PR Week articles feature comment section
Posted Saturday, October 27, 2007 at 12:34pm in PR General | 4 Comments
Looks like PR Week has had a bit of a website upgrade. The design has been tweaked a little, there are RSS feed icons all over the place and there’s now the ability to add a comment at the bottom of any article on the website. Just checking PR Week US that too has had a design revamp which has been acknowledged on the site:
“PRWeek.com has relaunched, taking advantage of new developments in online journalism and adding to its mission of covering the marketing communications industry in real time. The new site will feature a number of new Web-exclusive recurring features and more customization of homepages, content, and RSS feeds.”
Must admit, the US version looks better aesthetically in my opinion and judging by the comment above, it looks like it will be more functional too. Although, unlike PR Week UK, you can’t comment on the articles.
I wonder if UK-based PR people comment on any of the articles? Imagine if an agency receives a bit of a bashing from PR Week, do you think the MD of the agency will come on and add his or her opposing view? Maybe. Maybe not. I do think people will comment though. Let’s be honest, we’ve all read something in the magazine that we didn’t agree with at one point. We may some discussion going on in the Letters section.
Fair play to PR Week UK. Good stuff.
Good night at the Flackenhacks
Posted Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 4:14pm in PR General | 2 Comments
Yes it was. I’ve got the hangover to prove it too. And it was because of the free booze that I kinda let the team down with regards to ‘live blogging’ the event while I was there. Fiona Blamey and Andrew B. Smith kept their word however and did a grand job. I uploaded a couple of pics to my Flickr account though, so I did, sort of, kinda, relatively speaking, do a little bit of live blogging.
Who am I trying to kid. Sorry.
The award winners haven’t been added to the Flackenhacks blog nor TWL’s as of writing this and, quite frankly, I can’t remember them all. Sonus won Best PR Agency; Hugh MacLeod won Best Result In The Face of Adversity and Omnifone won Most Valuable Piece of Coverage, if memory serves me well. I imagine the official announcement will be up soon. A camera crew was present also so expect something on YouTube too.
All in all an excellent first. And a first of many I believe also. Word on the street is there’s going to be something happening in the summer too. Kewl.
e-consultancy’s social media briefing
Posted Monday, October 22, 2007 at 5:35pm in Blogging, PR General | Leave a Comment
Those clever folks over at e-consultancy have just produced a new and free roundtable briefing, this time focusing on everyone’s current favourite meeja - social media. Organisations in attendance this time around were COI, Orange, Conchango, Post Office, Epiphany Solutions, RBI, Immediate Future, Yahoo! and Nixon McInnes. And covering a range of social media related topics including:
* Trends
* News and Marketplace Developments
* What’s new in social media?
* How should brands engage online?
* Leveraging social networks
* Social media as a statistic
You can download it free from e-consultancy’s website. It’s free. Have I mentioned it’s free? There are some other PR-related content worth downloading while you’re there too: Their PR roundtable from September and their PR briefing from April. Both free too!
The Kooks - Naive
Dos and don’ts for digi natives
Posted Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 8:18pm in Blogging, Media, PR General, Technology | 10 Comments
Youngie’s seeking the wisdom of the crowds for an up-and-coming conference he and his colleague, Christie are speaking at. Their talk is titled: Reputation Management for Digital Natives and they’ve tagged me and a few others on the three dos and don’ts of online etiquette we’d recommend for digi natives. Youngie says:
“There has been a lot of talk about young people potentially harming their reputation online - along with many case studies. Digital Natives will be the first generation to live their lives branded by a Google Tattoo. At the same time, I’m a firm believer that there is so much to gain from actively engaging online that you’d be stupid not to, it’s just a matter of knowing the ground rules.”
I’ve noticed there are quite a few comments from those who have been tagged in the comment section of Paull’s blog which I’ve purposely decided not to read. Reason being is I’d probably plagiarise them. Here are mine:
Don’t…
… say anything online you wouldn’t say to your boss, colleagues, parents, grandparents etc. Common sense really but you’ll be surprised at how many people think that because they’re in behind a computer and not actually communicating with others in the physical sense then it doesn’t matter. Seriously, it really does. Google has a longer memory than you and me put together.
… lie. Okay, maybe little white lies are okay. Say if your friend on Facebook asks you what you did last night and you tell him/her that you were the life and soul of the exclusive celebrity party you attended when really you stayed in reading a book then maybe (just maybe) this is okay. However, lying about who you are, your age or any other way of deceiving someone then that’s when you’re in hot water. And besides, you can’t lie online because 99.9% of the time you’ll get found out.
… forget you mature with age. Dude, we all go through music phases. There was once a time when I liked this guy*. Not now though. And there’ll come a time when you’ll look back at the pictures of yourself looking like a white Tupac with embarrassment. Only a limited few can make a bandanna look genuinely cool and, frankly, you aren’t one of them. Be warned. It’ll haunt you.
Do…
… be yourself. Just because you are easily google-able it doesn’t mean you’ve got to be seen as a square. Everyone who has some sort of online presence - be it on a blog, MySpace or Facebook is ‘image building’. Let your online presence be an extension of your real personality.
… see online as your gateway to the world. Woah, less of the corny-ness Davies. It’s true though. This little ole blog got me to London, my last three jobs, the various speaking events I’ve done/I’m doing, New York next month and I’ve now got contacts/mates all around the world. Granted I’ve put the work in but it’s there if you want it.
… be prepared to know what you don’t know. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learnt over the last two and a half years but, at the same time, it’s made me realise how much I don’t know. I guess what I’m tryng to say here is that you’ll learn far more by communicating with your peers online than you would from any magazine, book or (dare I say it) degree. If you’re willing to put the time and effort in it of course.
And that’s it.
* Did I Rick Roll anyone? An explanation of Rick Rolling here. Awesome. Thanks Seasons.
The growing European internet
Posted Thursday, October 18, 2007 at 10:03pm in PR General, Technology | 8 Comments
Because of technological advances, some say the world is becoming increasingly flat. I would agree also. But one thing is for sure, the world isn’t monolingual. A piece of research carried out by Global Reach found that the English language only accounts for 35.8% of all languages used online. European (non-English) languages were found at 37.9% of the total internet population.
A recent report by eMarketer titled, The Expanding European Web, seems to back up this notion and gives further claims of how the t’internet is becoming increasingly European. It says:
“‘Of the five major Western European nations, the United Kingdom has embraced the Internet most avidly — it was the first of these countries to see more than half its population online,’” said Karin von Abrams, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report Western Europe: Internet Users and Usage. ‘Though the French, Germans and Italians were slower to respond to the Internet opportunity, all three have reached 50% penetration and even Spain is growing now.’”
The report goes on to predict the European internet usage on a year-by-year basis up to 2011 with the UK expected to reach almost 75% penetration by that time. The table below illustrates this:
So, from a PR point of view, as the world becomes increasingly flat but the languages differences continue to grow, will monolingual PR pros have to brush up on their GCSE French and A-level German?
Okay this is a pretty terrible example of how the internet’s changed the way I write and the words I use but yesterday in an email exchange to Youngie I used the words “G’day”, “dude” and “mate” all in a couple of paragraphs. I sometimes say “awesome” these days too. I’ve been saying ‘mate’ all my life but the other three I would have never have said more than two years ago.
Unless I was quoting Bill and Ted or Brad from Neighbours. 
