Category: Technology PR

Call Kit Gould, Managing Director, IDG UK on +44 (0) 20 7071 3615 for more detail on why.

Or read the press release below.

INTERNATIONAL DATA GROUP ACQUIRES FAIRFAX’S UK PUBLISHING AND DATABASE BUSINESSES

LONDON – 10th August 2006 – Boston-based IT technology publisher IDG has announced that it has acquired the publishing interests of Fairfax Business Media in the UK. This includes the monthly magazine MIS; the annual MIS100 which profiles the UK’s biggest users of strategic IT; and a new quarterly, The C Magazine. The business will be integrated into IDG’s UK publishing operations based in London and represents the continuing commitment of IDG to promote a range of media solutions throughout the globe.

"This acquisition further extends IDG’s development into the enterprise IT sector. MIS magazine is a strong publication that gives us the ability to offer advertisers a range of advertising and marketing solutions to address the needs of the most senior buyers of IT in the UK. By joining the other 24 publications in the CIO product line, MIS will benefit from the capabilities of IDG’s global sales force, IGS," said IDG UK’s Managing Director, Kit Gould.

Fairfax’s business in the UK consists of three publishing properties and a research and database division. With a circulation of 23,052 (BPA audit), MIS is a leading monthly magazine read by CIOs and other senior IT professionals in the UK’s largest companies who need to understand and explain technology investments from a purely business perspective.

MIS100 is an annual publication profiling the UK’s 100 largest users of IT within the private and public sectors. It is regarded as the industry bible. The C Magazine, launched in July, is a quarterly magazine for the C suite – from CEOs through to CFOs, COOs and CMOs.  It looks at strategic business and management issues from the C level perspective and the launch issue included profiles of Starbucks’ CEO,  plus Martin Sorrell of WPP and Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC.

MarketBase is the database arm of Fairfax UK and the most comprehensive source of senior decision makers in IT and the technologies employed by all UK companies of over 200 employees.

MIS will become part of the IDG global network of titles totalling over 300 magazines and more than 400 websites in 85 different countries around the world. IDG in the UK publishes PC Advisor, Macworld and Digit and produces Techworld.com, a dedicated online news and reviews site for networking and infrastructure professionals.

"MIS is a highly respected magazine that is held in regard by the UK’s CIO community. Being part of the IDG global network will allow us to plug into the considerable power of IDG’s editorial network of over 1,200 technology journalists around the globe and significantly enhance the editorial offering" said MIS editor, Janice McGinn.

The integration of MIS into IDG UK will compliment the existing B2B offering, Techworld.com, to include a more senior, business focused IT audience. IDG’s extensive online experience and expertise will enable the development of MIS’ web capabilities, while IDG Events will bring into focus issues of interest to the more senior end of the IT hierarchy. All staff currently employed by Fairfax Business in the UK will transfer across to IDG, with no redundancies envisaged.
-end-

About International Data Group (IDG)
International Data Group (IDG) is the world’s leading technology media, events, and research company. IDG publishes more than 300 magazines and newspapers in 85 countries including CIO, CSO, Computerworld, GamePro, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, and PC World. IDG’s online network includes more than 400 Web sites spanning business technology, consumer technology, digital entertainment and gaming worldwide.   IDG is a leading producer of more than 170 technology-related events including LinuxWorld Conference  Expo, Macworld Conference  Expo, DEMO, and IDC Directions.

IDC, a subsidiary of IDG, is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events.  Over 850 IDC analysts in 50 countries provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends.

Additional information about IDG, a privately-held company, is available at http://www.idg.com.

Contact details:

Kit Gould, Managing Director, IDG UK
+44 (0) 20 7071 3615

Link: USATODAY.com – Study: Emotion rules the brain’s decisions.

According to this USA Today piece: "The evidence has been piling up throughout history, and now neuroscientists have proved it’s true: The brain’s wiring emphatically relies on emotion over intellect in decision-making."

It goes on to discuss "framing: " a hot topic among psychologists, economists and political hucksters." And, presumably, PR and marketing folk.

The piece continues: "Framing studies have shown that how a question is posed — think negative ads, for instance — skews decision-making. But no one showed exactly how this effect worked in the human brain until the brain-imaging study led by Benedetto De Martino of University College London." Read the full piece for the detail on the experiment. But according to De Martino: "The brain stores emotional memories of past decisions, and those are what drive people’s choices in life."

In other words, we all have an emotional database that we search and query every time we make a decision. Perhaps that explains why most PRs rely on "gut feel" when deciding who to send a press release to.

