You can imagine this is somewhat exciting for me, and my increasing use of Apps is one of the factors that has me wanting an EEE PC so much.

And, to answer your unasked questions, no, I haven’t met Larry, Sergey or Eric, but yes, I’ve been to the Googleplex in London, and yes, it is as awesome as you’d imagine.

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Danny writes about PR hits and misses (and about a specific miss), and highlights some of the things that PRs do wrong when supporting journalists. He very kindly credits me as being someone who stands out from the PR perspective. Thanks Danny, I think you’re a great tech journo and enjoy our conversations too ;). /mutualbackslap.

My job, for those of you who don’t know, often involves (amongst other things) supporting journalists writing stories by facilitating conversations with my clients (technology companies, for the most part) or their customers, and relevant third parties when we have access to them. Matching the relevant spokesperson/angle/customer often requires a certain amount of research/understanding of the subject areas, and the journalists in question. My status as a creative geek and my past experience as a (student/freelance) journalist does translate into a passion for technology stories that helps me here, as Danny notes. And I love doing it — you have great conversations with very bright people on a daily basis, both media and client-side.

Danny laments, however, that many PR people often don’t get it and proceeds to give a whole string of (mostly pertinent) advice… But I had a couple of issues with the post as a whole:

(1) Bashing at inept PRs publicly is harsh. Even the most experienced PR professionals will occasionally slip up (as do the most experienced journalists), but where Danny pretty much names and shames an entire agency, PRs are often not in a situation where they can respond. Not that I think online feuds would be helpful, but the context of these PR slip-ups is often complex – deadlines, client pressure, etc… events that are mirrored and cause parallel crapness in the world of journalism. Given that most people, never mind most journalists, don’t have the faintest idea what goes on inside a PR agency (“PR, that’s like advertising, innit?”) setting the community of PR professionals up to sound like more of a hindrance than a help through public moaning seems unnecessary. I appreciate that’s not what Danny’s doing, but people don’t tend to focus on the positive with posts of this nature.

(2) The advice — great. The tone, I thought, was unnecessarily harsh. How many PRs treat Danny’s emails / requests for interviews for a National story “with contempt”? Is it possible they were ill / away / the email got caught in their spam filter / the story sounded negative so they needed to get client input? Not excuses, granted, but explanations, and things that could happen to anyone. If they were that hopeless, rude or unpleasant without just cause – then I agree, it’s a major issue. You should take it up with them / their managers / the owners of their agency, etc., especially if it had an impact on your story. If it really happens regularly, then they probably sould be sacked, but it does seem hard to believe that there are (m)any PRs who’ll let straightforward National opportunities slip through their fingers.

(3) The move to RSS. Yes. Absolutely. I agree — all of our clients should have RSS enabled newsfeeds. We advise them accordingly. But… how many PR agencies have complete control over website content, and therefore any control over how quickly that happens? Not many. And does the fact that we have clients with RSS enabled newsfeeds mean that our clients will be happy with us not sending out press releases by email / calling journalists etc? Of course not. So the press list issue will be ongoing, I’m afraid, and will face the same difficulties any significant adminstrative task does.

So in essence: yes, PRs sometimes mess up. So do journalists. And the advice that people like Danny and Charles give out is often helpful. But getting het-up about inadequate PRs in specific circumstances (just like getting het-up over specific journalists in specific circumstances) is, I think, going above and beyond the call… After all, if every PR who had a blog posted about circumstances where journalists cancelled at the last minute/forgot to turn up to/were late for/were rude at meetings with our clients… well, I’d have a lot more stuff under the tag ‘whinge‘. And of course – we couldn’t do this anyway. As a workmate pointed out, four things would likely happen:

we might get the sack
the journalists might not write about our clients
we might damage opportunities for the rest of the agency’s clients
we’d look petty

…which is probably a bit more of a risk than any of us would be prepared to take just to get it off our chests. And my thanks to the colleagues who looked at this post to make sure I wasn’t risking any of the above!

Update: Chris spotted that I misread one of Danny’s points, re; RSS. Danny seems to suggest that PR agencies should host newsfeeds for their clients, not their clients’ websites as I implied, as an alternative way of receiving press releases. This is a whole separate debate which I’ll come back to at some point… but apologies for now, I stand corrected.

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Chris’ response: “Oh. That question…” – which amused me; it did seem likely that if I didn’t ask it, someone else would. He guessed at 10-15 years before it happened, and when we chatted later – we talked about why. And the web, RSS and social media are clearly key contributing factors. How would traditional media be sustained? A part of me had a kind of doom and gloom thought to it all – that all we’d have left was vacuous blogs of people spouting off unresearched, primary-research free journalism… And to this Chris made two points – first he (metaphorically) slapped me into remembering just how blogs add value in other ways (hopefully this one too!), and second — he said that the traditional media that failed to embrace RSS, etc., and provide value in the new order of things, would disappear. But other media companies – and he flagged the BBC and Reuters as two in the UK that were doing good things – will find their way to a new model of sustainability. Obviously the beeb has a slightly different funding model…

Interestingly, in the period where business models adapt and print media starts to subside (and it will, no matter how much you like newsprint the future will be more, if not exclusively, digital) – Chris pointed out how substantial the savings would be for Wired, at least – who could cut costs by 60% by eliminating the print and distribution arms of their business.

60%. Jeez.

This isn’t true for everyone, though. The cost of producing a newspaper is far, far lower — the print process, volume of production, different distribution channels and cheap paper sees to that… so will be harder for a lot of newspapers than it will be for Wired to make the transition from being print-ad funded… to something else, that will probably involve Google adwords…

We talked about the problems with RSS too – primary amongst them the fact that people don’t get it. I’m on a personal crusade to explain the technology to everyone I speak to… but is it enough?? Will you join me in a campaign to get RSS for all? Will you?

On a side note: Chris was attending to promote his new book, the Long Tail, and was very generous with his time – it was a good experience meeting him and I’d recommend anyone interested in market dynamics, social media and the ‘new economy’ kick off with his blog, articles on Wired and the various Wikipedia entries, and if you’re hungry for more… buy the book!

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I’ve mentioned before that Slingshot Studios is specialising in all-digital film production – and Arvind’s working with some cool folks, on some interesting looking projects (from the little I’ve seen). I imagine more will go up at the Slingshot blog (in due course).

I’ll be speaking to them at some point soon about blogging and movie making — will need to look into quite how successfully people have used blogs to market films of late — but the if the paridigmata that are the King Kong and Superman Returns blogs is anything to go by, I suspect film-goers do want to hear things straight from the movie makers mouths (although those examples are arguably atypical ;)).

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Now, I have no call for an aluminium suitcase, but if I did… I’d want one of them. Same goes for IP phones and self defending networks (one of my clients…).

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Rather gratifyingly, when browsing Steve Rubel’s blog, I found that he said the same thing just a couple of days ago.

One of the problems I’ve found with this whole social media lark is the rapid proliferation of new services. I use, and have got the hang of, del.icio.us, but now think that Digg might be worth my while as I work in (and love) technology… and I haven’t even got round to looking at reddit. How do people keep up? And do we need yet another social bookmarking service?

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