The New View From Object Towers

So, farewell then New View from Object Towers

I moved my blog over from Bloglines in June 2005 - and now, some 340 posts later, it is off to a new home here.

Huge thanks to everyone who has read, commented and tracked back here. Much appreciated. Hope to see you over at the new place some time soon.

43 Days Of Blog Silence

First, apologies for the paucity of posting over the last 43 days. Just to reassure Sally, nothing untoward happened at the Flackenhack awards in October to cause me to fall off a blog cliff.

No comas here.

However, being referred to as "the de facto godfather of PR blogging" did cause me to fall off my chair (and if I'm the godfather, who are the parents?)

But to take things in reverse order, astute readers (if I still have any left) will note that I have changed the name of the blog to In Front Of Your Nose. This is a none too subtle reference to the the title of an Orwell essay  from 1946 as well as the fourth volume of his Collected Journalism and Essays. The concluding paragraph struck me as incredibly pertinent when I first read it nearly 25 years ago. I think it is even more relevant now - especially in relation to blogging (and PR: simply replace “politics” with “PR”):

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one's subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one's thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.

So why the name change and blog silence? Suffice to say, I have been occupied on other matters - namely a decision to take some time away from the world of tech PR (the current trendy phrase is I believe, adult gap months). For a variety of personal and professional reasons, it seemed a good opportunity to do it as this point. 

Clearly there has been something in the air recently as other PR bloggers such as TWL and Strumpette have decided to retreat from the fray (though I see that Amanda has taken a very brief retirement and is now back in business).

I will be back on the professional front at some point in early 2008 with something shiny and new. In the meantime, I will continue to post my views on all things tech PR here for the time being - though a new blog is planned in the near future.

Again, apologies for blog silence - appreciated people getting in contact to check that I was OK due to my lack of posting - but near normal service will resume shortly.

Dan Illett wins best freelance journo award

Danny Bradbury was robbed,

Microsoft/Stoermhoek win first award...

..for best triumph in face of adversity.

Hugh  McCleod strangely not around to collect the award - but Phil Devery from Microsoft was.

Collecting the gong, he said: "It had fuck all to do with me."

Nice.

How to get coverage on BBC Click with Chris Long

Knock a glass of champagne over him. Congrats to the PR who did that a few moments ago - barely 8pm and already people falling over - marvelous!

And ex-colleague Nicky Alvey asked me to mention the porn tree - apparently it will mean something to people who worked at Brodeur in the late 90s.

Anyway - we are all waiting breathlessly for the awards to begin.

Drink count: +2 glasses of wine.

Flackenhacks - let battle commence

So here we are at the inaugural Flackenhack awards in the ultra chic Audi showroom in Piccadilly. Peter Kirwan is nervous and TWL is off down the pub - sounds about right. 200 tickets sold, so this really is the only PR show in town tonight. The excitement is, well, palpable. And the Pretenders are playing on PA system - perfect.   

More news as guests arrive.

BTW - the keyboards on the PCs are very cool,shiny and metallic - and difficult to type on. Get my excuse in early.

Drink count: one glass of champagne.

Text 100 outsources back office functions to India

PR Week reports today that Text100 is centralising its back-office account servicing to a new office based in India.

The ‘Global Resource Optimization’ service will apparently provide account administration, content and secondary research to support client campaigns and pitches.

The story doesn't give any detail on exactly what content and secondary research will be done overseas (press release writing? features tracking?) - but as I discussed here last November, If 70pc of legal work can be offshored, who says 70pc of PR work can't be? Looks like Text 100 are first out of the gate among the bigger agencies - will be interesting to see how they get on. And what impact it has on profitability.

Do IT decision-makers still read the trades in print? Jury still out.

Peter Kirwan at FullRun picked up on earlier post  of mine regarding the relevance of IT trade mags to senior IT decision makers.

He cites a couple of surveys that appear to contradict my argument:

1. A study of 600 senior executives worldwide from the FT and US ad agency Doremus asked respondents to comment on the suggestion that "print media are becoming obsolete". Fully 73% disagreed. Meanwhile, two-thirds said that they paid more attention to print ads than the online equivalents.

