WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell has spoken out against politicians and business leaders for celebrating economic recovery when the market is “less worst” rather than growing.
Speaking to Bloomberg at the annual World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, he said “you can’t declare victory until you see consistent gains year-to-year.”
Delegates at the PRCA and CorpComms Conference last October received the same message when Sorrell delivered the keynote.
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PR and media response to the Inconvenient PR Truth campaign launched yesterday falls into two camps: broad agreement or a direct challenge, not to the key message of the campaign, but its style.
The irony could not be more delicious. The campaign has utilised a well worn PR tactic, namely powerful content, to get attention. It’s pulled in opinion from across the industry and is now an open platform for discussion.
There have been lots of positive comments. Conversations are taking place on the campaign site itself, blogs, Twitter and an article on the PR Week site. There has been lots of positive input.
But the campaign’s language has also been the target of criticism. It stands accused of opportunism and dramatising the issue, yet much of the content is collated, or crowdsourced to use digital parlance, from articles and blogs where PR spam has been debated over the past two to three years.
Realwire and the campaign in general have been called “arrogant” for its approach to raising the issue. I caught up with its CEO Adam Parker for breakfast this morning. He has strong opinions which he is forthright in sharing but he certainly isn’t arrogant. Engage on the issue and you’ll find out for yourself.
Parker’s objective was to create a discussion around the issue across the PR and media industries and work towards some solutions.
Yes of course it would be great if a PR or media industry organisation or publication was campaigning on this issue – but they aren’t and none have picked it up until now. In his latest blog on the campaign site Parker goes as far as offering to start-over and calls on the CIPR or the PRCA to take up the issue.
Final thought: maybe PR spam isn’t really the issue that it is claimed to be by bloggers and journalists, in which case the campaign will die a natural death. But I doubt it.
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Kelvin Newman has asked digital marketers to name their favourite Seth Godin book and give reasons why in his latest blog post.
Mine is All Marketers Are Liars published in 2005. It taught me the importance of authentic communication – “don’t invent stories, tell stories about what you’ve invented.”
Kelvin interviewed Seth on his Sitevisibility podcast this month.
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The latest special report from The Economist (disclosure client) called A world of connections examines the potential of social networking in business. It’s a 14-page guide that you could share with anyone that is yet to be convinced of developing their business via networked connections.
The report predicts a positive outlook for social networks in business in a series of articles that examine the potential of social networks to generate income and support business functions such as marketing, recruitment and research.
Fears such as productivity-drain and privacy are also tackled head-on in articles on each topic.
The Economist argues that “social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper and that social-networking technologies are [already] generating considerable benefits for businesses”.
Small businesses have been the fastest to profit from networks according The Economist mainly as a word-of-mouth extension of an existing marketing effort.
As well as a basic guide to social networks for business, The Economist special report contains much for advocates.
It predicts the development of Facebook Connect’s model where profiles are transferable from network-to-network and between different network-based web applications.
Twitter according to a quote from its founder Biz Stone will become an information company but The Economist says its challenge is “transforming […] raw data points into profit.”
Finally there’s a powerful prediction that we may no even have begun to see the potential of networks. The special report predicts a future that will see a powerful mash-up of machine, location and social network to deliver applications that we haven’t even begun to consider.
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Speed is backing an industry initiative launched this morning to address the issue of PR spam. It’s the brainchild of Realwire’s CEO Adam Parker.
We’re all aware of the issue; there isn’t anyone in the PR industry that hasn’t been guilty of spamming bloggers or journalists at some point in their career.
Research by Realwire claims that 1.7 billion irrelevant press release emails estimated to be received in total each year by UK and US Journalists alone
Mark Borkowski and Stephen Davies are also onboard from the PR industry alongside media distribution services and journalists. It would be great to see more PR agencies get behind the initiative and sign-up to its Bill of Rights.
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I’ve spent the last few days researching a story for Reputation Online on mechanical networking. The article has been published this morning.
