Category: Uncategorized

In his PR Week column this week, Anthony Hilton takes a pop at “listen only” conference calls – where journalists and analysts are only allowed to hear what the company wants and not allowed “to interrupt, challenge, question or even express disbelief.” About as far away from the PR 2.0 concept of conversation as you could hope to get.

Hilton also makes a rather good observation – namely that “the art of PR is to persuade others of the merits of a client’s case, not simply present it.”

And is that not the problem with a lot of PR? Endlesss amount of “presenting” the clients case, but little done to actually justify.

Let is linger longer on the concept of persuasion. There are plenty of books on the subject – and a bit of random googling brought up this. I don’t know Tom Hopkins from Adam, and his list below may be rather old hat on the subject. But it did raise the interesting question of how PRs normally would respond to each of the points below – I’d argue in most cases, they’d behave in exactly the opposite to that described in order to try and “persuade” a journalist.

So says Digital Business Editor Peter Whitehead in a cheery email to podcast subscribers:

"To all those who feel their submissions have been overlooked (and in fact they have been). I
can only promise more such frustrations in 2007 – it’s just the way it works."

Listen to this. Anyone working in marketing and PR will laugh (and cry).

Here is how to get coverage on ZDNet – see Rupert’s formula below. Though I thinks some of those variables need properly defining and quantifying.

Dear PR – The probability of a successful pitch can be calculated by
the following handy formula applied to the details of your client’s
latest wheeze.

3NT x 4UP x 2BI x 5EAI
—————————–   = P(copy)
3M^3 x 2ACE x 10L

Where NT = New Technology, UP = Unique Product, BI = Beer Involved, EAI
= Engineers Available for Interview, M = Marketing Managers, EMEA or
Mornings, ACE = Already Covered Elsewhere (ie, your American brethren
have already spilled the beans) and L = the word Leading or Leader in
the first para of the press release.

According to PR Week via ….the world’s leading….., Rainier PR has been acquired by Loewy for £5m. Good luck to the two Steves from Rainier and Charlie Hoult at Loewy.

Cheatsheet: What is pretexting? – Valleywag.

In case you didn’t know, Wikipedia says: "Pretexting is the act of pretending to be someone who you are not by telling an untruth, or creating deception. The practice of pretexting typically involves tricking a telecom carrier into disclosing personal information of a customer, with the scammer pretending to be the customer."

According to Valleywag: "This isn’t the last scandal we’ll hear. The president of one security company says that heads of Fortune 500 Companies hire "fly-by-night organizations" to do their dirty investigative work all the time. Now that a pretexting scandal is front-page news, expect investigative journalists to hunt down similar stories."

And if the practice is so prevalent amongst US CEOs, what about UK chief execs?

Link: New VNU owners mulling European B2B sale-sources�|�Business�|�Reuters.co.uk.

"Among the titles in the portfolio are IT Week and Accountancy Age and the Dutch Intermediair job listings guide. Exhibitions include the International Construction Fair and the Holland Art Fair."

How did I miss this one? Surprised there hasn’t been more discussion on the blogosphere about this.

 

Via Dennis Howlett.

AOLs monumental moment of madness: “

This one’s going to make international headlines. Around 2.30am, I was repairing my son Joe’s Windows XP install when Zoli pinged this story. He says:

AOL, in blatant violation of its users privacy just released the log of 3 month’s worth of searches by 650,000 users. Not to the DOJ, but for open download by anyone. The claim:

‘This collection is distributed for non-commercial research use only. Any application of this collection for commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED’

…

AOL, you betrayed your users. If they are any smart, they will boycott your services.

Yuk – that’s really, really bad. Zoli and I engaged in a Skype IM about this – by 4.35am (I was still fixing Joe’s machine!) – the link had gone to a blank page. I won’t link there. I’ve not downloaded the file which is 2GB unzipped.

Techcrunch thinks this could lead to evidence of criminal activity and refers to AOLs ‘utter stupidity.’ Paradigm Shift says:

The big affiliate marketers will make millions off this, i’m already busy processing the data, and after taking a quick peak at the data its an absolute gold mine for PPC and SEO.

So much for explicit prohibition for commercial use.

Among other things, Zoli and I speculated that:

Spammers will have gotten hold of the data and have a field day

It is possible to reverse engineer the searches to discover a LOT of personal details about people.

Questions:

1. Zoli estimates maybe 1,500-2,000 downloads by the time AOL woke up to what they’d done. What’s the real number?
2. How long was the file in the wild?
3. Could illicit copies end up on eBay?
4. Could market data derived from the file end up on eBay or as part of a market intelligence offering? Almost certainly the second if not the first.
5. What will be the impact on AOLs stock price?
6. Might shorters speculate on the impact?
7. What about a class action lawsuit? For once I think there are decent grounds for one of the ambulance chasers to send out its hit squad – they may even get what they need from the file
8. Will AOL be able to track who got the file?
9. What is the potential for wholesale identity theft among those 650,000 AOL users?
10. Who takes responsibility for this at AOL and how many heads roll as a consequence?

I’m sure there are plenty of other questions. These were what sprang to mind over a 30 minute IM.

BTW – this has nothing to do with security per se but everything to do with stupidity and ethics. It’s up there with Gerald Ratner as a gaff of monumental proportions.

Technorati Tags: AOL, privacy

“

(Via AccMan Pro.)

As I’ve discovered, just when you think there is a trend in one direction, someone comes up with data to send it the other way – or least to temper the former claim.

Nick Carr has a good post on the subject, based on a recent Pew survey:

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: A reality check for online news.

As he says: "The upshot is that online news appears to be not a replacement for traditional media but a supplement to it. The report is not good news for newspapers, but it does show that the
reports of their imminent death have been exaggerated. The real
division is not between the audience for online news and the audience
for traditional news – they are the same audience. The real division is
between the people who are interested in the news and the people who
couldn’t care less. In fact, it looks very much like online news media
are now merging with traditional news media, as the two come together
in a symbiotic relationship to serve the same set of customers. They
are not competing with each other so much as they are competing
together against nonconsumption.

Link: Open (finds, minds, conversations)…: Sad footnote to PR Business saga.

So. Farewell then, PR Business.
Even moving from weekly
To monthly
Couldn’t save you.