues. The company provides for free its sophisticated, open source ad serving software, giving site owners everything they need to generate more money from their websites.
Already used by more than 20,000 publishers in 140 countries around the globe, Openads offers complete control of banners and campaigns along with a highly sophisticated tracking and stats system, all controlled from a simple screen interface. Openads is backed by leading investors including First Round Capital, Index Ventures (backed up Skype, Lastfm, Lovefilm and MySQL), Mangrove Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
For more info contact Sarah at:
sarah (dot) mcquade (at) openads (dot) org