Last week I chaired a low key session with the PRII on the topic of Data Driven Journalism that ended on a more positive note than I had expected.  Some very pragmatic pointers from the session and although its not quite revolution it’s a trend that is sure to continue, at an accelerated speed.

Data analysis has always been a key driver in the media but in 2009 when the Washington Post let award winning journalist Dan Froomkin go, supposedly because of low website views, I often think that the die was cast for its future central role.

Since then we have seen an incredible explosion in the amount of data being shared.  We have witnessed articles written by algorithms and algorithms that decide what news we get to see and don’t.  It was only time before these started to impact on the PR/Journalist relationship.

In one way data and data crunching is nothing new to the PR industry.  We became experts in the survey release, punchy statistics and more recently generating eye catching infographics.  Whats different is the speed, volume, scale, availability of open data and the variety of tools that are available which brings up important areas like skillsets and training for the industry.

When you gloomily look at this area logic would say we are also not far from PR pitches being potentially decided by data crunching algorithms – based on past and projected viewership, which is a scary prospect.

The three speakers on day gave a really deep dive in their allocated 10 minutes so I have tried to capture some of what they covered.  The speakers were:

Cyril Moloney, a Senior Account Director at PSG Plus specialising in online and tech PR.  

Pamela Duncan, who is one of the main contributors to the Irish Times’ data-driven journalism initiative;  

Dermot Casey, a director at Near Future and a Storyful pioneer; 

First up was Cyril Moloney who helped to put these developments into context and also some steps the industry should take.

His takeaways.

• “Don’t believe algorithms and data scientists will replace PRs/journalists, but we (PR) need to evolve (the human element/story context and the ability to tell a good story will only be enhanced by data journalism)”
• “More the change – more the same – PR and data stories (indexes, consumer surveys), but we need to evolve beyond short term use of these tactics”
• “PR measurements need to reflect digital and we as an industry need to better implement the Barcelona Principles of measurement for clients”
• “However PR needs to evolve as data journalism will change the playing field in terms of story pitching and news (in some respects, mirror a digital newsroom)”
• “Great opportunity for PR to use data journalism techniques to create better stories”
• “Agree standards and processes and share data sets with the media (to avoid the “my data scientist is better than your data scientist” scenario) – a big risk, but potentially big gain for transparency and trust (can’t be about your Google analytics alone)”
• “Great role for citizen data journalists /data scientist PRs to spot trends and issues for clients”
• “PR training will have to evolve to incorporate data collation, clean, analyse and report”
• “Transition will be a challenge (traditional PR still here/and clients may have to lead with their chin and consider digital not just print – but better data and measurement is the reward). Clients may resist this as a ‘fad’, and push back”

He was followed by Pamela Duncan from the Irish Times Data Division @irishtimesdata which launched a few weeks ago and has been producing some interesting infographics, visualisations and data driven stories.  She gave some fascinating insights into how this all works in the Irish times, the type of stories, the tools you use and some useful pointers on how the PR industry can help especially in terms of type data you look for.

The main tools used are Excel and also Datawrapper amongst a few other specialist tools but spreadsheets are the first thing she opens up every morning.

Some takeaway quotes.

• “Data journalism is worthwhile: it’s not a fad, it’s not something that is going away because more and more data is becoming available all the time and the tools to tell the story are also on the increase. “
• “We are interested in data journalism because there are some seriously good, important and worthwhile stories in the available data and it’s always been the job of journalists to dig them out”
• “I think there are benefits to both PR practitioners and journalists if they can include interesting data sets with reports/surveys etc: if I get a dataset and the data is interesting enough to warrant a graphic or interactive map then the story either gets more space in the paper or more traction online: so there’s an advantage for all sides.”
• “PR practitioners are already providing data: it’s in the body of the report or in indices in the back pages. But if I have that data in accessible format – we’re talking Excel here, nothing scary – then I can easily examine and make graphics or interactives using that data if it warrants it. If it’s in a non-readable PDF it’s much harder sell.”
• “That said I wouldn’t encourage PR people to take huge time over building graphs and maps because, chances are newsrooms are going to have to recreate them using the programmes and software that’s compatible with their systems”
• “But quality of the data is paramount: if you are going to give me a report and a data set attached to it I need to be able to rely on it. So there is, I suppose an argument for PR people to be trained in some data journalism skills – again an Excel course would probably suffice for most.”

