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Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

An alternative look at the PR Week Top 150 League Table

PR Week published its annual top 150 rankings of UK PR firms a few weeks ago. Adam Parker at Realwire has already produced a good analysis of the figures. I thought I’d throw in some further analysis to try and draw a clearer picture of the state of the UK PR industry.
First, some top line figures. Based on PR Week’s league table, the top 150 UK PR agencies in 2009:
Generated £814 million in fee revenues
Employed 7790 people
Worked on 5683 client accounts and 7154 client projects
Had an average monthly client PR retainer of £6K

In terms of this last figure (and others), I used a rule of thumb that says 80pc of agency fees come from retainer work and 20pc from projects. Clearly this will not apply across the board. Indeed, given the economic climate of the last year, it could be argued that project work should occupy a higher share of total revenue, And looking at the number of projects that some agencies worked on, it would seem that perhaps even the majority of fee revenue came from projects.
Taking all of that into consideration, the 80/20 split at least provides a starting point for analysis.
On that basis, we arrive at an average monthly client retainer fee of £8K. However, it is worth qualifying this. First, given my rule of thumb, one agency skews the results hugely. According to the PR Week league table, Axon Communications only has one client – but on my ROT, this would provide an average PR retainer of around £179K per month. If we remove Axon from the list, then the average monthly retainer drops to £6K per month.
Next, let’s look at some other performance metrics.
1. Fees per earner
Fees per earner has been a standard metric for evaluating the relative performance of PR firms for decades. Looking at the PR Week figures for 2009, the fee per earner leader board clearly shows that financial PR is the place to be:
Agency Fees per earner (£000s)
Brunswick 280
Finsbury 280
Maitland 280
WCG 235
Financial Dynamics 190
Buchanan 190
Gavin Anderson 190
Citigate Dewe Rogerson 171
Bell Pottinger Group* 159
Galliard Healthcare Communications 157
WCG is an anomaly (see below).
Of course, profit per earner would be an even better metric, but short of trawling Companies House for the data, the fee per earner ratio is the one that must suffice for the moment.
Here is the bottom of the fee per earner table:
Agency Fees per earner (£000s)
Iris PR 50
Wolfstar 50
Bellenden 50
Luchford APM 50
Quantum Public Relations 45
GyroHSR/ Woolley Pau PR 41
Radio Relations 40
Finn Communications 29
Kenyon Fraser 28
ICE 22
Some immediate caveats. In a number of cases, PR fees represent only a proportion of total turnover ie the firm makes money from non-PR fee related activity and the staff numbers refer to the business as a whole. So the fee per PR earner ratio is clearly higher. (However, it does beg the question as to what percentage of total turnover devoted to PR should qualify a firm for entry into the league table).
Also, a number of these lower fee per earner agencies are based outside of London – so may argue that a lower cost base allows them a lower than average fee per earner ratio.
2. Ratio of staff to clients/projects
This metric takes the total number of clients and projects an agency works on and divides through by the total number of staff. In theory, it should give an indication as to the average number of clients and projects that each agency employee has to deal with. Again, this comes with a number of caveats. Clearly project type, length and budget will vary enormously from agency to agency. Having said that, it is at least an attempt to provide some kind of indicator on agency workload. Combined with fee revenue, it gives a picture of which firms may be performing better than others.
Agency Client/project staff ratio Change in fee revs 09/08
WCG 33.33
TVC Group 14.41 -8
Radio Relations 11.25 2
Grayling Communications 6.87 -22
PPS Group 6.71 -31
The Reptile Group* 6.27 -7
The Outside Organisation 6. 2
FWD 5.50 -10
The PR Office 4.8 0
Myriad Public Relations 4. -3
Again, WCG should be treated as an extreme outlier. One thing to note though is that nearly all of the agencies with high client/project to staff ratios saw revenue drops.
Odd curiosities

