12-04-08

Meme Non-Response Guilt (MNRG)

I’m feeling guilty because I haven’t taken part in a meme thingy that Ged started – listing out the top not-very-technical things that every PR person should know. Then the other Jed has retagged me and reminded me in his follow up – expanding the list out to 50 things! Oh and in the meantime, Becky has delivered the goods too and I feel bad, but OK for the time being because Jonny, Stephen, Paul, Stuart and Wadds are yet to get involved.

There’s some really good thinking here that I reckon could be repurposed into a more use friendly format and used for lots of things. A bit of a cop-out maybe, but how about a wiki? That feels more suited to the task at hand which is essentially creating a big list of useful stuff. And then by taking part you’ve already ticked off ‘editing a wiki’ too.

10-15-08

General Geekery

Whilst Suw is on ‘blogging sick leave’ I’ve been geeking out with a guest post over at Kits and Mortar. I wanted to write about cats, GPS and stuff and it turned into a rather lengthy post. The first of a few I hope, thanks Suw! It’s really funny though to be blogging away from home after so much one-on-one love with middledigit. I think that might explain the slightly different style and unusually lengthy nature. PS – if you work in PR, it’s worth reading this – what happens when someone like Suw is confronted by reams of spam from PRO’s, even after taking hte time out to write this.

In the meantime, I’ve also been doing HEAPS of Flickr trawling and stumbled across this – some awesomely geeky ink-work. I am awarding the proud owner of these tattoos full middledigit-certified geek status. The first ever award and (I have a feeling) the first of many. More geek tattoos here BTW.

09-01-08

Rise of the micro-agency continues

Today Stephen Davies (aka PRblogger.com) joins the growing list of former agency digital PR peeps to launch their own specialist agencies/consultancies with new venture 3WPR. I did the same in March this year with Shed and I haven’t looked back since. Yes, it’s a bit scary and strange at first but you soon get used to working differently and dealing with all that extra stuff that comes with setting up on your own.

Personally, I absolutely love the freedom and flexibility it gives you in your work. Since setting up Shed I’ve had the time to meet loads of really smart people, start working with a few of them and even cook up my own ideas for some web based things. As well as doing all that social media and digital stuff that I genuinely love.

Good luck Stephen and thanks for calling Shed disruptive.

PS It was Ged that called Shed a micro-agency and it’s kind of stuck in my mind.

08-22-08

Get on with TechCrunch UK

Amongst all the PR bashing that’s going on right now, Mike Butcher over at Techcrunch UK (which unbelievably this blog was shortlisted alongside in the Computer Weekly Blog Awards web 2.0/business category which Mike deservedly won in the end) has posted this incredibly useful list of pointers for PR peeps to help increase their chances of striking up a decent relationship and maybe getting some TechCrunch love.

Nice one Mike. I encourage anyone in the business to read carefully as it applies not just to TCUK but any online media.

[Pic of Mike asking Ev from Twitter a question at Le Web 3 with Loic Le Meur on stage. Everyone looks a bit worried - can't remember what the question was but I'm sure there's a funny caption in here somewhere about revenue models or scale or something]

08-20-08

A tool to help fix PR?

Pitchspace is featured today on the Guardian Tech podcast and also over on pda in more detail. Over to Jemima to explain:

The idea is to offer a platform for PRs and journalists. PRs seed stories and releases, and journalists can pick up the stories they like and use Pitchspace to organise the material for that story. The system also ranks PRs (and, I assume, journalists!) according to the relationships they build up with journalists, so the more they work together the more contact details they get, and so on.

PR is definitely broken as is, so it’s good to get the debate going as to what the solution is. So get involved if you care about such things, which I suspect a lot of people don’t. They’re just excited about the prospect of all this ubiquitous invisible connected technology stuff.

PS – I think the wrong URL is used in the podcast – it’s space not base, so don’t fall into the ‘rant about not having a live website when you’re featured on the Guardian and wasting an opportunity’ trap I fell into this morning. But then again a bit more info on the site would be nice, but they are probably still very much in protective phase I imagine.

One to keep an eye on.

07-22-08

Facing the reality of PR perception on the web: Revisited

Yesterday I spoke to Anthony about PR FAIL and again, it made me ask myself if I was being too harsh with this post and setting up PR FAIL. I thought about it for a while and then decided, nope, I’m not – I’m just trying to make it easier for people to face up to some of the really basic mistakes that are being made all around the web and the current (and unchanged in most cases) perception most people have when it comes to PR on the web and engagement with bloggers.

Then, as it happens – later on in the day – this popped up in my Twitter stream via Whatleydude (who also wrote a great post recently on o2, CPW and evangelists) – a great post full of insight (and a whole load of reality) from top blogger Vero (aka Canadian Girl), positioned as an open letter to PR agencies to try and help things change for the better.

Here’s the summary Do’s and Don’ts’ that end a blunt, honest post about how PR people engage with bloggers, complete with real life examples. You should head on over there and share your experiences. Together we can all change this – just as you encourage all the brands you work with to listen to the conversations on the web, now is the time for the PR industry to listen and CHANGE.

Personally, I think it boils down to two words: Be Human. Over to Vero . . . . . .