My takeaway from Pamela was that interpretative content like press releases and summary reports gives useful guidance but the raw data is where she her own unique angles from.  Gone are the day of surveys of 10 people and hiding certain things in reports if the full data set is issued.

Finally Dermot Casey from Near Future gave a good overview of what is happening internationally, how data driven reporting is driving change and how data compiling was handled and evolved in Storyful.

• “Lost of investigative journalism is data journalism in slow motion.”
• “The inverted hierarchy is Compile / Clean / Context / Combine / Communicate”
• “The local is global.   The Trichet Letters from EU to Ireland was a Data Journalism story over a very small Data point.”
• “Los Vegas Sun looked at 2.9 million hospital records and found 300 preventable deaths from analysing the data. Nevada brought in six pieces of legislation on the back of it.”
• “In Storyful debunking is as important as finding information. Is it true. Is it real. Can you prove it.”
• “”We found some of the key background information by Anders Behring Breivik  the Norwegian gunman. We curated the information in real time and then dug into his background and found his manifesto. It was designed to be found but not to be too easy to find.”
• “With Syria we’re watching a war where both sides are documenting their war crimes in real time. And Storyful has worked with YouTube to preserve important video.  But sometimes videos are fake so how do you know its true. Is there really a shark on the New York Stock Exchange (but there are tweets and video). Those Tornado photos from New York, they’re 1973 not yesterday.”
• “The Google Truth project is interesting in this context as soon when you google for Measles you won’t get any information on anti-vaxxers. They’re rolling that softly through other areas, so what does that mean for journalism and for PR people and are Facebook doing something similar.  In many cases 90% of traffic to sites is coming from Facebook and from Google.”
• “Algorithms are already deciding what’s important (AP publish 3,000 stories per quarter written by Robots).”
• “Role of the tools is as an Exo-skeleton helping Journalists sift through 90% of the rubbish so they can focus on the 10% of value – Storyful has built a suite of tools to do just that.  Other people are doing it as well.”

With about 70 people in attendance the response from the floor was slightly muted.  Jacqueline Hall enquired about the state or readiness and future training requirements.  Cyril Moloney felt the industry was around a 2 on scale of 1-5 while Pamela Duncan felt that even improving basic spreadsheet skills could help a lot and Dermot Casey has some ideas about a data driven journalism course.

Sinead Whooley questioned how new all this was.   Data has always been central but agreed that the tools gave new scale and importance.  She also tackled the elephant in the room about the reluctance for open sharing of data by some PR practitioners.  This reluctance is frequently due more to massaging figures and controling the message – a topic that arises a lot in the PR/Journalist relationship.

Although there were clear opportunities highlighted during the session there was a overall sense of pessimism about the future of PR but Padraig McKeon finished on a very positive note of the industry ‘lifting up its head’ and that the real future lies with those who control information.

PR’s has an natural affinity to this role but the potential to be left behind or overtaken by others who embrace the tools and technology is, in my opinion, very real.

However my gut feel is glass half full for an industry populated with some great minds.

Keith Bohanna from Near Future live streamed much of the session using Meerkat.

 

 

 

 

 

The formal launch of the Irish Times data section last week unveils an interesting emerging picture in the world of data driven journalism. Social media and Twitter in particular have been very fertile grounds for journalists but the pure volume of data is a mixed blessing. Lots of new information but the sheer amount of it can be hard to handle.

This is where the data journalists step in.

Over the last year Irish media outlets like the Irish Times and the Irish Independent have been rapidly recruiting graduates and researchers from the Insight Centre. Some of these have done very interesting semantic analysis on elections for Irish online news sites in the past so its not hard to see their usefulness to the traditional media industry.

The first wave of data driven journalism is likely to involve crunching of large scale data sets to produce some nice tidy news and feature stories/infographics. This will probably be followed by long tail focused articles that hit very select niches and probably seem out of place with the normal selection of articles.

This development and the increasing appearance of infographics, video, audio and other content forms are to be welcomed.

However I have some nagging dimmed alarm bells ringing in the deep recesses of my brain when I think about some potential directions these developments could go.

