Category: PR
“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. More »
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. More »
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. More »
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%). More »
The PR profession has hit a technological glass wall. I can see all these slick communicators pressed up against it, looking at all the weird buttons, lights and gizmos, wondering whether they’re looking at their future or their demise.
The grey haired leaders, who brought them to this point, are getting angry, like the DVD player at home, they can’t work out how to program it and are too damned long in the tooth to be bothered with these tricksy things now.
Somewhere at the back, a few youngsters have Foursquared their location and are now sending abuse to each other on Twitter. One of them says something derogatory about the MD’s lack of tech savvy and will get sacked later on.
All the while, behind the glass, in amongst the lights, cables and myriad computer screens, the rock star techies are playing warcraft and eyeing up a big pile of cash with ‘online pr’ written on it.
One of them is on the phone, you can just about hear him saying – “certainly we can provide content for the organic SEO, keyword optimised, linked to product pages, yes no problem. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – oh yes we can do that too”. More »
Politicians are failing to take advantage of new media’s huge potential to engage voters with 79% of Britons unable to recall any online electioneering, a survey by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts found earlier this month.
And this was supposed to be the new-media election – yet TV appears to be stealing the show. The debate on ITV on April 15th was watched by 9.4m Britons – 37% of the prime-time audience – and led to a ten-point swing to the Liberal Democrats.
E-mail, blogging, social networking and tweeting have all had some impact – but arguably nothing comparable to this. As the political debate rages on, a report in The Economist this week describes the televised debates between Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and David Cameron as “a triumph for old media.”
The Economist also reports that Get Elected, a political-research outfit, has examined 100 tight races, where online campaigning should presumably be fierce. It found that only 45% of the candidates in those races had Twitter accounts. More »
NB, update from freshegg 3:10pm: “www.timesonline.co.uk is now back in Google’s index. They went from having 0 pages indexed this morning to a quarter of a million just now. The SEO guys at the Times are saying there was a technical issue of some sort causing the dropout – I am unconvinced and cannot see how any technical problem (which no SEO I know could detect) could simply take an entire site out of the index and then pop it back in again. All I can say is I can imagine both Google and The Times offices have had busy mornings with plenty of heated phone calls.”
Coinciding with the launch of Times Online’s much debated paywall, Google appears to have removed the paper’s online site – www.timesonline.co.uk – from their index entirely.”
According to a report by freshegg, by way of Malcolm Coles, searches for “times online” or for the entire subdomain return zero results.
Freshegg says: “it seems that Google has manually removed the entire timesonline.co.uk site from its index, either at the direct request of Rupert Murdoch (or his best minions), or perhaps this was an initiative from Google itself”
Subdomains such as business.timesonline.co.uk and technology.timesonline.co.uk are currently still indexed though this may change down the line.
Nod to Garry Davis at WhyCommunicate? for bringing this to our attention.
The influential parenting site, Mumsnet, is playing an increasingly active part in social debate, with George at Asda becoming the first retailer to seek approval from the site’s members before putting a potentially controversial product on its shelves.
Whatever we think of this as a PR move – and it’s an interesting one – it serves to underline the impact that key social networking sites can have on brand reputation. Mumsnet receives more than 1m unique visitors each month. Its discussion boards attract about 20,000 comments daily. Even the upcoming General Election has been dubbed the ‘Mumsnet Election.’
George at Asda, Boden, House of Fraser, Mothercare and Start-rite have all signed up to the site’s ‘Let girls be girls’ campaign, after members expressed concerns about products on sale in high-street stores. It aims to get retailers to agree to end the ‘premature sexualisation of children though their products and marketing.’
Writing in his Editor’s comment this week, Gareth Jones of Marketing magazine is sceptical as to whether Asda’s decision represents an intelligent PR coup. “Mumsnet is a hugely powerful force that brands should seek to harness but, in this case, it seems George at Asda may be going a step too far,” he says. More »
Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube predicts that the next five years for the site will be all about “stickability” and convergence of channels.
In order to encourage people to stay on the site for hours rather than minutes, he says, “we need to create a much more seamless experience across devices.”
Interviewed in The Telegraph, Hurley says “People think about the world of TV and the world of online video as being different ways to distribute video, but what happens when every TV is connected to wi-fi with a browser? What does that mean for your distribution opportunities? And these budgets dedicated to digital online – that proportion spent on video versus the big dollars that are being spent against TV – what happens when those worlds collide and is it just one thing? That is what we envision.” More »
