Some news do make me wonder if the proverb
There is no such thing as bad publicity
still remains true.
a personal website slash blog
Tag Archive for 'PR'
Last night we attended a great talk given by Amy Walters (political analyst for CNN) about the upcoming US elections and the ongoing democratic primaries. Because of recent private changes I got somehow involved into US politics. Even though I’m just an observer from outside, it’s interesting to watch the political process and how the political landscape of the US seems to change (oh, there it is, the “c” buzzword!) right now.
Anyways, I found especially one quote of Amy Walters interesting. The discussion was about how many people one politician attracts to come and fill up civic centers compared to the other. It’s often seen as indicator for popularity. But, as polls show, it’s not. At least the number of people going to civic centers doesn’t reflect the polls in any sense. It’s a matter of the target group: civic centers are filled up by the “rally people”. People who have time and money to go there.
It made me think about the hype around Web 2.0, the next big thing to generate millions page views and create so much more awareness about your product.
Most Web 2.0 services still only attract the “rally people”: people who have time to spend online and participate in whatsoever web service or people who are somehow professionally involved (mostly techies and PR guys). Or people who spend their saturday afternoons to write blog posts about themselves instead of doing their weekly grocery shopping.
I think all the countless Web 2.0 services, all the effort, still focuses on a very limited group of society.
Although it’s fascinating to see politicians heavily using Web 2.0, their real business, collecting votes, lies outside the web. That’s what polls teach us. The next president isn’t going to be elected by YouTube views, Facebook friends or Blog subscribers, but by real people with real issues they are concerned about.
A good new reason to give Ask another try as search bar default: unlike most other search engines, Ask released a tool, called AskEraser, which allows users to delete their search histories entirely from Ask servers.
User privacy as PR campaign: I’m not sure if this will help Ask a lot since the average search engine user is not aware or simply does not care about left online traces.
However, in terms of user interface and smart features Ask is already my favorite search engine. The problem is that Google still returns better search results and eventually that’s what counts in search engine business. Otherwise the Ask logo would already have been set as default on my upper right corner too… [via NYT]
30 seconds seem fine to answer political questions. It gives just enough time to focus on the question itself and point out the main concept or idea.
30 seconds minimize the risk of politicians attacking each other with rather stupid arguments.
Or maybe it’s just a matter of culture in political discussions. I mean here we’re used to (and probably a good part of the audience is sick of) TV discussions where the majority of politicians keeps on talking endlessly without saying anything substantial.
Some of the questions raised at the CNN YouTube debates in South Carolina where indeed quite interesting. Obviously not as sophisticated as if they were asked by experts, but that’s probably the idea behind the YouTube debates: address regular people, who are talking a regular language and make them participate.
Another thing which really impressed me was hearing the clear answer “yes” or “no” from a politician. Can you imagine?! The last time I’ve heard those words from an Austrian politician, even asked a straight “yes” or “no” question, is quite some time ago.
Due to a really exhausting move and two weeks of office abstinence I’m offline since more than 10 days now, can’t remember when I did that for such a long time, probably during the nineties where only modem connection were available and website took ages to load. But I desperately expect the new dsl-modem/router/ap to arrive every day now. Thanks to some nice bars nearby with free wifi I can get at least a bit of my online dose once a week or so.
However, tomorrow I’m giving a short presentation at the CORP Conference (Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning) in the afternoon session from 2-3.30pm. It’ll be about an exciting project we did last year, exciting because it was pretty unusual for us to do an animation film about regional structures. So if you happen to be there, feel free to drop by and say hi. I doubt I’ll spend much time at the conference because the new apartment still needs quite a lot of my attention. But I’ll certainly make a quick round to see what’s going on and talk to some people there.
Austria’s conservative peoples party invited a handful bloggers to cover the annually party convention. Obviously not more than a PR experiment, but an interesting one, and, frankly, one I wouldn’t have expected from that side of the political landscape.
Besides inviting bloggers, the party will be posting videos on YouTube and photos to Flickr, making friends on MySpace and even is represented in Second Life. Seems like they got some social media budget to play with.
Politicians writing blogs, doing podcast, vlogs or generally participating personally in Web 2.0 (to name the buzzword) are nothing new. As one could observe during US elections those are quite powerful methods to create awareness. At the same time it must be handled carefully. Social media is controlled by the people, beyond the influence of PR departments or press agencies. Once the wrong message is out it can’t be controlled any more and, as we know, bad news are spreading fast, much faster than good news.
Since social media popularity in Europa isn’t as high as in the US, there is still some room for (safe) experiments left, like this one of the peoples party. Blogs surely offer a clever possiblity to reach certain audiences, still a small but increasing target group (as far as I know blogs are currently read by bloggers in the first place) and partly acting as multiplicators.
So what does it mean to invite known and rather popular bloggers instead of advising the own press department to set up and maintain a blog?
The invited bloggers can’t be said to be conservative or traditional peoples party followers. They simply had the opportunity to watch the convention, presentations and speeches (from the best press table btw) and blog about it, or not, don’t if they were asked to write at least a minimum of words on their blogs.
There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
(Brendan Behan)
The result of that experiment is mainly a controversial discussion about the party, speeches, concepts, etc. in the blogosphere. Even a post titled “7 reasons why I will not vote for this party” from one of the invited bloggers showed up.
Inviting guest bloggers were in that case quite a good option: the posts are not directly seen as marketing activity and therefore leave a more honest impression than other initiatives. It doesn’t really matter if the posts are positive or negative. Suddenly blog readers receive an entire stream of posts about the peoples party. Posts which trigger follow-ups (like this post), lead to discussions within the blogosphere and create even more awareness about the party. Hey, otherwise I never ever would’ve thought about or even mentioned the party convention.
After all, I think it was a very clever move.
Clearly, a bad public opinion is still better than no public awareness at all. But if your target group starts joking about your product than there is possibly something going very wrong.
[youtube 2yhgvJaO9uE]
Why didn’t CK include bloggers in their campaign?
There are quite a few rather effective ways to commercially create awareness inside the blogosphere. I think a bottom up approach instead of a top down campaign would market that audience much better.
Smells like terrible marketing…
Finally I managed to upload some parts of the most exciting project I did last year to Google Video in order to show it here and on some other places too.
We were asked to prepare a room for an exhibition and decided to produce a short animation film. The challenge was on the one hand to communicate rather complex content – topics about on-going structural changes such as demography, education, economy, labor market, etc. in that particular region – within short presentation time and on the other hand entertain normal exhibition visitors, mainly non-regional scientists.
What we did was basically link abstract scientific information and regional analysis to real-life stories and experiences of real people living in that region.
It was a very intense project, our time frame was very short, though, it was quite interesting to listen to the stories our interview partners had to tell and, above all, I really enjoyed the way we worked on the visualization.
[googlevideo -6277916183992179226]
Better viewed large at the exhibition or with some more (german) information at the official project site at our clients portal.
I’m pretty proud that a map we did before the Christmas holidays appeared today in an Austrian newspaper. It wasn’t a big deal at all, just collecting data from eligible federal states and visualize it in a single image. More interesting was the sensible political aspect of the content. The map basically shows the allocation of 680 mill. EUR regional aid across Austrian municipalities. So it means a lot for regional development if a municipality is colored or not.
However, the certainly talented designer of the newspaper deleted the legend, changed some colors, reduced the source information and therefore added a questionable 3D effect. Actually there is not so much left of our map…