danleach.co.uk

My morning kicked off with a conversation about Twilert and in particular why the site was launched in BETA and what BETA actually means. It got me thinking about my reasoning behind it and I ended at the question of “Why would I ever take the site out of BETA?”

For me, BETA means the final version of a service or site before small tweaks are made and a final, clean version is rolled out to the masses. However, that implies that the service is perfect as doesn’t require constant TLC, tweaks and improvements and I’m yet to find a single online service that fits in the “perfect” bracket.

The point is that, as I am finding with Twilert, user interaction online now means that feedback and advice for online tools and services comes thick and fast and webmasters (for want of a better word) need to react to this feedback by incorporating it into their sites. The feedback will never stop and therefore neither should the tweaking.

BETA works for real-world things, things that can’t be upgraded or changed en-mass easily. But online, there is no such thing as BETA. Every CEO, CFO and webmaster should treat their site like it is constantly in BETA and mould their service to meet the demands of those using it. If you don’t then a competitor that does, will, and you’ll lose users overnight.

Has the world gone mad….and when I say world I mean the British media?

I’m not condoning the actions of Russel Brand or Jonathan Ross, what they did went beyond an innocent prank and simply wasn’t funny, but this morning I’ve woken up the front page outrage aimed at the pair. What’s more, Gordon Brown has jumped into the furor blasting the pair, and Sky News informed me that the issue was likely to come up during Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon.

With two wars, an economic crisis, an entertaining yet globally relevant US election, Tory sleaze etc is the outrage caused by this practical joke really reflective of its severity?

I can’t help but think it’s all gone a bit to far a la Princess Di (oh no he di’n't). Perhaps Elton John should dust off his songbook.

While I’m on the point of the media: On Sky News this morning, after Noel Gallagher blamed the decline of Top of the Pops for youth crime, its newspaper critic responded – “I don’t know if it’s true but it’s a good point!”

A good point indeed, particularly if you step out of the realm of reality. As the old saying goes…why let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Rant over!

Another day another Internet meme doing the rounds.

MIchael Litman from LitmanLive and [EDIT 30/10/2008] Paul Stallard have tagged me in the Three for Three post where bloggers are encouraged to list their three choices across three categories before tagging other bloggers to continue the chain.

So, here goes…

Top three non-work websites:

• - Football365.com – The number one resource for the UK football fan. It isn’t the mecca for stats that the BBC is but its mix of irreverent comment, insight and humour makes it a winner in my book!
• - Digg.com – The ultimate time waster but an incredibly useful one. An instant snapshot of what’s hot on the web
• - TheOnion.com – Older than the WWW itself. One of the few US sites to do satire very well

Top three karaoke songs:

• - Don’t Stop Believing by Journey – “I love Journey, but I hate baseball cards”
• - We Built This City by Starship – Guarantee you’ll get groans when this first comes on but 2 minutes in you’ll have the entire bar singing it with you
• - Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi – For little over 3 minutes you honestly believe you are a rock star

Top three weekend cocktails:

• - Mojito from anywhere
• - Raspberry Collins from Lab on Old Compton Street
• - Old Fashioned from Match just off Regent Street

That’s given me a craving for a bit of Journey…”She’s just a small time girl….”

You are now tagged…

• - Gaylene Ravenscroft from Collective Conversation
• - Candace Kuss from Brand Street
• - Paul Stallard from Paul Stallard’s Technology Blog

I’m beginning to find some innovate ways brands are leveraging the Twitter platform. Two new services caught my eye this week!

The first, Qwitter, aims to help stop people smoking. As a non-smoker I haven’t tried it but it’s simple to get involved. Simply follow Qwitter and send messages to the user (@iquit) telling it how many cigarettes you have had. Qwitter will track how many packs you’re getting through and provide tips and advice to help you kick the habit.

The second is Tweet What You Spend which, like Qwitter, allows you to send messages and track how much you are spending day to day.

What I love about this is the fact that it’s such a simple way of engaging an audience through an existing and established platform. Both Qwitter and Tweet What You Spend are the start of brands engaging Twitter users with value-add services.

Many of our clients are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, using it as a simple comms tool. But, the examples above show that Twitter is becoming much more than a micro-blogging service and extending beyond comms and into a powerful web app for both brands and consumers.

So some of you will have noticed that the old blog hasn’t been in its best state recently. Between work, a holiday and work I really haven’t had time to show it the love and tenderness it deserves. But I am still here and remarkably have found 10 minutes to myself and thought I would post a note around a topic I was discussing yesterday on Twitter – The Great Drain Robbery, or, in non-Sun speak, the fact that Starbucks has been caught wasting millions of litres of water every day.

