Michael O'Connor Clarke is proud to be a card-carrying flack. Currently based in Toronto, Michael has spent almost 20 years in corporate communications and marketing roles. He started blogging at almost the same time as he first moved into PR - over five years ago. Now he's trying to figure out how to combine these two areas of expertise for the benefit of clue-seeking clients. In his time, Michael has pitched people, products, processes and pop-tarts, but he has a congenital inability to peddle fluff.
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Couple of quick pointers to interesting AdAge pieces.
First, the horror continues at Marketing and PR industry giant Interpublic Group, with news of a deeper and wider SEC investigation into their rather...um...interesting accounting practices (hey - they're a creative company, what do you expect?). As AdAge also notes: "...in what has become an annual summer event, Interpublic announced the departure of another chief financial officer."
What a mess. I witnessed some of the ugliness in my relatively short stint with one of the Interpublic companies. More on that topic another time.
"Nearly one-quarter (21%) of Web users who do read newspapers now read the daily paper online," according to the AdAge piece. (The Nielsen news release is rather more conservative - they tag the result as "a fifth". I agree with them - 21% is much closer to a fifth than a quarter. But I'm quibbling).
AdAge goes on to cite ABC numbers that indicate the fall in newspapers' average daily circulation in the six months to March 31, 2005. Dailies are down 1.9% to 47.4 million - Sunday papers fell 2.5% to 51 million.
What I'd really like to see now is a much more direct, single-survey comparison of growth against the fall off. Maybe the numbers are in the full Nielsen//Netratings report, which I haven't read.
One fifth of all readers choosing to get their news primarily online is an interesting stat - but I'd love to see a hard stat that proves the correlation between falling print circulations and growing online news audiences. It seems intuitively right and obvious, but where's the research? Guess I've got some Googling to do...
Random thought. Could be some depth in this - too tired to explore it through the keyboard, but it's going to keep me awake a while longer.
Inspired in large part by an excellent, wide-ranging phone conversation with Frank Paynter, and by reading Constantin Basturea's superb response (and Adam Brown'sre-response) to the Ketchum blog/nonblog thang - here's the thought, for what it's worth...
Much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair in the PR world over how the practice of public relations must evolve to tune into the rise of citizen's media. Perhaps the answer is much bloody simpler than we all thought:
The necessary evolution of PR is blogging. That's all.
No more news releases, no more pitches, no more one-to-many media relations. Just bloggers talking to bloggers and blog readers.
"...top leaders...understand that powerful cumunications skills are not a warm-and-fuzzy evil but vital to their success. Regular, effective communication from the top can enhance employee pride, offer inspiration and directly correlates to employee satisfaction and retention."
Alix sets out seven simple, constructive steps to improve executive communications. It's the sort of straightforward stuff any communications pro would nod sagely at and mumble "true, true..." - but it's well worth saying, nonetheless, and well said in this piece.
My only gripe with the article is that there's one particular word sadly conspicuous by its absence.
Mark Twain is reported to have once said that you should "never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel".
As the Internet continues to level the playing field between reporters and the subjects of their stories, Twain's quip (sometimes erroneously attributed to Bill Clinton) could probably stand some updating. It's still not smart to go after a newspaper if you think they've done you wrong, but as some reporters have learned, when the battleground is online, it can also be pretty dangerous to pick a fight with punters who purchase pixels by the pound.
A reporter at Moneyweb, a South African business news website ("South Africa's leading source for independent investment information"), recently waded into a scrap with Elan Suisse Capital - a somewhat less than transparent investment group.
[N.B. I'm not taking sides here - but there's precious little information available about Elan Suisse online. Hard to form an impression of the firm when their corporate website is so elegantly content-free, and Google can only dredge up four rather uninformative hits].
Moneyweb reporter Julius Cobbett penned an investigative piece, digging into the background of Elan Suisse, and finding very little good news with which to encourage investors.
The people behind Elan Suisse have responded by registering juliuscobbett.com, and using the site to launch an ad hominem attack on the reporter.
It's certainly an unusual approach, and not one I can ever imagine recommending to a client - but it's entertaining as hell to watch this one play out.
There's a fairly bland piece in the LA Times on "Using Blogs to Build Direct Links to Public". It's not a bad article -- worth a quick read as long as you're not expecting any major insights. Looks like it may have been prompted by Edelman and Intelliseek's "Trust MEdia" whitepaper (about which I'll post more later). Good for them.
The standout comment in the piece is from Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, who says: "At the end of the day, the job of any good leader at any corporation is to communicate ... The hallmark of companies that will find blogs useful is the company that cares about its perception ... and the integrity of its relationship with its customers." Damn skippy. Companies that choose the fake blog route are telegraphing the fact that they don't really care if their customers think they're idiots.
Curious to see if there was any kind of ethical framework in place at AlwaysOn, I just clicked on "Post Your Own Editorial" link over there. Right at the top of the entry form, it says:
NOTE: Blatant promotions and advertisements will be removed by the editors and violators suspended.
Further, "The AlwaysOn Blogger Bushido" in the sidebar states:
"We shall not promote our own companies, events, or investments in our entries. We will object rigorously to posts we consider to be advertisements, and we understand that AO will delete them."
