Obituary for the Press Release?
Here’s a funny call to arms, by Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher, to kill the press release as we know it. However, press releases wont be extinct any time soon, especially with all the websites and RSS feeds willing to post and send them verbatim. So expect to see even more bad releases. But there’s good news: Tom’s got some great suggestions, and there’s a maybe the first diggings of graveyard for the worst releases at this site.
PR Firms that Blog: Take 2
Update: We have added a page to our Wiki that serves as a running list of PR firms that blog. If you aren't listed, please feel free to edit the Wiki and add yourself. Original post follows.
In a story I posted a few days ago, I found that 4 of the 18 largest PR firms had official corporate blogs (Burson Marstellar, Edelman, Hill & Knowlton and The MWW Group). Constantin Basturea wrote in with some corrections/additions to my list. Here goes:
- The Horn Group has a blog that I flat out missed. My bad. That's 5 of 18.
- Manning Selvage and Lee doesn't have a blog, but Hass MS&L does. I'll leave it to you whether that should count.
- Ketchum's Personalized Media practice has a blog that they update fairly regularly. However, Ketchum doesn't even link to this blog from the Personalized Media practice area section of their coporate site, and its the last entry on the second page of Google, well behind the faux Ketchum Ideas blog. I'll let you decide whether to count it.
Here are some other non-official PR blogs Constantin pointed out:
- Tony Obregon from Cohn & Wolfe is blogging.
- There are at least two senior execs from Ogilvy who are blogging: John Bell and Rohit Bhargava.
- Robert J. Ricci from Weber Shandwick’s Web Relations Group is blogging and the Weber Shandwick technology PR team in New York is blogging.
- A group of people working at Porter Novelli Washington is blogging.
- John Brodeur (Chairman of Brodeur Worldwide) has a blog.
Constantin also recommends this as a good listing of PR blogs. Please feel free to post any additional blogs I may have missed.
WP: Spotting Trends in Blog Buzz
Blog buzz makes the front page of The Washington Post. (registration required.) Article talks about ConAgra Foods and H-P monitoring blogs for emerging trends in comsumer attitudes. Piece features the blog monitoring company Nielsen BuzzMetrics, formed last week by the merger of Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics.
The Limitations of Tracking Blog Buzz
I was vaguely interested in how much online buzz was being generated about Microsoft’s Origami Project, so I spent a few minutes on IceRocket.com using their blog trends tool. Here’s what the trend line for mentions of the word “origami” looks like over the last month:
The chart tells me what I already knew – that bloggers are talking about the Origami Project. Tools like Icerocket’s blog trends graph interest me, but ultimately the insights these tools provide are superficial and anecdotal.
Say I was charged with tracking blog coverage for a company like DuPont (which is not a client of ours). I might see a spike in mentions on blogs when DuPont releases an earnings report. But I might also see a spike when DuPont’s Nascar team runs well. Or when someone with the last name “DuPont” posts some gossip about Lindsay Lohan. Or when someone uses the word DuPont as an example in a post about blog tracking.
Tracking the volume of conversation alone isn’t sufficient. You’ve got to understand the context of the conversation. You’ve got to block out the background noise and find the two nuggets that might be posted on a given day that truly impact your company/organization.
Clarification: Mark Cuban, the owner of Icerocket, wrote in to point out that I could exclude Nascar results by typing in the phrase “dupont -nascar”.
Technorati Tags: Ice Rocket Search Blogs Tracking
Not What the Ad Man Had in Mind.
Check out this ad for the new AT&T. It got placed above a story entitled “Telecoms let NSA spy on calls,” that reports on the agency using AT&T and other telcoms to help with domestic eavesdropping!