Strategic Public Relations

Fed Ex, UPS Blog?

Nope, the leading expeditors are not blogging..not that I am aware of anyway. But Bloglines just announced that you can track your packages through your Bloglines Feeds.

Now, you can have Bloglines track the status of your UPS, FedEx, and USPS packages. From your My Feeds page, click the Add link in the left pane. Then, click the Package Tracking link in the right pane. From there you can enter tracking numbers for UPS, FedEx, and USPS packages. Also, you can do a search on a specific tracking number. Entering a tracking number will create a subscription in your account that is updated whenever the status of your package changes.

If it absolutely, positively HAS to be there overnight, you can rest assured your media kit, tchotchke or high-resolution images have arrived safely to your editor without missing a second of your precious RSS feeds. Now if only RSS could clean my oven.

Is it me, or shouldn't Fed Ex or UPS blog? There have to be some great travel stories or behind the scene details these folks could provide the blogosphere. More importantly, I am willing to bet there is an audience out there interested in what they might have to say...top-down or bottom-up.

Product Placement is Morphing, But is it Working?

Consumer marketers are giving the four P’s a workout lately. Product placements are making big news and raising bigger questions as companies like Home Depot, Coca-Cola and even Caterpillar are pushing the bounds of promotion to boost more than product sales.

My first experience with product placement came while working for the Iams Company’s then PR agency. Iams had provided some free bags of pet food to a product placement company. The food was included in an episode of Northern Exposure. In return, Iams got a bill for $4K and some glossy 8x10’s of a scene in the Northern Exposure general store. You can see the product in the background.

Branded Entertainment
The pet food example raises the biggest question? How do you measure the effectiveness of this tactic, especially as the placements get more creative and unconventional?

Product placements are pushing the envelope to try and escape TiVo. Just look at the Apprentice. Last week, Home Depot hitched their wagon to The Donald. It was interesting to see how Home Depot supported the appearance. They ran an ad during the show promoting their in-store Apprentice “How-To” classes. The combination gets Home Depot more buzz, brings customers into their stores and offers an approach to measuring the success of the placement.

Evidently most consumers do not mind product placement, depending on how it is done. But it is still a questionable approach to creating awareness. According to Ad Age (registration required), network executives are getting savvy to this new generation of product placement, calling it product integration or branded entertainment. This is in part so they can charge more for it, but it is also in response to the increase in marketers looking for new ways to put products into programs.

The Dark Side of Product Placement
Product placement started in the 1930s. Since then it has been done, redone and overdone. Remember The Restaurant? American Express was sponsoring the "unscripted drama" and seemingly every other scene included a gratuitous product placement—from a contrived reference by someone on the show to a lingering camera shot of an Amex card. Product placement is one of the reason’s the show was panned. (Emphasis on one of the reasons, but I digress.)

Since then, the media bring us an array of examples with an equally diverse level of effectiveness. Burger King recently took an irreverent approach, mocking themselves on an episode of Arrested Development. And Survivor has deals in place with several advertisers, getting Ad Freak to ponder about alternative uses for products from GM, Home Depot and P&G.

Product placement is on the rise, but so is scrutiny for this tactic. If you decide to investigate product placement, I would offer the following advice. Do it big and do it right, but make it measurable and most of all—be careful.

E-Mail is Dead, Long Live RSS

OK, the subject of this post should read: "Proclaiming something to be dead is dead." But I figured this headline might raise more ire. The gimmick of proclaiming the death of one industry, discipline, technique or technology due to the creation of another is just asking for it. When people claim public relations is dead, when they claim anything is dead for that matter, I laugh. It shows a complete oversimplification and misunderstanding of what we do so they can place their related field on a pedestal.

B.L. Ochman lists nine words not to use in a blog post. Might I add the above approach to the list? Heck, while we're at it, making absolute statements and defining blogosphere rules should join the ranking...even though I'm doing so above. You are just making yourself fodder for a rash of posts noting the error in your thinking.