Ever since the sacking of the award winning Washington Post political journalist Dan Froomkin due to poor website site traffic figures in 2009, the potential for algorithm and data driven decision making taking over from journalist gut feel has been pretty clear.

This will all have a big impact on the PR industry. On one side new content forms are good but if algorithms were to utilised to decide if something was covered or not – this is bad news.

Take this small example of what currently happens every day.

PR executive phones journalist to pitch story. They have a well oiled pitch, customised to the papers profile, they know its in the journalist interest area and they have a friendly relationship – all good practice. Journalist listens to the pitch, visualises the articles, does a mental run through of pitching it to the editor and if he trusts the source and has enough autonomy to make a decision then its green light.

Now picture this future scenario.

PR executive repeats process. Journalist puts the article pitch into the news algorithm cruncher. This checks for similar stories or companys name, checks the amount of web traffic it generated, the amount of social sharing, the influence of the company, the likely readership of the piece, the ad potential and produces a report to say this article is not commercially viable.

Journalist says the machine said no.

How do you argue against data?

I love the insights that data can give but really hope these developments do not see the human element being removed.

Not everyone is as gloomy Luke Capizzo portrays a less scary world for PR in his analysis

Taking the journalist side there are some nice snappy quotes in this piece by the Data Journalism Handbook including the ominously titled one “An Answer to Data-driven PR”

Journalist and PR companies utilising and crunching data is nothing new but now the tools are much more sophisticated, the news environment is much more competitive, investment in journalists has dropped and the rush to get stories out first has increased.

As new business models emerge I imagine they will introduce new challenges and opportunities.  Take the above example with a publicly accessible tool that could scan a PR pitch to see if it was likely to be accepted by an editorial team – could save a lot of time and effort for both sides.

Watch this space for a lot of disruption.

I felt my head nodding a lot as I read David Meerman Scott’s updated ‘The New Rules of Marketing and PR” which has been on my reading list for a long time.

Updating a book of this nature can be tricky, especially in world of shifting sands and on occasion the updating feels like new case studies rather than a fundamental rethink.  In 2007 I can imagine it would have had a much bigger impact on my thinking.

The book is well laid out with stand alone chapters although I went through it from front to back.  In scanning a book of this nature you can easily miss one of the main attributes, which is his first hand experience of actually doing much of what he writes about.  I did pick up some handy tips and in some cases a nice way of branding something that most PR companies have been doing for a long time without a term for it – newsjacking.  This practice of jumping on to an emerging news topic with your own value add content is not new (although twitter does add an extra element) but I can see it popping up on lots more PR plans.

For the last few PR companies who are purely focused on publicity and the traditional media this book is an absolute must.  For those who are awash in social media and the evolving trends it’s a good reminder and a handy reference tool.

 

I agree with the author on the demise of interruption marketing but the impact of key influentials versus smaller groups as in Paul Adams book Grouped is up for debate.

 

Although I see an almost daily demise in the newspaper industry there is still plenty of value in traditional media relations and the skill of gaining earned media.  The PR skills of negotiation, content creating, selling stories, influencing content creators are timeless and will continue to be in demand.  The key is understanding the trends and riding the wave.

 

The book is available on Amazon in printed form or audio.

 

 

 

You can also see Mr Meerman Scott in action being interviewed on YouTube.

 

On the 19^th of February I have the pleasure of chairing a session organised by the PRII Entitled Should PR Own Social Media?

Normally these type sessions can tend to a self supporting and predictable with little dissent.  However this one is comprised of seasoned representatives from the other organisations competing/operating in this space including:

• Christian Hughes, Communities Manager with Irish International,
• Colm Ó’Riagáin, Digital Account Director with WHPR,
• Eoin O’Suilleabháin, Social Media and Digital Marketing Manager with Bord Gáis Energy,
• John Ring, Managing Director of internet marketing company RingJohn

As I was researching and gathering my thoughts I stumbled upon an old piece from 2010 in the Irish Marketing Journal that I had contributed to and had forgotten about.  A lot of the contributions in the article are as true now as then so I will try not to repeat the same points.

The PR industry naturally responds that it is best positioned as it has the broadest view with tentacles in all corners of the business (especially inhouse), is used to dealing with outreach and engagement, understands current cultural and environmental factors, are guardians of the organisations message, can rapidly generate crisp and clean content – the list goes how.

