Public Relations, Social Media and Ephemera Since 2005
At the risk of stating the obvious…
This is not the sort of press you want for MSN Virtual Earth.
Sorry but unless we’re talking fine art, grainy black and white images from 1991 don’t cut it in 2005.
The point is, when you’re Microsoft, you either lead with your best shot or don’t lead at all. That’s just the way the world works.
Technorati Tags: Apple, public relations, Microsoft
Hugh MacLeod asked me (quite mysteriously) to put up a Wiki.
Here it is, the HughPage.
PR and marketing peeps can hang their shingles here.
Enjoy.
Technorati Tags: Hughtrain, wikis
Yep. It’s new and exciting, isn’t it?
Since upgrading to WordPress 1.5 last week I’ve been playing around with various themes.
I’ve settled on the Connections theme from Vanilla Mist.
There’s still some tinkering to do and I’m going to replace that image up there to something more or less relevent. But otherwise, there you go.
Update: A big thanks for the nice words from John Wagner.
Between the ‘PR people are dolts’ meme and the ‘News releases are not fit to line bird cages’ argument, we’ve had quite a few weeks in the PR blogosphere.
But after managing to poke holes in both arguments, despite being right we’re all wrong here.
PR people who make asses of themselves to bloggers and journalists are a problem for the whole industry. And while the news release format is still useful and still has a lot of life left in it, the concept of ‘the message’ and ‘control of the message’ and the language we use itself in releases, pitches, etc., is the problem.
Richard Edelman wrote something last week that got me thinking about this:
We talk with pride about developing messages for our clients. What about Doc Searls’ view that in this democratized world, we don’t need messages? Maybe the idea of controlled messages is something that worked in a world of relatively few media and is now obsolete. We have to get away from anything that smacks of control and manipulation of audiences. We should opt for public relationships where the operational words are dialogue, transparency and speed to market.
The way we deal with journalists is a problem precisely because we make assumptions about ‘control’ and ‘message’ that are fundamentally in opposition to how journalists see the universe. And in the networked world we’re living in today, those assumptions are fundamentally wrong.
The larger point is that ten years after the Internet and five years after the Cluetrain, most PR agencies are still in denial that the age of control is over.
In my last agency job we would sit in meetings for hours working over every detail of what to say to a single reporter, when a simple ‘hi, are you interested in this’ would have sufficed. Instead we sent out six paragraph long monstrosities that ended up in the proverbial circular file. But it was the tone that mattered to us, how could we justify our retainers if we didn’t maintain that tone?
I’m sure this scenario plays itself out in most agency and most reporters can smell a contrivance a mile a way. But PR folks still do it. And journalists and bloggers still hate it.
And I’m still getting through to reporters by talking like a human being and holding a conversation with them. Not dictating to them.
Technorati Tags: public relations
Follow Me: