Five on Friday - five fabulous web tools of the week (05.06.09)

June 5th, 2009

Hi guys

Me again, your five on Friday sub. Your usual Five on Friday host will be back next week, but until then let’s take a look at this week’s selection.

First off, we have:

1. Photoxpress - If, like me, you use images to spice up your posts and comments, this free photo finding tool will come in very useful. It’s a quality image bank providing you with a vast and legal image library for both personal and professional use.

2. Almost.at -This tool allows you to follow people at real world events in realtime. Simply choose an event from the list provided and track the conversations and pictures. Content will be displayed in realtime but you can pause as required. Currently in beta but a very nice idea.

3. Moogo - The time when you had to shell out thousands of pounds for a website has long since passed, and yes this isn’t the only option to get a free website, but it’s easy to use, quick and offers some nice features such as web stores, blogs, photo albums and mobile pages. It’s aimed at small companies, associations and individuals, so give it a go, even if it’s just for an event or service that you are launching.

4. TypingWeb - Embarrassed about your typing speed? Still only use two fingers to bash out your documents? Come on, everyone would like to type a bit faster and this app could be the help you’ve been looking for. It’s a free online typing tutor for typists of all ages and skills.

5. AlmostMeet - This is a very useful service for collaborative group meetings, allowing everyone to talk and see each other, using peer-to-peer technology, which also enables visibility of participant’s desktops, whiteboards and file sharing. And of course, it’s free!

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Digital communications, Digital media, Emerging technology, Social media, Trends and research, Useful resources | No Comments »

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Devaluing PR

June 1st, 2009

Be warned this post contains a PR-based rant, not a new one, but a valid one, and one that has been raised by many others in the past. Well now it’s my turn, and I’m afraid it comes from recent experience.

So what is the problem? And how does it devalue PR? Well it’s very difficult to be more literal about devaluing PR than actually offering the service at a massively discounted price for the sole purpose of taking a client from another agency, or for the purpose of having the client on your roster in an attempt to win additional business.

This is far from a new issue, it’s been a problem for at least the last 11 years that I’ve been in PR and I suspect it goes back much further. I’ve seen it happen before, and I’ve known agencies that have done it, but let me make it clear; I think it is wrong on so many levels.

Why? Well, without wishing to repeat myself, IT DEVALUES PR. How can you say a service is worth X one day and the next it’s worth next to nothing? It also demotivates teams and makes them feel worthless. I’ve been on such a team in the past and don’t underestimate the effect this can have, there’s nothing worse than working hard to service a client that has zero respect for your agency/team and knows that when things pick up they’re off. It’s also disrespectful to our peers. Sure, in the bad old days we were all supposed to hate each other, while secretly trying to see if we might get paid more by moving to a rival agency, but haven’t we moved past that, at least to some degree? I really thought so.

So, when a client came to me recently and said; “Look, there’s no easy way of saying this, and it’s nothing to do with you guys or the campaign, but I’ve been made an offer I can’t refuse and I’m under pressure to take it. You know how it is in the current climate,” it was difficult to take.

Obviously I asked the client to tell me about it so that I could at least understand the situation and see if there was something that could be done. Then the bolt from the blue, the other agencies’ ridiculous deal smacks you in the face.

To cut a long story short, that’s it, end of discussion. Alright there may have been a few more discussions, I’m not making it that easy, but fundamentally that’s it.

So where does that leave us? Well, as far as I know the agency might actually be decent, I don’t know as I haven’t had any experience of them, and I’m sure they have their reasons, but I don’t think I would agree with them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doing this to ‘out’ the agency or the client, I’m not going to mention either, and I’m not doing this because I’m bitter. I’m doing this because it’s so short sighted and damaging to us all.

Can this even be a viable new business tactic? I’m struggling to see the pay off. I think we’re all agreed that PR, as an industry, needs to wake up to a whole host of challenges, and the last thing we need is to be destroyed from the inside. Have we really been demoted to scrabbling around fighting each other for an ever decreasing pool of clients?

Isn’t it time we stepped up and took responsibility for our actions and stopped shooting ourselves in the foot when the going gets tough? Sure, you can say it’s just business, or it’s the client’s choice and I’d agree, at least in terms of it being the client’s choice. But how can it be ‘just business’, when my point is there’s no ‘business’ to be had if you’re going to quote crazy prices. What do we think will happen when the agency eventually wants to put the fee up, try justifying that.

Posted in Blog, Digital communications, Digital media, Liberate Media news, PR | 3 Comments »

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Five on Friday - five fabulous web 2.0 tools of the week (29-05-09)

May 29th, 2009

Hello all

Your regular ‘Five on Friday’ host isn’t here today, so I’ll be your captain for the week, steering a path through the sea of web 2.0 tools.

To kick us off, we have a recommendation from a reader:

1. Twiogle - It’s a great search engine that indexes Google and Twitter, easy to use, simple and it also has nice video, book, blog, and image functionality. Top job!

2. Yasni - In at number two, and another recommendation from our loyal readers, Yasni is a people-based search engine,  with more than 10 million visitors worldwide each month. Imagine Google meets Friends Reunited.

