AP Style?

US PR people are encouraged to learn to write in AP style. Hopefully that doesn't include the headlines if this AP news story that just appeared is anything to go by:

Being delays first flight for 787

YouTube provides brand scorecard

The popularity of YouTube is undeniable. This promoted me to see if it could be used to rank major brands. While highly unscientific in some ways and slightly unreliable in others, I used the search engine in YouTube to see which major brands got the most clips when you search by their name.

The results were:

Brand Number of clips
Disney 224,000 <--- I guess they ought to have a lot of content!
Google 97,000 <--- they own YouTube...
Yahoo! 81,100
Apple 74,200
Microsoft 44,700
Coca Cola 34,400
Toyota 33,400
Nokia 27,700
McDonalds 22,000
GE 15,000
WalMart 10,600
Starbucks 7,200
Intel 6,280

Now this research took about 5 minutes and as you can probably tell was based on a list of brand names I pulled form an old Fortune article plus a few names I threw in. It wouldn't be hard to do some more detailed research using the YouTube site and search engine to get a sense of how many clips are appearing each day by brand etc. As it stands I can't find a way of seeing which brand has the most number of clips associated other than by trial and error. Perhaps YouTube could issue a press release with that data?

Anyway, for those people looking to help big brands with their marketing, it seems YouTube provides a pretty simple way to score companies. There are of course some difficulties and these relate largely to the way the search engines work. For example if you put in 'Ford' as a search topic you will get a lot of clips that have nothing to do with Ford Motor Company showing up. Conversely if you put in Ford Motor Company it will only list those clips where people took the trouble to tag the clip with the full name. So YouTube is far from perfect but once again we do at least have another quick and cost effective measurement tool available.

Just for fun I also checked to see what the numbers were like for the bigger PR firms. The results were:

Text 100 312
Edelman 295
Hill & Knowlton 18
BM 8
Weber Shandwick 4
Fleishman Hillard 2
Ketchum 2

As you can see, the PR agencies have some way to go to catch the big brands....

Wikipedia Scanner designed to create PR nightmares

Last night on NPR's Future Tense they interviewed, Virgil Griffith, the creator of WikiScanner, a tool that shows who made what edits to entries in Wikipedia. When asked why he created it he said he did it to create PR nightmares for companies that were using wikipedia as a disinformation tool. Indeed on his own blog he says he created the tool to: "To create a fireworks display of public relations disasters for all the world to sit back, and enjoy." This is a man who is clearly annoyed to see that some companies are attempting to hide behind the anymous posting policy on wikipedia and distort entries relating to their business. An example he used in the interview was of soft drinks manufacturers removing mentions that these drinks were harmful to your health. I think it's great that he has created this tool as I think it will help clean up wikipedia. Having lived through the nightmare of getting my own business listed on wikipedia I do worry that it will make people less likely to contribute though. When I listed Next Fifteen it created a host of comments about my independence and therefore the entry's credibility. In truth I never tried to hide my identity and the edits I made were to make sure it was factually accurate and that it met the criteria the 'wiki police', as I call them, were telling me the piece had to meet.

I have to say though that if wikipedia has been so abused by big companies, I am surprised that a 'PR firestorm' or two hasn't already started. Or is it simply that nobody has yet really used the tool in anger? Either way I guess from here on in PROs had better be aware that their entries are being watched. Of course I guess they could always make entries using a computer at an internet cafe given the tool relies on the IP address of the computer making the entry. No PRO is clever enough to do that of course.

What is wrong with books?

The Associateed Press released a AP-Ipsos Poll yesterday that shows that one in four Americans didn't read a single book last year. Nont one. Not even a Harry Potter book. Curiously, book sales are flat despite the fact that the AP-Ipsos Poll suggests that more and more Americans are finding other ways of spending their time reading books. This suggests that the ones that are reading are actually reading more books. Also shown in the poll is a bunch of data that you would likely expect. Out of Women that read they tend to average nine books a year versus men who read a mere five (it doesn't say who reads the more interesting stuff ;). So it would seem that we now need to add the death of the traditional book to the slow painful death of the newspaper...

