CIPR Northern Conference 08
Posted Sunday, September 21, 2008 at 7:04pm in Blogging | 3 Comments
On Friday I delivered two workshops at the CIPR Northern Conference; this year held at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester - last year it was held in Newcastle. The underlying theme of this year’s conference was ‘reputation’ and my workshop focused on reputation from an online point-of-view and was titled, Coming Out From the Shadows & Managing Reputation Online.
It was another great event by the CIPR. I met quite a few new people and managed to catch up with the regulars too. The Labour Party Conference was taking place the following day so the Manchester Police were out in force just down the road, including snipers on every roof of the surrounding buildings.
Here’s my presentation which I’ve also added it to the new Presentations section on the 3W PR website.
Is online PR losing its real definition?
Posted Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 7:13pm in PR General | 20 Comments
One thing that’s become apparent in the advent of online communications is the amalgamation of the various communication professions. Is SEO a stand-alone discipline or should it belong to PR? Does blogger outreach really belong to PR when there are one or two online marketing agencies doing a mighty fine job of it already?
Should there actually be such phrases as Online PR, Online Marketing, SEO etc? Or should they all just come under one name which encapsulates each discipline together? I remember having a telephone conversation with Ged not too long ago about this very same topic.
There’s actually no right or wrong answer (for the moment) but one thing I have noticed in the last few months is that some online marketing agencies (including one or two of the big ones) are offering “Online PR” as a service.
As a PR person you might think you have cause to worry. Dig a bit deeper though and what you’ll find is that these agencies offer a small segment of online PR which usually involves generating backlinks and increasing traffic. Yes, both backlinks and traffic do have a PR element to them, but both are generally byproducts of a much larger strategic initiative.
And, besides, backlinks and traffic are more of a marketer’s concern given their objectives usually involve large numbers and eyeballs, and less about changing attitudes and enhancing reputation.
Then it occurred to me. PR doesn’t face losing the online PR battle against marketers as I initially thought (read the comment by me from last year on Drew B’s blog to prove it) but what it does face though is losing the battle among marketers of what the definition of real online PR actually is.
And it certainly ain’t just about backlinks and traffic that’s for sure.
Tomorrow’s fish & chip paper?
Posted Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 10:28pm in Media, PR General | 2 Comments
Okay, Google is beginning to scare me now. The Official Google Blog has just announced that they’re beginning a new initiative working with newspaper publishers to digitise millions of news articles. From the blog, “For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint — from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores.
“Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.”
Of course, Google being Google, these articles will be easily searchable using the media company’s (Google is no longer *just* a search engine) technology. The blog post also says you can browse the articles as they were actually printed in the publication. Here’s an example.
From a research point of view this is very significant. Imagine being able to search every news article ever printed from the last 200 years directly from your Web. Here’s another question to the PR people out there. Will you count a news release generated article included in Google’s database as another piece of coverage? 
I was going to link to Todd Andrlik to alert him to the news as I know he’s a collector of old newspapers. Glad I checked first though as he’s already spotted it.
Show Him Numbers
Posted Monday, September 8, 2008 at 10:58pm in Blogging, Business, PR General | Leave a Comment
When I announced last week the launch of 3W PR you may have noticed that I provided a link on webitpr head honcho, Adam Parker’s name. It was a link to his new blog and if you didn’t check it out at the time I recommend you do now. It’s called Show Me Numbers and in Adam’s own words it’s “about the power of numbers and analysis with particular focus on the online, PR, and general economic worlds.”
For anyone that’s worked with Adam you’ll know he’s a bit of numbers geek and one of his most recent blog posts compares fee incomes of the PR Week Top 150 alongside those of the top UK accounting firms. Suffice to say the difference (including fee income per head) is huge. Each of the Big Four accountancy firms have a greater fee income than the entire PR Week Top 150.
No doubt we’ll see more PR industry analysis in the coming months. I’m interested to see how long he can keep the numbers theme going in his post titles. Welcome to the b/sphere mate.
Crowd Surfing launched
Posted Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 11:45pm in Business, PR General, Technology | Leave a Comment
Being the avid blog reader that I am, I often hear social media specialists utter the words, “you no longer own your brand.” Now, read that sentence again and imagine you’re a business owner or a marketing officer, “you no longer own your brand.” Quite heavy to take, yes?
But what does it actually mean though? Do these people ever actually explain in great detail their reasons behind making such a statement? If I’m a business owner or a marketing officer I want to know (in great detail please!) how and why I no longer own the brand I’ve carefully and painstakingly created over the years.
Well, now there’s a recently published book that not only explains how consumers are taking control of brands, but how brands are effectively leveraging the consumer by being “smart enough to recognise that people around the globe - emboldened and enthused by a new spirit of enquiry and self-expression, and powered by the internet – have changed the rules of the game”
It’s co-authored by my mate David Brain along with Martin Thomas, the book is titled Crowd Surfing and it’s available to buy on Amazon.
Looking forward to the official launch at the famous Groucho Club later this month.
And just realised that I had the option to link to either the Groucho Club’s website (which looks a bit crap) or the Wikipedia entry which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the club on one page. I went for the one that was created by the crowd.
Crowdsurfing from David Brain on Vimeo.