Drew B's take on tech PR

Cillit Bang and online PR

Cillit Bang, or at least the badly made commercial for Cillit Bang, has been the topic of conversation on the blogs for ages, and on media forums like UK Net Marketing. It's getting some huge viral online PR. People want to know whether Cillit Bang is real? Or is it some teaser for a different product altogether?

LinkMachineGo (wicked blog about all sorts of radom things) has gathered together some opinions, including how school kids greet eachother with the phrase?! And have a look at how many comments there are on this blog. You can even buy the T-Shirt!

Added Feb '04. -- And this is the best website I've seen for ages - it's some guy Adam Welch talking us through how he bought four bottles of Cillit Bang and cleaned over £20 of copper coins just to see if the advert was telling the truth, with loads of photos. Proof the product exists and works! But there's a twist in the ending. Read it to see what happens to the coppers.

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Get paid for blogging - $800 a month!

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion has pointed me in the direction of an article in Internet Week (and on Marc Canter's blog) that covers something very interesting. Apparently some influential bloggers are being paid $800 a month to mention a product in their musings. Who are they? Dunno. It doesn't say. But Marc Canter came up with the idea though. Clever old boy.

Addition: Danny Bradbury, the daddy of IT journalists, has some opinions on this too. It's also mentioned on Threadwatch.

Mark Street moves to Lewis

Today's PR Week says Mark Street has taken up a position at Lewis. Doesn't say whether the position is full time or not though. Looks like it from the press release on Lewis' website, but Mark is still in this week's flannel panel in IT Week.

FT's Gowers and his mobile

Could this be true? Looks more like a sketch from a comedy show, but Spin Bunny says that the recent FT gathering in Paris saw Andrew Gowers walk off stage with his microphone still on and call the do a load of bollocks on a private phone call! Brilliant. Here's what Spin Bunny reports:

"Spies tell of a wholly embarrassing incident in which editor Andrew Gowers made a glowing speech about the success and planned future success of the esteemed publication. But then the daft bugger went backstage, forget to take his clipmike off and the whole audience heard him take a call on his mobile.

Amongst the tirade of abuse dished out as commentary on how the meeting had gone, he was heard to dismiss it as the usual load of bollocks and a waste of time."

Class.

Working at home is awful

Lexmark, the firm that makes office printers, has published research into how working from home is awful. No office gossip, air conditioning or comfy chairs if you work from home. Nightmare! Obviously the more we work at home, the less we use the office printers, so Lexmark would say it's awful being based at home. But interesting article on why working from home isn't what many would hope for.

Outsourced call centre and PR

Spin Bunny rightly points out that PR teams are hard enough to manage without having the execs based in India! I would say that likening PR agencies to call centres is absurd - apart from a few agencies I'm sure Spin Bunny wouldn't hesitate to mention. Outsourced call centres are my pet hate right now.

I had a shit experience with an outsourced call centre this Monday, when trying to track down the missing mobile phone which I ordered a month ago from O2. When I finally got through to the right department (most of the numbers tell you to call somewhere else, cut you off, or put you through to an agent who isn't equipped to deal with your enquiry) they told me it was DHL's problem. So I called DHL, who told me that because I wasn't in when they came round, they sent the phone back to O2 (and that someone called Caluuo signed for it). That's clever. Well done on not bothering to leave a card when you called round, DHL.

This is where I got angry. I called O2 back to tell them, and got through to their Manchester call centre, I was told. They said to me that they sent me the phone to me and that I had signed for it. I told them I hadn't, but they told me that, actually, I did!

They didn't believe me when I said that DHL returned it to them and assured me it was signed for by an O2 employee at O2's depot. The woman in O2 that I was speaking to was completely unwilling to believe my 'story' and I would have to take out insurance and claim for a lost phone, even through they never sent it to me. And - get this - she wouldn't put me through to someone who COULD help me. Why? Because she said she was in an outsourced contact centre and terefore couldn't transfer me. Instead, she put me on hold while she sucked air through her teeth or something. While I was on hold I called the same number again from my old mobile and got through to a different call centre who told me they would call DHL, find out what had happened to my phone, and resolve the issue for me. I was on hold for two minutes while they sorted it out. They accepted responsibility and sent me a new phone which arrived yesterday. How come Manchester couldn't do that? Because they were outsourced.

Fredrik and the Squirrel

So Fredrik Wackå is in The Guardian this morning in the paper's Blog Watch section. His comments on Blog Squirrel, which are on his blog are balanced by The Guardian's view that people who aren't quite so blog-savvy would find Blog Squirrel useful.

Computer Associates PR

It says in PR Week that Computer Associates has shortlisted six PR firms for its UK PR account. They include incumbent, Lewis, Fleishman-Hillard, Brands2Life, Catalysis, Inferno and Hotwire. Hmm. Some big business up for grabs, and looking through the client creds of some of these agencies it seems CA is after a firm that's a little 'different'.

In the past I have seen several times, first hand, a Lewis client give the agency a kick up the ass by throwing the business up for grabs, only to retain Lewis in the end. It's a very old trick to stop the PR stagnating. And obviously Lewis is doing something right in the long run. So it will be interesting to see who gets the UK PR account here.

New UK media blog on the way

I saw today that there is a new UK media blog coming out soon called GrokSpin - published by Mink Media, the firm behind two blogs launched yesterday called Honourable Fiend and Wanda Lust.

One of the people behind these blogs is Azeem Azhar, who writes a column in The Guardian now and again, amongst other places.

IAOC Guest writers - I'm on for a PR lecture - PR blog in gobbledygook

I'm spending some of this week planning a lecture that I'm giving to The College of St Mark and St John, AKA Marjon, for its PR degree course's PR in Practice module. I only just realised, having tried researching a fair bit, that Marjon was ranked by The Sunday Times, as the best Higher Education College in the UK!  Will let you know how the undergrads receive blogs.

On other PR blogs, I notice that Jim Horton and Steve Rubel are blogging on the International Association of Online Communicators' blog. Really, really great stuff on there right now. Anyone who's wondering as a PR person what value blogs have should chech out the articles.

And I've decided that PR blogs in gobbledygook are fab. Check out Всеукраинский портал про PR - which I found through Jeremy Pepper's Pop-PR.