If you want to read the details of the Poll click the link below. It has all sorts of interesting facts. For example of the books that were read the most popular were the Bible and other religious texts at 64%, whereas business books got a mere 4%.

http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/client/act_dsp_pdf.cfm?name=mr070821-4topline.pdf&id=3613

Clean conscience

Like many people in California I drive to and from work. In truth there is little choice unless you want to embark on a public transport system that would take twice the time and cost pretty much the same amount. I am due to change my car in a few months and have been getting my mind around the idea of buying a Toyota Prius. For the record I can’t say I like these cars very much. I fall in to the group that thinks they are relatively ugly. However, as someone that believes we need to do our part for the environment, a Prius seems the best bet. That said, when you look at the cost of a Prius, which is after all a pretty basic car, you realize that you are paying about a $10,000 premium to drive a car that is more eco friendly. As someone who typically owns a car for about three years that isn’t too bad when spread over the cars life - or is it? I’ve been looking at TerraPass.com which, like CarbonNeutral.com in the UK, gives you a chance to buy carbon credits for all the nasty emissions your life produces. For example, you can pay about $200 and that will apparently make your home carbon neutral for a year, a similar sum would handle emissions from most people’s annual air travel. When it comes to cars the TerraPass site estimated the cost of clearing out my emissions to be $50 a year for my current vehicle or $30 a year for a Prius. You can see where this is going can’t you? So for $150 I could make up for my car’s emissions during its time in my hands. Put another way if I bought a slightly more attractive car that actually cost less than the Prius but wasn’t as eco friendly I could use the saving to buy a massive amount of carbon credits. Indeed I’d likely have enough credits for all the people that read this article. So what do I do? Should I buy the Prius and feel good about it’s eco stats or get something cheaper and buy each of you a carbon credit?

Cutting the wires

Last month Sun Microsystems announced the beginning of the end for the wire services by saying that they would use the Internet as their primary distribution channel for important news, with the wires carrying the news 15 minutes later. Their first major announcement to be handled this way was their quarterly earnings and it seems to have gone without a hitch. I can only guess how many other Fortune 500 companies are watching to see how this switch goes so that in time they can end the somewhat old fashioned notion of using a wire service to distribute news. In the age of the Internet and RSS feeds it does seem very strange to rely on a wire service but on closer examination there is an argument, albeit a rather flimsy one, to keep the wires in place, at least for now. The argument as I see it is simple - the Internet can be unreliable and isn't necessarily controlled by the person either sending or receiving information. This means messages can get hacked, blocked etc and who is then responsible? Add to this the fact that we know that some companies have CEOs that are prepared to do things that are less than 100% legal (witness the stock option back dating mess) and you realize that it would not be hard to conjure up the situation where company A's earnings release is blocked by company B's hired hackers. So while I for one fully expect the Internet to replace the wire services, I also suspect that the wires will continue to stay in business until such time that such issues can be fully overcome.

Has MySpace died and will the WSJ follow?

Pre Murdoch I heard about MySpace every week if not day in one way or another. Since Murdoch bought it, the military has banned its use by soldiers and Facebook has arrived as the latest 'thing' in social media. This makes we wonder about a couple of things:

1) Are social media sites a bit like search engines were back in the old days - destined to be superseded until somebody invents the Google equivalent?

2) Will Murdoch's acquisition of the WSJ be a good thing? The apparent disappearance of MySpace is of course a PR problem. MySpace is still huge and getting bigger by all counts. It simply doesn't get the buzz that Facebook currently enjoys. While I'd argue that Murdoch still doesn't seem to know what do to with MySpace, it would be hard to argue that he'll have the same challenge with the WSJ. He understands the newspaper business and will presumably leave the news side of the publication well alone. He may well change the right wing tone of the editorials but even that is debatable. He does have a challenge on his hands though. He has bought a publication, that like most other newspapers, is losing readers on a daily basis. Sure, they are acquiring some online readers but the overall picture isn't a good one. At a certain level he will be forced to make some changes at some point, if only to make sure he can continue to generate reasonable returns. I guess the question is how long will he wait before he acts and how will he go about it?

Boeing, Boeing Gone

Boeing recently launched the 787 a totally new type of commercial airliner. It seems to be a huge success with 677 orders already on the books. Despite this rather long waiting list they today placed a full page color ad in the Wall Street Journal on the back of the first section. This seems an odd move to me. Looking at the ad I can't help but feel that the real reason they ran it was that in all the press coverage they got about the launch of the plane, few, if any, mentioned that it was launched on 7/8/07 (get it?). Indeed the whole purpose of the ad seems to be to point out that they launched the plane on that date, which is now 10 days ago. I guess with 677 orders they can afford to waste moeny on ads that simply point out an aspect of their marketing program that is now out of date...

Facebook offers cheap polls

If you want to do a quick and cheap poll to see what 200 people think about something, you can add a tool, imaginatively called Polls to your Facebook page which allows you to ask some multiple choice questions, each of which will get up to 200 responses and each of which will cost up to $51. You can select age groups for your poll and to some degree demographics. It's hardly the most advanced tool in the world but it's pretty good. I just put out the question: "who does the best PR?" offering Cisco, Dell, Apple, Microsoft and Google as possible answers. On the day that Apple is launching the iPhone it is perhaps not surprising that Apple is so far in the lead with 38% of the vote. Dell is currently last with 0%. The tool is hardly perfect - in fact I tried to offer IBM as a potential answer in my poll and it said this answer had too many capitals, so I chose Dell rather than write ibm. Anyway - this maybe useful for PR folk out there doing pitches or when they want to give a client a more calibrated view on a subject.

More bad news for advertising

The FT has just posted this article. Hot on the heels of the ban on billboards in Beijing come these moves in the UK.

Spread the word about the benefits of advertising
By Jamie Whyte
Published: June 26 2007 18:31 Last updated: June 26 2007 18:31
Advertising is unpopular with those concerned for our welfare. They see it as a kind of  coercion, making us “want things we do not really need” and, sometimes, things that are positively bad for us. Ban the ad, they demand.
Modern regulators are happy to oblige them. On Sunday, two moves to tighten up on advertising junk food to children come into force in the UK. Ofcom, the media regulator, introduces new content rules (including banning the use of celebrities), prior to banning advertising of foods high in fat, sugar or salt during television programmes popular with under-16-year-olds next January. The Committee of Advertising Practice, an industry group, is bringing in similar content rules for press, posters and paid-for internet space.

Beijing Bans Billboards

Jason Leow of the WSJ wrote yesterday about the removal of 90+ billboards on China's Golden Avenue in a bid by the city sanitize the city's image. He reports that the crackdown appeared to start on the advertising of luxury homes. Now, he went on, as a part of a massive urban reorganization exercise the advertising ban has been extended across much of Beijing.

This is reminiscent of a similar move in New Delhi a few years ago where thousands of illegal billboards were removed so you could actually see the city. At the time there wasn't actually that much to see but a lot has changed since and presumably the city planners in Beijing expect their city to continue to evolve and would prefer that billboard proliferation not be a part of the outlook.

This of course poses a huge headache for brands that relied on these billboards to get their messages across, however unsubtly. So as the city tries to prevent itself from being one giant Times Square or Piccadilly Circus it will be interesting to see where those ad dollars go that would have promoted all those luxury cars and condos. I suspect the ad agencies will have some ideas on how to spend the money but maybe some PR execs should be putting their thinking caps on too.

