Time warp or moderne, the state of legal PR.

Legal Week has an article by Ronel Lehman which deals with a range of ways law firms can promote their services.

It is limited in scope and suggests that the legal profession is stuck in a 1970's promotional time warp.

This is not the case. Outlaw Radio, a weekly 10 minute podcast is an example of the use of new media and a fresher look at how the legal profession can engage with communities both local and global.

Almost all Social Media can be effectively deployed by law firms to good effect and the competitive advantage is available to the early adopters.

Retail narrowcast TV is a hit

There is a phenomena in UK stores that offers a channel for PR communication that is becoming really popular.

Narrowcast television has a proven record.

In this report, there are data to help understand what can be achieved in terms of exposure showing 85 per cent of visitors to stores equipped with Tesco TV see a screen during their visit, and that on average they see eight screens in total. The average recorded viewing time per exposure to a screen was three seconds. The group calculates viewing figures on the basis that stores have an average of fifty screens, of which 20 will be passed by any given shopper per visit.

JC Decaux group marketing director David McEvoy says. "These results prove beyond doubt that not only do consumers see the screens, but they also have a high frequency of exposure. The research provides us with real audience measurement for the very first time."

The alternatives such as the internet and electronic point of sale displays helps to remove uncertainty from communications in an era of fragmented media, according to a report into the consumer psychology aspects of digital media.

Digital Signage Networks: Theory, Psychology and Strategy has been produced by the Centre for Experimental Consumer Psychology, and by content creation group Pixel Inspiration.

In addition there is the Samsung Screen Survey (see article in Clickpress) now in its fifth edition, which offers detailed analysis of the state of the market.

The application of the communication channel to engage the consumer using relationship building content (PR) in place of just screen exposure, offers new opportunities.

This should be a PR channel and practitioners may like to explore this emerging capability.

Call Centres wreck relationships

A YouGov survey reveals just how bad the call centre experience really is. Commissioned by Callmedia and published in Net4Now, the UK’s leading developer of contact centre software reveals that only four per cent of people in the UK have had a favourable experience when dealing with a customer call centre, with 44 per cent complaining that their biggest gripe is contacting a call centre based overseas.

Commenting on this survey, Rufus Grig, managing director, Callmedia said:
“This research clearly indicates what customers do and don’t like.
Companies need to make quality customer service a priority and take steps to provide good, consistent and timely service in a bid to increase loyalty and reduce churn. The surprising find from this research is quite the strength of feeling felt by UK consumers against the outsourcing of contact centres overseas.”

The survey has revealed a number of other interesting facts:

* When a consumer wants to complain about a product or a service, 42 per cent of respondents prefer to use the phone to ensure that their point is heard

* However, 78 per cent of respondents prefer to buy products online rather than by telephone, email or post

* Respondents’ second biggest gripe is being passed from department to department until someone who can answer the specific query is found

Newspapers on paper are on the way out.

MICHAEL KINSLEY of Time asks the question and comes up with some pretty drab news.

How can the newspaper industry survive the Internet? On the one hand, newspapers are expected to supply their content free on the Web. On the other hand, their most profitable advertising--classifieds--is being lost to sites like Craigslist. And display advertising is close behind. Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports.

The full article has implications for the Public Relations industry. If newspapers are on their way out, what are the pratitioner options. Michael offers some hope.

New Media courses are part of PR degree courses

In a straight rebutal of the PR Week story Derek Hodge makes these points:

Under the headline PR Colleges ill-prepared for new-media explosion the current issue of the UK trade magazine PR Week (22 September, 2006) reports what looks like a shockingly sloppy piece of “research by tech agency Lewis PR” and tells us that “Just seven out of the 27 CIPR approved higher-education PR and comms courses in the UK offer modules dedicated to new media”.

There’s a list of “Colleges offering new-media modules” at the top of the article which fails to mention the University of Stirling where we have a Public Relations and Technology option for students taking our full-time MSc Public Relations course and also the University of Central Lancashire where I used to teach a module on Strategic Communication Technology to students on their MSc in Strategic Communications. That’s two courses I know of that are missing from the list and I wonder if there’s any others that they’ve omitted.

No lecturer teaching on our PR courses here at Stirling was consulted during this “research” and information regarding this module has been on our website since March.

The PR Week article states “Just seven of the 27 CIPR-approved higher-education PR and Comms courses in the UK offer modules dedicated to new media”, while the CIPR website lists over forty such courses and provides full contact details for most course leaders.

Oh dear.

I did rather admire the brass neck of Patrick Barrow, Director General of the PRCA, who seems to think that a major reason why those of us teaching public relations in the university sector should add modules covering new media to our courses is to reduce the cost of doing business for his members.

Is this poor journalism or great blogging?
Well, which do you think is the authentic voice?

A new approach to online conferencing

A first hand description of socil media conferening by Chris Rourke on e-consultancy.