WCG
WCG (rank 138) employees only 3 staff according to PR Week – which leads to some anomalous results. Namely, its fee per earner figure is 235K. It also means it has the highest client/project to employee ratio of 33.33.
Grayling
Grayling stands out for the huge number of client projects it worked on in 2009: a total of 965. Coupled with retainer clients of 430, that’s a total of 1395 clients and projects. Based on my rule of thumb, the average Grayling client is paying around £2K per month. If they are paying more than this, then the average Grayling project is going to be around £1 – 2K.
Axon Communications
According to the PR Week table, Axon only has one client – but generates fee revenue of £2.6 million. Even allowing for the fact that project work may represent a larger than average share of revenue (41 projects), that still suggests that one client represents a large slug of revenue.In my opinion an Cheap Ambien excellent medicine, in order to fall asleep in the evening and normally wake up in the morning.
This is only a cursory analysis. As ever, I’m always grateful to PR Week for producing the baseline figures. I’ve no doubt that further insight can be gained into the health of the sector and individual firms with more scrutiny.
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Digital marketing digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Are PR people the main readers of UK online IT news publications? Google thinks so.

Google has just updated its Doubleclick Ad Planner tool with a useful new feature that shows a site’s top 10 audience interests, representing the aggregate interests of the site’s visitors.
As Google says: “In these top 10 lists, each interest is assigned an affinity score, such as 3.9x, which means visitors to the site are that many more times likely to be interested in the topic than the average Internet population.”
I tried it out on a couple of UK online IT news sites – computerweekly.com and v3.co.uk.
For the former title, public relations was the 2nd top audience interest for UK visitors, with an affinity score of 33.3x.  For V3.co.uk, PR was the top audience interest with an affinity score of 30.1x. In other words, the average UK visitor to computerweekly.com/v3.co.uk is 33.3/30.1 times more likely to be interested in public relations than the average Internet user.
Which is curious. Who knew that UK IT folk were so interested in PR. Or could it be that a sizeable proportion of UK visitors to these online IT news sites are in fact PR people (presumably checking to see if they’ve got any client coverage).
I realise this is only a sample of two, but I’m curious to see if this is a common phenomenon across the online IT publication sector as a whole – at least in the UK.
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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

What engagement time tells you about the value or otherwise of online press coverage

Consider the following:
1. An average person can read around 200 words per minute on screen.
2. The average UK Guardian website reader spends around 7 mins and 30 seconds per visit (according to Google)
3. The Guardian has monthly page views of around 88 million in the UK and around 21 million unique visitors per month (according to Google)
4. Based on the above, the average visitor will spend around 450/4.2 = 107 seconds per page. In other words, the average reader will read up to 350 words before moving on to another page or off the site completely.
What might we infer from this?
1. Any article longer than 350 words will not be read in full. Not least because on any given page, the reader is also potentially being distracted from reading editorial copy by ads and other elements on the page. In which case, what density of client reference is required within 350 words to have any material impact on the reader?
Is 107 seconds really long enough to make any impact at all?
What about press releases?
Based on Google Ad Planner figures, the average amount of time spent on a page on Sourcewire.com (a well known press release distribution service) = 151 seconds.
Based on an average reading speed of 3.33 words per second, then your typical Sourcewire visitor (ie a journalist) is going to consume, at best, 500 words per page.
However, based on an admittedly small sample, the average Sourcewire press release contains 800 – 900 words.
In which case, you might argue that putting a release on Sourcewire of more than 500 words is a waste of time because the likelihood that a journalist will read more than 500 words per page is very slim (ignoring the SEO value that you might gain from using Sourcewire).
Caveats
These are average figures (Avanash Kaushik would roast me alive). Some people may be able to read more quickly on screen. Then again, many people will read more slowly. And clearly some people may spend more time with content. However, that means that an even greater number spend less time. In fact, that probably is the case if the Newspaper Marketing Society’s figures are true (that 56pc of all UK newspaper web site visits last less than one minute).
Google’s figures may be wildly inaccurate too. That was certainly the claim from publishers when Double Click Ad Planner was first launched. However, you don’t hear so much complaint about them now.
Conclusion
Online PR planning needs to take account of engagement in determining what media sites to target and the appropriate content to provide. If a site’s visitors spend barely 30 seconds on reading a page, then crowing to the client that they’ve got 14 paragraphs of coverage at the end of a 3,000 word article is pretty meaningless – whether it is the BBC or the Wheel Tappers & Shunters Weekly.
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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Is your Twitter Home Page your biggest SEO asset?

Do you know the Page Rank of your Twitter Home Page? You may be surprised to find it is a lot higher than you think it is – and you probably achieved it without even thinking about it.

