Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Journalists surveyed on effective PR contact

From the Publicity Insider (www.publicityinsider.com):


Unless you work in a newsroom every day, it is hard to gauge reporters' likes and dislikes when working with publicity seekers.

Thanks to public relations firm Bennett & Company's annual surveys, we can take the media's pulse. Here's some findings from their Annual Media Survey:
  • Email: Fifty-eight percent of all journalists surveyed preferred email as the main way to receive information, followed by wire service (15%), regular mail (13%), fax (10%), and telephone (4%).
  • In addition, 70 percent of journalists said that they read every e-mail they receive except for obvious spam. Bill's Note: Keep in mind these results are the media's preferences - not what gets the best results for the publicity seeker. When appropriate, the telephone's human connection is still a publicists' best friend.
  • Personalized Address: Fifty percent of the media polled said they respond more readily to a personalized address and 4 percent said that a general editor address will do. The remaining 46 percent did not have a preference. Many noted that while they do not have a preference, personalized communications reach them quicker.
  • Availability of Multimedia: Fifty-nine percent of media polled said that the availability of multimedia (photos, charts, graphs, audio and video) does enhance the chances of a story being used.
  • How important are weekend, night and cell numbers for contacts on news releases? Back in 1990, 44 percent of journalists said they were not necessary. Currently, 72 percent deem full contact info important.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

CTIA Day II

Had a few good meetings today... I really like Audible.com--though I remember that they were the ones that got slammed by the keynote speaker at a PalmSource Developer's Conference for their awful website. You can use Audible to put your podcasts, audio newscasts or audiobooks on your Java, Palm, Symbian, or Windows Mobile device. The company makes it very easy for you to have your favorite content downloaded to your device in minutes and purge your system of old content. Very cool.

Macroport is pretty cool. www.macro-port.com. They allow you to put content on a storage card, and the software on the card identifies what kind of device it has been inserted into and then automatically launches your content in the proper format. Users usually don't know what kind of operating system they have on their device, so this makes it irrelevant. If you publish content--examples I saw were promos of video games and trailers for upcoming movies--this eliminates the stupid factor when dealing mobile content.

JuiceCaster is one of my favorite things I've seen here so far. Juice Wireless now allows you to publish your pictures, text, videos to whatever website you have that enables HTML publishing. Then you can share it with a select group of people or with the public as a whole. The demo I saw was a video they took with their cellphone, uploaded to the juice account, then downloaded on another mobile device to be viewed, then also available on a personal blog. There are so many potential applications for this, but just for personal use it's a great way to share pics and videos with family and friends scattered all over the world. They say that JuiceCaster "connects the user's cell phone to their entire online life." See it at www.juicecaster.com. I dig it.

More to come later. I need to get to the airport.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

CTIA news

Today was my first full day at CTIA and it's been a fun rush of meetings...mostly with people I know, but I also took the time to check out a press conference and look for the smaller "what's new" people. Amazingly enough, according to their press releases they are all the "leaders" in their industries. Never heard of them, but I digress.

This one is pretty cool, actually. A London-based company called Mobix announced peer-to-peer mobile video sharing called "Shoot 'n' Share" in which you can send videos to your friends from your mobile phone. You can send them to another phone, an email address, or a website, or you can send them to a cell phone from your online video storage website.

www.mobixinteractive.com

Bango has signed a mobile search marketing agreement with Yahoo!, and "will offer Yahoo search advertising products and services to mobile content providers, through the integration of Bango's platform and Yahoo's mobile marketing service. This also creates a one-stop solution that allows businesses to establish a mobile presence and billing capability, then create mobile search advertising campaigns on Yahoo to target users who are looking for products and services through their mobile devices."

www.bango.com

My favorite subject: taxes! Keep your filthy taxes off my wireless (and my Internet while you're at it). MyWireless.org launched a new ad campaign to shine a light on how state and local taxes and regulations "threaten to pull apart" the nation's successful wireless framework.

www.mywireless.org

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

CTIA IT Wireless & Entertainment

I'll be traveling to CTIA next week in LA and will be blogging from the event. I'll report on social networking, mobile marketing and electronic communications that is cool and noteworthy--the greatest cutting edge stuff I've ever seen I'm sure.

I'll also have a photo SplashBlog set up so you can see pics as I'm moving around the show.

I've got great meetings set up and I'm excited about the stuff I'm going to see there.

Friday, September 01, 2006

Radio Shack fires off an email

Well, another big case of the impersonal termination of employees via electronic means. Radio Shack sacked 400+ workers and alerted the immediately displaced workers via email. I wonder if the email message was colored pink?

I don't care if you personally alert people in advance that they may lose their jobs, and if they do it will be electronically, that doesn't make it an acceptable approach. It may not be personal to you (yeah, it's just business, got it), but it's personal to them. These are people who dedicate themselves personally to their job with your company and you owe it to each and every one for a supervisor at some level to personally be the bearer of bad news.