Drew B's take on tech PR

Google hires ex Tory PR

PR Week reports that Google has hired Rachel Whetstone, Tory boss Michael Howard's former adviser, as director of European comms and public affairs. Mark Groves also points out in a comment on this blog that Google are hiring a senior European PR manager job in London.

Making the news - Sunderland's Blog / PR conference

On Friday a PR / Blogging conference took place in Sunderland. It was opened by CIPR President-elect, Tony Bradley. Speakers included Microsoft PR man Tom Murphy, Sunderland Uni's Philip Young, PR blogger Elizabeth Albricht and UK Tech PR man Stuart Bruce, and Amsterdam-based comms blogger Neville Hobson. Here's the agenda - some interesting topics like how blogs are changing PR.

Neville Hobson does a great review of the conference, points to a nice slide (on PR Blogger's Flickr) by Tom Murphy to illustrate the lifecycle of PR tools, with RSS, blogs and wikis on the up. Neville's own slot on podcasting is up on his blog - both the slides and the podcast. 

Analyst moves

Update on AR news from the Analyst Insight blog of David Rossiter:

• Cathren Whelton has left Ovum, leaving the firm's PR dept the responsibility for booking vendor briefings. Analyst turned AR man Duncan Chapple gives an overview of how Ovum is coming along.
• Dale Vile has left Quocirca to form a new analyst firm named Freeform Dynamics.
• New (to me) AR blog ARmageddon, which I hadn't seen before. An anonymous blog seemingly written by three AR bods from the UK.

Googleplex please?

Wouldn't you love to do Google's PR? Especially when just up the road from you, the web firm that is now has a higher stock value than Coca Cola and Disney (apparently) has opened a new trendy Googleplex to talk to everyone about. I'm such a nosey bastard that I'll probably go find them and poke my nose in on my way home... see if they really do have table tennis, video games and a chef to rustle up 'the grateful dead'.

Silicon has some cool pics here in a gallery they put on Thursday. And Jack Schofield at the Guardian also has a piece on the opening at Guardian's site.

Is this public relations?

Why is this blog listed under the Public Relations section of BritBlog??? Ngh!

What happens when companies get staff blogging

There was an article in the FT yesterday, which is worth a read for firms that are thinking about how to blog, and how to manage staff bloggers. It covers a lot of the high level issues around companies blogging. Here's an excerpt:

When IBM decided to encourage its 320,000 employees to start blogging, it asked them to develop a set of simple guidelines themselves. The result was 11 core principles, which IBM published in March (see below).

IBM's guidelines read more like a list of best practices than a rulebook. Along with the obvious advice about not sharing company secrets or commenting on sensitive financial information, they encourage IBM bloggers to use their real names, state their position in the company and stick to writing about what they know.