My motivation was simple. Two weeks ago I was pissed off when I learnt from a prospect that a rival agency had touted mechanical networking as a means of quickly building a guaranteed following.
I’ve tried insofar as is possible to bring my journalist training to bear and report with impartiality; without sounding overly pious I hope that I’ve succeeded. It’s an important issue.
Thanks to David Cushman, Ian Brodie, Mat Morrison, Michael Litman, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Fabretti, Robin Grant, Simon Collister and Tim Hoang for their help. I’ve only managed to fit a fraction of their comments into the final article.
David has posted his interview in full on his blog: Why I hate automation in human communication.
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Greenbang has published an update on my family’s renovation project. We’re restoring a 300-year listed farmhouse in Northumberland and attempting to live by eco-principles.
It’s called the Grumpy Environmentalist because we started out two-years ago with the best intentions but are constantly tested by the need to balance historic restoration with eco-measures.
The latest article reports on wooden shutters and cling film as alternatives to double glazing, compromises we’re making over insulation and the restoration of an old cast iron kitchen range.
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How do you respond when one of the PR industry’s top dogs compares your product to crack? I caught up with Gorkana’s Celina Maguire yesterday to find out.
“Mark Borkowski’s blog is always a good read. While we know he is being tongue-in-cheek when he says Gorkana […] is the technological equivalent of crack […], he spotlights a serious issue.”
“In my previous life as a consumer agency director we sweated over targeted media strategies for every client campaign, and counselled clients that coverage was about quality not quantity. While there was always enormous pressure to get more, our journalist relationships were too precious to risk bombarding them with crap.
“As Mark says in his post, spam could be avoided by using technology with a bit of intelligence and a willingness to listen on both sides. Use a bit of common sense.
“Mark’s blog highlights another issue which I think is making spamming more rife – sloppy or poor PR training. Any consultant knows that playing the numbers game by sending out press releases to a cast of thousands doesn’t constitute a PR strategy, yet this approach still seems to be rife.
“Gorkana seeks to bring PR and journalist communities closer together and help both save time. Our database provides a snapshot of what journalists write on, how they like to be approached, their interests, as well as the best time to make contact. It also lists journalists who do not ever want to be contacted by PRs.
“We also invest in breakfast briefings which bring senior journalists to the PR community so they can hear first-hand what the publication will or won’t cover.
“And from a techical point of view we stop duplicate emails being sent to the same journolists and we regularly monitor over sized client lists. While we aren’t big brother so can’t pull rank if a PR decides to email the world, we are always on the look out for ways to counter rabid spammers.
“Alexander Northcott, Gorkana’s CEO, is keen on a US idea where flaks using the HARO (Help A Reporter Out) system are handed a red card if they bombard journalists with irrelevant releases. Who knows if we’ll go down that route but the point is that we’re aware of the issues and are keen to engage with the industry and find a solution.”
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I am fascinated by the messages on old postcards. The limited space means that they are often no more than single sentences written in clipped English.
This one was sent sometime after 1912 judging by the George V half-penny stamp.
The message asks its recipient to meet the sender off a train.
“Just a line to let you know I shall come on Friday. I shall reach Meldon with afternoon train and expect you will be able to come to the station.”
It’s succinct and to the point. It’s also social. A postcard can be passed around and shared. Now we’d use email, Facebook, SMS or Twitter of course, but the message would be equally brief.
Almost a hundred years on the content of our messages hasn’t changed, only the way we send and share them.
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Shields Bialasik has been critical of Adam Westbrook’s book Newsgathering for Hyperlocal Websites on his blog hyperlocal101. Bilasik says that Westbrook ignores the issue of how to generate an income from a hyperlocal blog. It would be a useful addition to future editions.
In its current guise hyperlocal journalism is either an experiment by the large regional publishers such as Trinity Mirror’s Your Place network in the North East, or is the pursuit of freelancers as part of a portfolio career.
