EschermanH.P. Said to Have Studied Infiltrating Newsrooms – New York Times.
Although it seems HP never actually did go ahead and plant spies in newsrooms, the fact it was being actively considered just adds to the company’s reputational woes.
The irony here is that HP was always regarded as a highly ethical business, not least of which because this culure emanated from the top via its founders.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard must be turning in their graves.
Link: itjournalist.com � Blog Archive � PR hits, misses, and hits and misses.
A good post from the ever astute Danny Bradbury.
And kind words for moi as well 😉
DWPub Sporadic: PR professionals of the future benefit from Response Source university link.
As Daryl says, PR students at the University of Gloucestershire’s new public relations degree course are going to have access to journalist requests through his Response Source Journalist Enquiries System: "This will give them real-world examples of the sort of requests journalists make so they can consider effective ways of pitching."
I guess one of the most important lessons the students could learn is to simply read the request properly – and respond accordingly. The main beef you hear from journalists is the fact that many PRs – knowingly or otherwise – seem to pitch clients or stories that bear no relation to the original request. So anything that helps the next crop of PR grads do their jobs better is to be welcomed.
Aside from that, it is good to see at least one PR degree course doing something to bring the "real world" of PR to students.
The full release below – would be interesting to see if they have a breakdown of where the spend is going – I suspect PR for example will still constitute a small part of overall marketing spend.
FRAMINGHAM, Mass. –(Business Wire)– Sept. 14, 2006 — The IDC CMO Advisory Service projects that IT vendor marketing budgets will increase by 7.5% for the full year 2006, the fastest rate of increase over the past five years. Along with overall increased investment, tech marketing productivity and efficiency indicators are also improving by several measures. IDC’s Marketing Staff Throughput Index measures program execution per marketing employee and has increased by about 10% over the past year to $301,400. The average tech vendor is also getting more leverage from its marketing staff as indicated by the IDC Program-to-People Ratio, which has expanded to 65:35 for 2006.
Richard Vancil, vice president of IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice noted some key trends in the tech marketing community. "Many senior marketers are making significant progress within the corporate pillar of marketing. IDC sees improvement in marketing’s contribution to the strategic planning processes, and in marketing’s ability to measure performance. However, there are still many challenge areas for the senior marketing team. This includes the need to improve alignment between corporate marketing and the product and field marketing disciplines. Also, our essential guidance to clients includes establishment of an overall marketing skill set inventory and improvement program; and an increased investment- up to 5% of marketing budget – that should be earmarked for IT and infrastructure for the marketing function.
The new insights and analysis are from IDC’s CMO Advisory Service, the tech industry’s most comprehensive benchmarking and advisory offering for tech marketing leadership. IDC’s fourth annual Technology Marketing Benchmarks Survey provides insight into the management techniques and investment strategies based on IDC’s unique access to the world’s largest and most influential technology marketing leaders.
In the study, Marketing Investment Planner 2007: Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators (IDC #203212), IDC provides a comprehensive analysis of qualitative and quantitative marketing investment priorities, marketing-mix decisions, and operational and organization information for many of the world’s leading and most influential technology vendors. This study is based on 95 interviews conducted with senior marketing executives of the leading IT hardware, software, and services vendors, including Adobe, Cisco, HP, Intel, SAP, and Symantec, representing over $360 billion in IT revenues and over $12 billion in marketing spending.
The IDC CMO Advisory Practice provides marketing executives and their operations counterparts with critical insights and fact-based information to plan program and people investments, prepare marketing operations, mobilize resources, and measure results.
To purchase this document, call IDC’s sales hotline at 508-988-7988 or email sales@idc.com.
The real surprise in this story from IT Week is not that 42 percent of respondents in an ATC sponsored survey thought IT staff used the most jargon – but that only 16 percent thought that lawyers were the
most linguistically impenetrable part of the business.
When lawyers appear to be shining examples of clear communication then the IT industry does have to do a much better job at explaining and justifying itself.
David Maister’s blog has this which gives US journalist Tommy Fernandez a good platform to give PR folk a good kicking.
The following was my long comment to this piece:
I should start by saying that these arguments about PR people are as old as the hills.
But to take one specific point – is that PR people don’t understand journalists?
No. On the whole, I’d say PR people do understand what journalists want
– the real issue is that their clients or the people they represent
don’t understand what journalists want.
