MarCom Professional

Is PR nothing more than 3rd rate e-mail marketing?

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post in which I opined that "many PR companies seem to treat press releases and media relations as a form of direct marketing – and do it in such a way that even a 3rd rate direct marketing agency would be embarrassed by. Bog standard things like opt-in, unsubscribe, data protection standards, etc, seem to be resolutely ignored by many. How long can this behaviour last?"

Quite a while it would seem. The hoary old chestnut of PR spam reared its ugly head again this week with the launch of Realwire's Inconvenient PR Truth Campaign and the usual hand wringing from the PR fraternity. More...

I have been reading and following the US direct marketing agency run by Robert Rosenthal, The Mothers of Invention.  They have some great promotion and marketing that they do for the agency and this Friday they have a great offer.

A free review of one marketing programme.

Here’s the offer text I received.

This Friday could be an eye-opener for you and your marketing team.
Because Mothers of Invention –  the groundbreaking agency behind dozens of record-breaking campaigns – will review the program of one marketer, at no cost.
We’ll talk about anything and everything you’re comfortable sharing: More...

You have to appreciate the irony!

Some poor dude who works at Sydney's Macquarie Bank - financial adviser David Kiely - was this week caught on television checking out several racy photos of supermodel Miranda Kerr (from her recent shoot for GQ magazine).

For those who don't know the story, Kiely's workstation was in the background of a live TV interview between one of his colleagues and Chris Bath of Channel Seven news.

If you squint, you might - just might - see Kiely in the background opening up an email and checking out pics of Kerr. At the last second, he spins around and looks into the barrel of the camera - sprung! 

NOTE: More...

Social Media Week has generated some criticism in recent days, unfairly in my view, for the saturation of events.

Undoubtedly the market is overhyped and is approaching bubble-like proportions. An element of the industry is taking on the hallmarks of a cult with self-proclaimed gurus ranking their prowess by follower numbers on Facebook and Twitter.

But a series of events that shines a spotlight on the market and its emerging potential can only be a good thing. And for the 120-odd people that attended events at 33 Digital, Porter Novelli and Speed this morning I hope it was worthwhile. I’ve never known a time when the PR industry has been so open and willing to share ideas. More...

Stuart Bruce says that the combination of media databases and inexperienced PR executives are the root cause of PR spam.

“While I applaud [the inconvenient PR truth] initiative, I’m not totally convinced about either the approach or if it will work. It also fails to mention the elephant in the room – the media database companies.”

Perhaps we can learn from network theory? Media databases are a form of automation that promote mechanical networks. They enable PR executives to distribute press releases to lists of journalists with whom they have no prior relationship. More...

I was reading Marketing magazine and one of the columnists was Will McInnes writing about Cadbury’s Wispa.

Itself a brand that’s been well used to great PR (thanks to inspiration from Mark Borkowski in the past). What interested me in what Will wrote was his criticism of Wispa asking visitors to register in order to get into the deeper engagement features of the site.

The registration was described as

a direct marketer’s fantastical wishlist

And that started me thinking.

The Early CRM years

When I was working with PRG doing CRM strategy – we’d set out a database specification that had hundreds of data points for each individual customer. More...

In 2009, Google struck a deal with Twitter, rumored at $15 million, to integrate tweets into keyword related Google searches. And last month, Google also integrated real-time search technology to surface blog posts and news content as they hit the Web – dramatically improving the previous five to 15 minutes its spiders would take to crawl the Web. I should also note that Collecta also offers the ability to search the real-time Web, but its results also include popular networks within the social Web. Between Google and Collecta, Twitter Search is starting to show its age.

The opportunities and benefits of accessing the real-time Web also represent its most notable deficiencies – the ability to truly focus the stream of cascading information into a river of relevance. More...

This is PART ONE of a guest post by strategic public relations professional and blogger, Craig Pearce (left). His views and news on PR can be found at Public relations and managing reputation: better business and society.

The world’s leading authority on public relations, Professor James Grunig recently said that social media has, “the potential to truly revolutionalise public relations – but only if a paradigm shift in the thinking of many practitioners and scholars takes place.” (Praxis, a digital PR resource centre.)

In the Praxis article, entitled Paradigms of global public relations in an age of digitalisation, he provides a lucid analysis of, and adds considerable value to, discussions on public relations and its dialectic with social media. More...

WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell has spoken out against politicians and business leaders for celebrating economic recovery when the market was “less worst” rather than growing.

Speaking to Bloomberg at the annual World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, he said “you can’t declare victory until you see consistent gains year-to-year.”

Delegates at the PRCA and CorpComms Conference last October received the same message when Sorrell delivered the keynote.

 

eMarketer reports that digital marketing survived the downturn, and marketers worldwide are now bullish about the prospects for growth in 2010, according to the latest market study by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA).

Their report found that 81 percent of the marketing executives surveyed expected an increase in digital projects in 2010, and one-half will be moving funds from traditional to digital budgets.

More than three-quarters also think the current economy will push more allocations to digital marketing projects. Senior marketers reported that social networks and applications were their biggest priority for 2010, followed closely by digital infrastructure. More...