The Long Tail listed for Award

I think this book is just fantastic.

Great news. The Long Tail has been shortlisted for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.

The mission is: "To identify the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics."

The Long Tail is a must read for Public Relations practitioners. It shows that in building relationships throughout the organisation's constituency has a pay back more significant than all the scream marketing in the world.

Die Marketing Die! Die! Die!

From CNN Money comes a report about the demise of scream marketing.

Ideas about achieving brand strength, that elusive alchemy of awareness and trust, have changed in the past decade. "It's no longer, What can we blast out there about ourselves?" says Michelle Roehm, associate professor of marketing at Wake Forest University. "Brand theory now asks, How can we connect with the community in a really meaningful way?"

Hooray! Some other comments:

"Today it's all about trust, community, and creating a dialogue with your customer that shares real knowledge," says Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer for Landor.

Perhaps no name on the list has attempted a deeper conversation with its customers than Dove. Its reliable but stodgy brand hit an emotional nerve-and pay dirt-with the "Campaign for real beauty," launched in September 2004.

I have more reasons posted here.

The moble audience - kids in the UK

The Mobile Life Survey, commissioned by Carphone Warehouse, quizzed 1,250 people aged 11 to 17 shows that nine out of 10 12-year-olds in the UK now have a mobile phone.

The biggest use is for Texting.

Another video channel

Microsoft is launching an online service to compete with YouTube, Google and Yahoo reports the BBC.

Soapbox starts testing on Tuesday and will launch within six months as part of current service, MSN Video.

So there will be another channel for communication. The video media list for PR professionals is getting bigger by the day.

Publicity, Propaganda or PR -the Cliveden set don't know

About a dozen propaganda and psyops specialists met at Cliveden, Berkshire, last week to discuss how America and its allies can use strategic communications more effectively in the War on Terror reports The Times.

Its a big bucks business.

The United States Government is thought to have earmarked at least $400 million (£213 million) since September 11, 2001, to enlist private companies to supply skills and ideas for an information war, covering propaganda and psychological operations (psyops).

These advisers are bringing corporate ideas to the military. Rebranding is one example.

Call a dog a different name because its mission has changed seems to be the BIG idea (wow1).

This is propaganda. In an age of social media it is simple an AK47 aimed at a delicate part of the anatomy.

Another corporate idea is the use of the chief executive as the voice of persuasion during a crisis (wow2).

The Times reports:

Nancy Snow, of the University of Southern California, who is a former propagandist for the US State Department, said: “There has been too much emphasis on having the President as persuader-in-chief and it isn’t working because he lacks credibility, especially abroad.” (wow3)

The information war experts also pointed out that private companies were motivated by the need to win short-term contracts, while military goals were long term (wow4).

This is publicity. It stems from scream marketing, a practice well known to command and control freaks.

Well what a surprise!

What I am trying to find in all this is Public Relations.

David Robertson, a Times hack thinks this is PR but what does he know? Marginally more than the headline writer is nearly obvious. The Times really does need a proper cub reporter who has, at least, some idea of the nature of relationships, how they are effected and nurtured for a common good.

The critical thing here is that there is a need for grown up public relations. This requires a clear understanding of the goals and ambitions of the governement (s) involved followed by research, planning strategy development, testing, monitoring and tactical application that is constantly monitored in the creation and flowering of relationships among many stakeholder groups all of which are interconnected.

The reason that the government cannot get a public relations person to prepare and execute a plan is that the client is awash with ego and bumbling about with sound bites delivered with 'personality'.

Lloyd-Webber would be a better option than a PR consultant. At least we would have tunes instead of the noise of a washing machine behind the spin.

Good employee relations critical - if poor - dangerous

Sacked spy Richard Tomlinson has defied the UK's secret services by posting the first chapter of his spy novel online. Says The Register.

It reports:

The ex-MI6 officer was fired in 1995 after four years in the foreign arm of British secret intelligence and spent a year in a maximum security prison for publishing a book about his time in the organisation. But he has fought back against what he claims is intimidation by his old employees with the publication of chapter one of The Golden Chain on his blog.

Imagine if this was to happen to your organisation. It is almost impossible to prevent ex-employees blowing whistles and making mayhem online.

This means that the Public Relations manager has to alert management and prepare for the eventuality as part of issues management planning.

Email is chaotic

Over a third (38%) of large organisations across the UK admit their email management system is in ‘complete chaos’, according to the findings of a survey released by AIIM, reports Retail Bulletin.

I have pulled out the key points. But waht this report says to me is that it is about time the Public Relations department got control of email and managed it properly and as a communications medium.

• The survey also found that the same number of end users admitted that their company either had no policy or they didn’t know their company’s policy when it came to email archiving.