2. Back in June, Hill & Knowlton produced another example of the genre. Surprisingly, perhaps, the agency's survey of IT purchasing decision-makers found a strong bias toward print titles among respondents.

On point one, it may be true that they pay more attention to print ads than online - what isn't mentioned is how much general attention they are paying to the mags themselves - if they are only having the odd glance, it still doesn't bode well for print advertising.

On point two, one thing I didn’t mention last time was that although the senior IT decision makers I talked to didn’t read the mags themselves, a number of them said they passed on these titles to other junior colleages – occasionally, they will have a particular piece highlighted to them.

In which case, it would remain perfectly valid for IT decision makers to say that they still regard IT trade mags as important – just not in the way you might expect ie by actually reading them.

It makes for an interesting PR challenge - how do you craft stories that persuade lower level decision makers that they have something that might be of interest to their boss?

As Peter says, in the absence of compelling reader research among IT decision-makers, you pays your money; and you takes your choice.

Tech Blogger Face Off at the Flackenhack 2007 Awards

What have I done?

The Flackenhack 2007 Awards, the alternative awards for the UK's technology PR and media community, are only a few weeks away - Tues, Oct 23rd to be precise.

Along with my friend Fiona Blamey at Prompt and Stephen Davies at WebIT, we have agreed (perhaps foolishly) to take part in what is being described as a Tech Blogger Face off by the organisers.

As Fiona said to me, sounds more like bear baiting. The image of us being prodded with sticks in a cage is clear in my mind.  Still, the beer is free, which should go some way to easing the pain - and by all accounts, it will be a fun night - I gather a bumper turn out is assured judging by ticket sales.

If you are planning to go, be gentle with us.

Losing sight of the basics in PR

For all the general noise about the potential of PR 2.0 - blogging, vlogging, podcasting, etc - two recent posts from very different ends of the spectrum suggest we've all lost sight of the wood for the trees.

First, up is Andrew Brown at The Guardian with his piece entitled: This article is not available as a podcast or videoblog.

He compares and contrasts information compression between the written word and audio/video:

"So if I want to absorb something complicated quickly - or even, when I need to do so, slowly - the efficient way to help me is to write it out first. When you think of it, the time compression between reading and writing is quite astonishing: the thriller that lasts for half a plane journey will have taken half a year to write. Even The 39 Steps, which John Buchan is supposed to have written in a fortnight while convalescing, takes only a couple of hours to read.

By contrast, audio and video are not lossy compression. They are lossy expansion. They take more time to convey less meaning. There are some things which print cannot easily - or at all - convey, and which sound and pictures can. But there are surprisingly few of them. Just for an experiment, try listening to the television news while not watching the pictures. You will be just as well informed and half your attention has been freed for other things. You will also notice - without the distractions - that hardly anything of any interest has been said at all. If you just read a transcript of what has been said, you will have learned even more, and in even less time."

In other words, most of the material flying out of the PR 2.0 tool box currently should probably have been left as plain old text. Or perhaps not even said at all.

On a related theme, via Strumpette, Loren Feldman, President of 1938 Media  presents a very, er, forceful case for What's Wrong With PR Today. His simple message is that for all the cheaply available technology available to produce video clips, podcasts, etc, 99.9pc of the content is rubbish. Creating a compelling audio broadcast, or editing a video brings with it a skill set that most current practitioners don't possess. "Editing is an art", he says. Robert Scoble is singled out as a prime example of the tech heavy amateur.

And he has a point - witness the number of print technology journalists who are now being asked to do podcasts or appear as web TV presenters - with all due respect to them, most don't cut the mustard - either because they've had no training to do it - or with the best will in the world, they have a voice or face for print.

And the same applies to PR - hence why so much of the material being produced doesn't hit the mark - though mainly due to Andrew Brown's argument that it doesn't expand meaning in a valuable way compared to the time to create or express it". As he says:

"The point of an advertisement, however, as of almost everything else that is published in journalism, is that it can all be boiled down to a couple of sentences. With an advertisement, the essential message is only ever two words long: "Buy this."

Replace advertisement with press release or PR and the point remains the same.

PR needs to get back to the basics of focussing on developing meaningful and valuable messages and content - and using the appropriate tools to do the best job - which doesn't always mean defaulting to a microphone or webcam.