For example, the Page Rank for my blog home page is 5 – and that’s taken a little while to get to, not withstanding the blood, sweat and tears of creating and maintaining content. In the course of some client work recently, I happened to plug in some Twitter Home Pages to check Page Rank – given they were created relatively recently, I was surprised by how high the Page Rank values were. And then I checked my Twitter Home Page PR value. Turned out to be 5. I then started looking at a few other people’s Twitter Home Page Ranks. For example, my chum Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications, who has a very respectable Page Rank of 6.

In which case, it is worth paying some attention to what you choose to link to from your Twitter Home Page profile – you may have one of the best backlinks available to you right in front of your nose.

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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Video: PR Week’s Search Box

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After my PR SEO presentation at the CIPR last week for Glide Technologies, I had discussions with a few people regarding video content. It made me realise that many blog posts could convey the same message but done in a video format. To show that I do eat my own dog food, see above for a video version of my recent blog post regarding what PR Week’s search box says about the PR industry.

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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

PR doesn’t care about business outcomes: what PR Week’s internal search function tells you about the industry

PR Week’s web site has a very useful search box that tells you which articles contain certain keyword phrases. It also helpfully breaks out what kind of article the phrase was contained in and the year.  As a result, it provides a useful measure as to how the interests of the PR sector are reflected in the actual words used by PR Week journalists. And perhaps indicates why PR still isn’t taken as seriously as it might be.
For example, the word “pitch” has appeared in nearly 8000 articles since 1995. Unsurprisingly, the number of articles about pitching or pitches rises in line with a recessionary year eg 2001 and 2008.
Phrases such as raising, boosting or building awareness appear in over 5000 articles. The number of articles on this subject peaked in 2004, dropped for a few years and rose again through 2008 and 2009. A total of 83 articles this year have referred to this subject.
The phrase “media relations” appears in nearly 5600 articles. However, having reached a peak in 2004, the term seems to have lost currency in recent times.
The term “Online PR” has 180 articles, with “Digital PR” following closely behind with 168. Interestingly, both of these phrases have been used for nearly 13 years. In fact, a PR Week article from 1997 credits Matthew Ravden, ex-MD of Bite Communications with coming up with term “digital PR” (I’m quoted in the same article saying that “by the end of 1997 the majority of the press will want to receive information in an electronic format.” I was only a decade out).
However, it is curious to note that the phrase “behavioural change” appears in only 62 pieces – and most of those in the last 2 years. Perhaps even more damning, the term “business outcome” appears precisely 3 times in 15 years.
If PR Week is a reflection of the industry, then it shows that the PR sector needs to start using language (and developing services) that better reflects genuine – and quantifiable – business benefits.
Wouldn’t it be nice to see a PR agency talking about how it is helping clients to deliver an improved business outcome rather than simply raising awareness?
Useful links
  • The SBS Interview: Lee Odden – An interview with Lee Odden about how small businesses can take advantage of new opportunities in public relations and social marketing online.
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Digital marketing digital pr online pr

SEO Workshop: Thursday, March 11th – CIPR HQ, Russell Square, London

Glide Technologies, the folk behind the Online Media Centre and GlideInsight, are holding a free, SEO Workshop at the CIPR HQ, 52-53 Russell Square, London, WC1B 4HP on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 from 8.30am to 10.30am.  Hell, they are even throwing in breakfast as well.

I’ll be co-presenting the workshop with Grant Whiteside, the Technical Director at Ambergreen Internet Marketing.  As a pioneer in the UK Search Marketing industry, Grant  has over a decade of hard-won experience under his belt in this dynamic sector. He is highly respected throughout the industry with experience across a wide range of industry sectors including B2B, Charity, Financial Services, Retail, Online Gaming, Hotels, Travel & Leisure and Recruitment.

The aim of the workshop is to provide some very practical advice to PR practioners about how to integrate search into their day-to-day PR activity. Places are limited (no really, they are) – so book now to avoid crushing disappointment.

