Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Online PR: definition and role

    Stephen Davies posted a thoughtful update on how he sees online PR in terms of its challenges and opportunities. Stephen feels that online PR is poorly defined amongst marketers and argues that techniques involving the creation of backlinks and traffic (via search) ‘involve large numbers and eyeballs, and less about changing attitudes and enhancing reputation.’

    I agree with Stephen that online PR and by extension PR itself has a problem in terms of definition. For many people that I used to meet PR meant ‘free advertising’. In fact, my former boss David Pincott used to use those very words. By extension, looking initially at the measurement of eyeballs and backlinks, one could assume that online PR was considered to be ‘free SEM’ and for many marketers I think that may be the case.

    This position is supported by public relations thinkers in some quarters, for example Grunig, James E. and Hunt, Todd. Managing Public Relations defined public relations as ‘the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics’.

    Which ties into traffic and back links as a measure in the most literal sense. However, many smart marketers who understand what a brand is, and appreciate that there is more to marketing than the transactional cause-and-effect of direct mail or pay-per-click still look at back-links and traffic numbers.

    The reason why is that backlinks and traffic numbers are surrogate measurements that you can use to infer some sort of value for attitudinal change and reputation. Don’t think of Google as a search engine but a reputation engine (which is the way many consumers treat it anyway). This reputation is based on the votes cast by webmasters (more accurately anybody who creates content on a site like this). We cast our votes by posting backlinks. This is very similar to the concept of whuffie that Cory Doctorow came up with in his book Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom which talked of a society purely based on the currency of reputation, whuffie is that currency.

    Traffic numbers derived from search are also a measure of popularity and ‘resonance’ of a company’s brand with the audience. Now these are crude measures, but:

    • The data is relatively easily derived from analytics tools
    • Very easy to represent in PowerPoint
    • Is provided in  an easily understood lexicon for the marketers peers in other business functions such as sales, operations and finance

    PR people have been slow to adopt a customer-centred tool: Net Promoter as a measure despite the fact it provides a measure of attitudinal change and reputation because so much of the customer experience is outside the PR manager’s control and the cost of measurement would consume a substantial part of their meager PR budgets.

    Let’s think about another PR definition this time from the UK’s professional body for PR professionals: The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). The CIPR defines PR as:

    Public relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.

    Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

    The problem with this definition is that an organisation’s actions play an important part in defining reputation from product design, sourcing and supplier behaviour, customer service, packaging, marketing, sales and channel partnerships.

    Public relations becomes nebulous because it becomes the whole business. PR by definition then becomes too important to be left to PR people.

    I disagree with Stephen that online PR is ill-defined by marketers, instead I believe that PR is ill-defined by PR thinkers. Further, that the PR industry hasn’t managed to fully grasp and resolve its identity crisis by coming up with an effective alternative.

    That’s also the reason why you never see PR as a descriptor on this blog, instead you see me alluding to marketing and social engineering in the sub headline at the top of this page.  More related posts here.

  • Transmeta + more news

    Transmeta

    Transmeta calls it a day and looks for a buyer | Channel Register – This was a shame, we lost a golden technological opportunity with Transmeta when it was crushed by the duopoly of AMD and Intel

    Economics

    BBC NEWS | Politics | Northern cities ‘beyond revival’

    Managing Globalization » Not just for back-office anymore – interesting and slightly scary article

    Manufacturing could hit a new upswing in the United States » VentureBeat

    Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on “Gold Farming”: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games (School of Environment and Development – The University of Manchester) – gold pharming and power levelling could be as big as Indian outsourcing business

    FMCG

    Paul Kedrosky: U.S. Consumers Live in Smelly Houses with Fat Pets – interesting data on where the recession is likely to squeeze spending on the supermarket isles

    How to

    ITunes Tip: How to Trim Podcasts and Movies in iTunes – very handy for presentations

    Daring Fireball: iPhone, iCal, and CalDAV

    Japan

    Japanese Women Shy From Dual Mommy Role – washingtonpost.com – “The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.”

    Online

    Google introduces Insights – The INQUIRER

    The SEC’s Interpretive Guidance on the Use of Company Web Sites: A Reality Check « BusinessWired

    Security

    ‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes – Times Online

    Vista security discovered to be even more useless – The INQUIRER – despite the headline this affects multiple OS’

    Software

    Why Vista is ‘Universally Hated’ and Other Training Truths – interesting perspective on SaaS and the longevity of MS Office

    Technology

    Apple sued for indentured servitude – The INQUIRER

    Wireless

    What’s Behind the iPhone 3G Glitches – Apple iPhone problems

    iPhone is big in Japan, reflects local failure to innovate

  • Inspirational communicators

    Wadds asked me on a meme to name three inspirational communicators, as part of a meme, this is how it started:

    The idea’s simple. We’re asking you to list the three communicators living or dead who have most influenced your way of thinking professionally and perhaps personally too. Who do you think the real innovators are? Who’s been most responsible for kicking the industry forward? And just who are the communication PRunks?