• A third of UK organisations do not have any clear plans and procedures for dealing with compliance issues, especially concerning historical records, which poses a number of compliance related risks.

• Only 16% understand that the broader concept relates to information within enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems.

• Half of the users surveyed admitted that employees do not fully understand how to access current versions of policies and procedures or other critical corporate information.

• Over two thirds (70%) of organisations admit that content created by employees who have then left, is not actively reviewed or archived appropriately.

South Bank Show podcast

If you have a client who would be good material for the ITV1 South Bank Show you will be interested to know that from today, you’ll be able to download a special podcast version of the show, carrying extended interviews with the week’s guests.

This is important for two reasons. The people who want to see the show can do so at a time to suit themselves which mean that the extended audience will be focused and relevant and, of course the podcast will remain available for years, extending the life of the broadcast.

Of course you will also be able to use the link to the show in additional and further promotional work too.

The same benefits also apply to Nigel Godrich's show

The Radiohead producer will head up 'From The Basement', which is expected to feature appearances from the likes of The White Stripes, Thom Yorke and Beck. The first series has already been recorded.


The show will have no studio audience, and will be available as a video podcast.

So it will get the extra bonus podcasts offer Public Relations practitioners.

Radiohead Official Site

Guradian reports on the power of the blog for corporates

Andrew Clarke tells how Dell learned recently about the growing power of the blogosphere when it recalled 4.1m laptop batteries after a video that showed one of its computers bursting into flames was posted on the internet. The brief clip zig-zagged through cyberspace and went from cult viewing to national television.

"It's a new culture, a new world," says Nielsen BuzzMetrics' marketing vice-president, Max Kalehoff. "For every company there's a huge, long tail of blogs with many, many niches."

He maintains that although blogs can be a thorn in the side of carefully nurtured brands, they can also be useful in alerting executives to hazards ahead.

Space for blogging

From Neville Hobson's eagle eye:

Ms Ansari says she will write the first blog from space. She says that her ultimate goal is to bring her experience and “the ability to fly to space to more and more people and to inspire young woman and men to go into the fields related to space.”

Is it OK to ghostwrite a CEO blog?

Debbie Weil says: This is one of the questions I get asked most often. What I want to know, dear reader, is what you think?

This is a silly question.

What are the corporate aims, where is the social media strategy and how can you lever most corporate benefit.

Most CEO's have a half life of 3 years so when they go... what is best for the organisation?

I am not a great fan of CEO blogs. Imaging the relative power among a wide range of stakeholders should they have a monthly podcast, an interview on sector wide issues by John Humphrys.

Research and evaluation

Heather Hopkins is Director of Research for Hitwise UK. In this role, Heather analyses the trends affecting businesses online and works with Hitwise clients to identify opportunities and threats to online business growth. She was looking at clickstream traffic from MySpace and Bebo this morning for a reporter and noticed HMV.co.uk among the downstream sites from MySpace. In fact, the site ranked as the third highest downstream Shopping & Classifieds site from MySpace Music last week, after eBay UK and eBay.

If The PR industry was to use this information, imagine its power for PR planning, strategy development and evaluation.

Sorta makes the usual charts look a bit ... unreal?

If you don't RSS you ain't in PR

Its simple. Without RSS a practitioner cannot keep up with the news, is unable to follow important discussion and debate about thier client, is swamped by email and is really a waste of salary.

The best advice about RSS today is from Elizabeth Albrycht. Her blog is worth adding to your RSS feed as well.

Then have a play after your workout in the gym and with a glass of Château Ausone and practice.

Its just so cool.

Celeb PR opportunity

YouTube has signed a deal with media giant Warner Music to allow its material to be used legally.

It means interviews and videos by Warner's artists can be used in return for a slice of advertising revenue.
The agreement also covers the use of material in homemade videos, which form a large part of YouTube's content.
Well there is some reality creeping in. The Warner long tail could be very valuable.

For Celebrity PR... get your client into the Warner library.

There is added news from Business2Day:

YouTube is getting ready to launch a "content identification system" by the end of the year that supposedly will let copyright holders automatically find when their content is being used and either charge royalties for it or share in advertising dollars associated with that content.

Eyespot - an vidcast experiment

It works!

I have experimented with Eyespot for the first time.

Just my cellphone (on a pile of books) and the free, simple and easy software works very well.

Now I have to get the camera out, prepare better content and get the sound, lighting, mixing etc better. But for 90 minutes from start to finish, this is not hard.

Show notes, are, of course, the blog comments I made this week.



The next think to do is to send it to YouTube, Live Journal, Veoh, BlipTV etc.

There is one issue which is that it is supposed to load to this blog (Blogger Beta) automatically and that does not work yet. I had to cut and past the code.