However, PRs seem to suffer from an endemic inferiority complex ie not
being confident enough in their own judgement and experience to tell
their clients that their expectations are too high or unrealistic. The
stereotype view of the PR is to be relentlessly upbeat and positive –
saying No is viewed as a sign of weakness. Yet any other business
advisor would surely counsel their clients to temper their expectations
if they knew the outcome was likely to end in failure.
Why is this? The old cliché about PR is that you can tell how important
PR is to the firm by how far the communications director’s office is
from the CEO. Generally, PRs – either in-house or agency side – are
viewed with at best suspicion or worse contempt. Which is curious given
that most senior execs in any business will usually say that PR (or the
firms reputation) is of paramount importance. Yet in terms of overall
marketing spend, PR never gets anything like the investment received by
other marketing disciplines. If you take the tech industry as an
example, according to IDC, for every $100K spent on marketing by tech
companies, only $7.1K of that will be spent on PR. The figures don’t
lie.
Also, in any industry sector, certain firms are always likely to get
the lion’s share of attention by journalists – however, all companies
seem to behave as though they have a right to a similar level of
exposure – but if their PR advisors don’t provide realistic
expectations of outcome, then you end up with the situation outlined by
Tommy Fernandez – and I realise he was referring to law PRs, but his
arguments could be applied to any industry – and have been for years.
Let’s take his points in turn:
TF: There are too damned many of you. (He gets more than 100 calls involving law firm pitches per day. Do the math.)
A: As he says, do the maths – it is impossible for all companies to get
the same level of high, positive press exposure – yet PRs act as if
they can. I don’t doubt that many ring up journalists like Fernandez
knowing full well that the pitch will fall on deaf ears – but at least
they can say: “We tried.” Which is somehow supposed to justify the
investment in time and money.
TF: It’s getting nearly impossible to tell your pitches apart. There is
no trend you can imagine that I have heard several times today.
A: Again – it requires serious effort to create a compelling and
differentiated story – and this isn’t just lack of elbow grease on the
part of the PRs. This is related to the firm’s own readiness to truly
formulate a proposition and story that really stands out. It’s not just
the PRs, but senior management that must also share responsibility for
this. Or indeed the whole firm.
TF: You don’t listen (or keep promises about when you’re going to get back with a quote or supporting evidence for a story.)
A: OK, maybe there are some slack PRs out there who are just plain
unprofessional – but I bet most of the time, they have acted in good
faith but are let down by someone else within the business who doesn’t
keep to their promises.
TF: You treat reporters like your social worker (“you’ve got to help me
out of this situation”.) I am not here to help you. I am not your
social case worker. I am not here to protect your job, make you feel
good or help your clients. The sooner you accept that reality, the
better of you’ll be.
A: Very true – but you can see how PRs are driven to act like this if
they are being forced to execute a PR campaign they don’t fundamentally
believe in.
TF: You treat reporters like a social trophy (Come to lunch and meet
our top execeutives and discuss the latest developments in document
flow management software.” “What do you mean you don’t want to spend
three hours with our management committee to educate us on ….)
A: Again – if the PR reminded senior management that what they consider
important is not necessarily what the reporter considers important,
Tommy might not have had so many wasted calls like this.
TF: Your clients are dumbasses and you don’t tell us: “Is that really
the right question to be asking? Is this really the right story to be
writing? I’ll tell you a story you should be working on, although it
won’t really be a story until the winter, but that’s beyond your
deadline, isn’t it?”
A: Again – PR people need to be more robust in explaining to their
clients about what is a realistic expectation – if they have a better
story that can be told at a later date, then give up on trying to get
coverage now based on a non-story. And yes, everyone needs to be seen
generating results – but the other danger is that by pursuing the
journalist now with a poor story, he will be less inclined to consider
the better story further down the track – a lose-lose situation.
TF: Reporters hate you (PR) becaude you act like used car salesmen. ‘A
study in nausea’ he calls it. -Drop your fantasy. There is no spiel, no
gimmick you can use to compel me to abandon my common sense. The
attitude of reaching (PR) goals is actually one of the easiest ways you
can shoot yourself in the foot.
