With my part time motoring journalist hat on it was with sadness that I read the letter from Audi’s press office this week about the proposed replacement of their printed press packs with email.
There was a time, before the rise of social media and user generated content when organisations could get away with scurrilous acts of consumer extortion safe in the knowledge that the muted customer had few ways to hit back other than writing to Watch Dog.
The Citigroup logo I’m used to seeing blazing proudly at night atop their Canary Wharf office block has been extinguished this week, perhaps out of respect for the 50,000 redundancies announced on Monday and what with Lehman’s once proud sign now unscrewed and lying in the liquidator’s skip, Auden’s words ‘pack up the moon and dismantle the sun’ seem weirdly apt for the financial sector these days.
Listening to Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, I was reminded of Shaw’s quote about how different we are in our use of language. Obama’s genuinely inspiring speech, referencing Martin Luther King in his call for supporters “to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day” while magical in a US context, sadly wouldn’t work for our politicians.
And so are blogs according to a journalist from US Wired last week – a story that somehow made it into the Telegraph, Times, Sunday Times, Radio 4, Brand Republic in the UK – and those are just the one’s I happened across.
Back in the balmy financial days of June I was bemoaning on this blog the absence of Mandelson and Campbell and the general decline of the spin doctor.
Having steadfastly refused to ‘do a Cherie’ Sarah Brown has finally stepped out of the shadows today and by introducing her husband at the Labour Party Conference, set the tone for a speech which appears to be doing the impossible in inspiring the party to get behind their beleaguered party leader – at least for a while.
A former Brunswick PR, Sarah Browns appearance reminds us that Gordon is not just a politician but a family man who cares about people and the country. OK, he’s never going to be a charismatic speaker but by demonstrating his human side and his party’s past achievements, he’s going some way to re establish his leadership on a solid footing.
Alistair Campbell had also been drafted in to handle the BBC’s coverage of the speech in a dual with John Sopel and appears to be winning,
Nice to see PRs doing a decent job for Labour at last.
So 79% of PR agents have yet to add any online services to their portfolio according to Bigmouthmedia. I guess from this we’re meant to get the impression that the PR industry is a set from ‘Life on Mars’ with a visitor from the future – Bigmouth themselves presumably, striding around looking astonished at how backward we all are.
I suspect the truth is that every agency actually offers some form of online service, however basic, it’s just that they are probably not promoting it very well. There’s no doubt a lack of expertise and maybe confidence in just what part PR plays online. Should we be involved in content for search? Should we be involved in website content? Blogs? Vodcasts?
The answer is yes, absolutely. The internet has opened up a limitless demand for the written word and PR agents are needed in the thick of it.
I must admit I was suprised to read this sentence in a letter from the NUJ recently. “The NUJ considers PR as work within journalism..”
Can this be right? I suspect a few journalists may disagree.