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Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr SaaS tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Escherman to handle UK PR launch for Pogoplug consumer multimedia device: personal cloud computing for the masses

[wpvideo GOJi2QuW]
You know how PR folk are always “excited” and “delighted” when they win an account.
Well, I can honestly say we are REALLY excited and delighted that we are handling the UK and European PR launch of the Pogoplug from Cloud Engines Inc.
So what is the Pogoplug?
For an immediate sense of its capabilities, have a look at the video above. In simple terms, the Pogoplug is “a multimedia sharing device that gives you more flexibility to store personal content safely in the home and then access, manage, and share it from anywhere on the Internet. The Pogoplug acts like a gateway from your home or office through the Internet. It allows you to access, share and even stream personal digital media directly to anybody, anywhere in the world. Your content always remains physically in your home or office, making it secure, convenient and available on your terms. Pogoplug is perfect for those individuals with increasingly mobile lifestyles and small businesses in need of simple, inexpensive mobile data access solutions. The Pogoplug hardware sports a new design boasting multiple USB ports supporting up to 4 external drives for expanded data capacity. The new Pogoplug also gives users improved sharing capabilities, an easy drag-and-drop interface to create engaging multi-media slide shows, seamless media playback, and enhanced sharing with friends on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.”
Very cool.
The latest version of the device launched in the US last November – and for once, the phrase “universal acclaim” isn’t all hype.  A number of eagle eyed observers in the UK have already been asking when it will be available over here. Well, they won’t have to wait too much longer.  Mid-February is when the product should be available in the UK.
In the meantime, we’ll be doing our bit to keep press and bloggers up to speed with review kit and  information. We will be making evaluation units free for review to relevant media outlets and bloggers in due course. Drop me a line at andrew@escherman.com or Tweet me @andismit if you are interested in taking a look at the Pogoplug.
In addition, Cloud Engine CEO Dan Putterman and VP Sales & Marketing Jeff Fochtman will be over in the UK in early February – we will be organising press meetings and a press/blogger demo and drinks evening in Central London. More details to follow.
Another happy by product of handling the PR launch is that I’ve had a Pogoplug installed at home for a few weeks now. And it is rather good.  I really did get it up and running within 60 seconds.  I’ve been showing off to friends my ability to stream video from a home drive via my iPhone. And they all want a Poguplug now.
And my mother in law who lives in the Channel Islands has been able to view some Xmas videos of my son remotely without the need for me to upload the material to a third party site. Neat.
I’ve also created a Poguplug folder on one of my drives that will over time contain a variety of relevant press and blogger information. If you’re going to walk the walk……
That’s probably enough for the moment. I’ve included below a fuller list of features and benefits. But suffice to say we’ll be talking a lot about the glory of the Pogoplug over the next few weeks and months.
POGOPLUG FEATURES
Automatically Synchronize Photos, Videos, Music and Other Selected Content
Users can synchronize their Pogoplug with their PC or Mac to automatically import new content from popular applications such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, and iPhoto. This feature allows Pogoplug owners to “set it and forget it” and always have access to new photos, videos and music from anywhere on the Internet.
Drag-and-Drop Music and Photo Slideshows
Users can easily create and share fun and engaging slideshows using their stored photos, videos and music.  Creating a slideshow with Pogoplug is as simple as drag and drop, and sharing these slideshows is just as easy as ever. Once a user’s link is shared and viewed, their slideshow will immediately begin with the photos, videos and music they selected, playing seamlessly in the viewer’s browser.
Easier Sharing with Pogoplug Address Book
Pogoplug Address Book greatly improves the speed and ease of use of sharing with a user’s friends and family. Pogoplug automatically remembers all email addresses entered in a user’s previous shares – even if that share no longer exists – and makes them available in an easy to use address book to make sharing truly one click away.
Global Search Across Multiple Drives and Pogoplugs
With support for multiple drives on a single Pogoplug (and multiple Pogoplugs on the same account) Pogoplug has added “global” search support across all of a user’s Pogoplugs and drives.  Search filters are now a distinct feature, allowing users to view all of their photos, videos and music in a single organized view, or to search for a specific file across all Pogoplugs and drives.
Organize Your Music, Photos and Videos
Pogoplug automatically displays music by Album, Artist and Genre, and shows cover art for quick access to a user’s favorite music. Photos are now displayed by photo timeline and videos are only a click away, including the ability to watch a preview in the thumbnail itself.
Play movies directly from my.pogoplug.com, or even to the iPhone
Pogoplug now supports the playback of videos directly from a Pogoplug, with support for the most popular cameras, video cameras and mobile phones.  Movies can be shared and viewed directly from the Pogoplug website – or even from an iPhone!
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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Engagement – PR’s lost metric

