Drew B's take on tech PR

Some PR blogs

Been checking the old RSS feeds and see some more PR people are creeping out of the woodwork and starting blogs still. Here's a couple worth checking out: Pudding Relations, by Ben Matthews, a financial and corporate comms guy from Wharton, and Grapevine Consulting, written by freelance concultant and ex-PR from Red, Darika Ahrens.

Columnistastic

PR Week gave me a column this week. No bribes involved, just an offer of a column. How nice, I thought, so got scibbling away. Here's what I said. Please let me know if you like. (ignore the old photo they used, I look v v old now compared).

Learn digital skills – or risk losing out to other disciplines

Drew Benvie 14-Feb-08

PROs should be creating online content and building applications in an effort to protect their territory, says Hotwire director Drew Benvie.

Digital and ­social media specialists in the industry have been talking recently of an elephant in the room. That is the notion that advertising, design and digital agencies are encroaching on PR turf and could potentially steal our work, flatten our revenues and take our budgets.

However, this battle is about much more than who gets what budget. It represents a fundamental shift in the kind of work we are able to do for our clients.

There has always been ­negotiation with our clients and battles with other PR firms and, of course, against other marketing investments. At events I have attended ­recently and in subsequent discussions played out on soapbox blogs, I have seen fellow professionals acting out of character, perhaps a little concerned about the new competitive force entering our room.

But I am seeing an entirely different room - and it is PR professionals that are the elephants.
Since the web began as an outlet for journalism, the ­industry has looked to specialise in getting brands covered in that medium.

The web has bred specialist PROs who create tailored campaigns and can also work independently of journalists, such as virally or through word of mouth. And so it follows that in recent years, with the ­advent of the social web and citizen media, PR has evolved further still.

We have an opportunity to develop the right skills in cutting-edge areas of digital comms around web 2.0, ­social media and word-of-mouth PR campaigns. These are not simply PR plans, budgets and concepts at play, but marketing too. It will help to broaden the industry's ­horizons and get PR a few more seats at the top table. 

So now the grey area emerges between PR and digital media production. Some of us will learn these new skills ourselves. Some will buy in that expertise. But we are now seeing PR practitioners who cannot (and will never need to) write a feature for a magazine, or don't know which journalist to call at a newspaper for placing a story.

But they can create digital content, build applications and make virals that are core to PR campaigns from strategy through to execution.

Such campaigns will be global and pervasive, not ­regional or by sector. They will be barely recognisable as PR to the traditionalists.

The blurred edges bet­ween digital media PR and other marketing disciplines will create new levels of healthy competition in our industry and theirs.

Drew Benvie is a director at Hotwire. He writes Drew B's Take on Tech PR (theblogconsultancy.typepad.com)

My new morning routine, free wi-fi and good coffee

There's an awesome coffee shop a few yards from the Hotwire office called Coffee @ Goswell. It does the best coffee, has massive shabby sofas, and free wi-fi. I go in there most days, but rarely use the wi-fi or work there.

And here's something altogether unrelated. Colleagues past and present (Rachel H in particular) know I'm a bit funny when it comes to GTD. I have a lot of the Lifehacker / GTD type books around helping me to get more out of my day. With a nasty long commute and a family to manage too, I kind of need all that.

So I've decided to mix the coffee and gtd together and start a new regime, starting tomorrow morning. I'm going to catch the early train into London, and get to Coffee @ Goswell for 8am to get my (obligatory) coffee. Then instead of heading to my desk over the road, I'll work on the free wi-fi 'til 9am. Hopefully I can start the day pretty chilled out and still get through an hours worth of work before 9am (and at that time of the morning it's more like 2hrs of work).

We do flexi-time at Hotwire anyway so not like I have to get into the office before 10am if I don't need to. See how this works anyway. I'll be setting my desk phone on fwd to mobile, email and messenger on, and see how coffee shop working suits me for part of the day at least.

Coke blog, Bojo break, and JP's Email 2.0

In a brief round-up of things I've been reading today in my RSS bucket: New corporate blog from a big brand - this time it's Coke! Hey, corporate blogging isn't dead yet! Bobbie Johnson has said he's taking a  one month sabbatical from The Guardian (more here). BT's JP Rangaswami, who is full of interesting musings on the use of social media in business, posts about how we're treating some web 2.0 technologies the way email and computers were once treated by managers.

And for Twitter users, try Gridgjit.com. It shows you your Twitter pages in a grid view. Kind of interesting and useful for browsing when you have frequent-posters as friends.

What will the socialites think! Microsoft stirs rebellion from Flickr, Del.icio.us and the gang

What will happen to my precious social media tools like Flickr, del.icio.us and Upcoming, now Microsoft wants its grubby mitts on the Yahoo! family!!?

That's what I was wondering when I heard about the Microsoft $44 bn bid for Yahoo. Obviously it potentially changes the face of the computer and web landscape. But my first reaction was for us poor users of the very unmicrosofty social media brands that are recent acquisitions of Yahoo and which may soon be part of Office Live or something like that. Check out this article on Wired about the Flickr rebellion that's already starting.

So will this make our Office more social, or could it lock down the best stuff of the web?

* Bonus link

Thanks to Bobbie Johnson for linking to this on Twitter - Last night on Newsnight, they had Robert Scoble and Charles Arthur Bobbie Johnson as their pundits. http://icanhaz.com/nn