Drew B's take on tech PR

Another blogger sacked? Morrisons employee blog deleted

Well, what's happened to the anonymous and infamous blogger over at "My Life as a Morrisons Employee"? The boring but addictive blog about what it's like to be a shelf stacker in a large chain supermarket, read by sooooo many, has been deleted and taken over by an opportunist who noticed that it had been deleted.

The old Morrisons blog was publicised recently in an article in The Sunday Times, where the leading paragraph read: "A disgruntled employee at WM Morrison has set up a website that ridicules the retailer — and allows fellow staff and customers to moan about the supermarket chain." Here's the full article.

So, has our favourite boring blog been pulled by the establishment? Has WM Morrison fired the anonymous employee?

The blog has now been redesigned and all the old posts have been deleted. But if you never saw the blog, you can read the old posts on my Bloglines subscription, here. just click on the Morrisons link on the left hand side and choose to disply all items.

New UK PR blogs

It looks like we have TWO new UK tech PR blogs! It looks like they are both being written by the same person, as the content and blogrolls are similar. One is called Marketing IT and it says it's "exploring the world of IT PR".  The other is called The world of high-tech PR. I am assuming they're written by someone in the UK based on the blogrolls, but can't be sure. I'll be watching with keen interest.

Advising on PR blogging

Am just reading an interesting blog entry over at PR meets the WWW. Constantin Basturea writes that:

Voce Communications helps Yahoo to set up its blogs and to publish internally-generated content.

Interesting entry, and you can see how the story evolves taking some of Media Guerilla's comments on board, and those of Matthew Podboy - both PR bloggers at Voce PR in San Francisco.

Cliche finder

Another interesting week in PR land. One stress after another to tell the truth. But it's the weekend now, so I've been catching up on industry news. There isn't much really. But to liven it up, here's a good substitute to buzzword bingo. From LinkMachineGo, the blog that's constantly churning out links to interesting websites, I found this one: Cliche Finder.

CW, Macromedia and Butler

According to the the nibs in PR Week, Computer Weekly has appointed a new PR firm - Midnight Communications. I also see that Macromedia has appointed Band & Brown in a pitch against Banner, Carrot, Bite and Harvard.

I also read earlier in the week in Computer Weekly that there's a merger in the analyst field - Datamonitor has bought Butler. I'll be interested to see if Butler retains its fairly-recently appointed UK PR firm.

Amazon and Gartner's PR

I saw in PR Week yesterday that Amazon and Gartner's UK PR accounts are both up for grabs. Both firms have shortlisted their finalist agencies already, and it will be interesting to see how consumery Amazon chooses to go, and how techy Gartner's agency will be.

• Added 14/01/05 - Gartner has bought Meta, according to an article in eWeek

Internet Works PR Masterclass

This month's edition of Internet Works magazine has a huge feature called PR Masterclass, which is well worth a read. As the magazine puts it:

"Public relations is an underestimated marketing skill. [By reading this feature] you'll learn all about creating and sending press releases to get your company in the news, and we'll show you other PR opportunites to try."

Also, my comments on sourcing a PR agency are featured in the article. Ooh the glory! The full piece isn't online unfortunately.