MarCom Professional

For those obsessed with tags - and what marketer wouldn't be based on the fact that you want your brand to be a tag as often as possible, and to understand how your content and products are being tagged - check out Wordle.  Bringing style to the tag cloud.

Here's one I ran for MarCom Professional just now (click on it or here to see the original), and then a description of Wordle in their own words.

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. More...

Andy Murray appears to have split the nation; in spite of winning his Wimbledon match against Richard Gasquet to get closer to the Wimbledon title than any Brit in years, there are still people who don't want him to win. Take a look at one of his videos on YouTube for instance and you'll find plenty of negative comment about him.



This morning on BBC Radio Five Live, Nikky Campbell said that the station had received several text messages from people who just don't want Murray to win. So, here we have someone who is clearly an accomplished tennis player - currently 11th out of 1,856 ranked players worldwide - who people don't want to be a winner. More...

By Peter Prodromou

We hear with increasing frequency from companies wanting RPG’s corporate practice to take them through the pre-IPO process or support their ongoing IR strategy.  And while the usual check box questions about capability are clearly front and center, the thing that really gets a lot of attention these days is the role of social media in investor relations.

We’re the first to counsel our clients to be judicious with a social media program in the context of IR and broader corporate communications as a public company.  At the same time, it’s clearer than ever, that social media can and does have huge impact on shareholder and corporate stakeholder perceptions.  Any company not integrating a social media component into their IR and corporate programs — even something as simple as understanding and evaluating the digital dialogue — is making a mistake. More...

Richard Bailey posted recently on pay equality the PR industry following Harriet Harman’s proposals on pay equality last week. Richard cites data from a PRCA survey from 2005 which reckons that there is chasm between the pay between the sexes in the PR industry.

Research for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in 2005 suggested a stubborn pay gap remained. The average salary for all men working in PR was recorded as £57,165. The figure was £39,507 for women (these figures are on page 50 of the report). What can explain this gap?

This is nonsense and is as valid as claiming that there’s a differential between the salary of PR executives and board directors. More...

Congratulations PR Week. Not just from the crew at Rainier PR for the recent redesign, but from the media section of The Observer no less. Apparently our weekly rag is the envy of Fleet Street for its political scoops.

There’s a long held mantra that business sectors get the trade media they deserve. Maybe things are looking up for the PR industry.

London's freesheet City AM, a newspaper of 100,000 aimed at workers in financial services, is to dispense with the services of its entire sub-editing team.

A spokesman for City AM said "In assessing the editorial capacity and based on similar experiences in Europe, City AM is undertaking a reorganisation that will see it move away from a combined editorial and subeditorial model to focus on frontline journalism."

Replace 'frontline' with 'cost-cutting' and I think you get a better picture of the publication's position.

This is another sign of bloggers and journalists becoming increasingly similar in the way they work. More...

Social Media is our genre's Industrial Revolution. It is the era of new influencers and the ability for every day people to share their creativity, expertise, thoughts, ideas, and passions in order to participate in and build a community around common interests.

People are taking their destiny into their own hands and evolving their online, personal or professional persona and brands online.

While there are many user-generated or people-driven social networks today, none generate the traffic or exposure possible at YouTube.

It has created stars, launched careers, extended brand reach and resonance, cultivated communities, promoted causes, and even helped politicians garner votes. More...

Visitors to your web site need to have a good experience. Firstly the pages must provide what they were looking for. Then you need good navigation so they can easily find their way around. And you need a search facility so they can look up specific items without having to trawl through everything.

OK - that's all common sense and any good web designer will tell you much the same. All of these features make your web site good to use and easy to get on with. Fantastic.

But there's a much more important reason for having all the right features in the right place. If your web site upsets people, makes them have any negative feelings in any way, they will remember it. More...

Friday Roundup 27th June 2008

Afternoon,  

Apparently some search engine marketing agencies are pulling in as much as 300K a month at the moment. Andrew Smith tells us where this money is coming from and what PR’s can do to ensure they keep their piece of the marketing pie.

Also in the round-up this week is a post from Philip Sheldrake enlightening us about how developments in Internet protocol will impact Marketing. Click here to see how the two are connected.

Finally, four minutes to spare? Check out the TED video and be inspired.  

Enjoy the weekend.

Best regards,

Andrew and the MarCom Professional team 

 

TED:

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