More seriously, the field of neuroeconomics (as it is apparently dubbed) is a burgeoning one. And easy to see how it could be applied in the realm of PR. I’m sure some enterprising academic will be able to fund a study into the emotional decision making of journalists – such as which PRs they prefer to deal with.

ZDNet reports on Gartner’s latest hype cycle – Web 2.0, mash ups and IPv6 at the peak of inflated expectations. Wikis nearly at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment.

According to PR Week US, Text 100 is set to launch a permanent presence in online social network Second Life by opening an office on its private island, the first global PR agency to officially do so.

Here’s the full story with my own comments – as you will see, there are some intriguing possibilities here.

The Text 100 office in Second Life includes three stories*: a welcome center, an information center, and an amphitheater, where Text plans to hold various internal and external events. The office will feature an avatar of Hynes, which will give an overview of the agency.

As the old line went, on the Internet, no one knows you are a dog. Here’s a great way for busy PR CEOs to be in several places at once – having someone "man" your avatar in a virtual world could provide more bandwidth to time-strapped PR supremos.

There will not be any sort of mandatory scheduling for Text 100 representatives to occupy the office, said Hynes, but she envisions the potential of having a global company meeting there, rather than dispensing information through a conference call or e-mail.

But will they get paid in real dollars or Linden dollars for their time in Second Life?

Better still, why not hire Second Life avatars to man the office? I’m sure Text’s Linden dollars might go a lot further here than in the real world.

Hynes added that the firm’s inroads in Second Life would better enable clients to take advantage of opportunities there and, potentially, lead to new revenue streams for the firm. It plans to launch a campaign with an undisclosed client soon.

Just wait till real world client’s start pitching up in Second Life – you could have a whole parallel world with virtual PR agencies pitching for virtual client business. Better still, could have the pitch process as a shoot em up – my avatar against your avatar – outside (virtually), now!

Hynes declined to discuss the agency’s Second Life budget, but said that the expense will be treated as an ‘innovation and research’ cost, rather than under the category of a new office, which comes with correlative revenue expectations.

There is a rich vein of creative accounting to be had here – rather than have an offshore tax haven, why not have a cyber-shore haven? ie incorporate a business in Second Life and then just transfer all your profits and assets into the virtual world? I’m sure those clever guys at Enron would have considered such a wheeze if Second Life had been around at the time.

*Typo alert

From the Bad Pitch blog. The following two tips in particular have always been relevant to good media relations – but judging by recent journalist comments, they also appear to be two things PR folk do the least.

Step Away From the Computer: Give your mouse a rest and step
out to Barnes & Noble and buy the damn publication. Sometimes
sidebars, graphics, freelancers and editorial coverage cannot be found
online. It’s also a lot more fun. We feel there’s nothing like a sea of
mastheads and cover shots to get your media relations adrenaline
pumping.

Be a Source: Take source filing a step further.
Being a source means making good use of all the industry reading you’re
supposed to be doing and coming up with story ideas. Some of them won’t
involve your client. Send these to the reporter.

This is good
karma and makes it about more than just "you, you, you." That may work
on dates but heck, sometimes it’s nice to just say "Hey I saw something
you might like." How cool is that? Your self-importance goes out the
window and you’ve helped someone with knowledge.

In the case of Microscope today, you simply re-run an old column. I was reading Steve Shipside’s opinion piece when I had a strange sense of deja vu. And with good reason. The column had a short note at the end:

Steve Shipside is on holiday so this column is a repeat. It initially ran on 17 April 2006.

Hope Steve gets paid for the re-run. But another example of the pressure on editorial resources?

Two recent blog posts from journalists bemoan the general lack of understanding of English language basics – namely spelling and grammar.

First up we have David Neal at IT Week bemoaning that: "With the proliferation of online and mobile blogs, and up-to-the-minute news
reporting it appears that correct spelling in communications is becoming less
and less important."

Then we have the the guys at Getting Ink railing against standards of grammar in PR: "I did some training with a London agency last week, and in a room of eight graduates, not one of them could tell me the definition of a noun, adjective or verb. To be kind, one of them did have a go at defining pronoun, but unfortunately she got it confused with an adverb."

(NB: this post had its fair share of typos).

So – are standards of literacy in such decline they threaten our ability to communicate? You could argue that this lack of language standards belies a more worrying inability to think clearly. Thinking and language are deeply entwined – poor language = poor thinking.

