PR « Brendan’s blog

The Flackenhack video

October 30, 2007 — Brendan

OK, so I know I’m taking a blogging sabbatical but I’ve been asked to put this up:

Enjoy. I’m not in it.

This may be an ex-blog

October 28, 2007 — Brendan

In case noone’s noticed, I haven’t posted for nigh on three weeks now. I’m not sure why this is – I just seem to have stopped.

I started the blog around last Christmas as part of a ‘Things I Must Learn About’ list, which also included stuff like RSS, aggregators, wikis and the like. Since then I have indeed found out a lot about them, and much more such as Yahoo Pipes and Google Docs, although I haven’t really been able to put much of this knowledge to practice in my professional life. I’ve also been very lax with updating the Social Media Resource, which never really took off anyway, and especially the PowerPR index which was fun at first but is now quite a bind.

So I’m wondering whether I’ve learned enough now, and whether this blog has come to its natural end. Since stopping posting my readership has plummeted, although curiously my subscriptions have climbed! As with so much in the blogosphere, this makes no sense. I’ll let it continue in its current form because at least the feeds churn out content, which some people have found useful, and the Social Media Resource might find a home some time.

So, this is just by way of explanation. I might get the bug again soon, but in the meantime this is Friendly Ghost signing off for a while. I might concentrate on the music again, or turn my attention to something completely different.

Oh, and I may as well come clean – my real name is Brendan Cooper, not Friendly Ghost. I really am a copywriter (for the time being) and I really do work in PR (ditto), but I can’t tell you who I work for because my company’s policy on personal blogs forbids association. How uncool is that?

Regards
Brendan aka Friendly Ghost

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Posted in PR. 8 Comments »

Marion Jones: Prophylactic PR

October 8, 2007 — Brendan

So Marion Jones is using the same platform she achieved by cheating, to admit to cheating. In so doing, is she just making it harder for the rest of us to apologise? Or is there just not enough money in it for ordinary folk?

On watching the widely publicised video of her ‘confession’ I must admit I found it convincing, as did Web Ink Now, where I got the link. She does show sincere contrition, and touches all the bases: no one to blame but myself; I hurt the people around me; I’ve let you down; you have every right to me annoyed with me.

But on mentioning this to my partner the reaction was “Pah. It’s a PR stunt. Give her a few months and she’ll be onto a lucrative deal.”

There is some truth in there, plus an element of the automatic eye-rolling cynicism towards PR generally. If there’s a smell, it’s generally attributed to PR. What I find interesting is the automatic dismissal of a public apology.

There has been a spate of these of late. JetBlue in the US is a high-profile example, albeit a while back, in which the CEO apologised for people effectively being held captive on its planes (you can still see it online – now that’s a very long-lived apology!). In the UK, the cricketer Freddie Flintoff was very apologetic for being caught either clambering onto, or falling off, a pedalo in a state of inebriation, and slightly backward Big Brother cartoon character Jade Goody was profuse in her apologies after bullying Bollywood star Shilpa Shett on-screen. Only four days ago Pandora apologised for being unable to pursue a coherent business plan.

Are we becoming apology-resistant? Is there really a statute of limitation on apologies? Is the erosion of public faith extending from corporate regret to heartfelt public self-disapprobation?

If so, what room is PR allowing itself for manoeuvre? Perhaps a dignified silence would be more powerful. Oh, but then, of course… it might harm future book sales.

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Posted in PR, ethics. 3 Comments »

Marion Jones: Prophylactic PR

October 8, 2007 — Brendan

But on mentioning this to my partner the reaction was “Pah. It’s a PR stunt. Give her a few months and she’ll be onto a lucrative deal.”

Are we becoming apology-resistant? Is there really a statute of limitation on apologies? Is the erosion of public faith extending from corporate regret to heartfelt public self-disapprobation?

If so, what room is PR allowing itself for manoeuvre? Perhaps a dignified silence would be more powerful. Oh, but then, of course… it might harm future book sales.

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Posted in PR, ethics. 1 Comment »

Infamy! Infamy! Hobson and Holtz…

October 4, 2007 — Brendan

… have got it in for me!

Check out the latest FIR podcast. Yup, that’s me at the end. Your very own FG with its very own music.

Many thanks to Neville and Shel for mentioning me in their podcast, and I’m glad Neville appreciated the email I sent him. Actually, I just realised, Neville didn’t read it out in full. The title of the email was “Hi guys – free beer! Not really - a song.”

So there you go. All you need to pitch Hobson and Holtz successfully is to offer them free beer and music. I must try it more often.

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Posted in PR, humour. Leave a Comment »

I’m egotistical, but fair

October 4, 2007 — Brendan

And I thought Google Reader was just for reading. When I noticed the search feature, I thought it was just a search feature. It takes someone like Steve Rubel to open our eyes to its potential as a data mining tool.

