EschermanKnock a glass of champagne over him. Congrats to the PR who did that a few moments ago – barely 8pm and already people falling over – marvelous!
And ex-colleague Nicky Alvey asked me to mention the porn tree – apparently it will mean something to people who worked at Brodeur in the late 90s.
Anyway – we are all waiting breathlessly for the awards to begin.
Drink count: +2 glasses of wine.
So here we are at the inaugural Flackenhack awards in the ultra chic Audi showroom in Piccadilly. Peter Kirwan is nervous and TWL is off down the pub – sounds about right. 200 tickets sold, so this really is the only PR show in town tonight. The excitement is, well, palpable. And the Pretenders are playing on PA system – perfect.
More news as guests arrive.
BTW – the keyboards on the PCs are very cool,shiny and metallic – and difficult to type on. Get my excuse in early.
Drink count: one glass of champagne.
PR Week reports today that Text100 is centralising its back-office account servicing to a new office based in India.
The story doesn’t give any detail on exactly what content and secondary research will be done overseas (press release writing? features tracking?) – but as I discussed here last November, If 70pc of legal work can be offshored, who says 70pc of PR work can’t be? Looks like Text 100 are first out of the gate among the bigger agencies – will be interesting to see how they get on. And what impact it has on profitability.
Peter Kirwan at FullRun picked up on earlier post of mine regarding the relevance of IT trade mags to senior IT decision makers.
He cites a couple of surveys that appear to contradict my argument:
1. A study of 600 senior executives worldwide from the FT and US ad agency Doremus asked respondents to comment on the suggestion that "print media are becoming obsolete". Fully 73% disagreed. Meanwhile, two-thirds said that they paid more attention to print ads than the online equivalents.
2. Back in June, Hill & Knowlton produced another example of the genre. Surprisingly, perhaps, the agency’s survey of IT purchasing decision-makers found a strong bias toward print titles among respondents.
On point one, it may be true that they pay more attention to print ads than online – what isn’t mentioned is how much general attention they are paying to the mags themselves – if they are only having the odd glance, it still doesn’t bode well for print advertising.
On point two, one thing I didn’t mention last time was that although the senior IT decision makers I talked to didn’t read the mags themselves, a number of them said they passed on these titles to other junior colleages – occasionally, they will have a particular piece highlighted to them.
In which case, it would remain perfectly valid for IT decision makers to say that they still regard IT trade mags as important – just not in the way you might expect ie by actually reading them.
It makes for an interesting PR challenge – how do you craft stories that persuade lower level decision makers that they have something that might be of interest to their boss?
As Peter says, in the absence of compelling reader research among IT decision-makers, you pays your money; and you takes your choice.
What have I done?
The Flackenhack 2007 Awards, the alternative awards for the UK’s technology PR and media community, are only a few weeks away – Tues, Oct 23rd to be precise.
Along with my friend Fiona Blamey at Prompt and Stephen Davies at WebIT, we have agreed (perhaps foolishly) to take part in what is being described as a Tech Blogger Face off by the organisers.
As Fiona said to me, sounds more like bear baiting. The image of us being prodded with sticks in a cage is clear in my mind. Still, the beer is free, which should go some way to easing the pain – and by all accounts, it will be a fun night – I gather a bumper turn out is assured judging by ticket sales.
If you are planning to go, be gentle with us.
For all the general noise about the potential of PR 2.0 – blogging, vlogging, podcasting, etc – two recent posts from very different ends of the spectrum suggest we’ve all lost sight of the wood for the trees.
First, up is Andrew Brown at The Guardian with his piece entitled: This article is not available as a podcast or videoblog.
He compares and contrasts information compression between the written word and audio/video:
"So if I want to absorb something complicated quickly – or even, when
I need to do so, slowly – the efficient way to help me is to write it
out first. When you think of it, the time compression between reading
and writing is quite astonishing: the thriller that lasts for half a
plane journey will have taken half a year to write. Even The 39 Steps,
which John Buchan is supposed to have written in a fortnight while
convalescing, takes only a couple of hours to read.
By contrast,
audio and video are not lossy compression. They are lossy expansion.
They take more time to convey less meaning. There are some things which
print cannot easily – or at all – convey, and which sound and pictures
can. But there are surprisingly few of them. Just for an experiment,
try listening to the television news while not watching the pictures.