I won’t go into the story itself, you can read it here. What is interesting though is how quickly the flames of such a potentially damaging story have been doused. Yesterday this was a front page story and appeared across a number of nationals and online publications. Today though, not a whimper. More than that though, a quick search on Google News reveals less than 30 articles. On BlogPulse and the various Twitter trend trackers the story barely raises a squeak!

I’m not going to judge Starbucks on this as I don’t know the ins and outs of the issue however given how prevalent environmental issues are within today’s media, their PR and crisis teams have to be commended for a job well done. Yesterday’s news really has become today’s fish and chip paper!

It is worth pointing out that they did get a small helping hand with Palin misquoting one of their coffee cup quotes the other day. It may not have sold lattes but it certainly deflected some of the attention off the running taps!

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article discussing how traditional PR is dead and today’s Google Chrome announcement only furthers my belief that PRs must continue to looks at new and interesting ways of communicating to the media and consumers.

Google has pulled off, in my opinion, a mini masterstroke by announcing its new browser through a cartoon. Why? Well for a start it’s much more interesting than a press release. But, more importantly look at how the story is being reported, there are just as many blog posts and news articles discussing the cartoon as the product itself.

The cartoon does nothing more than communicate the key messages and features of Google Chrome but by packaging it in an interesting and unique way, (all of) those messages are reaching the end-user. By discussing or even posting scans of the cartoon the media are doing the equivalent of reprinting a press release.

I don’t think we can all go start sending out cartoons to journalists, we can’t lose sight that the Google brand and this particular announcement carries a fair amount of weight with the media. However, we shouldn’t be afraid of exploring new ways of engaging journalists and consumers, especially now that Google has given us the perfect case study.

Today marks the 4th anniversary of BlogDay. To take part the rules are simple:

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2008
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link:
   http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2008 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

-

So without further ado, Happy BlogDay 2008:

1. Delightful Work: Coach Tom Volkar provides advice on achieving, as he puts it, “work life freedom”. Great blog that should be visited whenever those deadlines start mounting up!
2. PsyBlog: Psychology is little more to me than a fleeting interest however I find this blog incredibly useful for gaining small insights into the way our minds work. For marketers this RSS feed should be a staple
3. The Blog of Tim Ferriss: Any blog with the url fourhourworkweek.com is going to get my vote. Great advice on Tim on working smarter and not harder
4. Chris Brogan: The hardest working man online? Probably! Chris regularly rolls out insightful, in-depth advice and information regarding social media and networking
5. Getting Ink: Sally Whittle’s often funny insight into the world of journalism. PRs are often portrayed as the arch enemies of journalists, Sally often points out why

I get a little bit of stick in the office for being a self-confessed techy but more and more I am finding an array of software, websites, gadgets and tools that allow me to stay one step ahead in the fast-paced world of PR

I thought I would compile a selection of things I kit myself out with to make me a little more PR 2.0:

1. Firefox & add-ons: I took the plunge with Firefox earlier this year and have never looked back. Aside from the speed, stability and usability it provides it also allows you to install add-ons and plug-ins to tailor the software. Pertinent to this post include:

• LinkedIn Companion: Allows me to keep access and my business network at the click of a button (Disclaimer: LinkedIn is an H&K client)
• Foxmarks: Invaluable for working between the office and home. Synchronises your bookmarks across computers so you never have to find that obscure news article you saved during some late night surfing
• Googlepedia: Displays a Wikipedia article next to your Google searches. Excellent resource and time-saver when doing desk research
• Cooliris: Fantastic tool for some one-man creative thinking. Turn your PC into a mood-board in seconds
• TwitterFox: I can’t remember the last time I visited Twitter.com. Tweet and access your feeds from the comfort of your toolbar
• Brief RSS Reader: I know a lot of people like Google Reader but I actually prefer this reader. It’s quick, intuitive and allows me track my 70+ feeds easily

2. Google Alerts: An absolute must for any PR worth their salt. Say goodbye to emails from clients that start, “Did you not see this article?”

3. Factiva Alerts: If you do have access to Factiva you’ll know it provides a useful if not limited service. People tend to overlook its alert service though, which I have found very good. I have it setup to send me an overview email of relevant news articles every morning at 8am. A good indication of what’s on your clients’ agendas that day

4. Mobile Internet / TV: I check the news on a regular basis either through Orange’s WAP site or via Sky News through Orange’s 3G mobile TV service (£5 per month). Increasingly useful as the meetings tot up in my calendar.

