Last week Mike Manuel did some research on the frequency of posts among fellow PR bloggers, including me. He concludes that “the average PR blogger creates a little more than 50 posts per month or ~2 posts per day”. During the period that he researched, my blog doesn’t reach that figure, but on the other hand 25% of the content was generated by one single blogger, Steve Rubel of course, so I think I did fine.
Tag: PR
Vdlkomna
Technology… is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ~C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 1971
Advances in technology has made it simple to communicate with thousands of people at the push of a button. Email newsletters cost close to nothing to produce and send to a number of clients and prospects. But the greater the opportunities, the greater the risks. If you are for example a PR agency – an expert in communications – you need to check that your email newsletter works across different types of platforms and browsers. In Sweden we have three letters (å,ä,ö) that sometimes gets you into trouble, like in this newsletter from a Swedish PR-agency (the three letters above are replaced by others, turning the whole text into gibberish).
The growth of astroturfing
You thought that fake grass can’t grow, think again. Astroturfing seems to be a popular campaign method from both democrats and republicans this fall, and a successful method as well. Here is an example that even shows how many letters that have been sent to certain newspapers. As if sending 121 close to identical letters to the editors at San Jose Mercury News would make any (positive) difference. Haven’t these people heard about Dan Gillmor? Of course it didn’t take him long to debunk this initiative.
The flood of fake grassroots letters to media forced Barbara Curtin, opinion editor of the StatesmanJournal, to voice her concerns, urging readers to use their own words.
“You might have just one chance to write an election-season letter. Make it count.”
Question is at what point an astroturf campaign becomes counterproductive.
Orcinus on astroturfing
David Neiwert wrote an interesting piece last week on Orcinus about astroturfing and the difference between the campaigns of John Kerry and George W. Bush.
The future of PR
There are so many interesting discussions going on right now at the Global PR Blog Week that it is hard to keep up with the information. If you want a recommendation for a starting point, read Tom Murphy’s article “The State of PR – A Tale of Two Professions”.
PR blogging in Iran
Trevor Cook posts about blogging in Iran, which reminds me that I had an email conversation a few weeks ago with Hossein Emami, who is a PR blogger in Iran.
Hossein, who is a real PR blog pioneer, has his own PR blog and he started and runs a corporate blog for his employer, the Export Development Bank of Iran.This was the first corporate blog in Iran. According to Hossein, one of the most important advantages of a corporate blog is the informal tone of voice, compared to more traditional ways of communication. His personal blog is called Ravabete Omoomi, which means “Public Relaions” in Farsi.
Hossein:
“Now there are 5 active bloggers in Iran who write about PR. I write about Media, electronic public relations, journalism, Information communication technology (ICT) etc.”
He says that there are two PR societies in Iran: http://www.prsir.org and http://www.pr-pa.org (link does not work at the moment) and that blogging is developing in Iran and Iranians are interested it very much. He points out that the vice president Mr. Abtahi has his own blog (mentioned on this blog earlier).
Hossein:
“There are many Iranian journalists who have blogs, such as Dr. Shokrkhah who is the chief editor of “Jam-e-Jam Online”. Jam-e-Jam is one of the newspapers in Iran with highest circulation. Altogether the journalists accept blogs, and use them as a good source of information.”
This is another illustrative example of how Swedish PR practitioners, journalists and politicians are lagging many other countries when it comes to blogging. Hopefully, the more articles are being written about blogging in Sweden, the more people will start their own blogs. The Swedish paper Axess has a long and interesting article about watchblogs and the influence of blogs on journalism. More of this, and blogging will take off soon. (Link to Axess via Erik Stattin)