Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Are blogs changing PR?


An interview carried by iMedia Connection – ‘Steve Rubel on how blogs are changing the face of PR’ - brings forward a debate of the technical possibilities versus their relevance to the target market and the interest, uptake and commitment of clients to participate. The figures seem compelling. According to emarketer “Once a haven for techies, there are now blogs for everything from celebrity gossip to political commentary to the most mundane personal minutiae. By 2012, more than 145 million people - or 67% of the US Internet population - will be reading blogs at least once per month.” They reckon 12% of US internet users, some 25 million write blogs. Surprisingly more than 100 million internet users, more than 50% are also blog readers. Big numbers then. Consider now some unofficial statistics from our own research in PR activity in the UK industrial market. Whilst the most active portal web sites carry news free of charge and archive thousands of stories, a sampling revealed that the vast majority were generated by relatively few companies or their PR agencies. The larger group of companies submitted very few stories. Some just one token story before presumably losing interest or running out of news. Talking to other PR people confirmed that news output from their clients was hardly prolific. Most needed quite a good portfolio of clients to make their PR business work. In our experience many clients don’t even think they have any news and a key task of a PR professional is teasing out stories in the first place. Then few have any people in-house that can write anything about their business sufficient to interest and editor, let alone a reader. But blogs demand a far bigger commitment by company personnel as there is both an immediacy and inside knowledge that the traditional PR practitioners will find difficult to embrace. For example not just getting the story, but getting client approval introduces a delaying factor. The blog is more of a personal view and works against the secrecy culture many clients have. Only recently a PR professional was lamenting a decision by a client to stop all case studies and third party endorsement stories as they did not want their competitors to know. We all have clients like that – great stories are blocked because the credibility associated with their blue chip customer cannot be mentioned. So the challenge is getting not only the commitment to write a blog, even if ghost written by an agency but also the openness to actually reveal the sort of compelling inside news content people want to read.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Niche markets can offer opportunity during recession and build a sustainable future

For the UK manufacturing sector the current economic crisis comes not after years of boom that banking, retail and housing enjoyed, but after decades of a shrinking manufacturing base. Once the manufacturer for the world Britain as the first to enjoy an industrial revolution, that situation has long since changed culminating in recent times with the big shakeout of the 1980s seeing a major erosion of the once mighty industrial base. As other nations became major low cost suppliers volume manufacture largely moved offshore with China just the most recent of supplier nations. Meanwhile not only has British industry been addressing niche markets, but also redefining what is a niche market. Once seen as uninteresting due to low volumes today’s niche markets are not just about providing manufactured goods, but a package that includes consultancy and service support both adding value for the customer and contributing margin to the provider’s balance sheet. There is also the benefit of an on-going partnership between manufacturer and customer - a distinct advantage compared to products that would only be sold every 20 or 30 years. The combination of consultancy, manufacture and service changes the traditional demarcations and is leading to greater innovation, design flexibility and customization. The customer experience provides direct market research input and builds in loyalty and of course can lead to new opportunities. Meanwhile the beleaguered retail sector resorts to deeper and more frequent discounting. This seems an unsustainable strategy when they neither control the cost of products or design and at some stage the discount approach must run out of headroom. Likewise banks who have to some extent misused marketing methods to sell money they either did not have or was unsecured, might be forced to reappraise whether service might be more valued than selling so called financial products. Just as the manufacturing sector has reinvented itself, so may the retail and banking sector need to rethink service and support, not to mention prudence to the mix and give customers reasons to return loyalty. So niche marketing should no longer be viewed as a back water but perhaps the future. At Technical Marketing we have long espoused a similar philosophy. In short we build relationships with clients that includes advice, but also many deliverables and yes a degree of service support too.