5. SpinVox: We all know what it’s like. Leave a 2 hour meeting, turn your phone on…”you have 15 new voicemail messages”. Streamline your voicemail by using SpinVox, a service that turns your voicemails into SMS texts. You’ll no longer be fumbling around for a pen on the 12:05 from Weybridge

6. The Web: Couldn’t really leave it out. But, whilst 99% of it is useless there are some gems in there that every (tech/consumer) PR should have in his or hers bookmarks:

• BBC News Online
• Digg.com
• Mashable!
• Techmeme
• Getty Images
• Wikipedia
• TheWebList.net
• PR Week UK

Follow me, be a geek and amaze your colleagues and clients with your knowledge, speed and creativeness. Just don’t tell anyone that without the web we’d be nothing!

Have I missed any? Let me know!

We all hear of horror stories of journalists being incredibly rude to PRs and many of us have experienced, first hand, exasperation turn to frustration turn to rage after unwittingly selling-in the tenth survey of the afternoon.

But recently I’m beginning to understand how they feel and to be honest wonder how they manage not to slam the phone down after two minutes of stumbling over the first sentence of a pitch.

As we near the end of the year many industry bodies and magazines start planning their awards ceremonies and with that comes the invitation to “take a table” at the event to PRs and the clients they represent.

I have had two already today and the pitching has been so woeful it’s a wonder how they manage to fill the smallest of venues.

The first one:

Sales: “Hi is this Dan”
Me: “Yes”
S: “Yes…er…hi….um…I’m not sure what clients you look after but we’re holding the xxxx 2008 awards in December. Have you heard of them?”
M: “Yes”
S: “Would you like to book a table?”

Second one:

Sales: “Hi I’m xxxxx and I’m calling about the xxxx Awards 2008″
Me: “Hi”
S: “Yes, we would like to invite you to the awards ceremony as I understand you represent xxxx”
Me: “Oh okay, sounds interesting. Could you send me an email with some more details?”
S: “Sure. How do you spell your company name?”

Neither is good but the second is better than the first purely because the sales rep decided to invite me rather than expect me to open up my cheque book within 30 seconds of picking up the handset.

The first rule of selling whether it’s a product or a story is knowing and understanding the audience you are selling to. And I don’t mean knowing what journalists or PRs like, I mean actually knowing who the person on the end of the phone is, who they are, where they work, what they work on and any other insights that are readily available through the magic of Google!

Not knowing who my clients are is annoying but forgivable. There is not central database for PRs however if you don’t know then why not ask. In fact that would be a good way of opening up some kind of dialogue. Not knowing how to spell the name of the company I work for is inexcusable. I know I’m one on a list of hundreds to receive a phone call that day but it doesn’t mean I want to feel like one.

When you’re asking for £3k+ to attend an event, a little bit of desk research is the absolute minimum I expect.

It’s the same for journalists – by doing some simple searches and gathering a little background knowledge I have found the levels of receptiveness and conversion increase vastly. It’s all to easy, when faced with a media list of hundreds, to try and rattle through as many as possible as quickly as possible (gotta get in before they go to conference) but a client would be much happier you called 10 and secured five pieces of coverage than called 100 and got nothing.

Note: I have not included the names of people or specifics about the events as I have used the experiences to make a point and don’t think it is necessary to publicly bash them.

In his latest post, Steve Rubel has asked whether PR is obsolete and I generally agree with the sentiment.

Traditional PR is, to a degree, dead. Distributing press releases far and wide in the hope of getting a hit (the machine gun effect) is time consuming and delivers little if anything. The same goes for press-conference style events – they no longer pull in the numbers.

Conversation has changed forever but as PRs we have been slow to adapt our approach and tap into “the new way”.

One of the problems is moving out of our comfort zone. Clients have to report upstairs and have numbers to hit, numbers that are measured by circulations, OTS and AVE – it’s hard to measure conversation. So why put ourselves out by trying to encourage the use of new media and communications tools such as Twitter.

Well if we don’t then one of two things will happen. Either our competitors will demonstrate how new media can be more effective and clients will walk out the door; or our clients will realise the power of new media on there own and guess what, they will walk out the door.

Our clients demand to be where their audiences are and it is our responsibility to take them there, whether they like (or understand) the journey or not.

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