    My thoughts below:

    • Steve Jobs is the master communicator if you look at his whole career, he convinced Steve Wozniak to work engineering miracles that laid the foundation for Apple Computer, sweet-talked John Sculley to leave PepsiCo at a time when technology wasn’t on the radar of career-conscious corporate American executives and the soap opera he has orchestrated since he returned to Apple in 1997.  Jobs knows when to use silence and the void, so when Apple speaks the world listens, you can see a communications strategy being rolled out that owes more to Sun Tzu’s Art of War than a marketing professor. He also realises that every point of customer touch is a communication, not just the press release.
    • Stewart Brand

      My fascination with the history of technology has gone along in step with fascination with counterculture. I finished reading  Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism on a flight over to Hong Kong in January. I had been aware of Brand through Wired articles and was vaguely aware of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Long Now Foundation. Brand has been a communicator at the nexus between the counterculture generation of the 1960s, the computer industry and the the online world we know today. It was his lobbying that was partly responsible for the release of the first picture from space showing the whole of the earth. That picture triggered the modern environmental movement as people realised the fragility of our existence in the vast emptiness of the cosmos. The Whole Earth Catalog that he founded was the Wikipedia of its day, hippy communes found out how to do handy skills and build geodesic domes, he was a founder of The WELL – (The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) an online social network that brought together some of the key personalities of the modern ‘net. I also believe that his famous Environmental Heresies essay in the MIT Technology Review will be looked back on as a turning point in green politics. Without Brand there probably wouldn’t be digital marketing based on social principles the way we know it.

    • Micheál O’Hehir,  was dubbed “The Voice of the GAA”, (GAA is the Gaelic Athletics Association).  The excitement and energy of commentaries on RTE radio talking about GAA football and hurling matches fired my imagination as a boy and are still a pleasure to listen to now.  O’Hehir made his commentaries into to stories that conveyed the excitement that he felt about the game, he had what my Mam and Dad would call the ‘gift of the gab‘ – he was the modern day equivalent of the family member or neighbour who would come into a house in the evening and tell stories by the hearth to keep everyone entertained. In a household that disliked sport in general as a waste of time, O’Hehir’s commentary was one of the few sporting relics welcome. As a young boy growing up in an Irish household in the North West of England his commentaries also helped me to identify with who I am and where I came from.

    Tagging Rachel Lee, Giles Shorthouse and Jonathan Hopkins.

  • The Three Tensions by Dodd and Favaro

    While reading The Three Tensions I was reminded of a plaque that I used to have. It was one of them demotivational poster designs.

    The Three Tensions

    When I was leaving a previous agency I was given the plaque as a leaving present. On the plaque is the message ‘If you can’t solve a problem, there is good money to be made in prolonging it‘.

    Consultants and management thinking yo-yo from one area to another. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s conglomerates were the fashionable way to go, for instance ITT, Xerox (who had an insurance business to balance their cash flow) and Coca-Cola who owned a film studio. Now there is a focus on the companies core competences, in fact organisations often outsource so much of their infrastructure that they scarcely have any physical existence.

    An extreme example of this was Enron, who was advised by management consultants to move away from being a natural resources infrastructure company to a more asset light structure. Throw in some corruption and the rest is history.

    Dominic Dodd and Ken Favaro in their book The Three Tensions aim for a more balanced approach to moving a business forward. The three tensions of the title are:

    • Profitablity vs. growth
    • Short term vs. long term
    • Whole vs. parts

    The authors relied on long term research of a number of companies. The balance that the book advises businesses to obtain is not easy. The book also makes it easier to diagnose the faults within an organisation. More on the book here. More business related posts here.

  • The Flip video camera

    A while ago I shared the unboxing pictures of The Flip camcorder that I got sent by Weber Shandwick. I’ve had a chance to play with it and here’s my inital thoughts.

    Recording

    The device is pretty robust and has been perfectly happy to float around in the bottom of my messenger bag the past number of weeks. In terms of video quality it provides a superior video experience to both my Nokia E90 and my Nokia N95.

    The video itself is easy to remove from the device as an upload, my Mac treats The Flip the same way as a USB memory stick. The pop-up USB connector is where it gets its name from as it ‘flips’ out from the device. I did find  with the videos that I made at Interesting 08, that there was a problem converting the video shot into a suitable format for YouTube and the supplied software was a bit flakey on occasion. For this reason I would recommend that Mac users download ffmegx  instead – a shareware application that costs the princely sum of 15 USD.

    Things to remember

    • Video eats through batteries compared to a still camera, however AA batteries are easy enough to pick up on the go
    • The microphone on the camera has quite a large angle for picking up sound – you can hear myself and Jonathan Hopkins talking low in one of the videos I recorded at Interesting 08 despite the fact that both of us were well behind the camera
    • A light plastic case means that you will get camera shake, however a standard camera tripod will do the trick

    Conclusion 

    The Flip presents an easy way to record digital video and transfer it on to a computer, however the more technology conscious may want to wait around for the Kodak Zi6 camcorder which also offers SD card storage and HD video quality. Ultimately, the films are only going to be as good as the camera operator.