EschermanWell, almost. The latest Daryl Willcox digital PR video is now up – and according to Chime Communications CEO Chris Satterthwaite PR agencies should “embrace the digital world so firmly that sometimes some of your clients say you’re almost excluding everything else”.
Couldn’t agree more.
Technology Guardian Editor Charles Arthur has some good tips on how to deal with the modern malaise of feedcreep (key points highlighted in bold):
Kill if:
* daily content consists of “today’s links:” followed by links and no new content.
* posts consist of no new content that I couldn’t find elsewhere, or just think of myself. (Musings on the crack in their living room wall or the new curtains they bought don’t count.)
* Haven’t updated the blog for more than 30 days (a “dinosaur”, in NNW’s parlance. Though I kept Tim Berners-Lee’s blog.)
* feeds are partial. Listen, don’t try to tempt me to come to your site to read your fantastically insightful things. There are very few organisations that can manage that, and of them, most are newspapers or very high-flown analysts of a sector. I just don’t bother with partial feeds any more. Apart from anything, most people can’t (a) write a good teaser (b) come up with any sort of analysis that makes it worth clicking through. Your overall traffic will surely be higher with full feeds. I’ve made this site full feed from day 1 because I couldn’t see any benefit from making people come to it. Yes, a few sites do deserve a clickthrough. But even then, it’s a barrier to reading. Barriers online don’t help.
Keep if:
* they’re in a sector where I want to hear the authentic voice of the user or programmer or problem solver
* they’re consistently able to throw new light on things I’m interested in
* they have a track record of telling you about things before they get big
* they’ve got a full feed.
Mike Magee, founder of The Inquirer, co-founder of The Register and one time editor of PC Business World, has penned a rather amusing departing shot from Incisive Media. In a self described “final act of ennui”, he gives us the definitive Guide to Modern 21st Century Journalism.
He has seven rules for the budding tech hack (reproduced in full below). As Peter Kirwan says, it’s a sensible rant against Google-driven hackery.
Rule 1 did get me thinking though:
Totally ignore PRs. The PR profession is deader than the journalistic trade. What place is there for an agency PR person when all the vendors throw up press releases instantly copied by serried ranks of “data gatherers” so cutting out the middle bunnies?
Amidst the satire, there is a serious point about the role of a PR agency today. Clearly there is a role to be played, but it almost certainly doesn’t resemble the PR stereotype of yesteryear. Sadly for Mike, it will involve knowledge of SEO, analytics, etc – but should still include the basics of good content skills and media relationship talent. And personally speaking, I don’t see why booze needs to be cut out of the equation.
Finally, as Intel and AMD’s PR departments break open the champagne, Mike says he will be “at his wit’s end at the end of the month at what to do”. I think the Coach and Horses beckons – for old time’s sake.
I decided to buy this drug on Cheap Ambien Possible side effects are dry mouth, drowsiness during the day, constipation, etc.
Those rules in full:
Rule 1 Totally ignore PRs. The PR profession is deader than the journalistic trade. What place is there for an agency PR person when all the vendors throw up press releases instantly copied by serried ranks of “data gatherers” so cutting out the middle bunnies?
Rule 2 A Modern Journalist never leaves the office, never has a drink, unless it’s a non-alcoholic Pimms, never double checks a story, never takes a chance, and has a pathological fear of a telephone unless the Health and Safety Inspectors clean the mouthpiece and earpiece every morning before the tidy world begins.
Rule 3 Google is the robotic news editor which rules the roost towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century. A Modern Journalist can do nothing except spur Adsense sales by endlessly re-writing stories that appear on Google News, which may never have actually been broken by anyone but first processed by the more important class of “data gatherers” who get early access to the er, press release.
Rule 4 The Modern Journalist never “breaks a story”. That would court the ire of the serried ranks of news management spinners and would breach Rule 2 to boot. Plus, even if a story fell into her or his hands, it would have to be “gathered” and then “processed” through the serried ranks of lawyers who act as an expensive filter to ensure that no boat is rocked.
Rule 5 The Modern Journalist must have gone to “journalist school”, where she or he will be taught all the tricks of the trade, such as sitting in serried ranks, never going out, never using the phone, re-cyling the endlessly re-cycled, and shamelessly cohorting with legions of other “professionals” such as people that went to “PR school” and those that drink non-alcoholic Pimms. They must be taking other stuff to get them high, surely? An old-fashioned hack would never do that. We think.
Rule 6 Show your adherence to 21st Modern Journalism standards by mouthing marketing slogans in your copy at every turn. If you have a news editor, and she or he wants you to “break stories”, complain through levels of the organisation that you’re being pressured and abused because she or he is complaining that you’re just recycling either press releases or re-cycled chunks from Google News.
Rule 7 Make sure you ignore this so 20th century saying: “You cannot hope To bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But seeing what The man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to. – Humbert Wolfe, Over the Fire” Accept bribes gracefully.
This Wikipedia entry for Digital PR is curious for a variety of reasons.
First up, it has clearly been flagged as an orphan entry (ie few or no other articles link to it). Second, it has been marked as a blatant piece of ad fluffery.
And when you read it, you note the very poor use of English. The final line had a certain odd quality to it:
“Digital PR is also a new style of pr not just an agency! Many agencies do this form of pr not just the above group.”
Which seemed a rather mangled way of saying “other PR agencies are available.” As well as a lame attempt to make out that this item had been written independently.