With the above rant, er, observation in mind, I read this article by David Daniels. RSS' effect on e-mail marketing makes the point that e-mail marketing is not dead. OK, based on the penetration of RSS alone, that's accurate. Not to mention, each technology has pros and cons. If your needs can be addressed by both technologies, it is really your goals, objectives and target audience that should drive your choice of one over another.

But Daniels makes himself the poster child for "you're wrong" follow-up posts with the following statement:

"RSS provides opportunity, particularly for newsletter publishers, but let's not kid ourselves. As it's repurposed for more direct marketing initiatives, it won't be a smooth, clutter-free ride. As e-mail marketers, we can relax. This technology won't seriously compete with our channel, so we can focus on what we need to: making e-mail marketing more relevant!"

Something tells me Fergus Burns is hoping the rest of David's colleagues listen to him and kick their heels up.

Me? I have a mix of e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds. But I could see getting rid of the majority of my e-mail newsletters if they offered RSS feeds of their content. Not all of them, but most of them.

Hobson & Holtz, Global PR Blog Week 2.0

If you have not stopped by For Immediate Release, I highly recommend doing so. Neville and Shel are providing great content and the site also offers folks an easy, relevant way to learn all about podcasting.

So learn by doing and download their latest program which includes an interview with Uber PR Blogger, Steve Rubel. There is some great insight into the emerging blog space and his firm's plans for their blogging practice.

Can you hear the buzz? OK, probably not, but get ready for Global PR Blog Week 2.0. Last year's group is getting organized for the 2005 event. As soon as a date is picked, we'll let you know. I'm contributing which means I'd better start thinking about what I want to report on.

Speaking of reporting, the discussion on bloggers vs. journalists continues to evolve. Richard Edelman's recent request for public relations practitioners to act more like journalists is much-needed. Let's hope everyone heeds the call. But I will still assert that even though we should ACT more like journalists that does not make us journalists. Well, not me anyway.

Will GM Blogs Respond to Bad News?

Will GM's blogs be tested by recent news of job cuts at the automaker? According to the Wall Street Journal, GM "plans to cut its North American white-collar work force...The cuts in salaried staff could be as deep as 28 percent in certain functions, according to the newspaper that cited industry officials and analysts."

Anyone that has visited the company's Smallblock Engine and Fastlane blogs knows they do not lend themselves to discussing “job actions.” But blogs are a dialogue and readers may steer the conversation to this news.

Regardless of how this unfolds, I’m sure Smallblock and Fastlane will continue to be great examples of corporate blogs. The blogs have been a well-publicized success, boosting the company's image with a refreshing dose of Detroit transparency.

Michael Wiley, GM's director of new media, says in B2.0, "we're really committed to avoiding corporate-speak and keeping this really transparent. This blog was an attempt to get GM more involved in the dialogue and to get people talking to us. We see this as a direct line to enthusiasts, supporters -- and detractors."

This is simply another example of why corporations should create blogs in the first place. You have a place for customers to be vocal—regardless of whether they are happy or angry. Just be prepared for the conversation to change, regardless of your blog’s focus, and have the steps in place that will allow you to respond. For example, if your company gets into labor issues, be prepared for Union members to show up on your product blog. This can be an opportunity...depending on how the company responds.

As of this post, GM is not addressing this online. The company is promoting a sales conference call on April 1st. Which reminds me, I would not be surprised if GM started podcasting its investor relations conference calls. Investor relations is a perfect fit for podcasting.

Blog Referral Experiment

My own version of Craigslist. A reader sent me a note asking for some help in retaining some public relations services. Here are the details:

I own a very small motorcycle touring company in California. I am interested in getting some P.R. help to raise my company's profile, but since I'm a one-man shop I'm afraid I'm too small for a traditional P.R. agency.

I asked if he wanted someone local, or if a virtual setup would work. He wants someone based in the Orange County/Long Beach/Los Angeles area, so he can have some face-time.

