Month: October 2006

Three stories have caught my eye in the last few days around the subject of innovation – or rather failure to invest in it.

First, the FT and others have reported on the demise of Vodafone’s innovation unit.

PR Week ran a story about Bite losing the PR account for BT’s innovation arm – as a result of cost cutting.

Then Rupert Goodwins made reference to Symantec’s Research Labs only having one person dedicated to fundamental research.

Which points to a curious trend where, on the one hand. technology companies often talk loudly about their commitment to innovation – but seem reluctant to actually invest in it.

Of course, the kind of pure research that can lead to genuine innovation more often than not can lead to expensive cul de sacs – but surely that’s the point – profit is the reward for risk – you have to take a calculated punt on innovation to get the "breakthrough" everyone seems to want.

MySpace is greyspace — mostly over 35 from Guardian Unlimited: Technology.

Perhaps this is how the enterprise MySpace will emerge…….

My attention has been drawn to this latest marketing wheeze from Business Objects.

No question it’s slickly produced (and probably cost an arm and a leg). And you can see what they are trying to do – using humour to inject some interest and diffentiation into an otherwise dry subject. However, in spite of trying to come across a la The Office, I think it fails on one fundamental point – it isn’t funny.

That’s my view at least – I’d welcome anybody else’s comedy rating on this one.

ITPro: News: BEA chief calls for "enterprise MySpace"

This is the latest in a series of comments being made by the great and good of the IT world – what Gartner calls the "consumerisation of IT" – namely, the use of consumer-based technology in the enterprise.

The increasing use of Instant Messaging is one obvious example – but an Enterprise MySpace? Hmm. Not so sure about that one. Smells more like a call for more collaborative computing – an idea that’s hardly new.

What we really need is an enterprise XBox – surprised nobody has written a game yet that would help  IT directors to try out their wildest strategies in a virtual world where no-one gets hurt if the server room burns down because you’ve tried to squeeze too much power out of your processors…..

Says IT Week.

Apparently, European internet users now spend an average of four hours a week
online, compared to just two hours in 2003. The average time spent reading newspapers and magazines is just three hours.
This trend has helped drive an increase in overall media consumption to 19 hours
per week, up from 15 hours in 2003.

The study found that European media consumption trends are underpinned by two
key factors: age and broadband access. Younger consumers exhibit a propensity to consume media online, whereas older
consumers lean more towards traditional print media.

The impact of broadband is also seen at a country level. France, which has
the highest rates of broadband household access, also registers the highest
average hours spent online whereas Germany ranks lowest on both metrics.

So as a PR, targetting older, senior execs is still best done through trad media – though if the stat in the Economist this week about 50pc of Forture CEOs going in the next 5 years due to retirement is anything to go, perhaps  the  victory of online over print is  merely a matter of time….

Well, thanks to web-based service Payscale , you can easily find out. Or rather, you can find out what the typical salary and benefits package for a particular job title is in an industry sector. And it covers the UK. What’s interesting is that it takes into account things like years of experience, etc. Having done a quick test it does seem to provide a pretty accurate guide.

According to this, the average technology company marketing director has a base salary of around £70K per year – the highest salaries just topping £100K per year. Other benefits such as bonus, etc can add another 20 – 30K to these figures.

Tom Foremski has more detail here – interesting that the av. Silicon Valley VP of marketing earns around $165K per annum – or around £87K – so not terribly dissimiliar to the UK.

Silicon Valley Watcher–reporting on the business and culture of innovation.

Additional Info:

Company overview:

http://www.payscale.com/about.asp?pg=about⊂=overview

Managment bios:

http://www.payscale.com/about.asp?pg=mgmt⊂=exec

HR Exec press release: http://payscale.com/about.asp?pg=news⊂=pr&pr=101

Veteran journalist Peter Bartram has just written a book entitled "Writing The Perfect Press Release."

As part of his research, he interviewed 89 journalists and discovered the following – these journalists received around 19,100 press releases per week or 993,200 per year.

And surprise, surprise, virtually none of these releases were relevant or contained a story worth the journalists attention.

Lets consider the economic cost of this. For argument’s sake, let’s assume that every press release has the following costs associated with it:

– researching and writing
– time spent by client approving
– distribution

Clearly not all releases will involve the same amount of time or effort – and distribution could be to a few names or many thousands. But again, for argument’s sake, let’s say on average that every press release has a total cost associated with it of around £1K, taking all the above elements into account (I haven’t factored in "follow up" – I know best practice says, don’t do it, but we all know it does happen inn many cases – which would mean adding more to the cost of every release).

So, based on Peter Bartram’s figures, there is an average of £993m spent on press releases every year to these 89 journalists – most of which don’t work. Even if you made the average cost per release much lower, it still comes out as a lot of wasted cash.

Let’s go further – if we assume there are around 10,000 targetable journalists in the UK – based on the above, then even with very low assumptions on the cost of press release production and distribution, the wastage element in press releases in the UK every year is very high.

As mentioned here before, there is an argument for viewing the press release as a direct to end user communication tool in its own right – which must surely carry some weight – because it would seem that the press release in its current form is not exactly the most efficient tool in the PR armoury.

Leader: Don’t fear generation Xbox – Comment & Analysis – Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com.

Silicon.com reports on a recent keynote from Peter Cochrane – as the article says:

Unfortunately, just moaning about long-haired, iPod-touting "yooves"
won’t make them vanish in a puff of smoke, to be replaced with the
Brylcreemed mini-adults of yesteryear. Many of these kids have
grown up with digital technologies all around them. To them CDs are
about as quaint as wax cylinders, and most probably don’t even know you
used to have to put a strip of chemically treated celluloid inside a
camera to make it work. These kids live and breathe network-centric computing and mash-ups without even realising it.

Having just taken delivery of an XBox 360 and played around with it, you have to agree with Silicon. The "yoof" of today are growing up immersed in a technology environment that would seem like science fiction to us only a few years ago. The whole XBox 360 experience and eco-system is very slick – and this where the IT workers of tomorrow are coming from.

Perhaps businesses ought to be examing the Xbox as a training ground for tomorrow rather than as a distraction from "real" work.

FT Digital Business joins the growing ranks of media outlets now producing podcasts. PRs now have a range of new possible outlets for gaining coverage – it also means looking at the kind of material that now needs to be produced to meet the needs of this medium – as well as training clients for taking part in audio interviews of this kind.

However, the FT might want to look at where they are positioning the mikes – interviewer Dan Illett sounds as though he is sitting at the bottom of a mine shaft on the latest one.