RSS — a win-win technical tool for journalists and public relations practitioners

Siggy in his presentation and post talked about the RSS feed and its application in virtual world. Derek pointed out the profound influence on monitoring various discussions on the products and the organisation.

Since journalists all place higher expectations on speed of the information delivery and exchange, RSS feed exactly could meet their needs, especially the moment they are following an ongoing crisis in an organisation. We all understand the important role an online press room plays in crisis communication. But imagine if practitioners had online press room updated while journalists missed the message that practitioners trying to distribute.

In this way, neither of them had the benefits of online press room. Therefore, except understanding the benefits of RSS feeds by ourselves, we also should make effort to encourage journalists to subscribe RSS feeds to keep up-to-minute with every content change in organisational online press room.

Political Issues and other disasters

There are two new-borned websites are very popular among netizens in China. Interestingly, these two non-profit websites are both set up by average Chinese netizens to demonstrate their opinions towards the protest recently happened in Tibet and other related incidents.

One websites is http://www.anti-cnn.com/, which "is established to expose the lies and distortions" the American news network (and other western media organisations). But CNN is becoming the target since one of its archor Jack Cafferty appeared on The Situation Room, and called Chinese "goons and thugs" and said products manufactured in China are "junk". Another websites is aimed to raise a campaign to boycott Carrefour, the French retail giant, whose biggest shareholder— LVMH Group is accused to donate a huge amount of money to Dalai Lama.

The website http://www.anti-jialefu.cn/ has been created to demonstrate the boycott Carrefour, the second biggest retailor based in France. Emails, text messages are spreading among people in China, saying not go to Carrefour on 1 May and suggesting not purchase products under LVMH Group such as Christine Dior, Louis Vuitton, etc.

Public relations people in Carrefour China responded quickly when asking organisational attitude towards the f Li Jing, head of public relations for Carrefour’s Shanghai branch, said the company was investigating the situation. Yesterday, a statement released by Eric Legros, the CEO of Carrefour China appeased on media outlets online and almost all the popular websites in China.

The statement stresses the goal of Carrefour is to promote economical and cultural development across the world. Carrefour has and will never do any things which might hurt Chinese people. The statement denies "the support to certain illegal non-government organisation(s)". At the end of the statement, Eric mentioned he and the CEO of Carrefour Group are fully support of Beijing Olympic Games 2008 and are expecting to attend the opening ceremony in Beijing.

From a public relations perspective, the reaction from Carrefour is fast and effective. Public relations practitioners in Carrefour were aware of the problem and the different voices from the virtual world. They responded to the rumour very quickly.

There is a growing tendency towards utilising ICT (Information & Communion Technology), such as websites, mobile phones, PDA as a tool in crisis communication. In my opinion, public relations people with Carrefour China could do a little bit more, such as setting up "online media centre" to better satisfy journalists. Gernerally speaking, the section incorporates important contact numbers, all the news releases, CSR report (corporate social responsibility), images and videos together. These could be used as supplementary information to support Carrefour’s statement and stand.

BA Terminal 5 chaos, so does BA PR?

A high-tech, hassle free travel experience in Heathrow Terminal 5 turned out to be a nightmare to all the passengers.





Telegraph has already listed the chaos in the list of top PR blunders.



"It was a PR disaster', Telegraph comments, "the airline and airport appeared to be blaming each other for the emerging chaos".


And "according to BA insiders, the airline's press officers working out of the company's Waterside headquarters were not trying to spin their way out of bad news".


"The sad truth is they had as little idea of what was going on at Terminal 5 about a mile away as the passengers who were engulfed in the shambles itself."



Finally, BA's CEO, Willie Walsh appeared on TV to apologize the current mass, who performed far better than his colleague Gareth Kirkwood, the airline's director of operations, who was described as "the original rabbit dazzled by the headlights".


"He read a statement and then scuttled off at some speed, accompanied by his minder, refusing to take any questions".


In this case, BA's website and its online press centre within in play an important role. The link of updated information is on the home page. Passengers are advised to check latest arrivals and departures information before they travel to the airport.


Speaking of its online press centre, however, news are not updated on daily basis. Specific tactics dedicated to the crisis are not well stated to journalist. Therefore, they could not blame journalists for using their own angles to tell stories.

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.

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.