Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, posted an article titled "Sorry PR People: You're Blocked". He complained that he received over 300 emails everyday from lazy PR people who simply click send button without thinking whom they want to target.
"So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I'm interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that's why my email address is public). "
"Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month's list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play."
He did list a looooooooong email address alphabetically. I guess a lot of PR people did check whether themselves or their organisations’ email addressed had been blocked.
Morgan McLintic in his blog mentioned an amusing post by Andrew Conry-Murray excessive press release which follows most virus outbreaks.
"A new product is available to block press releases that invariably follow malware outbreaks. ShuTup 1.0 stops 100 percent of press releases that tell you how a product automatically and proactively blocks the latest worm, virus, spyware, phishing, or 'bot attack. "
"ShuTup 1.0, which is launching this week, is aimed at security professionals, IT administrators, journalists, and editors. These markets suffer crushing volumes of e-mail in the wake of the threat-du-jour."
ShuTup 1.0 maybe launched in the near future since a lot of people are getting sick of these "spams". Clicking the send button is a very easy thing to do, which makes some of PR people won't bother to select addresses from the whole list. There is another possibility that these PR people think maybe, maybe someone else such as Chris Anderson, would interested in the topics. Unfortunately, Chris' answer is "sorry, you are blocked".
If these PR people really want to target the right people, online pressroom could be an effective aid tool. One of the advantages of using online pressroom is that news release will be well in control. And those journalists who are really interested in your organisations could easily find information they want.
Saturday 29 March 2008
Monday 24 March 2008
A New Word-of-Mouth Era
According to the statistics produced by CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Centre), the number of Chinese internet user is more than 210 million by the end of 2007, an increase of 48 million in last six months.
According to 18th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China (July 2006), 43.2% net citizens often use BBS and engage in different kinds of discussion groups, which mean more than 90 million people in China, play active roles in BBS. As can be seen the statistics below, BBS users are even larger than the users of IM (42.7%), which enables BBS to be the communication platform following after emails.
(Sources from CNNIC, available: http://www.cnnic.cn/download/2006/18threport-en.pdf)
It seems that BBS still plays an important role in Chinese internet life. Actually, the influence of BBS also reflects on net citizens’ life in real world. A report on the Internet mentioned that a growing number of people begin reading comments on the different kinds of forums when they are interested in a certain product or service. A new word-of-mouth era comes!
Since BBS is a topic-centric communication platform, people can easily google topics what they are interested in and engage in the discussion. There are hundreds of thousands of people take part in any kinds of topics you can or cannot image. People share their opinions and experiences of certain products and services; they complained about low quality products and awful services they experienced.
Internet expends word-of-mouth influence. Not only marketing people have to pay attention on word-of-mouth strategy, practitioners really need to think about it. There are a lot of work need PR people to do: How to locate those opinion leaders online? How to maintain the mutual relations with those people? How to engage in the discussion? How to monitor related topics?
(Sources from: CNNIC, Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China (January 2008), available: http://www.cnnic.cn/uploadfiles/pdf/2008/2/29/104126.pdf )
According to 18th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China (July 2006), 43.2% net citizens often use BBS and engage in different kinds of discussion groups, which mean more than 90 million people in China, play active roles in BBS. As can be seen the statistics below, BBS users are even larger than the users of IM (42.7%), which enables BBS to be the communication platform following after emails.
(Sources from CNNIC, available: http://www.cnnic.cn/download/2006/18threport-en.pdf)
It seems that BBS still plays an important role in Chinese internet life. Actually, the influence of BBS also reflects on net citizens’ life in real world. A report on the Internet mentioned that a growing number of people begin reading comments on the different kinds of forums when they are interested in a certain product or service. A new word-of-mouth era comes!
Since BBS is a topic-centric communication platform, people can easily google topics what they are interested in and engage in the discussion. There are hundreds of thousands of people take part in any kinds of topics you can or cannot image. People share their opinions and experiences of certain products and services; they complained about low quality products and awful services they experienced.
Internet expends word-of-mouth influence. Not only marketing people have to pay attention on word-of-mouth strategy, practitioners really need to think about it. There are a lot of work need PR people to do: How to locate those opinion leaders online? How to maintain the mutual relations with those people? How to engage in the discussion? How to monitor related topics?
Sunday 9 March 2008
From Push to Pull Media Strategy?
Hilary talks about the push and pull technology applied in mobile phones, which reminds me that these two words “push” and “pull” could also be used to describe public relations media strategy.
According to Wiki,
the business terms push and pull originated in the marketing and advertising world. The push/pull relationship is that between a product or piece of information and who is moving it. A customer 'pulls' things towards themselves, while a producer 'pushes' things toward customers.
When these two terms are applied in PR world, they are used to describe two ways that practitioners get their messages across. Practitioners use push media strategy by sending emails and making calls to media organisations or more directly the journalists, to get their message publicized. The pull media strategy owes its creation to the rapid development of organisational websites with 'press room' section, which provides an alternative way to appeal to journalists and draw public attention.
As per the discussion on Thursday regarding “the online press centre”, it was argued that journalists would not be spending a great deal of time searching for news since they could get loads of information by receiving calls and emails. In other words, traditional (push) media strategy dominates till date. Therefore, the main purposes for journalists visiting organisations’ online press room still remains for searching basic information like fact sheets, backgrounds of chief executive, contact number of PR office.
It seems that pull media strategy still has a long way to go.
According to Wiki,
the business terms push and pull originated in the marketing and advertising world. The push/pull relationship is that between a product or piece of information and who is moving it. A customer 'pulls' things towards themselves, while a producer 'pushes' things toward customers.
When these two terms are applied in PR world, they are used to describe two ways that practitioners get their messages across. Practitioners use push media strategy by sending emails and making calls to media organisations or more directly the journalists, to get their message publicized. The pull media strategy owes its creation to the rapid development of organisational websites with 'press room' section, which provides an alternative way to appeal to journalists and draw public attention.
As per the discussion on Thursday regarding “the online press centre”, it was argued that journalists would not be spending a great deal of time searching for news since they could get loads of information by receiving calls and emails. In other words, traditional (push) media strategy dominates till date. Therefore, the main purposes for journalists visiting organisations’ online press room still remains for searching basic information like fact sheets, backgrounds of chief executive, contact number of PR office.
It seems that pull media strategy still has a long way to go.
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