Brand Monitoring

Mike Manuel has picked up a Forester Research report about Brand Monitoring and identifying
Nielsen Buzzmetrics
CymfonyBiz360
Umbria
Brandimensions
MotiveQuest
Factiva
on the way.

I am getting more and more uneasy about many metrics. My concern is that they can lead one down the route of market segmentation in a misleading way.

I now tend towards a view that, for many application, there is a need to identify with the content values offered by constituents within contextual frames which can be as granular as one because of their influence on the long tail asset.

For a lot of organisations their long tail asset may be greater than the annual marketing budget which would lead one to imagine how much more effective it might be for closer attention.

Levering up one blog post by a factor of three by just responding would seem to be a valuable investment.

There are not many brand monitoring capabilities that identify the long tail asset.

Mobile keeps up the pressure for effective communication

Mobile keeps cropping up in forecasts and is becomming core to PR communication. By 2012, cellular VoIP services are forecast to generate revenues of $18.6 billion in the USA and $7.3 billion in Western Europe, compared with fixed VoIP revenues of $11.9 in the USA and $6.9 billion in Western Europe, according to a new report, Forecasting the Commercial Impact of Wireless VoIP in the USA and Western Europe, published by Analysys, the global advisers on telecoms, IT and media (http://research.analysys.com/).

European commercial broadcasters threatened

Yankee Group today announced that multi-channel services, new advertising formats and new direct business partnerships between content providers and advertisers are posing a tremendous threat to the core business of European commercial broadcasters. As a result, European free-to-air (FTA) broadcasters are facing a severe decline in advertising revenue. Yankee Group finds that to retain these budgets and margins, broadcasters must refocus their traditional business model and explore new and emerging TV distribution and merchandising options.

This means that broadcast public relations acivities need to re-think how they provide content for broadcsters.

Free video editing software

If you are thinking of learning how to edit your video for your company vidcast or blog, you may want a list of free video editing software from TV ISG.

For podcasting the most used free editing software is Audacity.

Work early for Christmas

Are you ready for Christmas?

Online performance, Internet interactivity and sales performance for the festive season is a must this year. The alternative, gardening in February, is not a lot of fun.

Online retail sales for November and December 2005 were up 20% on the previous year, outperforming the high street by a factor of eight. Way back then, this represented 6.8% of all UK retail sales.

I have already reported research that suggests British retail spending over the Internet is set to double, hitting almost 40 billion pounds, by 2010. This year there will be a surge. It would surprise few people to see an additional 25% sales increase online this year over last, the increase could be even more. This would pitch online sales at £3.75 to £4bn over November/December 2006.

This means, if you have any connection with online retailing you have to be working up your programme now. Of course your web site should already have enjoyed a comprehensive makeover. This will mean it will get its tinsel on time and in the right places.

You will check that server can cope with huge surgesn traffic and high throughput of purchases. You will have a group ready to respond to questions and issues and perhaps a method for helping people who want to ask questions or comment online.


If the PR industry gets this wrong it will never be forgiven. Think in terms of one in every three pounds spent by householders will be via the Internet (and this is not just for the young and trendy, my 89 year old Mother-in-law depends on Internet ordered meals for her lunches).

The evidence of the power of Internet retailing keeps mounting.

John Lewis reported a 25% surge in profits last week fuelled by a huge increase in internet sales. The department store group, which also owns the Waitrose supermarket chain, said it had enjoyed an 'excellent' half year.

Meanwhile, the UK Town Centre Retailing 2006 report by retail analysts Verdict Research found town centre spending fell to £122.3 billion in 2005, a 0.6 per cent drop on 2004.

Clothing retailer Next Plc posted an increase in first-half profits on Wednesday last, as a surge in its catalogue and Internet business helped offset a drop in same-store sales.

Chocolate retailer Thorntons Plc posted a 36 percent drop in full year profits on Tuesday last because of sluggish high street demand. On a positive note, demand for chocolates over the company's Internet site grew 6.4 percent over the past 12 months to 5.5 million pounds.

Shoppers spent £767 million less in town centre shops last year, turning to the internet, retail villages and supermarkets that are selling more and more non-food items like TVs and clothes.

Insurance giant Aviva, one of our biggest financial-services group, said it would cut 4,000 jobs in the UK, in part because customers were no longer shy about doing big financial transactions online.

Online, non car dealer, second hand car sales has increased share from 3% in 1998 to 7% in 2005.

Last week the Civil Aviation Authority issued a report revealing there were twice as many failures of old-style holiday companies this year than last with people booking flights and holiday accommodation direct with vendors via the Internet.

I just hope that the PR industry is ready for all this.

This is coming at us really fast.