Then again, having the odd typo in a blog post I don’t think constitutes the end of civilisation as we know it.

According to Martin Banks: "If
you promise not to laugh I’ll tell you a little secret: for many years
I have been interested in the ancient art (if art it be) of the Runes
as a guide to life, the universe and everything. Most people use them
as a guide to their personal lives. Some people put far too much faith
in them. But
it recently struck me that people in industry put similar amounts of
faith in the outpourings of the market and technology analysts which,
despite all their talk of models and methodologies are just modern
rune-reading diviners – or should that be guessers? The only difference
is that their runes are made of mangled numbers rather than bits of
wood and bone."

Read the full piece for Martin’s Rune-driven analysis of the IT industry. As he says, some of those analyst companies would have charged $250K for similiar insight.

The discussion sparked by Andy Lark’s recent post set me thinking about PR value propositions.

Back in March, Harvard Business Review ran a piece entitled Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets (its $6 to download the full article).

It contained some pertinent comment on where companies go wrong in trying to develop their value proposition – and highlighted why the PR industry is currently struggling to articulate its own value.

For example:

Most managers, when asked to construct a customer value proposition,
simply list all the benefits they believe that their offering might
deliver to target customers. The more they can think of, the better.
This approach requires the least knowledge about customers and
competitors and, thus, the least amount of work to construct. However,
its relative simplicity has a major potential drawback: benefit
assertion. Managers may claim advantages for features that actually
provide no benefit to target customers.

Take a look at most PR agency websites – if you removed reference to the company name and logo, and asked people to identify the agency simply based on the stated value propostion, most people would be hard pushed to name a single agency. And before anyone starts mentioning pots and kettles, I know we are as guilty of this as anybody – hence why we are spending time on better refining our value propostion.

Favorable points of difference: The second
type of value proposition explicitly recognizes that the customer has
an alternative. "Why should our firm purchase your offering instead of
your competitor’s?" is a more pertinent question than "Why should our
firm purchase your offering?"

Prospects are spoilt for choice at the moment – with such little differentiation in the market at the moment and with PR companies desparate for new business and prepared to offer loss making discounts, the danger is that PR is turning into price-led commodity business. And many clients may soon realise that much of what some agencies offer, they could do themselves, even more cheaply.

Resonating focus: [Customers] want to do
business with suppliers that fully grasp critical issues in their
business and deliver a customer value proposition that’s simple yet
powerfully captivating. Suppliers can provide such a customer value
proposition by making their offerings superior on the few elements that
matter most to target customers, demonstrating and documenting the
value of this superior performance, and communicating it in a way that
conveys a sophisticated understanding of the customer’s business
priorities.

This echoes Andy Lark’s desire for agencies who "get" their clients business. Yet how many PR companies have really developed a value proposition that is "simple yet powerfully captivating?

On the subject of what are the critical issues for tech marketing directors at the moment, a quick straw poll reveals one stand out item – lead generation. The tech industry remains relentlessly driven by quarterly sales targets. Show a marketing director a quick and easy way of increasing qualified sales leads and you have their undivided attention. The problem for PR is that it is the one aspect of the marketing mix that is the most difficult to measure in terms of its true impact on lead generation – it is better suited to the longer term development of a company’s influence and reputation – unfortunately, short terms demands lead prospects to look to those who claim they can offer a short term solution – could it be that PR companies in their desparation to win business are making promises they can’t keep in terms of their ability to make a major impact in a short timeframe? That would explain the price discounting and overservicing.

Stephen Waddington’s comment on my earlier post re: the slump in PR new business reminded me of the Plimsoll survey of the UK PR industry. According to Plimsoll: "35% of the Top 1000 companies in the UK Public Relations Consultants industry have spent the last 3 years gradually increasing their levels of debt. These companies are now faced with severe commercial disadvantage: debt is threatening their survival in the industry and exposing them as potential acquisition opportunities."

The report also notes that:

Debt is eroding profits throughout the industry.
235 companies are ranked as Danger.
208 companies are overtrading and selling at a loss
£1.1 billion profit is lost every year.
44 companies are ‘ripe’ for acquisition.
26% of companies are loss making.
92 companies enjoyed over 20% growth.
50 companies are aggressively attacking the market share of others

So here’s another feature that I’m sure we’d all like to see PR Week write – who are the 235 companies in danger? Who are the 208 companies selling at a loss? And which 44 are ripe for acquisition?

As I said in my comment to Stephen, perhaps some of us should club together and pay a journalist to write this story if PR Week won’t?