Tags: pr, Press Release

• Scoble Asks What Is Social Media?
• Doc Searls and Robert Scoble on “What’s wrong with social media”
• What’s wrong with social media
• New media/social press releases are not blogs
• How to write social media press releases

Technorati tags: press release, social media

Tags: media, pr, Press Release, Social Media

I’ve stumbled into this post by Sivaraman Swaminathan at Customer World, and I’ve immediately tried to apply the eight rules he has summarized from Exceeding Customer Expectations to PR agencies. I’ve worked in several “global” companies (i.e. US based PR agencies with offices abroad, who have been trying for over 50 years to understand Europe and other continents without getting a single clue about it) and I know that they fail in several areas. These are the eight rules, with my comments in italic:

1. A passion for taking care of customers. Can you please explain me how can you pretend to take care of customers when your first concern is to charge them by the minute even when you are preparing their bill?
2. A willingness to be flexible. Same as point 1. How the hell the hourly rate and the time sheet can be considered a demonstration of flexibility?
3. A work ethic based on dedication to the company and its mission. Same as point 1 and 2. How ethical and dedicated to the company and its mission you are when you try to justify an inflated invoice “making up” the time sheet?
4. An eagerness to learn a new business and work their way up. How do you call this in agency jargon? Overhead? Pure bullshit. Not only you are supposed to learn at the client’s expenses, but you are usually “warmly invited” not to lose time with these useless details…
5. Self-motivation and goal-orientation. Bullshit again. Global PR agencies are hourly rate and time sheet oriented, and because of this accounts are usually demotivated for a number of reasons, starting from the fact that most agency executives don’t have even a basic knowledge of their profession (this, unfortunately, applies to 98% of Italian PR agencies).
6. Persuasive sales skills. This might be true, but not in my case.
7. Excellent communication skills. Aren’t we supposed to be nice and friendly? I’ve heard more than a chap affirming that a PR guy must be cool and talkative. Are these the communication skills that we are supposed to provide to our clients?
8. Leadership ability. I’ll end with an anedocte: the CEO of one of the “global” PR agencies I’ve worked for has explained to the US management that we Europeans would eventually drop our native language and adopt English as our first language, because “this makes sense”. What a “global” leader… (clue: he’s the closest to Anheuser Busch headquarters).

Tags: media, pr

• Windows Vista: the end of one revolution and the beginning of another
• Windows Vista - What will it mean for Microsoft?
• Dell Computer
• Dell back in charge at Dell

Technorati tags: technology

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• Web Ink Now: Something Is Very Wrong in PR Land
• Web Ink Now: Something is very wrong in PR land part two: PR’s dirty little secret
• Communication Overtones: Pitching Tips: Reaching Journalists through Blogs
• How PR Got Locked Out of the Web Revolution. Is Its Image Repairable?

Tags: pr

• What is a business model?
• New Business Models for Strategy Consulting
• Christensen on Business Model Innovation
• Interview on Business Models

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According to Joseph Jaffe, marketing organizations need to foster and adopt an aggressive and intense culture of experimentation. He presents 10 critical components to take on the journey and a 5-step process to guide the way in this manifesto from the Change This Newsletter. An interesting reading.

Tags: Marketing, pr

Last year, Robert Gray has reported in a PR Week feature how the staff at 50 UK PR agencies spend their time, based on 12 months worth of research. The results are not surprising, and confirm why the business model built on the billable hour - which, in my opinion, has never been the right one for an industry whose main objective should be to create added value on behalf of clients - is totally obsolete. Here are the numbers:

1. Media relations: 15%
2. Tracking features: 0,9%
3. Client communication strategies: 0,6%
4. Business development: 1,5%
5. Reporting: 17,8%
6. Administration: 6,3%
7. Account management: 44,9%
8. Other tasks: 13%

Just to summarize: 16,5% of the time is spent to provide added value and 19,3% to provide some added value to the client, but a whopping 51,2% of the time is actually wasted in activities that do not bring any value to the client but are only intended to “please” the financial controllers. Robert Gray comments: “The findings suggest that agencies are - for want of a better word - ‘wasting’ much of their time”. I do not feel confortable when I see these figures because I know that they are real, as I have been on the client side before switching to the agency business and I always had the perception that PR agencies were not organized to provide the added value that I wanted (and needed). At the time, I have probably been one of the nastiest clients in the business, but I always managed to get the right level of service. For instance, I refused to accept more than one report per month (no meeting and no phone call reports) and I wanted to attend the agency meetings (usually internal) where the account team was supposed to discuss PR strategies and tactics for my company. PR agencies should be as “flat” as possible in term of structure, and as “networked” as possible in term of organization. In my ideal business model, which I can describe as a “matrix” where each individual is part of several account teams (each one built in order to provide the highest added value to the specific client) and at the same time has a strong vertical specialization (for instance, product reviews, technical media, or industry analysts), the continuous “contamination” between teams and specializations brings an additional value to the client. I will return on this subject in the next few days. P.S. - I have not accessed the original PR Week research. The data have been mentioned by Andy Smith at Object Towers in this post on October 31, 2006.

Tags: media, Media Relations, pr, Public Relations

When marketing hype manages to add 10° to a circle… The gentleman capable of this achievement is Gigi Acciaio (i.e., Lou Steel) of GMA, a large distributor of beers and other beverages, including spirits. For those who understand Italian, this is the page where the miracle happens (the company headquarter is very close to Pompei Sanctuary…).

Tags: Marketing