The Online PR Week: July 12-16, 2004

A group of PR Bloggers is organising an online PR week to be held in July. The purpose of the week is to focus on some key issues and attract attention to the emerging role of PR bloggers in developing and spreading knowledge about public relations. Often decried as a secretive profession we want to share our knowledge with everyone and encourage a better understanding of the contribution we make to our societies.

Trevor Cook, who publishes the Corporate Engagement blog from Australia, is the mastermind behind a week of PR debate being hosted by twenty PR bloggers around the globe.

I will be participating if I can get the logistics to work. I will be offline during the first part of the week.

Program: Draft as of May 26 (more info on the New PR Wiki)

MONDAY 12 JULY – PR in the Age of Participatory Journalism

Steve Rubel (Micro-Persuasion) interviewing Jay Rosen, Chair, NYU Department of Journalism, author of the Pressthink weblog (confirmed)

Trevor Cook (Corporate Engagement)

Ryan May (Minnesota Public Relations Blog)

TUESDAY 13 JULY – Corporate Blogging

Jeremy Wright (Ensight)

Trudy Schuett (WOLves) How Business, Governments and Non-profits can use blogs to communicate with the public

Roland Tanglao (Streamline)

Hans Kullin (Media Culpa)

Todd Sattersten (A Penny For…) and (800-CEO-READ Blog.)

Wayne Hurlbert (Blog Business World)

WEDNESDAY 14 JULY – Making PR Work: Creativity and Strategy

Elizabeth Albrycht (CorporatePR) – Corporate PR – Practical strategies

Alice Marshall (Technoflak) – Media relations issues – including pitching small businesses to editors

Bernard Goldbach (Irish Eyes) – Promoting client messages through blogs

Mike Manuel (Media Guerrilla) – Micro media measurement

Angelo Fernando (Hoi Polloi) – Impact of blogs on PR and Marcomms

Anthony V Parcero, (eKetchum Digital Media Group) – Developing interactive PR strategies

THURSDAY 15 JULY – Crisis Management

Jim Horton (Online PR)

Kevin Dugan (Strategic PR) – On the Martha Stewart case

Colin McKay (Canuckflack)

Steve Rubel (Micro-Persuasion) interviewing Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News and author of the forthcoming book We the Media

FRIDAY 16 JULY – The State of the PR Profession

Richard Bailey (PR Studies)

Robb Hecht (PR Machine)

Tom Murphy (PR Opinions)

Philip Young (Mediations) – Ethics in PR

Corporate blogs as an internal channel

One of the reasons I started blogging was that I thought this would be an interesting way of communicating for the company I work for. But it has been hard to find really good examples of corporate blogs.

So I found this article to be a good reading for would-be corporate bloggers. Clickz.com writes about Symmetricom, the world’s leading provider of atomic clocks, and precision devices and equipment. They use blogs to keep in touch with a decentralized sales force that includes 325 representatives and distributors scattered throughout the world.

Jeanne Hopkins, Symmetricom’s senior manager of e-marketing and transactional sales channels says: “My boss now says it’s the most fantastic sales tool he has ever seen implemented in an organization. And people in the field tell us they feel more connected to the company — and in the know.”

Bloggers influence big media

Online Journalism Review reports about blogger Robert Cox who tried to get The New York Times to get a correction in the paper. He tried everything, but in the end, it was his parody of the Times’ correction page – and the overreaction from the Times’ legal department – that got the newspaper to change its policy.

Link via Dan Gillmor.

New York Times in unusual media culpa over Iraq coverage

The New York Times today had a healthy and unusual article (free registration required) about its own coverage of the Iraq war.

“Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.”

Some parts of the coverage the paper is not happy with, and that includes for example trusting sources like Ahmad Chalabi or people close to him.

“The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on “regime change” in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks.”

A sample of the coverage is online at nytimes.com/critique.

Consumers use blogs to get even with brands

I was reading this post on Whatsnextblog about how disgruntled former employees use the internet for revenge. A few minutes later I stumbled onto this website, saabdisaster.com, which is a blog that was “created because Saab Sweden and it’s agent in South Africa are having big problems for the last six months, and we, Saab owners, are the victims of that!” There seems to be at least 17 Saab owners committed to the blog and they claim to have had 9000 visitors during the last week.

The initial reaction is of course that this is a public relations disaster for Saab in South Africa, but because of the viral nature of blogs, these things have a tendency to spread. One post was made on the subject in a discussion forum at UK Saab owners club and traditional media reported about the site too. One wonders if Saab has a strategy in place to monitor if and how this spreads through the blogosphere?

For the record I have a Saab 9-5 and I’m very satisfied with it, but then again, I’m not in South Africa.