I was curious to know more about this H&K division – clearly I’d missed something. On checking out the Digital PR web site, I discovered that they are: “an agency specialized in the research and implementation of the most advanced digital communication tools.”
Hmm. Lots of non-existent links. Garbled English at every turn. The most recent “news” dated from May 2007.
Perhaps these guys could do with some help. It was only after looking at the contact page that it revealed they are based in Milan (they also have an office in Madrid). I’m sure the copy is fine in Italian and Spanish – but it felt like they’d hired a cheap translator to do the English version.
However, I came away with a general sense that they were shooting themselves in the foot – as well as, by association, tainting the view someone might get of H&K’s overall capabilities in this area.
Having a key search term like “digital PR” linked to a high ranking Google slot (via a Wikipedia entry) would on the surface appear to be a good thing – but allowing this entry to remain there – as well directing English language speakers to unhelpful content – (if they can even be motivated to click on the link as most people will realise it is a very unsubtle plug) does seem rather counter productive – both to Digital PR and H&K.
Anybody who feels like helping Digital PR to remove this unhelpful Wikipedia entry can of course go here.
Not only that, but we could do with someone writing a more detailed and objective entry to replace it. Any takers?
Valleywag fails to be outraged by Alex Petraglia, editor of Primotech, a US videogames-news site, claiming that CNET’s “ad sales team carries more weight than the editorial team.”
As Valleywag puts it: “Media companies don’t care about their writers. Reporters are nothing more than expendable, semi-skilled labor. Despite the chicken and the egg scenario (you can’t sell ads if there isn’t content, you can’t pay people to create content without ad sales), sales staff land the multimillion dollar deals that dictate everything from magazine cover themes to advertorial packages. You don’t need a bloody beheading to point out the disparity — just glance at the parking lot. All those Infiniti G37s belong to sales. Editorial is lucky to be cruising about in a used Ford Focus.”
On one level, they are right – editorial has never been as well paid as the sales side of publishing – however, there does seem to be a paradox in that everyone seems to agree that quality content is a key differentiator (both in publishing and PR) – yet no one seems to want to pay for it.
My thanks to eagle-eyed Peter Kirwan at the FullRun who noted our old blogging chum TWL has returned from a brief self-imposed exile. However, in keeping with the spirit of the times, the acerbic one has come back as a social network (courtesy of Ning). After only a few days, membership is up to 41.
TWL himself remains sceptical as to whether this format has legs: “The blog worked because most of the audience could be passive. Just sit back and read, be entertained, be appalled, be bored. It took no effort. It did for me though, which is largely why it came to an end. This’ll need a great deal more involvement from the members if it’s going to come to life.”
Whether user generated content can rival TWL’s fine wordsmithing remains to be seen. But worth keeping an eye on. Chris “Long Tail” Anderson seems to be a fan of Ning. In a recent interview, he said: “Ning has about 40,000 very niche, narrowly focused social networks. I think that is the right model going forward, with social networks being extremely granular, laser-focused on small, intensely narrow communities. They can perfectly serve those communities rather than forcing them to try and conform to a one-size-fits-all model.”
Speaking of narrow communities, I’ve just joined another new niche social network site – MarCom Professional. It appears to have been going since last October and has some nice features – not least being able to import and synchronise your own blog postings there. Again, early days, but worth a look.
As promised back in December 2007, here is the shiny new location of the blog formerly known as The New View From Object Towers.
Just getting used to the WordPress way of doing things – but so far, so good. And I have to say that the import process from Typepad was painless – very neat.
Suffice to say there will be a lot more happening around here in the next few days, weeks and months. So stay tuned.
And if you are wondering what the hell Escherman is, that’s the name of my new business. Website will up at www.escherman.com in the next week or so.
Good to be back.
First, apologies for the paucity of posting over the last 43 days. Just to reassure Sally, nothing untoward happened at the Flackenhack awards in October to cause me to fall off a blog cliff.
No comas here.
However, being referred to as "the de facto godfather of PR blogging" did cause me to fall off my chair (and if I’m the godfather, who are the parents?)
But to take things in reverse order, astute readers (if I still have any left) will note that I have changed the name of the blog to In Front Of Your Nose. This is a none too subtle reference to the the title of an Orwell essay from 1946 as well as the fourth volume of his Collected Journalism and Essays. The concluding paragraph struck me as incredibly pertinent when I first read it nearly 25 years ago. I think it is even more relevant now – especially in relation to blogging (and PR: simply replace “politics” with “PR”):
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one’s subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one’s thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.
So why the name change and blog silence? Suffice to say, I have been occupied on other matters – namely a decision to take some time away from the world of tech PR (the current trendy phrase is I believe, adult gap months). For a variety of personal and professional reasons, it seemed a good opportunity to do it as this point.
Clearly there has been something in the air recently as other PR bloggers such as TWL and Strumpette have decided to retreat from the fray (though I see that Amanda has taken a very brief retirement and is now back in business).
I will be back on the professional front at some point in early 2008 with something shiny and new. In the meantime, I will continue to post my views on all things tech PR here for the time being – though a new blog is planned in the near future.
Again, apologies for blog silence – appreciated people getting in contact to check that I was OK due to my lack of posting – but near normal service will resume shortly.
Danny Bradbury was robbed,
..for best triumph in face of adversity.
Hugh McCleod strangely not around to collect the award – but Phil Devery from Microsoft was.
Collecting the gong, he said: "It had fuck all to do with me."
Nice.