However the social media scene is also littered with poor examples of PR executives engaging in social media outreach – from treating bloggers like media and bccing them on general and untargeted press releases (not best media practice either) to editing of client Wikipedia pages scandals.

Social outreach means researching and building relationships with a new set of influencers with different agendas and needs than traditional media.  PR has the skill set but all this entails more time and in an industry driven by charging for time this is a problem unless the client is willing to pay.

David Murdico executive creative director and managing partner at Supercool Creative does a good job of detailing where PR can take a lead role beginning with strategy development.

However following the line of who has the best skills never really answers the question.

Christopher Penn from Shift Communications makes some very sensible points on the topic rephrasing the question to

“Who should own a hammer?” is the wrong question. “Who has a use for a hammer, and can they wield it skillfully?”

He rightly points out that for some organisations social media is a customer relations tool and the PR team is probably not crucial.

Like every other industry PR is not homogeneous and not all executives are equal in their abilities and understanding.  Penns final line captures this nicely

“Who should own social media? Whoever can use it to help build your business, that’s who.”

Sophie Daranyi, CEO at marketing agency Haygarth reflects what most considered articles on the topic say which is that the best results are achieved by taking an integrated approach with agencies working collaboratively and leveraging their core strengths.

Some of the advance tweets and Facebook posts on this event have brought out divergent views with some comments  saying that PR should have very little input unless it a crisis communications situation.

Some of my own views are:

• PR has lots to contribute as do the others chasing this arena.
• New skill sets from content creation in different media to technical skills are needed.
• SEO will start to offer traditional PR to supplement SEO PR services.
• SEO and PR will form closer unions in very short period of time.
• PR’s core domain in media relations will come under threat from savvy social media users engaging with journalist online.
• PR executives need to move from “getting” social media to time consuming greater content creation and community engagement.
• Budgeting power for social media will continue to migrate to media buying agencies.
• Marketing managers are starting to appreciate that social media is not free.
• Those able to mine social data and interpret it will rise in importance.

I am putting together some questions for the speakers and would be delighted to include suggestions from any comments below.  Also my view is only one view and what better way to frame the introduction than crowd sourced from the community.

 

Comments appreciated.

I am surprised that the launch of Microsofts Kinect, the long expected arrival of internet TVs by year end and the never ending expansion of cloud based services has not generated more debate about the potential impact on PR and social media.

In the not too distant future instead of the collection of different remote controls, DVD/VHS players, games consoles and related bits you will eventually have a very large screen with a built in sensor that can pick up and interpret your movements.  This will all be connect to a ultra fast broadband connection which pulls down the different services you are looking for from entertainment channels, social media platforms, your photos, home videos and music collection.  The lines we draw between different media, storage and internet access will become completely blurred.  Instead  of thinking PC for internet access, TV for news and programmes, stereo and radio for music we will consume it all through one screen.  For alot of people this is already a reality as they access TV via RTE’s iPlayer on their PCs or laptop.  We will probably spend more money on sound systems and bigger screens as ultra fast broadband via fibre becomes more of a commodity.

All of this sounds wonderful and not too futuristic but it has seriouly implications for the PR industry.

Picture this.  You will be sitting on your sofa, to change a channel, increase the volume you merely waving your hands.   You are watching the 9 O’Clock news or PrimeTime and see something about company.  You wave your hand another direction and your collection of social media appears along with a virtual key board.  As the piece is still running on split screens you visit the company website for more information.  You also decide to check out their facebook page and decide that what was reported is worthy of posting a comment or you just check what others are saying.  You go to the personal sites of the spokesperson via LinkedIn or another to see how credible they are.  You tweet your comments on what is being covered with your own personal networks and make judgement calls on it.  If it particularly irked you, you DM friends and organise for a coordinated response to the company.  DMs will naturally switch to video chatter where you see the people in your network and the debate leaves a less trackable footprint.  Parodies of the crisis/spokespeople performance will appear instantly as people create their own mocking content.  The phone number pops up in the company search and you call the organisation to register your view point – all from your couch.  Finally you organise a flash mob to appear at the company or outlet to register a protest, video record it and upload to keep the debate going.