3. Tweepler - We’re going back to Twitter for number 3, and specifically organising your Twitter feed. Tweepler is a processing tool that allows you to classify your new Twitter followers in one of two ‘buckets’. ‘Follow’, meaning you wish to follow them back and ‘Ignore’ meaning you don’t want to follow them and can archive them out of the way, reducing Twitter noise.

4. FileTwt - This is a useful application allowing Twitter users to upload a file and tweet about it automatically. It also allows users to send file links as direct messages for sharing private files.

5. Trackle -  Finally, with all of our web profiles and accounts, we need a tool to keep track, and this is it. Trackle tracks all of your personalised information on the web and then indexes it by category. The service is built using algorithms that provide a layer of intelligence meaning timely results with notification via web, email or SMS.

Posted in Blog, Content, Digital media, Industry events, Journalism, Liberate Media news, PR | No Comments »

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Five on Friday - five fabulous web 2.0 tools and sites of the week (15-05-09)

May 15th, 2009

Here is this week’s bundle of 5 top web 2.0 tools and sites of the week.

1. Scoopler is a real-time search engine taking feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more.  The most relevant and timely results are found at the top of the page.

2. Spezify is a very visual search engine, all the results are laid out like a mood board. I really liked the way this was set out all though the page was quite slow to scroll, it’s still in early beta.

3. OpenZine lets you create your very own free web magazine with text, pictures & video, in reality you create a blog that groups your posts with a magazine style cover. One of the best features about OpenZine is the create a cover process.

4. Flackr aggregates all the latest breaking news from a number of different sources on Twitter into a neat dashboard. If you are interested in one particular story you can click on that story and then view additional updates linked to that piece.

5. Clixpy is a usability tool that tracks how people interact with your site. Try the Clixpy demo to get an idea of how it works, this tool could be great for webmasters to optimise their website landing pages.

Posted in Blog, Digital media, Emerging technology, PR, Trends and research, Useful resources | No Comments »

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#PRdebate: Can PR step up to the digital challenge?

April 22nd, 2009

I attended the NMK - What happens to online PR debate last night, and it was a very interesting and worthwhile session. Big thanks to Ian Delaney and Jenny Tyler at NMK for organising.

The session was structured as an Oxford-style debate on the issue of ‘has the PR industry lost its capability to lead clients in a New Media Landscape?’, with Roger Warner of Content and Motion and Antony Mayfield from iCrossing in the ‘yes’ camp, and Stuart Bruce of Wolfstar and James Warren of Weber Shandwick in the ‘no’ camp.  Mike Nutley, editor-in-chief at NMA chaired the discussion.

I should also point out that a great many of the agencies that ‘get’ online PR and social media were there too. However, there was a real lack of client-side attendance, which meant there was a heavy bias towards the PR angle and argument, which was always going to win the debate in such a crowd. Please read Roger Warner’s write up for a different and more digitally-focused point of view.

As you can tell by the panel, it was a meeting of strong opinions, but i was surprised not so much by the differences discussed on the night, but more by the similarities. Obviously, the two sides had differing opinions on many of the issues, but overall I felt the vision for the future of online PR, digital communications, call it what you will, were similar. Let me make it clear that both sides made a good argument for digital or PR to lead clients in a New Media Landscape, but what i took from it was that it will in fact be a mixture of skills coming from both sides that will win out, something that i totally agree with.

For exampIe, I agree with the ‘yes’ debaters that you need specific skill sets in an online environment, and that not all PRs have this, but I also agree with the ‘no’ side that the art of communications, not the way in which we reach our audience, is the key factor.

From a personal point of view, i also found it difficult to choose a side. I come from a traditional PR background, but what we’ve been trying to do with Liberate Media over the last three years is very far from traditional. We are part of a newer breed of PR agencies that are trying to break free from the shackles of traditional agencies in terms of our set up, approach and skill sets. So from that point I agree traditional agencies cannot lead unless they bite the bullet and evolve. But from a communications stand point, i also believe this blend of skills, be it PR, digital or journalism will be the future not either - or.

This part of the debate was also flavoured with the point that PR has become media relations in many cases, and this is why digital must lead as media relations alone is not relevant. This has been an issue, but taking the PR panel members as an example, it’s certainly not true in their cases, and i would argue to a greater degree that more of an emphasis has been put on strategy and communications development in the leading PR agencies over recent years to move away from this problem. And at the top, i don’t think this is a major issue.

So, where does that leave me? Well, if by ‘the PR industry’ you mean traditional agencies or ‘the dinosaurs that run PR who don’t get the significance of digital’, as James Warren put it, then i agree PR has already lost. But if we’re talking about the growing band of smart new agencies and the intelligent approach of the larger  agencies of which a few were represented last night, then no. These sorts of comms professionals know they still have a lot to learn, but they are building digital skill sets by hiring in experienced individuals or looking beyond the boundaries of what would traditionally be PR. Yes, the social media specific agencies and digital agencies have a lead in understanding the environment, but they also need to skill up in terms of comms strategy and delivery. Something that they have also been doing over the last few years.

Who will win? Well, it’s simple really, the winners will be the agencies that get this blend of skills right, be they digital or PR in original orientation.

The debate continues on Twitter: #PRDebate

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, PR, Social media | 2 Comments »

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