Apple's $3Bn Battery

Apple's market capitalization increased $3Bn today on the news that it had improved the battery life of its soon to be launched iPhone. They also said the screen would be glass rather than plastic. My assumption is that the latter didn't affect the stock as much as the former. Either way it seems that investors are betting big time on the iPhone and assume that any small improvement will have a big impact on sales. That said, today's rise in Apple's value is stunning. If you assume that all the people who will now buy the iPhone because its battery life is a bit longer buy the more expensive model then to generate $3Bn in additional value in one year you would need to sell an ADDITIONAL 400,000 phones by my calculations (I've made some basic assumptions on how much after tax is earned from each phone sold). That's about a 1000 EXTRA phones (that cost $699) a day just to support today's rise in stock value. Of course it could be that the market is only just getting its head around the fact that Apple is going to be a big player in the phone market alongside Motorola and Nokia. But remind me, how may phones a day do they sell that cost $699?

Microsoft spell checker

Ever noticed that the spell checker in Microsoft Word knows names like IBM, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba and Sony but struggles with Google, Facebook and MySpace? Makes Word look like the parent that can't quite speak like a teenager. Funny though that the spell checker in Google's blogger doesn't question any of the names...

Notable PR blogger seeks job

Seems a notable PR blogger that writes under a nom de plume in the US is looking for a job in Europe. They're presumably hoping to cash in on their social media prowess by helping beef up the skills of the firms over there. There is a challenge with this though. Good PR blogs, like many good industry blogs, are irreverent and tend to poke agencies in the eye when they do or say something stupid. In truth they poke at agencies most of the time, whether or not they've been stupid because that's what make them an interesting read. In other words, the very skill that makes them good at their job as a blogger makes them harder to hire in the industry they watch. After all, if you are agency X and have been roasted by a blog for the way you handled something, are you likely to want to hire the blogger? The answer is going to be no in most cases as quite simply most agencies would struggle to admit that the blogger was 100% correct. That's because they weren't 100% right... 85% maybe but not 100%. This is of course a shame but it's human nature even for thick skinned PR folk. Of course I'm not suggesting that bloggers soften their style so they can get agency jobs. It would be a shame to lose the edge that these blogs have developed just so the poeple writing them find it easier to get a job in PR. Instead it probably calls for these blogs to be prepared to be a little more willing to listen and for the agencies to accept they're not perfect.

Google is hiring for PR

Word on the street is that Google is looking to hire some 70 PR people at its head office in Mountain View in the near future. If true this could have quite an impact on the tech PR industry. At its simplest level it will tighten an already tight labor market and potentially drive up salaries as people try and compete with the search engine giant. Nobody would argue that Google has built an impressive brand in recent years but there are a couple of questions that I’d put out there. First, why is Google doing this now? Is it because they believe they are starting to see sentiment move against them much as it did with Microsoft when they became wildly successful? If so, then being a PR person at Google may be a less enjoyable task than in the last few years where editors have eaten up every news story, no matter how trivial. The second question is what has happened to Google’s stock? Last year the stock soared and then… soared. This year it spent most of January around $500 and has since drifted off to around $475. Could it be the new army of PR people is being brought on board to try and get the stock price moving again by airing more positive stories about the business? It’s worth considering that Google has historically been able to attract some pretty hot talent thanks to its soaring stock price. I wonder if the relatively poor performance this year is starting to hurt these hiring efforts…

eBay as a market research tool

I was reading a blog entry the other day that asked what had happened to the Microsoft Zune, the much touted rival to the iPod. Given the money Microsoft spent promoting the product it is a good question to ask. One way I sought an answer was to look on eBay and see what price these were now selling for. In essence I wanted to see if there was a big market for them and also what had happened to prices. It then occurred to me that eBay in effect offers a great tool for people wanting to track the life cycle of a consumer product. You can pretty easily take off the current pricing of products (highest and lowest) and also the volume available on a daily basis and thus plot the rise and fall of these products over time. This is the sort of data that usually required expensive research. Thanks to eBay it is essentially free if you can get someone to pull the data, or if you create a tool that automatically takes off the data. In the case of the Zune it did sell at a small premium to start with and can now be bought for around $180, which is about a 28% discount. Taking my theory another step I'm pretty sure you could use this kind of data to predict when you need to release a new version of a product in order to prevent the sales price sliding too far. Of course you could also use it to predict when your competitor should be releasing a new product.