After reading his post and finding some surprising trends in my feeds (it seems I’m twice as interested in PR than copywriting, and in both quite a bit more than tech), I decided to look afresh at Google Reader. It struck me that I hadn’t really delved into the Trends option, although it’s been there for a long while.

It proves quite revealing, particularly when I look at the blogs I’ve read over the past 30 days, and those I’ve shared (which you can see in the FG Flags feed to the right).

These are the top 40 blogs I’ve read:

… and these are the ones I’ve shared:

Points to note:

I must have an ego the size of a planet. Or I’m self-obsessed. Either way I’m probably temperamentaly quite well-suited to PR. In fairness, the Read figure is probably because I tend to make small changes to a posting after publishing, and the shared figure is influenced by my taking the view that I’m entitled to share my own posts on the FG Flags feed.
I’m quietly pleased about the other top ten or so blogs I read. I like them all but I really had no idea they were my favourites. I used to think I just picked and chose quite randomly according to what caught my eye on Google Reader. While this is on the whole true – most of them have just been viewed once or twice – if asked I would probably have listed most of them as bloggers whose insight or style (or both) I admire.
I find it interesting also that I share with a similar pattern. On second thoughts this makes sense. When I go through my feeds I do tend to share the posts I read, simply because they caught my interest.
I’m thinking that I’ll monitor my read and shared figures, then I’ll turn that both into my blogroll, and into my PowerPR index. The index is very large and proving difficult to maintain: certainly 40 blogs will be a lot easier to handle than over 100.

If you’re a Google Reader freak like me, take a quick peek (a freak peek?) at your trends. You may be similarly proud, happy and thrilled. And, in my case at least, slightly ashamed.

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Posted in Google Reader, PR. 1 Comment »

Network numbers

October 2, 2007 — Brendan

An article in the Guardian recently caught my eye: Why web.2.0 adds up to a revolution for our industry looked at the maths of networks and how they apply to different networks for carrying information.

It got me to thinking: how do the numbers really shape up? What would my ‘number’ be? And are they already too scary to contemplate given that the pioneers of broadcast media promotion would have started with much smaller numbers? Or is it just perception – was the risk still there even with smaller multiples?

She’s a model and she’s looking good

There are three models. I’ll try and summarise quickly so I can get to my point.

The first, for broadcast, is one-to-many and named after the broadcasting legend David Sarnoff. It takes the relationship between viewers and possible interactions as parity: a broadcast to 20 recipients as a point value of 20. In other words, 20 people would receive the broadcast but that’s where the interaction, and possible number of connections, ends.
The second, for email or telephone, is one-to-one. Named after Bob Metcalfe, it takes the number of participants and raises them to the power of two. This is because all the participants are singly interconnected. A network of 20 yields a Metcalfe score of 400.
Then there is the web. This many-to-many relationship goes another order of magnitude higher. Because everyone can talk to everyone else, this network – named after Professor David Reed – calculates the number of connections as two raised to the power of the number of participants. So a network of 20 has a Reed value of…

… and this is where the article piqued my interest. “Over a million,” it said. “How many over a million?” thought I. So, in my slightly geeky, probably autistic way, I opened a spreadsheet, saved it under the name ‘netwroks.xls’ (sic – I have a headcold), and figured it out. Precisely, it’s 1,048,576. So, just over a million then.

The point of the article was that this is essentially the same interaction we see everyday but in the Web 2.0 world the constraints of time, geography and cost are removed. That is why these numbers are so real and so scary. They hold potential for huge gain or huge loss, and thereby huge risk.

Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht

But what exactly are these numbers? Let’s employ netwroks.xls to find out.

Friendly Ghost, at time of posting, has 162 subscribers. Let’s chuck it into the spreadsheet and see what comes out. The maths states that I have a Sarnoff score of 162 – one to one – and a Metcalfe score of 26,244. In other words, if all my subscribers could email each other, they could have 26,244 separate interactions. Cool.

But my Reed score would be – stretch that column out and change the format so I can see the figure because those funny scientific notations don’t mean much to me - 5, 846, 006, 549, 323, 610, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

That’s an awful lot of zeroes. So many it even starts to spell ‘ooooOOOoooo’.

Let’s look at some of the more popular on the PowerPR index. Of those that advertise their subscribership, Neville Hobson is rated highest. His Sarnoff/subscription figure is 1,704. So, his Metcalfe score is 2,903,616. His Reed figure is – oops, here we go, Excel can’t handle it. We get a NUM! error. So, Neville Hobson is off the scale.