I think I'm just going to give up trying to update the blogroll of PR blog links here, and my own steadily growing list of PR-related blogs on the del.icio.us service. Now that I've discovered Constantin Basturea's canonical list of PR bloggers, my own meagre efforts seem completely redundant. Kudos to Constantin for this labour of love. It's so good, someone should be paying him for it.
I’m indebted to the estimable Constantin Basturea for doing the little bit of Googling and extra research I should have done myself, and helping to reveal the full perfidy of a pitch I’ve already taken one swipe at elsewhere.
I leaned in hard on what I read as a particularly brain-dead piece of blogorrhea, and fisked the living daylights out of the post over at my other blog, here. If you want the full context, start with reading that piece, then come back here.
I tend to keep topics that aren’t directly related to the worlds of PR or marketing off this blog, preferring to post them at my personal site. As it turns out, this particular issue has now revealed itself to be very clearly a PR-related one, so I’ve chosen to move the discussion back here to Flackster.
In the AlwaysOn piece that inspired my invective, one jesse tayler (sic) wrote a confusing and inconclusive bit of puffery – “Why smart companies don’t use corporate weblogs” – trumpeting the virtues of something he described as “blogworking” over the failings of “traditional weblog publishing”.
I ripped into his rhetoric for a range of reasons; the principal point of push-back being the fact that nowhere in his ode to “blogworking” did the author take the time to explain what, exactly, blogworking is and how it differs from plain old vanilla blogging.
Thanks to a note from Constantin in yesterday morning’s inbox, all has been revealed – and the truth is even more clueless and odious than I’d suspected.
Only just found this, and I've spent the last hour or so reading through the archives. Katie Paine is THE expert on PR measurement. She's proven again and again that, contrary to popular misconceptions, the value of PR is explicitly measureable - and that companies needn't spend a fortune figuring out how to do it.
I've admired and respected Katie for a long time, ever since I first met her at an international PR group meeting with the Lotus Development folks a few years ago. If you're in the PR business and don't yet know Katie's work, you have to check it out, for the good of your company and your career.
My Dad's fond of saying: "Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your kids." If that were true, we might almost be able to hold a certain notoriously airheaded heiress accountable in the latest Hilton Hotels debacle.
Renowned marketing strategist Joseph Jaffe is fuming at a clause in the hotel group's upcoming $45 million agency review, which stipulates that candidate firms sign over all rights to creative materials developed for the pitch - regardless of whether they win or lose the account.
He's absolutely right. As he says: "It's highway robbery and the worst possible insult to every last bit of integrity left in the ad business to have ideas from losing contenders implemented down the line."
Hilton get some twisted credit, I suppose, for at least being up front about their duplicity. I pitched a major consumer products firm about 18 months ago. Didn't get the business. Two months later, I got to watch the chosen agency execute exactly the big campaign idea we'd developed for the pitch.
Not really, but if anyone's going to tear into this topic, I'd love to hear Seth's take.
A Wired News report describes how zombie advertisers want to eat your brain:
"The nascent research, known as "neuromarketing," could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes...Earlier this month, Stanford University researchers reported that they've pinpointed the parts of the brain that handle two major parts of a choice -- figuring out how nifty something is and then calculating how likely it is that you'll get it..."
It gets scarier:
"...At stake is more than just greater understanding of the brain's mysterious inner workings and boons for advertisers. In the wildest dreams of researchers, their findings could help political leaders fine-tune how they make choices about everything from geopolitics to government finances."
Let us be thankful we have commerce, THX-1138. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy more and be happy...
Pause, if you will, and offer up a small happy bunny dance in honour of American Business Media - the association of business publishing houses, whose members include CMP, Crain Communications, The Economist Group, Elsevier, Hearst Business, IDG, McGraw-Hill, Penton, PRIMEDIA, Scholastic, Ziff Davis, and many other print and online powerhouses.
Kudos is due in this case for their courage in taking a position on the blurry line between advertising and editorial - calling on member companies to keep a clear separation between the newsroom and the schmoozeroom.
In their release, Gordon T. Hughes II, president and CEO says: "The cornerstone of editorial integrity and credibility is the ability of media to make content decisions based on mission and the needs of the reader, and to make these decisions without undo influence from outside interests such as advertisers."
He points members to the association's Editorial Code of Ethics, released in March of this year, which is a worthwhile read in itself.
The real test now, of course, will be to see how many of the member media companies follow through on this call to action. Specifically, how many publishers will have the balls to decline lucrative advertising from the likes of BP or Morgan Stanley, in cases where the contracts include slippery ad pull clauses?
Michael O'Connor Clarke is proud to be a card-carrying flack. Currently based in Toronto, Michael has spent almost 20 years in corporate communications and marketing roles. He started blogging at almost the same time as he first moved into PR - over five years ago. Now he's trying to figure out how to combine these two areas of expertise for the benefit of clue-seeking clients. In his time, Michael has pitched people, products, processes and pop-tarts, but he has a congenital inability to peddle fluff.
