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I'm flying out to Sydney, Australia tomorrow and will be there through to Wednesday, March 1. Catching up with David Bass who heads our office there and meeting with clients to talk about tech and PR trends in the Valley. I'll see if I can pass on some details about the IT PR market in Oz.
BBC: Tony Blair's ex-media chief Alastair Campbell says he never sent an e-mail or used the internet during his near decade working for the Labour leader. “I never used a computer other than to write - I used it as a word processor,” he told BBC Radio 4's Start the Week...[snip]
“I think the public out there are just consuming news in a completely different way which is way beyond what we did when we were sort of growing up in our 20s and 30s,” he said.
“In a sense they're getting in the driving seat of their own media consumption and their own political consumption and they're saying: 'Well what I'm interested in is X'.”
You betcha.
The 20th E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award kicks off for Silicon Valley tomorrow with an event at the St Regis Hotel in San Francisco. We were fortunate to have three CEOs shortlisted last year, with Brian Hinman, CEO of 2Wire, winning the national award for the networking and communications category. As a result, my colleague, Lucy Allen, vice president, will be giving some insight into the process and the benefits from a PR perspective at the event.
Last year's kick off was quite a flackfest, so look me up if you are there.
Technorati Tags: Ernst & Young
Matt Marshall at Silicon Beat says that Six Apart, the blogging platform developer behind Typepad and Moveable Type, has just landed $12m in series C financing. Intel is rumored to be in on the deal, which consisted of just three firms. The news broke on IDD Magazine which has more here. Six Apart has needed to invest in its infrastructure to keep up with bandwidth demands as it scales, so hopefully this will ease that process going forward. My bet would be that some of the money will go towards further international expansion too.
Update - Om's on the case too.
Technorati Tags: Moveable Type, Six Apart, Typepad, VC
Micro Persuasion: Steve Rubel's testing out the Memetrackers - TailRank and Memeorandum - by asking bloggers to link to this post quoting the word Breememe, seeing how quickly it appears in each, and how that compares with the blog search engines.
Technorati Tags: Breememe, Memeorandum, TailRank
Comment tracking service, CoComment is now open for all. Worth trying, if you haven't already. That said I'm having a few problems whereby it prevents me from posting comments, and tracks every comment made on a particular blog not just a specific post. Also I can't seem to delete comments which I'm no longer interested in tracking, for instance where the conversation has moved on (a good example being the test post which CoComment put up for users to try - every time someone else tries it, I get an alert).
Technorati Tags: CoComment
I'm having a problem with NetNewsWire, my RSS reader. I have a number of Technorati, IceRocket, PubSub and Feedster alerts set up to track topics, links etc. When something new crops up, it shows in NetNewsWire in bold as unread. I read it, and it grays out. But then it pops back up again as unread. I re-read it - no change. Grays out. Ping - it's back. Is there something new - some new nugget of info included in the post which means I should take another look? Nope. NetNewsWire is just crying wolf. Not just once or twice, but over and over and over. Even if I 'Mark As Read' the entire feed, and nothing new comes in to that feed, soon it just shows up as unread once more.
Is this a problem with NNW or with the feeds themselves perhaps? I would have thought NWW can recognize that the content is identical and has been read, so there's no need to refresh its alerts. And since it happens across so many search sites, it seems unlikely to be their republishing the results? Or could it? I don't get this problem with the blogs I subscribe to. Once something is good and read, it stays read.
What's up? Should I try a new reader or just accept that these alerts are going to pretend to be new when in fact they're yesterday's news.
Technorati Tags: Feedster, IceRocket, NetNewsWire, PubSub, Technorati
Todd Defren is letting the cat out of the bag about why agencies fire unprofitable or unpopular clients.
Some campaigns are just not profitable since expectations and demands exceed the time and budget available to deliver. Sure there are peaks and troughs of activity, but there's little point in a relationship which is one-sided and unprofitable. There's an opportunity cost to continuing these campaigns, so it's a fairly easy one to spot and to take action on.
The trickier one, which Todd refers to, is the unpopular account. Demands are fine, budget is adequate, technology is good but it's just not fun to work on. We've all been there. You pitched the account, the campaign was great, but now new contacts have been brought in, and the chemistry is gone. This can be addressed with some frank chats and perhaps switching around the account team - we all have our styles and approaches, so a swap out can often fix the problem.
But fix the problem you must. And Todd hits the nail right on the head, since in the current market you need to safeguard your staff as much as your revenue, if not more. The last thing you want is for your team to leave since they are forced to work on a beastly account. Better to resign the client, find a new campaign and keep your strong team. Good staff won't stick around working with bad clients. And more good clients will only be attracted by a great team. So, the long term view is to take the hit to revenues, disengage with an unpopular client, and find some new biz to work on. Thankfully in the current climate agencies can feel confident in finding new clients in short order.
In fact, it's a useful exercise to sit down periodically and look at the bottom 10% of your client roster - not by budget but by popularity. Keeping a strong client roster is an intrinsic part of keeping and attracting great staff. And that benefits all of your clients, so best to manage the roster proactively.