If you fit the bill, send me an e-mail. Initially I sent this request out to a Yahoo! Group I belong to and dropped an e-mail to a colleague at a larger agency in the area. This approach turned up nothing. I'll let you know if this generates any interest.

Martha Talks?

She's baaaack!

I won't get into a ton of detail here. You can read the news and there is plenty more at the Martha Stewart & Public Relations blog.

But it is interesting to witness Martha's post-prison strategy with the media. She is being selective on how she merchandises her prison stay, but clearly she is merchandising it. Case in point: the flat-bed truck waiting at the airport, courtesy of MSLO, so reporters could get a good photo of Martha walking onto the plane.

Also noteworthy is that Martha Talks , her main Web presence during the trial, is no longer being updated. All of her Web announcements will now be found at home base. No surprise.

So in review of Martha's legal wranglings, I will give Martha Talks the Gallant and the infamous CBS salad comment the Goofus. What's next? Well, she made money while in prison and, as you read this, MSLO stock is on the rise. We're simply at the beginning of her well-planned return.

Yahoo! Shows up Late to the Party

What better way to celebrate your birthday? Attend a trade show! Well, at least it was in NYC. 10-year-old Yahoo! announced at Search Engine Strategies that it will focus more on blogs.

Web logging will be part of Yahoo's focus on personalized media. The company already is offering blog-publishing services in Japan and Korea, Yang said. While he didn't say whether Yahoo! would provide similar services in the U.S. market, he did say that Yahoo! will tie blogging into more of its services in the next few months.

Talk about showing up late to the party. Google owned blog search BEFORE it bought blogger. Microsoft has already stepped up its blog focus and I'd be willing to bet my Bill Gates and Robert Scoble action figures that Longhorn will bring us some blog-friendly features.

So Yang shows up to the 2005 Search Engine Strategy conference and talks about blogs in the future tense? Good luck with that Jer.

Yahoo! Goofus & Gallant: Yahoo! gets the Goofus and the Gallant today for trade show public relations. What better way to show your industry expertise than keynoting a search engine conference during your 10th year of business? They are getting a ton of coverage and promoting the milestone online.

But Yang focuses more on the fact that Yahoo! is losing the Overture name and absorbing the brand along with the business they bought a few years back. It would be like attending MacWorld and not learning about any new products, just some name changes. Yahoo! should have planned accordingly so they would have had something to unveil at this show. This was an opportunity lost.

It is hard to imagine Yahoo! is only 10 years old. I remember a colleague telling another co-worker to go to "www dot yahoo dot com" and our co-worker doing the "RKO Dog." The RKO Dog is when someone cocks their head to one side as if to say, huh?

When I read the coverage of Yang's keynote, I was doing just that.

New Blog/Communications Specialty Firm Announced

It's about time. Elizabeth Albrycht, Christophe Ducamp, Guillaume du Gardier and Neville Hobson announced the launch of Blogging Planet. The firm will help companies adopt new communications tools such as business blogging, wikis, RSS feeds and podcasts.

They join some other firms that recently launched blogging practices. And what I like about Blogging Planet, Voce and CK's Micropersuasion is that they all took their own advice. They looked, listened, learned and engaged blogs and other technologies before simply adding the expertise to a list of services offered. Congrats to all the firms. If you build it, will they come? It is one thing to show up at a luncheon to learn about it, quite another to invest in a relationship with a professional firm. My hope is that businesses are ready to get serious about blogging. GM's full court press into these new technologies would certainly pave the way for more timid companies to get involved.

One ding I will give our folks at Blogging Planet is on their press release. While I prefer one sentence boilerplates, I also prefer that they are not run on sentences.

Blogging Planet, an alliance of internationally recognized practitioners in participatory communications based in Paris, France and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, provides counsel and training to organizations in Europe and the United States on how to effectively adopt new communications tools, such as blogging, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts, and more for a wide variety of corporate functions, including corporate communications, marketing, public relations, employee communications and investor relations.

Say that three times fast.