A lot of this all happens at the moment.  Anyone checking out twitter at the weekend will see lots of comments by people about whats on TV and radio.  This ranges from mere obervational to wide ranging debates.  At the moment this is a trickle as you need to have a reasonable smart phone, be working on your PC or feel motivated enough to go online.  Once people have access to all of these on one ease to navigate screen its set to explode.

Most companies have a reasonable feel for the increased importance of social media and have started down the line of building a social media strategy.  This will move it from a nice to do to a must have.  Here are some of the changes I can see.

• Social media monitoring and responding becomes a 24 hour job.
• Debate will be swift and much more far reaching.
• After hours online chatter will have matured by the time most people get to the desk the following morning.
• Social media tombstones which have not been updated will be highly visible and reflect poorly.
• The expectation that there will be a company representative at all times will grow (via social media or phone lines).
• Big launches and crisis may need to have experienced teams working on them on a 24/7 basis.
• The weight attached to traditional media will continue to be extremely important but debate will take place else where.
• Local issues will get even more global exposure and debate.
• Messaging will morph and adapt as the temperature of debate rages.
• Expectation of an active presence on a broader range of channels.
• Ability to rapidly create content to match particular platforms will increase from Video – YouTube, Photography, Pix.ie, Facebook etc
• Traditional PR outreach will need to be integrated into social media outreach.
• Communications, marketing and online teams will need to be synched.
• Close community debate will be harder to track especially if video or DM orientated.
• Coordinated action will spill over into real life organised action.
• Nature and tone of online debate and chatter will change as it moves from early innovators to mass audience.

None of this is massively different from what PR companies are faced with every day but the scale, speed and timing are very different.  9-5 just wont work and ill thought comments will spread much faster and to wider communities.  At the moment this is contained due to technological barriers, once these disappear a regular tidal waves will appear.  Consider the difference between 20-30 tweets from a few influentials which can network out to a few thousand via retweets versus the 600,000 people who view PrimeTime.  How well resourced would an Irish or international company be to that larger figure but also a much broader profile.  Some Irish companies I have spoken to can be dismissive of what they view as a small Irish Twitter community while they are consignant of the impact of high profile programmes.  Merge the two with sufficent numbers and you enter a whole new arena.

Of course its not all bad and with all this come huge opportunities but the the reality is its not that far away.

PS: Since writing this I stumbled across this interesting report by emarketer on social TV trends amongst different demographics.

PR companies generate a lot of really good photography from media launches to product launch shots.  Normally they are only distributed to the media and remain on file server until someone requests them which is a shame given the relatively high expense of them.  This is a legacy from the days when prints were ordered and with each print costing up to 20 euro, executives were reluctant to order what was not going to be reprinted.  Things have changed greatly since then:

1. Most photographers will give unlimited usage of the images and supply them on disk following an asignment.

2. Social media has created a wealth of new platforms to get extra value and better visual understanding of an organisation or the product.

At the most basic level photos should be uploaded to the company website – ideally in a format where they can be downloaded.  Social media sites like Flickr and Pix.ie should also be optimised especially if you have developed a community there.  Facebook, bebo and blogs can really be enhanced by including these images in posts and updates.

To date these images are also mainly 2D static images and give little interactivity or ability to see from multiple angles.  Now you can produce 3D images for free using Photosynth which is technology developed by Microsoft (disclosure they are also a client).  In their own words it “allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automagically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web.”

Photosynth gives the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs.  The free webbased technology examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, it recreates the space and uses it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

In essence you take a bunch of photos (20+) of the scene walking through or around it, upload them to the site (you need to set up a profile but simple enough) and then the technology does the rest.

You are left with an image similar to below:

From this you can navagate left, right, upwards or downwards depending on the range of photos you inserted.  You can include the link on a varity of different mediums.

This is one we did for the launch of Airbike showing its Yamaha FJR 1399A motorcycles that they will use to deliver a motorbike passenger service.

How Photosynth is used in communications is very open.  Image you are trying to walk people through a building/hotel/leisure centre or allow them to see a new car from different angles.  Normally this would have involved complicated website building technology.

Once you have created the synth why not include in press release material, blog, email signatures and social media platforms from Twitter (shorten the url) to Facebook.  What I really like about it is that people can choose the angle and the level of interactivity it allows.  