So are the Online Marketing blog (Sarnoff 8,983, Metcalfe 80,694,289) and PRSquared (Sarnoff 1,143, Metcalfe 1,306,449). Excel is borked.

Let’s down the ante. Wagner Comms has a Sarnoff of 334 and Metcalfe of 111,556. This gives it a more manageable Reed figure. It’s a mere 34, 996, 011, 596, 528, 200, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

Canuckflack is lower on the PowerPR index but has a higher subscribership (an object lesson in the weakness of the index if ever there was one). Sarnoff 535, Metcalfe 286,225 and Reed of 112,472, 844, 863, 580, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

Wow. This webpage would be borked too if I hadn’t put those spaces beween the zeroes.

Time. Travel. Communication. Entertainment.

I need to stop going ‘wow’. We’ve had a bit of number-related fun. Let’s think for a second. It’s hardly surprising that we’ve yet to embrace Web 2.0. These numbers scare the willies out of us. They are astronomical. But then, when newspapers came about, there must have been some brave soul who put the first ad in there. Same for broadcast: who put out the first commercial on radio, or TV? Who had balls enough to dip them in the cold waters of what was then ‘new media’? I’m talking advertisements here because, well, PR is probably more difficult to quantify in terms of who was influencing the influencers, so to speak.*

The first paid-for British TV ad was for Gibbs toothpaste – and, by the miracle of YouTube, here it is!

Its style is jerky and uncertain. Hardly surprising. It was after all a step into the unknown.

The first British radio commercial was for Birds Eye foods in 1973. Sadly there is even less information about that online (we need an audio equivalent of YouTube). My guess is that it was slightly more sophisticated by comparison. The first clickable banner ad was sold in 1973 by Global Network Navigator (GNN), to law firm Heller Ehrman LLP, when the total domain name database registered 4,000.

Beam myself into the future

These were all the acts of people with the foresight to see that the new media was simply another vehicle for promotion. And yet, even though they ramped up through the multiples of network numbers, they all started at a very early time in every media. Was the risk any less? The numbers were certainly smaller.

Web 2.0 is here now. It’s massive, and massively interactive. Quantitatively and qualitatively it is different. I cannot deny that the other day I read some broadsheets and the thought crossed my mind that the high quality of journalism displayed was a strong argument simply to concentrate on the industry-strength solutions, that is, the huge influence and comparatively low popularity of more traditional media. Perhaps we really shouldn’t get involved with the amateur rumour-as-fact blogosphere, and just let them talk amongst themselves while we get on with real jobs in the real world.

We’re charging our battery

But then, what would we lose? Action could provide us with so much. It could even cause us to lose so much. Inaction will certainly cause us to lose out. Perhaps we should stop worrying about the figures, get our heads down and just go for it.

* Advertising and PR are difficult to categorise anyway. Who’s to say what the first examples were? Signs painted on walls in Babylonia could have been the first adverts, but then again so could any cave paintings, which probably said “This is our domain” or “We have magic” or “Ouch, I wish I’d been more careful with that axe.”

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Posted in PR, paper media, social media, technology, web 2.0. 2 Comments »

Network numbers

October 2, 2007 — Brendan

She’s a model and she’s looking good

There are three models. I’ll try and summarise quickly so I can get to my point.

The first, for broadcast, is one-to-many and named after the broadcasting legend David Sarnoff. It takes the relationship between viewers and possible interactions as parity: a broadcast to 20 recipients as a point value of 20. In other words, 20 people would receive the broadcast but that’s where the interaction, and possible number of connections, ends.
The second, for email or telephone, is one-to-one. Named after Bob Metcalfe, it takes the number of participants and raises them to the power of two. This is because all the participants are singly interconnected. A network of 20 yields a Metcalfe score of 400.
Then there is the web. This many-to-many relationship goes another order of magnitude higher. Because everyone can talk to everyone else, this network – named after Professor David Reed – calculates the number of connections as two raised to the power of the number of participants. So a network of 20 has a Reed value of…

Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht

But what exactly are these numbers? Let’s employ netwroks.xls to find out.

That’s an awful lot of zeroes. So many it even starts to spell ‘ooooOOOoooo’.

So are the Online Marketing blog (Sarnoff 8,983, Metcalfe 80,694,289) and PRSquared (Sarnoff 1,143, Metcalfe 1,306,449). Excel is borked.

Wow. This webpage would be borked too if I hadn’t put those spaces beween the zeroes.

Time. Travel. Communication. Entertainment.

The first paid-for British TV ad was for Gibbs toothpaste – and, by the miracle of YouTube, here it is!

Its style is jerky and uncertain. Hardly surprising. It was after all a step into the unknown.

