Drew B's take on tech PR

Getting in the podcasts

How can a PRs get brands covered in podcasts? PR Week's article: 'Podcasting enters the mainstream' has profiled the big print media podcasts and has quoted yours truly, alongside Antony Mayfield and James Warren (no blog/podcast that I can find) on what to do to get coverage in them.

William Hill is podcasting the World Cup

Bookie William Hill is starting a new daily podcast so that gambling footy fans can follow the World Cup odds better. William Hill has been running podcasts for a while now, according to its site.  Via Netimperative

Blears: let's podcast, blog and text for more members

Tomorrow's Times is scheduled to print this letter from minister Hazel Blears, who is calling for more blogging, texting and podcasting in campaigns in order to increase support for the Labour party.

There should be more good UK PR blogs

OK, so this week began with a column from PR Week's editor, published in The Guardian. In the column the editor said there's a real lack of good PR blogs in the UK at the moment.

Cue a considerable number of the UK and US PR community (Antony, Stuart, Simon, Stephen, Constantin, Niall...) who responded by pointing out that there are actually many UK PR blogs. The editor of PR Week then replied and said 'ok, maybe you're right'. In terms of how many UK blogs there are, a definitive(ish) list is here.

I'm not taking sides, but I sometimes wonder if there are enough good PR blogs in the UK. What do you think? Maybe, in a roundabout way, PR Week's editor is right. I'm not saying there aren't many, just there could be more. I'm thinking there could be more good PR agency blogs for a start - there's a lot of agencies that aren't blogging. And maybe there could be more discussion blogs, like Linkbunnies for PR people? I think maybe UK Press should be a blog, so the emails could still come to you through RSSFwd, or you could surf the blog, or use something like bloglines. And I think more of my friends could blog. They'd be great at it. And did you know RocketBoom, the tech videoblog, is making $85,000 in ads a week and has 300,000 daily viewers? I know the PR industry isn't as big at the geek industry but why isn't there a PR industry videoblog? (hmm! :-) I think we've got so much potential, but maybe the problem is that PR agencies are always so busy that there's just no time. 

So here's to many more home grown blogs, podcasts and videoblogs for the PR industry.

Cripes!

I wish I lived in San Francisco sometimes. Booze with the creators of Second Life.

The six types of blogger

Six types of blogger. Via

Comments on comments

I hear on the grapevine some features are coming out in PR Week on blogging and podcasting soon. I'll be looking out for them in the coming weeks. Great to see more analysis of this area of PR.

Also, I've written a post over at LEWIS 360 on Seth Godin's decision to tighten up his blog. Feel free to comment here or there.   

US geeks on football

US geeks on football:

Oh brother. I don't even know what the FIFA World Cup is. I'm guessing it's soccer, which I hate just as much as any other pro sport. Every editor at Boing Boing detests professional sports, and we would sooner stream a video of a crumpled up paper napkin in the corner of a room than show some jackasses running after a ball.

IMHO the best bit of Boing Boing's review of the World Cup video debacle.

The heavy hand of FIFA

Remember the law firm whose £150,000 a year IT lawyer repeatedly demanded his mourning secretary for £4 for a dry cleaning bill to get rid of the stain on his trousers she made with spilt ketchup? She was at her mother's funeral, yet the boss persisted, only to be flamed by the national press, like The Times, The Mail and so on, when they heard the story. Ouch. That was bad PR for Fifa. 

The most famous ketchup stain in London has claimed its first victim. Richard Phillips, the City lawyer whose suit was soiled by the misdirected tomato sauce, has resigned from his position, it was announced yesterday. Mr Phillips, 36, had decided to take a "long-planned" study break from work as the spillage continued to exercise the imaginations of some of the most highly paid professionals in London. The £150,000-a-year senior associate, who is an IT law expert, is said to be humiliated by the media attention surrounding his claim for recompense for his £4 dry cleaning bill from the much lower paid legal secretary.

Well, Baker & McKenzie have done it again. This time they've issued the big blog Boing Boing with a note warning that they'll be looking out for illegally-posted video clips of World Cup footage (their client is FIFA, you see). What BM didn't realise is that with blogs, you have to take into account the attitudes of the users. Bear in mind that we're looking at people who could post videos online whenever they want, cos they dont care. They aren't bothered by law. They watch the whole series of Lost before it's out, through BitTorrent. They get the new Kooks album off Limewire. And they blog and YouTube and MySpace about whatever they want, so you have to think a bit before assuming old school tactics will work just as well. And boy is this a big crowd we're talking about. It's going to include 80 million MySpaces, 50 million YouTube views a day, 42.9 million blogs, then the P2P downloading sites... so targeting BoingBoing in this way has only fanned the flames. 

Perhaps FIFA could've spoken to its PR people instead of its lawyers and done something smart. They could've taken bytesize chunks of MySpace and blog content and given it away to the social media set? Such as video packets, MySpace backgrounds, photos, it doesn't take much imagination. They could've got some great PR and Myspace loving. But instead they've created a monster of anti-FIFA bloggers, YouTubers and MySpace rs. Good luck monitoring and taming 172.9 million online outlets, and some, in the coming weeks.

To round things off, here's a graph of the blog traffic BM is now getting from this negative publicity. Ouch.

PR moves

London tech PR blogger Retrospective Futurologist, aka Justin Hayward, is leaving his associate director job at Ogilvy PR for a new role at MS&L. Hope to see more blogging, Justin, and good luck with the move.

Thanks for the tip go to ...the world's leading...