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In a business that deals primarily with influence, tracking content – going to the source of the story online is becoming increasingly important.
We know that the vast majority of content is re-cycled (neatly illustrated by the launch of churnalism.com) but a lot of the time it’s hard to tell the difference between the original and re-cycled stuff – and not all sites (and I say that charitably), are that good at attribution.
The chaps and ladychaps at Google launched an algorithm change recently that’s now affecting around 12% of all results. It’s designed (unofficially) to promote original content over and above unattributed re-cycling, (content commonly referred to as “scraped” and “farmed”). There are slight differences between scraping and farming, the former being worse than the latter, and so the punishment dolled out will be relative.
The point being that for those of us who look for influence instead of reach this seems to be a good thing, for the rest, not so much…
This entry was written by , posted on February 25, 2011 at 11:29 am, filed under PR. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Just seen this post over on Stuart Bruce’s blog in which he touches on the continuing row over McBride-gate (or is it email-gate? Surely it’s a gate by now.)
I agree with Stuart when he says the row has on on too long, in fact I thought it had gone on too long by Tuesday and was fast descending into the kind of Westminster gossip that nobody outside of parliament and the lobby correspondents gives a flying foxtrot about. I think this, not because it wasn’t serious, it was, but because I am looking at it from a party political point of view.
If Cameron really wants to stick it to Brown he should publicly forgive him and focus on getting back to the serious business of government. It’s his trump card – he gets to end the scandal, play the statesman and counter the most damaging attack against him, namely that he lacks gravitas. Despite the obvious temptation to twist the knife, he risks losing that trump card if it goes on much longer and the media start to lose interest.
That’s all… I’m going home now.
This entry was written by , posted on April 15, 2009 at 5:58 pm, filed under Political, PR and tagged Cameron, Mcbridegate. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
At Waterside we’re all on our way to Newcastle for our Christmas party. We’re going today because it is the last free date in our collective diaries before christmas.
PR really is the most ridiculous profession
This entry was written by , posted on November 23, 2007 at 2:52 pm, filed under PR. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I’ve been blogging quite lightly over the last few months – mainly due to a lack of time and, whilst that’s not really a problem, (I can always just start writing right?,) what is a problem is that I haven’t been reading a lot either. Quite a few people have literally dropped off the radar and, it doesn’t feel like I know where the debate is anymore.
I want to start again so… top 5 UK PR blogs please? If enough people comment I promise to bring all the data together and produce a bloggers’ “most favouritest” list.
This entry was written by , posted on November 21, 2007 at 10:47 am, filed under PR, social networks. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
This morning, driving in to work, I was wondering what my next post would be about. I got in, switched on the computer, loaded up outlook and three emails later this post was practically written.
Email 1 – Title: Request for coverage on All Things PR.
Despite the arrogant title, the body of the email was very polite, asking me if I’d blog about an International Association of Online Communicators (IAOC) event. Once I’d worked out that they didn’t want to inspect my nuclear arsenal I gave the speakers a quick google and it turns out, they aren’t international at all, they’re American. I’m not anti-american but International means more than one nation and I don’t like the assumption. So no, I won’t blog about it.
Email 2 – Title: All Things PR
This was from an ad agency who have developed an ”interactive” periodic table of marketing bullshit terminology. Firstly, It was clear from the pitch that either the agency in question had never read my blog, or they were just stupid. I blog about PR and Politics and Web 2.0 stuff and many other things but I don’t blog about “brand penetration” and “market segmentation” because these things don’t interest me. Secondly, the table was a bit… well rubbish.
Email 3 – Title: Property Week – Read today’s issue NOW
“Over the next two weeks your copy of Property Week may be delayed due to the knock-on effect of the Royal Mail strike.
To ensure you still have access to Property Week on Friday, we will host digital editions on the 12th and 19th of October.”
Link provided, Property Week ready to download, brilliant. It isn’t arrogant or presumptive, it shows that they’ve thought about how they can make a good publication more accessible and improve life for their readers, and it uses appropriate technology to do it. PW, have a gold star.
If ony they’d sort out an RSS feed from their news page and stop closing down the one I made with Pony Fish
This entry was written by , posted on October 12, 2007 at 8:56 am, filed under PR, Technology. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
If anyone needed an example of quite how drastically PR has changed since web 2.0 got its teeth into it, this weekend has provided plenty.
Screw print deadlines, gone are the days when you could prevaricate your way out of a news cycle. Danny Finklestein and Con Home were broadcasting the news of the election that wasn’t over their RSS feeds hours before any TV had wised up to the story, and whilst one campaign may have come to an end, another managed to continue, just. Lewis Hamilton may have been let off but his story just goes to show that you can no longer manage TV cameras.
