Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2006, global opinion leaders say their most credible source of information about a company is now “a person like me”.
In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today. Opinion leaders also consider rank-and-file employees more credible spokespersons than corporate CEOs (42% vs. 28% in the U.S.).
Also interesting is that trust in government is low in the U.S. (38%) but high in China (83%, up from 63% in ’05).
There is some truly great stuff being produced over at the Global PR Blog Week 2.0 event blog. Check out for example Tom Murphy’s article about pragmatic PR and Dee Rambeau & Chris Bechtel’s great piece about online media relations.
Here’s an odd version of personal branding. “Peter K – former journalist” wants me to buy his books. Apparently you can build a career on having once been a journalist. File under “has-been positioning”.
Yesterday I posted that the domain rokr.se was still available. Today it is gone, registered by a Lukas Marberger.
Having spent three weeks in my summer house in July, I had to wade through hundreds of emails when I returned back to civilization. One of them was from one of largest companies in Sweden, I will spare you which one because I am a friend of their head of PR. I believe it is the first time I have been approached by the communications department of a large Swedish company in my role as a blogger. I’m glad that public relations professionals are aware that bloggers are influential and potentially a target for PR pitches. But when it is performed in such a clueless way, I’m baffled.
First of all, the PR person hasn’t read my blog. If she had, she would know that I never ever write about stuff from her company’s industry. Is it really so hard to figure out that I blog about PR and media? It is in the headline. I do not blog about your products.
Second, if you are in the process of sending out a mass mailing, please make sure that I don’t feel like I’m on the receiving end of a spam attack. The email I got had obviously been forwarded at least once, so it had the “>” sign before every line, and the second half of the first sentence had apparently been edited, because it had a different color than all the other lines, at least in my email program. Translated:
> Hello,
>
> You receive this email because you are one of the most frequently read and
noticed blogs in Sweden.
>
> We wonder if you are interested in subscribing to press releases from XYZ?
Now, I am not trying to be mean, rather show that if you are pitching bloggers, you need even more finesse and fingerspitzgefühl than if you are pitching journalists. Not the other way around because bloggers will tell everyone that you’re making a mistake. Besides, it would have been smarter to let people sign up to press release subscriptions via the online press room or via RSS, but of course you can’t.
Precis, The Association of Public Relations Consultancies in Sweden, are hosting an event tonight that I am going to attend. The event is called Spinn 2004 and during the evening Precis will hand out awards for best marketing PR in 8 categories. The name Spinn upset people at agency Spinn Action Marketing AB, who thought Precis should have managed to give their competition a name that had not been taken by an agency.
I have another problem with the word “spin”. It doesn’t have very positive connotations to it and I am surprised that the PR industry really wants to be associated with spin or to be recognized as spin doctors.
Some negative definitions of the word spin:
> twist and turn so as to give an intended interpretation; “The President’s spokesmen had to spin the story to make it less embarrasing”
> make up a story; “spin a yarn”
The name was coined by Citigate Gramma.