I was intrigued by a recent blog post from Tom Foremski where he “raised the possibility of PR agencies developing the ability to drive lots of traffic to specific news stories” and suggesting that this would constitute a PR firm’s “killer pitch”.
I immediately thought of a superb piece by Ashley Friedlein at E-Consultancy (New metrics and business models for digital publishing – selling outcomes not inputs).
He may have written it nearly a year ago, but it still makes good sense. His opening question – are publishers using outdated metrics – could equally apply to PR.
And it was this that struck me about Tom’s post.
The implicit assumption in Tom’s analysis is that all traffic is good. And more traffic is better. However, even publisher’s don’t think this. Rupert Murdoch clearly doesn’t think so. Specifically, traffic from search engines. In which case, why is traffic generated by PR firms going to be any better?  In fact, you could argue that they will generate precisely the kind of traffic that Murdoch and other big publishers protest to hate – namely, sporadic, non-loyal readers.
Given that this is 2010, surely the traffic for traffic sake argument is well and truly exploded. Isn’t engagement the name of the game?
What is the point of increasing traffic, or indeed unique visitor numbers as per Gawker, if the bounce rate rises and average engagement time falls?
As per Ashley Friedlein’s post, last year, the Newspaper Marketing Agency in the UK found that 56% of newspaper site visits last for under one minute. That’s not a great deal of engagement with content. If increasing traffic leads to greater numbers of unengaged readers, then who cares. I’ve long argued that only publisher’s have access to the data that advertisers (and PR firms) should really care about eg readership figures for specific stories, engagement time with specific pieces of coverage, etc. However, as Friedlein points out, advertising and PR clients are now in a quite powerful position – they know not only the input they’ve paid for (ads or press coverage generated), but they know the outcomes that these inputs have created (or not). They can now easily compare different input mechanisms and see which ones perform better than others. In the context of PR, those that are focussing on delivering outcome based campaigns are clearly going to fare better than those that deliver inputs.
In short, engagement is the name of the game.
But lack of engagement exists everywhere.  The New York Times has nearly 2.3 million Twitter followers – and yet the click throughs on links to its stories via Twitter often barely break into double figures. Even the best ones are in the low 000s. Massive reach in this case isn’t necessarily translating into engagement with content (at least not on the scale that you might imagine)
To return to Tom Foremski’s argument, I’d be curious to know how a PR might go about bumping up traffic to a particular news story (I have an image of hapless PR execs spending their days furiously opening and re-opening the web page of a piece of coverage to try and bump up the viewer figures – again, it might increase traffic, but engagement time is clearly zero).
If you were going to take this approach, why not just run a PPC campaign instead? (don’t publishers do this already?) Why do you need a PR firm to do that?
As Friedlein aptly puts it: “Too little attention is given to measuring outcomes. Specifically, digital media and digital publishing offer greater opportunity to track and measure outcomes that are not so readily available in ‘traditional’ media.”
Likewise with PR. The sooner the PR sector starts to think about outcomes and engagement rather than inputs, the better for all concerned.
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Digital marketing digital pr Media online pr Web/Tech

Bloggers and journalists needed for annual Glide survey

For the last few years, Glide Technologies (purveyors of the well known Online Press Centre product) have conducted an annual journalist survey to delve into the nitty gritty of what kind of information journalists want and how they want to receive it.  The Glide surveys have tended to stand out from other similar, run of the mill research efforts in this area – they actually do seem to come up with some valuable insights.

The 2009 survey is now getting underway – the key difference this year is that Glide is looking for input from both journalists and bloggers (sorry, no PR folk required).  I realise most hacks would rather poke their own eyes out rather than spend time on yet another bloody survey – but if the thorough approach of recent years is replicated again this time around, I’d say it is 15 mins well spent.

As an added incentive, everyone who helps by completing a survey will be entitled to enter a prize draw and a chance to win 2 bottles of Champagne –  3 sets up for grabs – and of course, everyone who takes part will receive a full copy of the results (naturally).

So if you are a journalist or blogger, feel free to go here to complete the Glide Technologies 2009 Media Survey. Go on. You know you want to.