By Linda Forrest
There has been a lot of bad news coming out of the publishing sector in recent years and the latest segment of the publishing world to sound the alarm has been the business-to-business space, with the majority of high-profile publishers like Ziff Davis Enterprise, Nielsen and Penton announcing layoffs and restructuring.
This piece in Folio analyzes the recent spate of announcements and asks whether it’s time for B2B publishers to panic. The conclusion seems to be that those publishers that have already made a significant transition from print to online holdings will prevail, whereas those exclusively devoted to print will continue to struggle.
As noted in the article though, it’s important to realize that B2B readers behave somewhat differently than B2C readers in that they’re not sitting in front of their computers all day, meaning that print publications and portability play a more important role with these outlets.
Only time will tell how trade information is communicated in the long term. For the time being, however, there’s a healthy mix of both print and online outlets where our clients can receive valuable coverage and glean intelligence about their markets.
By Linda Forrest
Today on MediaBistro, I was directed to a piece on Portfolio‘s web site that talks about WashingtonPost.com‘s tinkering with its links on several microsites to enable instant pop-ups of additional data on mouse rollover that doesn’t necessitate leaving the site. This is nothing new to those of us familiar with WordPress blogs as the Snap feature currently used on this site and others does the same thing. Some grumblings in the media about the glut of interactive content on online news sites fly in the face of the theory I introduced yesterday in my post about online news and the process being the product. Is this indicative of a widespread dislike for too much dynamic content or a holdover of viewing the new media with old media sensibilities, the very point of the Buzz Machine article that spawned yesterday’s post?
By Linda Forrest
I read an interesting blog post today at Buzz Machine on the changing nature of the media. The post illustrates that news, unlike in the print-only days, has mutated online such that it’s a collaborative endeavour best summed up by the following Marshall McLuhan-esque line from the article, “In print, the process leads to a product. Online, the process is the product.”
The post has a number of charts and diagrams to help illustrate this point and it did get me thinking with the axiom that with online media, the process is the product. Indeed, since I began my career in media relations close to a decade ago, generating media coverage has changed considerably. It used to be that this was a clearly defined process and that once the article had been published, that was that. Now, with the organic nature of the web, a variety of other voices can be added to the piece in the form of comments, opinions, corrections, links, and any other range of inputs.
Well-known technology blogger Om Malik stated a month ago, “I have often said that the real value of blogs lies in the intelligence embedded in the comments.” and perhaps it is fair to extend this to online news as well – the news isn’t in the news itself in the traditional sense, but in the conversations that it starts and the resultant collaborative coverage as a whole. If indeed this is true, the challenge then becomes managing one’s brand and messaging as other inputs raise their voices and add to the conversation.
By Linda Forrest
I can’t help but share what I think is a brilliant PR campaign by Dr. Pepper. The company has agreed to give every person in America, except for Slash and Buckethead, two guitarists who have famously quit working with Axl Rose in various incarnations of the band Guns ‘n Roses, a free can of Dr. Pepper if the band, such as it is, puts out its long awaited album Chinese Democracy before the calendar year is through.
A little history on Chinese Democracy. It has been in production, supposedly, since the early 1990s. Every six months or so, Axl Rose says that it’s just about complete and that it will be released shortly. Then, some sort of internal strife or label struggle causes an incalculable setback and the album never comes out. Suffice to say that since Bill Clinton had just entered office when production began, Americans will have to find other ways to quench their thirst as it’s improbable, to say the least, that 2008 will be the year that the fabled album makes an appearance.
Okay, so it has little to do with B2B PR, but it is nonetheless a terrific strategy that’s circumventing a lot of the gatekeepers and barriers to coverage that would traditionally exist for a corporate behemoth like Cadbury Schweppes in reaching its target demographic of males 18-34. Kudos to Ketchum for developing and executing this creative campaign.
The tenuous connection between inmedia and a music-themed PR campaign is that in a former life, I worked in public relations for a variety of record labels and recording artists. For those of you playing the six degrees of separation game, I’m the link here, folks.
By Linda Forrest
This is one of those posts that as I’m writing it, I am second guessing my usage of both punctuation and grammar since in this post, I’m hoping to highlight the fact that everyone needs an editor. I need not worry too much since this, like all materials we write here at inmedia, will pass through at least one editor.
Though we are self-professed “word nerds” here at inmedia, we are also human and, as we all know, to err is human. Still, there are a number of ways to mitigate our humanity when it comes to content production, first and foremost being the review of all materials by a colleague before it is sent to a client for review.
In addition to the multiple sets of eyes that will hopefully catch any punctuation or grammar errors before the piece leaves the shop, there are many online tools that can be useful in building one’s skills as a writer and affirming one’s choice of punctuation or grammar before it leaves the desktop.
Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are useful when you need to confirm spelling or want to branch out from repetitive terminology in a news release or article.
GrammarGirl endeavours to do the impossible — make grammar hip — with her Quick and Dirty Tips.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves is the definitive humorous book on punctuation and a favourite of the inmedia team. (Editor’s note: Linda scored major points in her job interview a few years back when she said she had this little tome on her Christmas wish list!) Online punctuation guides can be found around the web, including this one. It should be noted that a cheeky Gawker post on the death of the semicolon inspired today’s post. May it rest in peace.
Carefully review your own writing before sending it on, and refer to these online resources when determining whether your piece requires a there, their or they’re. Save yourself, your agency and your client the embarrassment of your news release ending up the butt of a PR joke because you confused your its and your it’s, or worse. Don’t let your materials be part of the reported 60% of business writing that contains errors.