Some tips:

• make sure you take enough photo (20 -30)
• try ensure that the background are different enough so photosynth can easily stitch together
• build in enough time into the photoshoot to take the right amount of shots
• ensure you have unlimited usage rights of the photos
• files are large so needs a good broadband connection

The video below gives a good run through the technology.

How influential someone is in PR has alway been a bit foggy to say the least.  It is easy to claim you are influential but proof has normally been in the form of being able to open doors or hidden in the infamous black book of contacts.

In theory online makes it easier to check how influential someone is.  Things have moved on in terms of people merely using the web to increase their digital footprint.  To date there has been a bit of land grab in terms of occuping certain spaces and putting up profiles and leaving them to gather dust.  This was useful at the beginning where you could find someone’s LinkedIn profile when you searched for their name but its hardly an indication of their influence – its merely that they exist.  Now as people gather and participate in communities around them it is easier to get a better sence of their consistent presence on the web but also their level of contribution.

Piaras Kelly posted about what your Facebook connections could indicate about you sometime ago and Tom Murphy has posted more recently about an Andrew Smith comment on how the media are using LinkedIn profiles to vet the credibility about a potential spokesperson.

There is no doubt that this will continue to evolve further but it is not an easy task to acertain someone influence as Micah Baldwin comments in Mashable.com.   As a starting point he points to

Incoming Traffic – Pageviews, Incoming traffic from search engines, rss subscribers

Incoming Links – Primarily manual links such as blogrolls, in-post deep links

Reader Engagement – Internal searches, time on site

Recommendations – Retweets, share stats

Connections – Number of mutual connections, number of mutual connections on multiple sites

Track Record – Age of domain, number of blog posts, length of engagement

 Engagement – How often and long a person has engaged with a service online   

It is possible to get a manual snapshot of someone by using some of the tools that are available.  By inputting someones blog url in Technorati you can get a numercial indication of their authority and ranking.  By looking at their Twitter profile you can see how many people are following them and how many updates they have made.  LinkedIn will show their connections, groups, length of time on the community and you can check how active they are in that forum.  Similarly with Facebook and other social media.

None of these are perfect measures and having lots of stuff online does not equate to being influential but its a better start than taking someones word for it.

Surely there is good scope for someone to develop a FREE application that is comprehensive enough to take account of the different platforms (ie number of retweets on Twitter, pics through Twitpic etc to the strength of connections in Facebook rather than numbers) so that it goes beyond a popularity contest and give a genuinely useful figure.  Following 500 people is very different to being followed by 500 people.  It would encourage people to move from ‘I am online’ to ‘I participate and contribute online’.  If there was an acceptance of the importance of a ORN (online reputation number) number and people could increase that number by engaging more surely this would lead to an uplife in genuine online activity.

I imagine such applications would be greately aided by people inputting their handles, user names for the different platforms with boxes to fill for a wide range of social media.  This is probably especially true as people use different usernames and handles.  There may be some issues with walled communities but technology normally finds a way around these.

I am sure that there are a few out there that come close to this but I have not found any to date.  Let me know if I am missing the obvious.  A simple tool could always progress into a more complex one.

I have stumbled on lots of online tools that are interesting but trying to find an application for them in PR is sometimes a struggle.  Twitter Mosaic for example is a nice tool but does not have huge amount of PR useage potential.

At Search Marketing World 2009 Ciaran Norris from Altogether Digital mentioned a service called Wordle in his presentation where he showed the tag cloud it created on Obama inauguration speech which clearly showed the key words he was emphasising.

Basically the service allows you to input text or a url and it will create a tag funky tag cloud from it.  Frequently mentioned words are emphasised as in any tag cloud and the layout is pretty intuitive and easy to interpret with nice colour coding and layout.

This one is from an analysis of this blog.  The more words the trickier it is but at a glance the main areas that you wish to cover should become pretty apparent.  So how is this of help to the PR industry?  This has great use to test the messaging validity of things like press releases and speeches.  It wont replace the manual intervention but it should give you a snap short.  It only does words and most messages are more complex than words but it should help to make sure that what you are trying to communicate actually comes across.   Consider that most people absorb huge amount of information but simple repetition of key words can stick.

