Strategic Public Relations

CRUNCH Time

A two-year long project comes to an end this week. I'll be quite busy as a result.

There are several topics I want to write about, including Publication Product Lifecycle, Brand Commoditization and Laws of the Network.

So stay tuned. Thanks.

The more things change...

PR Techies everywhere are rejoicing that the Red Herring is back in black. Hopefully their balance sheets will stay there too as they cover "issues related to the global industry in Internet technology. " It will be interesting to see how nostalgic purists weigh in on the new Herring since it is under new management.

BusinessWeek is revamping its design for the first time in 20 years. The "first" issue hits newsstands Monday. It will be great to see the new design. Hopefully it will be more substantive than the WSJ's over-hyped "redesign." It was a well-done, welcome change to THE national business daily, but it was really more of a tweak than a redesign.

When will I offer RSS?

Several folks have asked where they can locate my RSS feed. Sadly, I do not offer RSS—yet.

When Blogger added several features to its free service, I hoped RSS would be included. But it was not to be. So it looks like I need to pony up some dough. Thanks for the feedback. I will add RSS to this site.

Steve Outing notes how RSS is quickly evolving and he foresees media Web sites offering beat-specific RSS feeds. This will occur, as it will increase feed subscriptions. A happy, captive audience translates into an advertising opportunity. We all know, "the first one's always free." And I'll bet media outlets offering RSS feeds will look at how to generate income from this service. If they are not already talking with news aggregators about this, they should be.

The beat-specific approach reminds me of the "my Web site" customization craze. The ability to customize your home page and filter out irrelevant content has been around for many moons. It has gotten scores of people to register with sites like Netscape, Yahoo and MSN. When will Google offer customization? At this point, they should go straight to RSS.

Aggregation, customization and blogs...OH MY!

Brand Models

Is your company's brand a star, problem child, cash cow or a dog? Well odds are good it could be more than one of these models over time.

Brandweek has a great article on finding the Seabiscuit in your brand portfolio...essentially dusting off a once great brand, revisiting what makes it special and turning a poor performer into a growth opportunity.

This is a great growth strategy for larger companies with several brands. It has been proven out by another trend of reviving extinct brands like Indian Motorcycle.

An old brand can learn new tricks.

Consuming Content

All good writers know the right visuals can make the strongest piece more impactful—from simply putting a document on stationery to full-blown layout and design. The goal is to make it easy for readers to consume, and digest, the content. Web sites have always taken advantage of the medium in this regard.

It started with offering documents as .pdf files and offering printer-friendly versions of content. Now "e-mail to a friend" and "download to pda" capabilities are de rigueur. Poynter's Outing notes how this is evolving to include text messaging and instant messaging. The tools are so useful some sites use them as membership incentives. Register with the site and you get access to printer-friendly versions of content.

These "bells and whistles" can appear to be the use of technology for technology's sake. But the best approach is to consider your audience when evaluating how you present content.

Take Design News for example. DN caters to the design engineer and recently revamped its print edition. In the process of surveying its readership, it realized readers were wired enough to enjoy a purely digital edition as well. It has since offered the magazine in print or digital format and increased its circulation in the process. This is also a great case for research-driven strategies. DN changed course based on what it learned and was more successful as a result.

Does Google Know the News?

An interesting article on Nielsen and Google News shows us the top 20 news sites as rated by Nielsen (scroll down). It will be interesting to see if RSS throws yet another wrench into Nielsen's numbers.