Drew B's take on tech PR

I'm moving on

As you may have seen on the blogs, PR Week or on Facebook, I'm joining Hotwire this summer as Director. More to follow, but suffice to say I'm sad to be leaving good friends and clients at LEWIS and super-excited to be joining my old friends and a new team at Hotwire.

links for 2007-06-13

• linkbunnies.org: "OMG my mom joined Facebook"
  "Everybody I've ever met, from widely disparate social circles, seems to be on Facebook. Many of them joined within the past month (myself included). I suspect it's very close to reaching critical mass, in the 20-35 UK demographic at least."
• Techdirt: Is It Worth Joining The Facebook Fad?
  "As a web 2.0 applications startup trying to determine a development path, what key points should we consider before jumping on the Facebook bandwagon?"
• LinkedIn vs Facebook: room for both? | The Social Web | ZDNet.com
  "LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Hoffman, is an early investor in Facebook, so either way he’s set to profit."

NMK pics and feeds today

NMK forum is looking like a great event today. London's digerati are there in force. As are some of the world's Web 2.0 leaders up at the lectern. Jason Calacanis (remember, the one that got reeeeally rich from Web 2.0) and CEO of Jaiku are speaking right now alongside host Mike Butcher. Writing about it already are Kevin Anderson and Jemima Kiss from The Guardian, Katherine Hannaford at Shiny Media, BBC's Jem Stone, freelance journo Graham Holliday, who is also updating us live via Flickr on how the event's looking.

Here's a live feed from Jaiku. And another one from Tech Digest. Here's NMK Forum's Facebook group and here's the official blog and backchannel.

I used to live opposite the venue and wish I could have been there if only to see it since it was renovated, not to mention that it's looking like a great event. Alas, too much on, but next time I hope.

Photo credit.

The Times does the top 50 business blogs

Rhys Blakely at The Times has a double page spread in today's paper on the growing influence of business blogs, with a compilation of the top 50 across topics such as economics, telecoms, industrials and utilities. It's on page 60 and well worth a read.

PR planning, time management and sports psychology

PR blogger Steve Rubel likes to talk sports management metaphors in his blog, looking at how they can be applied to the management of PR teams and PR campaigns. Right now, he's on to American Football and scripting. In business, this is the practice of getting a set number of tasks done before you start working reactively on ad-hoc projects that arrive through emails, calls or meetings. In American Football it's the process of planning your first 15 or so attacking set moves and sticking to them so that you are well-drilled and so that when you come to be a bit more flexible with your attack later in the game, you know the lay of the land.

Sounds great. Steve points out, it shares some principles with Tim Ferris' ideal of the work week where you focus on batching work into chunks so that more time can be spent on what you really want to do, and less on inanely working for work's sake but not necessarily being more successful (which in turn touches on Parkinsons Law of work filling the working day). The bottom line: get lots done quick and plan it. Then don't mess around with the rest, learn from your plan to be most effective when you start freestyling. Or else you'll fill your day with dross, lose your way, and not get done what you wanted to prioritise to begin with.

As well as Ferriss, Rubel likens the working practices of Marissa Mayer, one of Google's famous big bosses, to the practice of scripting in business. I like some of how Marissa Works. I feel a little bit like her in ways, such as the tetchiness and task-cramming. But a bit like her complete opposite Ferriss in others. They're both extremes who both use scripting to help them get stuff done. Have a read about Marissa - it's part so-what, part fascinating.

Mayer is time-sensitive to the point where she gets angry if the channel on the TV doesn't change quick enough and she multi-tasks so that she never has an empty moment, multi-tasking work into her free time. She puts in 14 meetings a day, with a further 14hrs of email on the weekend. She gets 800 emails a day. She manages her time through an assistant, and her tasks through text based email. She has two email addresses. Now that would make me explode. But she works a lot like me and people I work with in many ways. Lots of information, lots of work, and the feeling of needing to fill every empty moment with tasks to complete.

So we can script our days to get more done (and see how to manage an assistant). How can we script PR campaigns? This would possible be like planning for three-monthly periods at a time, learning from the previous quarter as the year progresses. This way you're more focused, and your next plans are better adapted to the environment. Quarterly 'scripting' as opposed to 12-monthly planning isn't new, but this shows an interesting rationale on how successful it is in sport (mucho Superbowls!) to justify it in PR campaign planning next time.

Passive agressive notes

It's late, but just got in and sitting around catching up, and the funniest blog was just sent me from across the table and it's the best blog I've seen in a long time. In the style of Post Secret, here's Passive Agressive Notes.

links for 2007-06-08

• ‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’ - New York Times
  There are 24 million Facebook users, only 50 per cent of which are students.
• The brands enter Facebook
  Apple and H&M are but two brands setting up groups on Facebook
• Coke to launch mobile social network for teens - silicon.com
  "Coca-Cola is creating a virtual teenager hangout like Facebook and MySpace.com but on mobile phones, to lure more youths to its brand."

Friendly ghost and a skills gap

Seen The Friendly Ghost? It's a new tech PR blog written by "a senior account copywriter flitting around the London office of a leading global PR agency." Subscribed!

Seen The World's Leading today? It talks about the skills gap that everyone's blogging about right now and the struggle us London workers face with the cost of living if we want to be anywhere near to the office. He reports that people used to have more fun in PR when they lived closer to the office. He offers up his thoughts on solutions, from tweaking the graphical equaliser, to a potential exit of PR talent and employers from London altogether.

links for 2007-06-06

• Facebook. It's just gone crazy - The Guardian
  "Facebook is essentially about communicating. Remember when people asked what was the point of a mobile phone?"
• BBC NEWS | The etiquette of networking
  "Just 10 days after deciding that social networking was not for the over-forties, I've got 1,007 outstanding friendship requests on Facebook. My phone is burbling day and night with new Twitter messages."
• Tech Digest: To add or not to add, that is the question - the politics of friendships on Facebook
  "Love it or loathe it, Facebook is the new MySpace...oh, and the new Twitter, the new Flickr and pretty much every other time-waster known to man"

Chris Bignell starts blogging and sets up shop

I've just added a new PR blog to my feeds, that of Chris Bignell, founder of newly set up XL Communications. Chris is a senior bod in the PR industry having led Motorola and Toshiba's PR up until recently. Prior to that he was at agency Company Care PR, which was when I knew him. I was a junior in-house tech PR and he was my agency's account director. I learnt a lot from him then and hope to learn much more about barbequeues and cats (and PR) from his new blog. (Hi Chris!)

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