In a nutshell the problem is this, when the mechanisms of content delivery were few and linear, they could be managed. Now they are many and networked and they can’t. Those who succeed will be those who recognise that message management never really made it out of the 20th century. I don’t know what the next step for PR is, there is allot of talk about engagement and it all sounds good but, to be honest, I don’t know what real corporate engagement looks like. For the moment I’m happy if clients can stick to a very simple formula.
1. Consider PR before a decision is made, PR applied after a decision is spin.
2. Be open and honest. You can’t hide anything if the guy next door to you with a mobile phone is every bit as able to publish a story as a BBC news crew.
3. Try to understand the power of content. The ubiquity of search based as opposed to channel based provision means that the internet rewards excellence in a way that traditional media never has and never will.
This entry was written by , posted on October 8, 2007 at 3:37 pm, filed under Political, PR, Technology. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
It seems Yahoo are developing a social network of their own. “Kickstart,” as it seems like it will be called, looks like it will be a career driven network linking students with ex – students at certain companies.
Hat tip to Jemima Kiss at the Guardian’s Organ Grinder for the info. She claims the feel is “more LinkedIn than Facebook,” which strikes me as about the right place to go with something like this. I have a LinkedIn profile but I never really engaged in it – the process of introductions was too cumbersome and the rest cost money. Just a few of Facebook’s innovations would have made it much easier.
Personally, I’m not sure of the need for a network like this. There’s a good post over at Simon Collister’s blog that, quite neatly, demonstrates how the nature of social networks delineates between different groups within a given set of Facebook friends. If networks don’t overlap as much as we think, why would I need a separate network for work colleagues?
It’s possible I’m being too negative, I look forward to being proved wrong.
Technorati tags: Yahoo, Social Media, Facebook
This entry was written by , posted on September 4, 2007 at 11:40 am, filed under PR, Technology. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I’ve just got back from a seminar on email marketing put on by the chaps from Communigator. I didn’t go because I wanted to find out more about email marketing. I don’t have the time, expertise, or infrastructure for a departure like that, but I was interested in how people developed channels of communication.
After a few hours of listening, revolutionary insights all stored up in my brain shaped head I mosied on back to the office, (is that how you spell mosey?) only to find that Collister (bah humbug) has once again thieved my thunder.
The presentation from communigator was genuinely impressive, but if you took the words “email marketing” out the entire section on content could easily have been a piece on blogging or any other kind of electronically delivered communications channel. It seems that despite the different channels, the fundamentals of communication don’t really change.
I have to admit that before today I thought of email marketing as just an online version of the leaflets that get stuffed into my mailbox and summarily discarded but I was dead wrong. Email can be just as communicative as what I had previously regarded as the more “real” conversations taking place in the blogosphere and through social networking sites. The only real difference is the mechanics of delivery and the context.
I get frustrated when I find myself blogging about new technology for new technology’s sake. Email is not a new technology. In fact, along with PR, Blogging, and bizarrely, Bill Gates it has been, on more than one occasion declared dead. What the presentation this
morning showed me was that actually, all technology, all systems, all methodologies are dead – right up until the point when someone brings them alive with a bit of creativity and thought.
This entry was written by , posted on July 18, 2007 at 3:28 pm, filed under PR, Technology. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Just seen this post over at Seth Godin’s blog. In some ways he’s right, it is often tempting to organise products or services around ourselves and not our users. I used to work in a Local Authority where we were trying to do just what Seth is saying and put (in our case) the service users at the heart of delivery as opposed to our organisational structure.
What he says is right but some of the examples he gives demonstrate very effectively how tough the process can be.
e.g. When you go to Home Depot to get what you need to build something out of wood, why don’t you find the glue and the wood saws and the screwdrivers and the screws all together in a section called, “working with wood”?
That’s fine, it sounds sensible except that last time I went into a DIY store I needed a drill (where would that be?) and I also needed drill bits and rawl plugs for both masonry and wood…
My point is that people are all unique so re-organisation has to be about flexibility and responsiveness. Seth’s Home Depot is analogous to the challenges faced by PR. We used to be able to write for nicely boxed up target audiences, but the internet is breaking down all those neatly constructed boxes, replacing them with a much more organic structure.
Where as “PR 1.0″ was all about broadcasting, what we are faced with now seems to me to be finding a correspondingly organic way of communicating. Some might call that conversation.
This entry was written by , posted on July 2, 2007 at 12:06 pm, filed under PR. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Doing some research into the age of seemingly modern proffessions I stumbled accross a guy called Epictetus. He was a greek stoic philiosopher but lived most of his life in Rome.
Beginning his life in Rome as a pauper (some accounts say a slave, others say a servant,) he rose to become an advisor to a senator before being thrown out of Rome by Nero. I can’t find anywhere exactly what kind of advice he was supposed to be giving but, given that his most famous attributed quote is “People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them,” I think I’m beginning to guess…
Epictetus was around 55 to 135 A.D. Anyone know of any B.C. PR gurus?
This entry was written by , posted on June 21, 2007 at 3:44 pm, filed under PR. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.