You will be just as well informed and half your attention has been
freed for other things. You will also notice – without the distractions
– that hardly anything of any interest has been said at all. If you
just read a transcript of what has been said, you will have learned
even more, and in even less time."
In other words, most of the material flying out of the PR 2.0 tool box currently should probably have been left as plain old text. Or perhaps not even said at all.
On a related theme, via Strumpette, Loren Feldman, President of 1938 Media presents a very, er, forceful case for What’s Wrong With PR Today. His simple message is that for all the cheaply available technology available to produce video clips, podcasts, etc, 99.9pc of the content is rubbish. Creating a compelling audio broadcast, or editing a video brings with it a skill set that most current practitioners don’t possess. "Editing is an art", he says. Robert Scoble is singled out as a prime example of the tech heavy amateur.
And he has a point – witness the number of print technology journalists who are now being asked to do podcasts or appear as web TV presenters – with all due respect to them, most don’t cut the mustard – either because they’ve had no training to do it – or with the best will in the world, they have a voice or face for print.
And the same applies to PR – hence why so much of the material being produced doesn’t hit the mark – though mainly due to Andrew Brown’s argument that it doesn’t expand meaning in a valuable way compared to the time to create or express it". As he says:
"The point of an advertisement, however, as of almost everything else
that is published in journalism, is that it can all be boiled down to a
couple of sentences. With an advertisement, the essential message is
only ever two words long: "Buy this."
Replace advertisement with press release or PR and the point remains the same.
PR needs to get back to the basics of focussing on developing meaningful and valuable messages and content – and using the appropriate tools to do the best job – which doesn’t always mean defaulting to a microphone or webcam.
Looks like Danny Bradbury has caught the Four Hour Work Week bug – and according to his post on the subject of virtual assistants, he’s already seen some very good results.
In short, Danny has outsourced a lot of the donkey work faced by freelance journalists (ie trying to sort out interview times, basic background desk research, sourcing pictures, etc) to a virtual assistant. As he says, this has traditionally occupied huge swathes of his time. After 3 weeks, he concludes:
"The cost? Less than the revenue from a feature article each month.
The benefits? Time, which as both a writer and a parent, is the most
precious commodity for me. If I wanted to fill the time I’m saving with
more work, I could sell more articles and make more dough, but I don’t
think I will. I’m hitting my financial targets, (with the cost of the
service factored in), and for the first time in years, I’m relishing
the ability to take some ‘me’ time and some more family time. I may not be working four hours a week, but I’m working
way less than I did, and the work that remains on my desk is more
valuable to me."
As Sally Whittle pointed out in a comment to Danny’s post, he has effectively hired a virtual editorial assistant. Or as a highly paid management consultant would probably put it, he’s analysed his business model, defined his core value proposition – and outsourced non-core activities.
It set me thinking that perhaps there is an opportunity here for PR agencies to drastically reduce their cost base – given that a whopping 69pc of an average agency’s time (PR Week survey 2006) is spent on account management, administration and reporting, surely a lot of this kind of donkey work could be outsourced rather than occupying the time of AEs and AMs who would be better focussed on doing real value added activity – such as writing better press release or improving their media relations skills.
Perhaps agencies are already doing this – but it doesn’t feel that way.
Google’s Adword Keyword Tool is a very useful aid for determining how much you can expect to pay for a key word or phrase associated with a Google ad. It also tells you the level of competition for a particular keyword or phrase as well as search volumes over time – helpful for detecting trends in searches.
On a whim, I had a look at the prices and trends for a host of relevant tech PR terms – ones that potential purchasers of tech PR sevices might use eg :
high tech pr
technology pr
tech pr
It produced some interesting results. The figures refer to the expected average Cost Per Click (CPC) of a term to gain a placing from 1 – 3 in the right hand ad section:
tech pr firm £8.00
high tech pr agencies £7.58
tech pr agencies £7.22
technology pr agencies £6.28
high tech pr firm £6.13
technology pr agency £6.10
high tech pr firms £6.07
high tech pr £6.01
tech pr agency £5.59
technology pr £5.26
technology pr firms £4.89
tech pr £4.34
consumer tech pr £0.04
consumer technology pr £0.04
high tech pr agency £0.04
maps pr tech £0.04
tech pr blog £0.04
technology pr companies £0.04
technology pr firm £0.04
technology pr london £0.04
At £8.00 per click through, the phrase “tech pr firm” commands a hefty premium. Yet, according to the Keyword Tool, there is very little competition for the phrase. And the average search volume for this term is low compared with others. Generally, the trends for various terms seems to rise and fall like the Persian Empire. In other words, potential buyers of tech PR services (who you would have thought might be the most likely people to use such search terms), seem to vary the way in which they seek out information. One month they are looking for a high tech PR firm, next month a technology PR agency.
