Thursday, November 1, 2007

Wired editor bans PR flacks

Interesting article on BoingBoing about how Wired Magazine is banning lazy PR people who just fire over press releases without qualifying the story.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/30/wired-editor-bans-pr.html

Labels: Online PR, pr, PR 2.0, Sydney Online PR, Sydney PR

Posted by Nick HaC @ 10:54 AM

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Monday, October 29, 2007

Online PR in Australia

While the US has engaged Online PR much more rapidly than many other countries, it is interesting to see some early activity in Online PR in Australia.

As far as we can see the Australian Online PR industry is evolving in several ways

Traditional PR agencies are adding digital media to their services ( with little understanding of the depth and technical aspects required by Online PR)
Boutique Technology PR agencies sprouting up - who are reasonably solid and do embrace social media or SMO (but don't cover SEO)
Web and SEO agencies rebadging their work as Online PR (without the holistic approach required)

There is much discussion about PR 2.0 amongst US blogs, yet most Aussie blogs seems to dance around the subject.

The reality is, PR has changed. PR is all about influencing the influencers. But as we have seen, the scope of influences have changed. No longer do TV, Newspapers and Radio hold the greatest influence over toady's consumers. A recent stat we came across mentioned that 65% of all Australian consumer purchases greater than $200AUD were researched online (ABN 2007).

When researching online, bloggers and social recommendation often hold significantly more influence than spun up Press Releases on any of the major news outlets.

So how do we deliver real value Online PR in Australia?

Well, if PR is about influencing the influencers, then Online PR is about influencing Online Influences, weather the influences are search engines results, bloggers, consumer review sites, forums, social media and community networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

So how to you influence online?

Find out who is actually influential. We use BuzzNumbers Online Media Measurement to evaluate just where and who is influencing
Target these Influencers and evaluate who can be contacted (you may require some technical research methods to find out exactly how to contact these people)
Engage in relevant, honest, authentic, spin-free conversations with these Influencers
Be prepared to take negative feedback, and to openly and honestly address the critisism.
Offer influencers something of real value.

At the end of the day, Online PR is different to Traditional PR. Online PR is a 2 way conversation, Traditional PR is a 1 way broadcast.

--
Shifted Pixels provides Online PR Services and Consulting to Sydney and Australian based businesses, and we also offer white label consulting services to Traditional PR and Marketing agencies who may be looking to get ahead in this rapidly emerging space.

Call us for a quick chat with one of our friendly staff.

Labels: blogs, communities, consumer, conversations, Online PR, Online Reputation Management, pr, PR 2.0, seo, Sydney Online PR, Sydney PR

Posted by Nick HaC @ 9:33 PM

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Blogs as reliable as mainstream media says Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

Interesting news from the ACCC who say that Consumers consider blogs as reliable and as influential as mainstream media.

Sounds like call to action for online reputation monitoring :P Its also interesting to consider how the ACCC see's its role in new media. Will they try to control and censor australian bloggers and online review sites.

"CONSUMERS who get their news from the internet are likely to trust a blog for reliability as much as a mainstream media site, the competition watchdog said today.

"For a growing base of users, these are all equally valid sources of news, information, entertainment and gossip, and users are not necessarily discriminating between traditional and new sources.""

"For regulators like the ACCC, it means ensuring regulation relied on during the last century does not become an irrelevant fallback position that fails to serve the public's best interests," he said".

This is very cool but also scary, what has made the internet great is its total freedom. Will that be eroded by Australian governments and what can we do to ensure that bloggers cannot be held legally liable if they critisise an Australian Company online.

Source: Courier Mail

Labels: Blog, blogs, consumer, conversations, internet, Marketing, online, pr, PR 2.0, reputation, reputation management, reputation monitoring, sem, seo, social media

Posted by Nick HaC @ 12:29 AM

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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

New economy consumers are different

New economy consumers are different. Selling traditional mass market products in the new economy doesn't work.

We are almost back to in the pre-industrial era of the fundamentally open market place, where buyers and sellers are 100% equal.