Reuters creates a target for PROs

A couple of days ago Reuters made an announcement that appears to have been ignored by the PR industry. Essentially they announced the introduction of technology that would scan news for sentiment on particular companies and issues. If, as a result of these news scans, sentiment went above or below user defined limits, then an automatic trade would be executed. It's another form of algorithmic trading and will likely become a key target for PR consultants wanting to drive the price of a stock up or down. Presumably, if you know how to play the sentiment game, you will in effect be able to force your client's share price up and its competitor's down. A pretty scary thought but just as there are companies that have built a business optimizing sites for search engines, I suspect there will be people optimizing content for this Reuters technology.

http://about.reuters.com/productinfo/updates/update.aspx?user=1&id=1176

Will a weak $ affect our industry?

My guess is that most people in the PR industry don't pay much attention to exchange rates, unless they do financial PR. This isn't intended to be a criticism. In most instances exchange rates don't make much difference to the day to day work carried out in our industry. However, the steady decline of the US dollar in the last few years ought sooner or later to have some impact. From where I sit I can see a few ways a weak dollar could impact agencies:

1. For agencies representing European firms a weak dollar may create an argument for higher spending. This argument is based on the fact that relative to the Euro or Sterling, marketing spends in the US are actually declining in real terms - of course so are sales which is of course the reason most budgets won't change. But for companies wanting to shift perceptions in a big way, now may be a good time for that promotional push in the US.

2. For agencies representing US businesses overseas it could be argued that budgets should also rise. I'll admit here and now that the logic trail is rather one sided but hear me out. Many US businesses are benefiting greatly from a weak dollar by becoming more competitive in overseas markets. Put another way they are deriving a greater percentage of their profits from overseas markets thanks in part to this improved competitiveness and in part to the translation effect of converting say sterling back in to dollars. This may in turn make it more attractive for them to up their marketing spends in these markets to improve sales even further.

3. US agencies looking to sell may find themselves more attractive to European buyers. The US agency market has been a difficult one to crack for many European agency groups. A weak dollar makes US agencies a relatively cheap deal right now - if of course you assume the US economy is going to continue to perform relatively well. Now there a number of UK agency Groups that could be potential buyers, these include: Chime, Huntsworth, Creston and of course Next Fifteen. The larger Groups such as WPP and Publicis are of course also an option. My guess is that the likes of Ad Media Partners are brushing up on their international dialing codes.

So while a weak dollar can be frustrating for someone like me that runs a UK-based PR Group, the news isn't all bad.

YouTube's Next Step?

If like me you occasionally poke around on YouTube for research reasons, you may have noticed an increasing number of videos of things that are for sale. This includes items like cars and houses. This of course makes complete sense as it becomes clear that if you want to buy a big ticket item it might be nice to have more than a few pictures, which is typical on eBay. It would seem logical therefore that Google, as the new owner of YouTube, may just look at adding an eCommerce engine to YouTube to enable people to actually buy the items shown on the videos. YouTube purists may say this will make it even harder to find good content but I suspect the guys in Mountain View could find a solution if the site really does fill up with sale items. Of course, the other alternative is that eBay adds YouTube like features to its site. Watch this space.

Technology PR or Energy PR?

In the last six months we have seen the environment come back on the agenda with a bang. This has caused almost every major company to look at its 'green quotient.' Now for some businesses this simply means making themselves carbon neutral but for others it means changing the products they sell and some cases rethinking the competition. Take companies such as Cisco and Polycom who both offer pretty sophisticated video conferencing solutions. Whereas these systems were at best hokey (and horribly expensive) a few years ago, they are fast becoming usable and affordable, thus causing the airlines to take note. Now if you had said a few years ago that United Airlines biggest competitor would be a technology company people would have patted you on the back and changed the subject. Of course just about every major tech company is now looking at its product set and asking: "can we make it use less energy?" or "will this solution save the customer some energy?" This is changing the very messaging of the major tech firms and many smaller ones, putting energy up near the top of the list. The other big shift has been the shifting interests of the major VCs towards clean tech investments. John Doerr and Vinod Kholsa in particular are making big steps in this direction with huge investments in areas like bio fuels. These people are of course expecting their marketing partners to make the same shift, meaning that PR businesses that were announcing servers and embedded chip controllers a few years ago are now discussing the merits producing ethanol from corn, versus sugar cane or even trees.