Here is one I did on a press release we did for Repak on recycling at Christmas time.

Packaging Recycling at Christmas time was the key message we wanted to get accross and it shows in the tag cloud.  I would suggest that if you put in a press release or speech from a CEO and the tag cloud bares no resemblance to the core messaging then something may be wrong.

One note of caution – do not add to the gallery unless you are comfortable with people seeing it.

The launch of a new press release distribution service called PR Zone is likely to open up the debate about public relations companies using online distribution services once again.

The PR industry has been slow enough to embrace these type services and Searh Engine Optimisation of press releases is ignored by a lot of traditional PR companies.  The service is not new (although it does contain some innovations) and is broadly a welcome development.  However the service uses a pay of play model where you register full company details and then buy credits to utilise the different levels of service they deliver.

This is a route that Prangle tied some time ago but with limited uptake from PR companies.  Prangle came from the journalist side of the house and tried to establish the service as a one stop shop for the media industry where the different publication houses would allocate a resource to monitor the feeds supplied by the PR industry.  The theory being that PR and other companies would go through the service rather than send their content to their contacts in the media.  The stumbling blocks were the cost involved (a fee was charged to use the service) and a perception that the relationships that PR companies spend years fostering with the media, would in essence be cut out of the equation.  It also relied heavily on the media commiting to using the service consistently and most media are still happier to receive stories from established contacts.  On a technical side the service was robust and future proofed in that it allowed uploading of different type media from high res photos to video.  As a supplemntary service it was useful but the cost of using it meant the PR industry did not buy into it wholesale.

Not all entrants went the paid for model and Irish Press Releases uses a model similar to the other international sites where you can up load a story, with the site displaying all the recent stories.  Some vetting of stories is done to ensure a certain level of quality control.  Overall its a good service and I imagine it will charge at a future date for add on facilities such as loading of extra multimedia and possibly other syndication services similar to PR Zone.

We have used some of the free international SEO press release submission sites and have also used paid for syndication services such as Business Wire – especially for international releases where we would not have strong relationships overseas media.

The PR industry would appear to feel threatened by these services espcially the paid for ones where they feel they could be cut out of the process and budgets are tight.  The reality is that having a service does not replace the genuine value that a communications company brings in terms of constructing a good robust story.  Up to half the effort can be invested in getting the messaging and scripting right.  These services are a good supplement to what a PR company does and does not replace them.  They are especially good at increasing the digital footprint, even more so if a company does not have a media section on their site.

Innovation in the PR industry is always welcome and for some companies these services are the best way for them to go, especially if they are good at telling their story and have limited budgets.  I dont believe they are a threat but rather offer a lot of synergy.

The big question is if the PR industry is willing to pay for them and see their value.  Time will tell.

Siobhan O’Connell wrote an interesting piece in the yesterdays Irish Times about how newspapers need to make online content profitable.  One of the things I took from it was that broadsheets are losing readership numbers to tabloids which would appear to be more linked to the lack of an online presence than the editorial.  The arguement being that most broadsheets are freely available online while tabloids like the Star feature little more than an ad.  If you cannot get it online you are forced to buy the physical product.  Not a very encouraging sign or trend.  The online subscription model has with a few exceptions failed but Times Ann Moore looks like reopening the debate.  

Who started this rumour that all information should be free and why didn’t we challenge this when it first came out? I say this in college classrooms and they start to throw their shoes at me. I say, ‘Kids, your food is not free and your cars are not free, your clothes are not free. Good information costs money. Someone has to pay for the Baghdad bureau’.”

This is understandable in a era of dropping ad revenues but its extremely hard to get people to pay for content and even harder if they are used to getting it for free.  It appears more like a desperate attempt by media publications to steam losses than a concerted effort to monitise their online models.

As usual the industry will find ways around this.  One interesting development is the paper reviews by Campbell Scott of IGO People and Bernie Goldbach.  They use very simple technology to talk through stories they enjoyed in the media, which they record with mobile phones and upload to mobile video shaing site QIK.  Of course if they agreed to show the ads then everyone would be happy…wouldnt they?

From a very selfish simplistic  PR viewpoint the more opportunities that people have to view a story about a client the better………that is until its a negative one and then we curse the longevity, reach and viral nature of the web stories.