Beam myself into the future

We’re charging our battery

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Posted in PR, paper media, social media, technology, web 2.0. 2 Comments »

Network numbers

October 2, 2007 — Brendan

She’s a model and she’s looking good

There are three models. I’ll try and summarise quickly so I can get to my point.

The first, for broadcast, is one-to-many and named after the broadcasting legend David Sarnoff. It takes the relationship between viewers and possible interactions as parity: a broadcast to 20 recipients as a point value of 20. In other words, 20 people would receive the broadcast but that’s where the interaction, and possible number of connections, ends.
The second, for email or telephone, is one-to-one. Named after Bob Metcalfe, it takes the number of participants and raises them to the power of two. This is because all the participants are singly interconnected. A network of 20 yields a Metcalfe score of 400.
Then there is the web. This many-to-many relationship goes another order of magnitude higher. Because everyone can talk to everyone else, this network – named after Professor David Reed – calculates the number of connections as two raised to the power of the number of participants. So a network of 20 has a Reed value of…

Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht

But what exactly are these numbers? Let’s employ netwroks.xls to find out.

That’s an awful lot of zeroes. So many it even starts to spell ‘ooooOOOoooo’.

So are the Online Marketing blog (Sarnoff 8,983, Metcalfe 80,694,289) and PRSquared (Sarnoff 1,143, Metcalfe 1,306,449). Excel is borked.

Wow. This webpage would be borked too if I hadn’t put those spaces beween the zeroes.

Time. Travel. Communication. Entertainment.

The first paid-for British TV ad was for Gibbs toothpaste – and, by the miracle of YouTube, here it is!

Its style is jerky and uncertain. Hardly surprising. It was after all a step into the unknown.

Beam myself into the future

We’re charging our battery

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Posted in PR, paper media, social media, technology, web 2.0. 2 Comments »

For the first time ever people think ‘Apple’ more than ‘Microsoft’

September 30, 2007 — Brendan

For the first time ever, in the UK, people are seeking more information about Apple than Microsoft, and it looks like the world is about to follow.

A couple of weeks back I posted my findings after playing around with Google Trends. One of these was, to me, astonishing: when plotting Apple vs Microsoft, the Google Trends chart search volume chart – that is, the number of people looking for each term – showed that Apple had, for the first time ever, overtaken Microsoft. Moreover this was at the end of a clear trend showing Apple closing the gap over the past three years. This implied that people are hunting out information more about Apple than Microsoft.

I posted, sat back, and waited for the comments to flood in. But this didn’t cause much of a stir. I was surprised because I think it’s highly significant. Perhaps I shouldn’t have ‘buried’ the finding in a post about Google Trends, or maybe I was slightly frivolous in investigating the effect the Cadbury’s ‘Drumming Gorilla’ was having on Phil Collins record sales.

So, I’m returning to it and looking more closely. Here’s the chart as it stands today:

My interpretation: since the beginning of 2004, in the UK, there has been a gradual closing of the gap between people searching for news about Apple (red) and Microsoft (blue), and Apple would appear to have supplanted Microsoft in the past two weeks. In the third quarter of 2007 we see this crossing for the first time. This is not a temporary reaction to the iPhone, and it would seem news of the Microsoft fine in the EU has had little effect. Furthermore, the chart for all regions shows a similar trend but Apple doesn’t quite seem to have crossed over yet:

In both examples the lower chart shows the amount of times the topic appeared in Google News. This shows less of a change: it would seem that Microsoft still generates more news than Apple overall, even though there are occasional switchovers.

Let’s look at more analysis, Steve Rubel-style. Firstly, Blogpulse:

This tells me that consistently, over the past six months, in all regions, people have been posting more about Apple (it also shows that typical, tell-tale weekly cycle in which people have better things to do that post on their blogs at weekends!). So people have always been more interested in talking about Apple, but, according to Google Trends, they’re also more interested in seeking out information about the company too.

What else does Steve Rubel do? (Yes, it’s true, I have no original thought). Oh yes – Technorati, Land of the Free. Below, we have Microsoft, then Apple, over the past six months, in all languages:

To my eye this looks like a close-run thing but I would say this implies there is more posting about Microsoft than Apple? Hmmmm.

So in short, we seem to have three plottable activities: news coverage in Google News; the amount people post; and the amount people search.

News coverage seems fairly constant, and Microsoft ‘outcovers’ Apple. Blog posting seems a little inconclusive: Blogpulse indicates more posting about Apple, whereas Technorati looks more like Microsoft.

But the Google Trends is very revealing about what people are looking for. Apple has turned the tables on Microsoft, as part of a clear trend over the past three years.

Apple is on people’s minds more than Microsoft for the first time ever.

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Posted in PR, technology. Tags: Apple, buzz, Microsoft, trends. 1 Comment »

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