A: PRs have to have goals – the trouble is, the goals are too often
unachieveable – either because senior management haven’t been told, or
refuse to listen. The come across as car salesmen because they are
attempting to modify demand to meet supply – rather than modifying
supply to meet demand.
In short, Fernadez’s arguments are as old as the hills – however, I
suspect nothing much will change until PRs have more belief in their
counsel and experience – and their clients are prepared to be more
realistic in their view of what can be achieved by PR.
Information Age magazine is to launch what its describes as "the UK’s first monthly IT-in-business online magazine programme, Information Age Live!"
Says IA: "The programme will be produced in the style of a radio broadcast – similar to Radio 4’s Midweek – real time news, analysis, interviews and panel discussion. You can pose questions – and have them answered – directly on air to our editors and the IT professionals who will be in our studio.
In this month’s programme, we explore two main themes: ‘Power and Heat – The Data Centre Dilemma’, in which Information Age’s editor, Kenny MacIver, interviews leading industry authorities, including Gartner VP, Rakesh Kumar, and Director of Future Tech, Chris Miller. The second major theme, ‘What’s wrong with software licensing?’, includes an interview with David Roberts, CEO of tif, the Corporate IT Forum, and will be hosted by Information Age’s Associate Editor, Phil Jones."
First broadcast set for: 6th September at 2pm.
To find out more, go here.
Last Bank Holiday Monday, I was up at BBC TV Centre with Chris Long, Producer for Click, the BBC’s flagship tech TV programme. We were doing some filming for a piece that will be out this coming weekend. I asked Chris how he fared with PRs these days – I’d imagined they’d be queueing at the door to talk to him.
In fact, the reverse seems to be true.
Or at least, the companies who you think would be constantly vying for attention on the show don’t seem to bother with it – and those that are completely irrelevant to the show seem to take up a lot of the Click team’s time.
Says Chris: "When I was editor of PC User I had millions of new best friends pitching every day – now I work on a show that goes out on BBC1, News 24 and around the world on BBC World and we are ignored – bizarre."
Bizarre indeed. Given that there are few dedicated tech outlets on TV these days, you’d have thought Click would have been right up there – admittedly it is aimed at a consumer audience (so ruling out all the enterprise and B-to-B IT outfits), but there are enough consumer focussed vendors to warrant putting some effort into talking to Chris and the team at Click.
Then again, perhaps it leaves the field open to those PRs who know their broadcast onions to take advantage of the apparent apathy of many consumer tech companies towards a major broadcast outlet.
Link: News and jobs for journalists :: Print and broadcast beat net for trust
Curiously, viewing figures and circulations continue to decline – people may say they trust traditional media more – but they are not translating that trust into loyalty.
Television and newspapers are still more trusted for news than websites and blogs, according to a new survey published by online marketing agency Telecom Express.
Researchers asked participants which information they believed to be accurate, true and unbiased from a variety of media.
Of 1,000 respondents, 66 per cent preferred TV, with the same number trusting their own friends first and foremost. Next on the audience’s list were local newspapers, with 63 per cent naming them as trustworthy.
Websites were the top choice for just 36 per cent, with blogs trailing on 24 per cent.
A BBC/Reuters report published in May found the web was the most trusted news source for only one in ten people, with national television reigning supreme.
Link: Hacks replaced by computers
According to this Inquirer story,Thomson Financial has been using computers to generate some stories since March.
Says Nick Farrell: "Apparently the computer can turn around an earnings story within 0.3
seconds of the company making results public. Of course that sounds
fast but since hacks usually get reports a few days in advance, writing
it for an embargoed deadline and pressing "send" is just as fast.
But hacks need not worry too much. The software just goes through press
releases and reports and turns them into newspeak.A computer cannot
ring people up and ask them searching questions.
If applied to the IT press, it will kill off all those who cut and paste press releases and stick their byline on the top."
Judging by the anonymous commenter here, perhaps VNU have also been using computers to write copy too.
More seriously, one does wonder if there is a contradiction at the heart of this approach. Thompson Financial claim it means it gives their real journalists "time to think" – and presumably ask the searching questions alluded to by Nick Farrell – however, most publishers are intent on cutting down editorial resources – which means that the journalists remaining are expected to cover ever wider fields – with presumably an even smaller understanding of what they are expected to write about – what’s the point of having more time to think and ask searching questions if you don’t know what searching questions to ask in the first place?