I think is is a broader change, markets are efficient and business as usual has changed. It will be increasingly more difficult to sell rubbish products and add some fancy marketing and become successful.

Social media, bloggers and online community's will see through the lies and talk about it. This will lead to negative online conversations.

Negative conversation about your company/brand/service WILL impact your search engine reputation, which consumers DO read

The frightening part is what people say about online can never be erased, and can be searched for all time! With services like Google and Archive.org, your bad press online can never be erased!

If what your selling isn't authentic, honest, real and of measurable value... start selling something that is, or it will damage you in the future. If you wouldn't buy it yourself, don't expect your customers too.

Labels: communities, consumer, conversations, Online PR, online reputation monitoring, pr, PR 2.0, reputation management, reputation monitoring

Posted by Nick HaC @ 10:41 PM

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Monday, October 22, 2007

Generation C is the new Gen Y!

Meet Gen C...

The Influencer's Influencer...

The Trend Spotters, the Cool Hunters, The Social Media Influencer's, Bloggers and Media Critics that influence what consumers think online.

We met Gen C on our blog in July 2007, but only just recently (thanks to Nick Hodge at Microsoft) have we put a name to this elite breed of new thinkers.

"In the golden age of branding, several guests at the party held sway: brand, PR, marketing, external relations (ER), research, and the agencies. On top of that, we had a few occasional attendees, such as consumer affairs, investor relations, and community relations.

Today, in the golden age of consumer empowerment, we have the same party guests, but their sway is being challenged in a very big way by an aggressive, sometimes rude and abrupt new guest at the party: the consumer influencer.

They may have accrued influence over time or have situational influence (e.g., they were first to try and review the iPhone, hence setting off a broader chain reaction). That influence often spills from the online zone into the offline or vice versa. Indeed, today's uber-influencers are largely platform agnostic, except they tend to have a more quantifiable digital trail of results online. Put another way, if you search their names, you'll find evidence of something they said."

One of the most interesting aspects of Gen-C, is they can't be bought, reached by PR agencies or brought over to traditional media's point of view.

They are often highly informed, highly critical, strongly opionated. They have little regard for trashing your reputation to millions of online readers if they percieve you to have wronged them in anyways.

So how do we manage and monitoring these what Gen-C says about your brand? We have been using BuzzNumbers recently to manage and monitor what Gen-C is saying about our clients. What have you been using?

What do you think of this Gen-C hype? (Gen-C Wikipedia) Leave a comment.

Labels: consumer, conversations, online blog monitoring, Online PR, online reputation monitoring, PR 2.0, reputation management, social media

Posted by Nick HaC @ 2:38 PM

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Monday, June 4, 2007

What's the difference between online PR and offline PR?

Basically, online PR invlolves activities geared towards influencing media, communities and audiences that exist solely on the Internet using online channles. That includes search engines, blogs, news search, forums, discussion threads, social networks and other online communication tools. Brand reputation monitoring and management is also a focus area for online PR.

Offline PR deals with the same things except with print, radio TV, conferences/events and other "real life" venues. One difference between online and offline PR is in pitching. For example, before pitching a print journalist, the publication's editorial calendar is researched to see if there are any planned story opportunities. The subsequent pitch is specific to the upcoming story.

Popular blogs can be as influential as many print publications, but pitching a blogger requires a careful approach. There is no editorial calendar for blogs so it is important to read previous posts and become very familiar with the subject matter covered. When pitching a blogger it is better not to include the press release in the pitch, since most bloggers don't write stories based on press releases, they point links to a release and write their own commentary.

When you pitch a blogger poorly, they may post your pitch to their blog for all to see. A print journalist will just hang up on you.

Labels: consumer, conversations, Online PR, Online PR Sydney, pr, PR 2.0, Sydney Online PR, Sydney PR

Posted by Nick HaC @ 7:29 PM

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ShiftedPixels

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Wired editor bans PR flacks

Monday, October 29, 2007

Online PR in Australia

Blogs as reliable as mainstream media says Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

New economy consumers are different

Monday, October 22, 2007

Generation C is the new Gen Y!

Monday, June 4, 2007

What's the difference between online PR and offline PR?

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