He says:

The highly accessible and usable conference website (developed in Drupal) set the scene and allowed attendees (the cast) to start deciding the themes for discussion, uploading their profiles, blogging, and meeting each other online. As with most social conferences, the agenda was set through the pre-conference online discussion, providing a groundwork for further engagement at the actual conference.

David Milliband Interview on his Wiki ideas

From e-consultancy we are getting insights into David Miliband (Secretary of state for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and his ideas and reaction to this summer when he launched the government's first experiment with wikis, only for the move to be scrapped after the “accidental or malicious editing or removal of material” by pranksters.

The wiki is back up.

Good work and an interesting interview.

Wireless in the Office and home

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are more tuned into the benefits of wireless than they were two years ago, with a 20 per cent surge in adoption, according to research published today.

More than three quarters (77 per cent) of this community are actively embracing this type of technology compared to just 57 per cent in 2004, claims the survey of 500 SMEs conducted by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and computer giant Dell.

Perhaps this is because so many SME owners have wireless at home.

China Blog

The number of blog sites in China reached 34 million last month, a 30-fold increase from four years ago.

ITPro

Public Relations Evaluation - online

We are really getting there now.

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise is offering some serious metrics that can help in evaluation of on-line PR programmes.

She says:

This week I focussed on the issue of using online usage data (search term volume and content and site visits) to improve the measurability of offline advertising and brand awareness. This week, we published a research report with Yahoo! Search Marketing and i-level (a digital agency in the UK) on this very topic. The research uses three case studies (Orange Shop, Sky and The AA to compare ad spend, creatives and online activity with online behaviour using Hitwise data on search terms, clickstream and visits.

Business Wire get PRWeb

David McInnis of PRWeb dropped Lee Odden a quick note about a new strategic partnership between PRWeb parent, Vocus Communications and Business Wire that includes the licensing of a private label version of PRWeb for use by Business Wire clients.

Lee Oden says:

This will give Business Wire a leg up over other wire services looking into the optimized press release space. It will also give Business Wire clients the opportunity to take advantage of the new media press release features offered by PRWeb.

Now it is time for Business wire to stipulate data feed using XPRL so the data can be used across a wide range of PR tools and services.

Its spin if you don't validating sources and offer representative graphics.

Jim Horton stumbled on two lessons in ethics and accuracy that would be good for PR practitioners to imitate -- sourcing numbers for readers and production of accurate and ethical graphics. The first came from a critique of newspaper columnists who cite statistics but fail to let readers know where they come from. The second is the code of ethics for the Society of News Design. Both strike a chord because twisting numbers to make a point is a common failure and using jiggered graphics for the same reason is pervasive in PR.

New Media Release

The Press Release is getting a major makeover.
Phil Gomes, is working on it as well. It will be nice when we can welcome him to the XPRL initiative as well.

In the meantime, it is my belief that the traditional Press Release has a very limited life.

Mobile Co's have another idea

Mobile companies have been watching the rapid growth of networking and video-sharing websites such as MySpace and YouTube. They have realised that content created by users themselves might be just what they need to persuade their customers to do more with their phones than make calls and send text messages.

Another PR communication channel is on its way.

Facebook - a communications channel - is changing

US social networking website Facebook is to compete more directly with bigger rival MySpace by lifting registration restrictions in a move it hopes will attract millions of new users reveals the Guardian.

Until now Facebook, the second-largest social networking website in America after MySpace, has operated a relatively closed community, open only to members of schools, colleges and workplace networks.

Reading

Richard Bailey has an important post for PR people.

What are you reading? My question to all PR practitioners

Too many blank stares.

Seven in 10 arts professionals – many of whom have a role in marketing – said they believed their organisation could make more use of digital media.

One stumbling block is clearly the amount of money available, as budgets for digital marketing remain low; two-thirds of organisations currently allocate less than £10,000 per annum to digital technologies. While 98 per cent of organisations now have websites, 76 per cent say their website fails to meet all of the needs of their audiences. Many said they believed their organisation’s whole site needed redevelopment to function effectively.

So says Bob Worcester of Mori in Profile this week.

Looks like there is another campaign that CIPR should get stuck into - Social Media work is not cheap!

Keep off my brand

Profile reports, Nike paid up, Hackney, isn't hackneyed.

PR is just not channel savvy

It comes as blow to learn that PR people just don't use the communications channels available to them.
From PRW (behind Michael Heseltine's skirts and other firewalls), we learn

SUBtv, the company that runs a network of screens in student unions and bars, has called on more PR ­execu­tives to use the channel ­to reach the UK's growing student population.

Measuring a Blog's popularity

There are many ways to evaluate the popularity of your blog.

I offer this snippet. The full post from Smart Mobs is here.

We've used the most popular feeds mined from bloglines subscribers with public profiles to do various kinds of analyses. We've also played with other influence models for the blogosphere. One thing that the Bloginfluence formula doesn't capture is that the importance of links from other blogs and their posts should be weighted by their importance.