Archive for the ‘PR’ Category

Facebook had a ‘do’ on the roof of their Palo Alto offices last week, specifically for PR people, imparting useful  information such as how to “like” any article online, use a Firefox plug-in and tips on live-streaming.

They’ve set up a PR page too (of course) which now has 3000+ fans and perhaps have started to take PRs seriously as future partners. There’s no doubt the interest is reciprocated, though most big brands are proceeding with caution.

Ford has just made a bold move however in eschewing the traditional auto show and advertising biltz, to launch their new Explorer model on Facebook.

They’ve used it a a kind of hyprid press room/consumer information hub, containing several video interviews, pre and post ‘reveal’ photos, a competition to win a new Explorer and a schedule of live city events.

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The latest survey of lead generation channels by CSO Insights, via eMarketer shows design & content to be the place most marketer’s will be increasing their investment in contrast to Direct Mail which will see further decline.

Email marketing runs a close second, with 54%, followed by New Media (blogs, podcasts, mobile marketing). It’s not clear whether social media is included within content or New Media however but we’re assuming the former.

The number one aim of this realignment in spend was new customer acquisition, with 91% of companies seeing this as the priority, up from second in 2007 when the survey was last taken.

Based on the quantity and quality of leads generated, companies said email was their best lead generation program, followed by live events, website registrations and webinars.

Al Pacino has done his first product endorsement ever –  for an Australian coffee brand – Vittoria.

Pacino insisted Oscar winner Barry Levinson directed the commercial, so it looks great but it’s hard to understand why Pacino would promote an Australian product, even if he does usually drink the stuff.

Contrast this with Robert De Nero’s ad for American Express, which literally spells out the constituents of his personal brand and associates them with an American product.

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1) It takes 24 hrs for them to return my call/email. If it’s taking this long, either your account handler is too junior to know the answer, too busy on the 15 other accounts they ’service’ or off with stress because the agency financial structure demands they work 16 hours a day.

2) It takes a month to get a press release back. So who’s writing this stuff? Is it going up and down some bureaucratic chain of command at the agency, being amended for style not substance. When it does appear, is it lost in jargon with no discernible news hook?

3) I haven’t seen the account director since the pitch. All the IP and experience you saw in the pitch has been very busy with internal projects and has become merely a CC on hundreds of emails from the AM asking questions, questions, always with the questions.

4) You’re their smallest account. If you’re the smallest account at a large agency, they just don’t care enough about you. Doesn’t matter how well known the agency is, you won’t benefit from their award winning expertise. Read the rest of this entry »

Two very different videos virals featuring the iphone 4 are topping the video viral charts in the UK & US this week, one ’smaltzy’ the other subversive, begging the question, does the UK online video audience want more edgy content than their US cousins?

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog” said Keith Weed, new CMO of Unilever at Cannes last week, answering the question “do big agencies do the best work…or small agencies”.

Interesting too that he was saying it to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP – one of the world’s largest comms groups (138,000 employees in over 2,400 offices in 107 countries) for whom Unilever is a major client.

Weed goes on to say that when working with a big agency, his aim is to make sure he has that agency’s best people on his account, implying that in a big agency, employees are a mixed bag.

While it’s feasible to demand the best staff if you’re Unilever with a budget of £5bn a year, if you’re looking for a PR agency and have say £60K a year to spend, the size and quality of the agency you’re dealing with become more mission critical factors. Read the rest of this entry »

At the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles, it was agreed, according to Gorkana that Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) – the  main PR measuring stick in use for decades has now been rejected by delegates from 33 countries.

Well we always knew it was a bit iffy, not least because the well known phrase ‘you can’t buy coverage like this’  is literally true – you can’t buy advertising in many of the editorial situations the PR industry gets clients onto, plus AVE massively undervalues the longtail benefits of positive coverage.

While Barcelona has put it’s foot down on AVE, the great and good of PR haven’t yet proposed an alternative. Offline they may continue to struggle but happily online we’re got plenty of options, here’s a few off the bat:

1) The number of new links to your site/blog – good for reputation, SEO and reach

2) The increase in the number of mentions on Google your brand gets.

3) Website grade – use one of the online tools to measure how well your website scores before and after a campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

I remember dating a budding actress at university who at some point in our ultimately doomed relationship, pulled out a square, white chequebook with old fashioned writing on it – very different to the animal patterned Nat West ones most students were sporting in those days.  I remember being impressed and slightly intimidated by it, as I was by her if I’m honest. She explained it was a Coutts chequebook –the Queen’s bank – that her Stepdad had given to her.

At that time in the late eighties, Coutts had a rock solid, exclusive reputation which any self- respecting yuppie wanted a piece of. Legend had it that you needed half a million in cash minimum before they’d consider letting you in the door. As with many of the aspirant financial clubs of the eighties, the lack of information available about them just added to their mystique and cache.

Just as the red Porsches and matching braces have all but disappeared from the City, so the era of such corporate reputations, locked tight in a marble clad safety deposit boxes, have gone. It’s not just the high profile Madoff, Enron and Lehman scandals that have shaken public belief in financial institutions but on a micro level, through the internet, reputations now rise or fall on what customers are saying online. Read the rest of this entry »

While it may have been Twitter’s year from a publicity point of view, LinkedIn, the grand old dame of business social networking – who turned seven this month, continues to dominate corporate America. New research from Netprospex shows that 43% of large company employees are members of the site.

Facebook is a distant second with 11% while Twitter languishes back in fifth spot (3%) behind Flickr and MySpace (both 4%). You quite often hear the phrase in relation to consumer social media ‘we need to fish where the fishes are’  but how often do you hear of the same thing translated to B2B, i.e., LinkedIn marketing campaigns

In our experience of LinkedIn marketing, judicious seeding of content can generate 75% of referred website traffic, far more than Twitter can manage, so why not do more of it?

The answer may lie in another recent study, marketers were asked what the main obstacles are to using social media. They said lack of analytics (35%), lack of management buy-in (25%)  and that their audience isn’t yet active on social media (21%). Read the rest of this entry »