Do…

- Have a Twitter account or personal blog where we can find out about the real you.
- Have a product geek or evangelist we can speak to and quiz without getting the canned marketing answers (Carphone Warehouse and O2, I’m looking at you, guys. You could have definitely done with a public-facing real-person on the days surrounding the iPhone launch.)
- Participate in events in an altruistic way every so often. We’ll get to know each other, and it’s bound to be good for your karma.
- Put some chili in your cornflakes; By that, I mean, have genuine energy and passion about your client’s product. If you don’t get up in the morning loving your job, maybe you need to find something else to do.

Don’t…

- Try to buy our participation to your event. Telling me you’ll pay £150 to show up on Thursday morning with a video camera for a “secret launch” isn’t social media, it’s cheap labour and fake hype.
- Send us a stock press release with an intro that betrays you’ve never even looked at our blogs
- Always play it so safe that we’d rather read the back of the cereal packet than your press release. Have some balls, and hey, have some fun!
- Don’t run with scissors Be afraid of asking a couple of bloggers for a pint to bounce some ideas. Most of them will be happy to help you out!

As for PR FAIL, it’s a ‘see what happens’ thing as I said at the time – so make sure you keep sharing your experiences by using the tag ‘prfail’ or ‘uselesspr’ in any Tweets about some of the bad experiences you have. And let’s ‘see what happens’ . . . . will things change?

PS I’ve now sorted out the feed after I found out Feedblendr had gone offline, so I had to set up a Twummize feed and everything should be working properly again now, aside from the del.icio.us integration.

UPDATE 22/7 – Lloyd has blogged about this and reminded people that ‘we don’t have to write anything’. Valid point and makes it even more important to bring value to the conversation and be interesting.

05-29-08

Facing the reality of PR perception on the web

UPDATE – I’ve created PR Fail as a way to help people face the reality of the perception of PR on the web, be better and stop doing bad things. A ‘see what happens’ thing.

UPDATE 2/6 – it’s still going on and this time there’s accusations flying around about the integrity of the PR industry – to which the PRSA responds

UPDATE 31/5 – the debate is still on – spreading to Phreadz

Coming from a background in PR and still very much involved in it on the digital side of things, I keep a close eye on the general feeling from the web community towards PR – and file any examples of really good (and really bad PR) or particularly fruity opinions about it. More often than not though, it’s negative and that’s obviously not a great thing.

Over the last couple of days, I’d be hitting del.icio.us every few minutes, as it’s all kicking off right now with a debate raging about whether or not companies need to do PR and general thoughts and feelings about PR are being thrown out left right and centre.

It started with Brian Solis revelaing his ‘PR Secrets’, then Loic Le Meur replying with his “Not a Secrets’ that pretty much dismissed Brian’s guest post on TechCrunch. Then, as is the case with social media and the web of today, it’s spilled out into Seesmic, Twitter, FriendFeed and a whole lot of other places.

So, rather than wade in fully and add to the noise, I thought I’d just share a few recent quotes from people on Twitter that I’ve been collecting and offer up my thinking that the definition and role of PR has changed to some degree, but people’s perception of it (and in a lot of cases, use and execution of it) hasn’t.

It’s this difference (and the fact there’s still a long way to go for the PR industry) that causes this debate and that the overall perception of PR on the web is a MAJOR FAIL. And that’s why (and I hate to say it), I more often than not cringe when I think about being in PR – as the industry has so much to do to change perception online and this needs to be led by actions and not more (insert expletive) words. This, is where the industry should be focused its efforts as I don’t think it’s ever going to shake off feelings like this, if it doesn’t change for the better and do so fast. As to how, not sure. More thinking needed, I don’t have all the answers. But in the meantime – consumers are just getting on with their lives and filling them with stuff they like. They don’t really care.

(Hope people don’t mind me ‘re-tweeting’ here. I just want to help spread the word. And, on Twitter, you really do have to face the true reality of what people think)

Charles Arthur – a particularly negative tweet, includes the word ‘DIE’

Jemima Kiss – a funny (but negative) tweet, made me really cringe

Mike Butcher – a negative tweet , I can almost hear him shouting this, my personal favourite one that also makes me cringe big time

Neville Hobson – a positive tweet (yay!), that is in fact negative when you think about it.

David Ciccone – a negative tweet

11-23-07

Future of PR – debate goes on

Please read this if you work in PR. Will, great post. Sure it will stir up some debate. Once I’ve read and digested thoroughly I’ll most likely comment direct. It’s great to hear someone laying it down as thy see it.

10-26-07

The word farms of the web

A great article by Danny Bradbury published on the Guardian yesterday – “The growing number of websites that mix and match low-quality articles produced by amateurs in order to generate traffic is causing concern”. PR, SEO and online advertising are mixing quicker than ever before and we’re having to get even more technically literate to understand what that means for each of our industries. This is right where I’m at right now. And it’s complicated!

10-03-07

Good “blogger relations” advice

From Iain over at crackunit.com, an awesome blog that I probably link to way too much. It’s just really rather very good and Iain just gets it. Simple as that. Subscribe now.

middledigit_

If technology doesn't seem like magic, it's probably obsolete . . .

middledigit.net uses a heavily customised version of this theme by Matt Lambert