Also interesting that a term like “consumer tech pr” has low search volumes – and very low CPC at 4p. Which could mean buyers aren’t searching for consumer tech PR – and why consumer tech agencies aren’t using Google ads – or paying a low price for doing so.
However, its this kind of data that gives a brief glimpse of how analytics can be used for business development in tech PR. And how the same principles could be applied in the context of developing PR programmes.
Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four Hour Work Week, is clearly the business/lifestyle title du jour. Having now topped the New York Times and WSJ best seller lists, he is gaining a cult following over here in the UK and Europe.
In simple terms, it is a book about "lifestyle design" – or how to do the things you really want to do in your life and earn enough cash to do them without having to work 80 hours a week- and wait until 60 to retire.
There’s obviously a lot more to it than this – he’s very cleverly taken a lot of themes from existing business books on things like the 80/20 rule and wrapped them up with some original insights of his own.
One of the cornerstones of his approach is what he describes as the "Low Information Diet". A common theme running throughout the book is the call to minimise the amount of information input you have to deal with – and focus on maximum output. For example, in terms of e-mail, he recommends an auto responder that says you will only check e-mail twice a day – once at 11am and once at 4pm. If people really need to call you, then you give them a mobile number – according to Ferris, this drastically reduces the number of so-called urgent disruptions you get in a day. (Wonder how many PRs or journalists could get away with this?)
However, he has an even more radical approach to reading newspapers and magazines – namely, not reading them at all. He claims to have not read a newspaper in 5 years. He devotes a couple of hours per month to reading one trade mag. And according to him, it has had no negative impact on his life or ability to generate income whatsover. In fact, quite the reverse.
From a PR and publishing perspective, this has some interesting implications. His book is clearly very popular. So what if people start adopting Ferriss’ low information diet in great numbers? Will magazine and newspaper circulations begin to fall further as people take this credo to heart and ignore virtually all printed mattter (or other media)?
To be fair to Ferris, he does suggest trying the low information diet for a week or month to see if you can truly remove your addiction – would be interesting to see how many PRs or journalists could get away with adpoting this approach – but perhaps we can indulge in a mass experiment to see if our lives are significantly changed in any way by doing it……
My good friend Mr Waddington at Rainier has been bemoaning PRs who still see print coverage as the primary goal of their work.
He says: "This reality, alas, hasn’t sunk into the UK PR
industry yet, which still regards hard copy coverage as delivering the
best value to clients when in reality web hits and increased search
engine optimisation (SEO) is the way forward. It’s the same old issue; the PR industry needs an effective model to prove return on investment."
I’m in general agreement with Stephen on this – and would add the following:
1. Why do PR agencies continue to churn out so many press releases? (And waste client’s money?)
In his recent book on PR in the UK, leading business journalist Peter Bartram noted that in 2006, a sample of 89 UK tech and business journalists received on average more than 19,100 press releases a week. Put another way, 993,200 per year. According to Bartram, “the vast bulk of these releases, say the journalists concerned, are either irrelevant to their interests or contain no discernible story.” In short, a huge amount of time, resource and effort is being devoted to writing and distributing press releases that have no impact whatsoever.
Couple this with:
2. Print Media Environment
Fewer tech titles + Fewer journalists + Fewer editorial pages
Fewer opportunities for coverage + Lowering circulations + Fewer readers = not a happy picture.
And do these dwindling band of print readers actually read the magazines they receive? Having talked to numerous senior IT directors in recent months, the general consensus appears to be a resounding NO. Reasons range from lack of time to a sense that there is no really actionable information to be gained by reading the trad IT pubs.
So is online the panacea? Not necessarily. As per previous postings on print vs online, readerships figures for both seem to be similiar – or indeed in favour of print.
Which does suggest that it is media relations generally – whether targetting print or online – that needs examining in terms of its value to the client.