Sources of funding are limited. Online readers almost certainly won’t pay for local news and Google’s adword network is not sufficiently granular to stretch to a post code area and is overly complex.
It’s why I think Addiply’s hyperlocal ad network is compelling. It makes advertising as simple as posting an ad in a newsagent. And that’s important for local businesses with limited technical expertise.
The Addiply team has a two-fold strategy: it is brokering deals with regional media groups and individuals that run hyperlocal blogs at the same time as pre-loading its ad network by pulling in national advertisers seeking to roll our regional campaigns.
At the point that Addiply reaches near nationwide coverage and is able to offer hyperlocal bloggers a startup package of guaranteed inventory to run on their sites from launch, it will have created a compelling business model for hyperlocal sites.
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The face recognition and tagging feature on the most recent version of Picasa, Google’s free photo editing app, is astonishing.
The application which has been available since September 2009 scans all the photos on your PC and asks for the name of each of the different people it finds. It then filters and tags each photo where it finds that person. Where it’s unsure it asks for confirmation.
It could almost be magic.
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I’ve discovered two e-books this week that should be a must read for any PR that is keen to understand how the remit of a journalist is changing and to gain an insight into the future of regional media.
Both books are written by London-based journalist Adam Westbrook, a City University graduate that has worked in Ghana, Iraq and the UK.
In Advice for Multimedia Journalists (free PDF download) an ebook created from a series of original blog posts, Westbrook spells out the opportunity for journalists created by the upheaval in publishing and distribution.
In the digital age journalists need to be brands in their own right. There is little room for humility. Westbrook says that journalists must overcome the discomfort of blowing their own trumpet quoting SEO specialist Brian Clark, “if people think you’re important, so will Google.”
Diversification is the key combining skills such as copyrighting, photography, video production and web design with journalism to create a portfolio career. Westbrook provides insights into each area as a means of generating an income.
In Newsgathering for Hyperlocal Websites (£7.99 PDF download) Westbrook tackles the rising genre of hyperlocal blogs and describes how to set up a hyperlocal blog, create a newsroom and describes the process of newsgathering and reporting.
The basic skills of a journalist have changed little despite the upheaval in the media. Much of the craft such as maintaining a news diary, digging out news from local sources and on-diary versus-off diary that Westbrook shares would have traditionally been taught on a NUJ training course.
Westbrook spells out the technical skills needed to set up a hyperlocal site, signposting sources of further information and sharing tips for automating much of the news gathering process. His sections on web mining for stories and Freedom of Information requests would provide a near constant news stream for any hyperlocal site.
Westbrook makes clear his attitude to PRs that fail to understand the remit of hyperlocal media and pitch inappropriate stories. But then regional media has long been poorly served by the largely London-based PR industry. PRs need to work out how they can best embrace the emerging segment that is hyperlocal media.
Westbrook is clearly a talented journalist with an entrepreneurial flair that has a bright future whatever the future of journalism.
Here’s a wedding invitation that will almost certainly go viral and launch careers in the creative industries for its creators Jeffrey Wong and Erin Martin. Assuming of course they aren’t at the top of the game already. Its heartwarming, delightful, human and funny. Good luck Jeffrey and Erin.
Via Oli Barrett.
The downside of having a home office in a farmyard is that occasionally you get unannounced visitors.
Steve has posted an update on the NLA vs Meltwater tribunal after the NLA issued a statement yesterday and he caught up with its commercial director Andrew Hughes.
“The NLA says Meltwater’s approach to the digital licence issue is unfair. Meltwater is saying bollocks, we’ll challenge the legality and appropriateness of this. The NLA is now saying come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough, but please make sure you have the requisite authority to make your point in court.”
“It’s not going to make EastEnders scriptwriters weak at the knees, but it’s a fair debate and one that needs to be had. And one I look forward to hearing it.”
