Category: Technology PR

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.

Link: Businesses failing to cash in on blogs – IT Week.

Nearly half of small and medium-sized firms understand the business benefits of corporate blogs, but only three percent have plans to start one, according to new research released today by web hosting firm Fasthosts.

The survey of over 2,000 SMBs found that firms understood that a good blog can drive traffic, attract customers to their goods and services, and provide a platform for interaction with business partners and other third parties. But many were put off by the practicalities of knowing what to say and how to say it, according to Fasthost’s Steve Holford.

"

Here.

The whole post is well worth a read – not least because it raises important questions about the future of journalism – and how we are to pay for it.

World Business carries this feature from Baroness Greenfield.

Two quotes from the piece stood out:

1. "Working on the screen is having a massive impact
on the way we think and process information. The screen culture is not
conducive to taking time to think – everything is instantly available.
The result is iconic thinking, quick fixes and short attention spans."

I agree with her that we are only just beginning to appreciate the implications of the tech-saturated environment we live in. The ability to focus and concentrate on things without distraction/interuption is becoming increasingly difficult. For example, developing a long term communications strategy needs time to be thought about and written – yet the expectation is that it can be delivered in hours rather than days or weeks. Strategy now seems be code for: "what are we going to do over the next week"  rather than months or years.

Instant responses and instant decision making are becoming the norm – but responding and deciding for the sake of it with no real basis for doing so is surely a recipie for failure? Nothing wrong with going with your gut instinct (pace Malcolm Gladwell), but relying on it in every situation might be a little risky.

2: "We assume that people want to work for other people – but that may
not be the case in the future. At the moment a lot of our pleasure is
derived from status, but I think soon that will be challenged – people
just won’t be motivated in that way. It’s just another arms race and I
think we’ll evolve to a point where people aren’t so status-obsessed."

This could spell the end for traditional, monolithic corporations,
she says. As the various rationale for forming large companies – for
example, to reduce the cost of gathering in materials – become less
important, smaller, more virtual units will emerge that are independent
but work through a variety of networks of other organisations, she
insists.

Nothing new here – small is beautiful, virtual teams, etc – but point about people not being so status obsessed has an air of truth about. More specifically, when people realise what they are expected to sacrifice in terms of life and health in order to "get to the top", I do think many more people will decide its not worth the effort.

HP CEO Allowed ‘Sting’ of Reporter – washingtonpost.com.

The whole Post article is worth reading – you couldn’t make this up. But try this as a taster:

Though nine journalists were apparently targeted in HP’s leak investigation, one in particular drew the scrutiny of Dunn and Hurd, according to a series of internal e-mails. Dawn Kawamoto, a reporter for Cnet.com, wrote a fairly straightforward article on Jan. 23 outlining the firm’s long-term strategy after a board retreat.

The idea, evidently, was to induce Kawamoto to open an e-mail attachment with a "tracer" in it that would allow them to see who she forwarded it to. They hoped it would pinpoint board member Keyworth as her source, according to the documents."

In other words, HP adopted the tactics of a common or garden hacker-phisher (would be interesting to know what security software Kawamoto had on her PC).

And how does that square with this from HP’s own website:

HP’s mission is to deliver policy driven security management across the
enterprise IT infrastructure to prevent, detect, warn, log and heal the
effects of attacks, security policy violations and other threats.

Perhaps they also planted some malware to stop Dawn Kawamoto downloading this.