November 1st, 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

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Call Shifted Today on 1300 144 367 At Shifted Pixels we go the extra mile to ensure that whatever work we do be it strategy, planning, design, development, online marketing, media buying yields a tangible net benefit. Give us a call, we would love to help your business grow online! See what shifted pixels has to offer

October 29th, 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?

  1. Find out who is actually influential. We use BuzzNumbers Online Media Measurement to evaluate just where and who is influencing
  2. 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)
  3. Engage in relevant, honest, authentic, spin-free conversations with these Influencers
  4. Be prepared to take negative feedback, and to openly and honestly address the critisism.
  5. 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.

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Call Shifted Today on 1300 144 367 At Shifted Pixels we go the extra mile to ensure that whatever work we do be it strategy, planning, design, development, online marketing, media buying yields a tangible net benefit. Give us a call, we would love to help your business grow online! See what shifted pixels has to offer

October 29th, 2007

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

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Call Shifted Today on 1300 144 367 At Shifted Pixels we go the extra mile to ensure that whatever work we do be it strategy, planning, design, development, online marketing, media buying yields a tangible net benefit. Give us a call, we would love to help your business grow online! See what shifted pixels has to offer

October 24th, 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.

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Call Shifted Today on 1300 144 367 At Shifted Pixels we go the extra mile to ensure that whatever work we do be it strategy, planning, design, development, online marketing, media buying yields a tangible net benefit. Give us a call, we would love to help your business grow online! See what shifted pixels has to offer

October 22nd, 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.




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Call Shifted Today on 1300 144 367 At Shifted Pixels we go the extra mile to ensure that whatever work we do be it strategy, planning, design, development, online marketing, media buying yields a tangible net benefit. Give us a call, we would love to help your business grow online! See what shifted pixels has to offer