Now this could all just be a passing phase and as one senior PR executive said to me yesterday, the media is already getting a little tired of writing about how company x is going green. But what does appear to be clear is that the tech market and energy market are converging. So any self respecting PR executive that is currently making a living from tech PR had better start learning about the dynamics of the energy market, because in one way or another its going to affect them quite significantly in the years ahead.

Didn't we get a new Fed Reserve Chairman?

The Federal Reserve Chairman is Ben Bernanke. Yet it seems the former FRC, Alan Greenspan, seems to have either forgotten he retired, or was never told. In recent weeks he's spoken to the media a great deal with views on the likelihood of the US economy slipping into recession (he's gives it about a 30% chance in the next year) and his thoughts on the collapse in the subprime lending market. His comments are getting the attention of the media and the financial markets. Now of course it could be that he misses being in the spotlight and simply wants to see his picture in the papers, or it could be that the government finds it quite useful to have a credited but unofficial source giving people some guidance. If it's the latter, then he may prove quite an effective spokesperson for the current administration, assuming of course he keeps people feeling that things are going OK. Either way, I'm guessing that the government's PR machine is keeping a close on eye on his pronouncements and is likely ensuring he gets their side of the story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070315/ap_on_bi_ge/greenspan_2

The next big thing

Spent the last few days at TED, a pretty amazing event that feels a bit like a meal. Presentations from movie producers, software engineers, poets, physicists, Paul Simon and Bill Clinton. The reference to the meal being that some of this has been like 'having to eat your greens,' while other parts have been like being given a great dessert. If there's one theme that has pervaded the event so far it is again that we all need to work on saving the planet. This was very much the message of John Doerr who ended his speech in tears and has been a passing reference by almost all the other speakers. From a communications perspective it's hard not to walk away from this feeling that for brands to succeed they must put greater emphasis on this aspect of their social responsibility if they are to succeed. Of course you may argue that consumers are the ones that will be the judge of that. I'd argue, having been bathed in the 'we have to save the planet' message for a few days by leaders from all walks of life, that this is not a passing fad. equally it's a message that is getting the attention of some pretty important minds. Therefore I'd argue that what we have here is something really important. It's what VCs have been searching for since the dot com bubble burst. It is the next big thing. Kind of funny when you think about it. The next big thing isn't some amazing new algorithm or financial model, it's the thing you've been standing on for most of your life - the planet.

A Long Tale on the Value of Blogging

Excuse the pun but I recently came across a paper co-written by some IBM and Google researchers on the connection between blogging and the sales of products. The paper was written back in 2005 so is not new but it is one of only a few papers I've ever seen that have tried to draw a clear link between the impact of blogs on the sales of companies. The good news for bloggers is that there appears to be a connection. At least there was when it was written. While rather academic it is worth a read.

http://labs.rightnow.com/colloquium/papers/prediction_from_chatter.pdf

Google Toy Useful for PR

If you want to know whether Tony Blair has been in the news as much as George Bush, or Apple Computer versus WalMart then Google Trends can give you a pretty quick answer. For many PR execs wanting to know if their client is making as much noise as its rivals this tool will be very helpful - assuming their client is big enough to make a decent amount of noise. I recently saw this tool used to express a client's 'noise level' versus other big companies and while it doesn't allow you to dig very deep it is nevertheless useful. Right now most searches simply track the volume of searches for each item but for some the results also show News Reference Volume. For example, search Google versus YouTube and you will see what I mean. I can only assume that in time Google will make this technology more powerful and useful, much as they have with Google Maps. Watch out media measurement businesses, Google has come to town...

Oh and if you search on PR versus advertising, it looks like PR is slowly catching the old dog.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=advertising%2C+pr&ctab=0&geo;=all&date=all