MarCom Professional

Friday Roundup 18th July 2008

As far as our MarCom Professional team is concerned, there's a must-see post this week. Amongst the other great content featured below you'll see this post by Trevor Young that highlights two photographic slide shows of outstanding guerilla marketing in action. Click through to watch them full screen.

Leaning forward to read about marketing communications is all very worthy, but sometimes, on a Friday say, it's very nice just to lean back and watch.

Enjoy.  And have a super weekend,

Andrew and the MarCom Professional team.

 

 

Message from God

by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile

Is there no end to the supreme power of the text message? Now it seems that even the Pope has got in on the act. More...

Hotwire recently blogged about a recent change to UK media law that makes a certain practice of ‘fake blogging’ against the law. What used to be just a faux pas is now more than just that. In plain English, the law means that organisations should not pretend to be consumers.

To prove just how relevant this issue is, an article appeared on the front page of the US edition of PR Week, describing an incident where New-York based agency 5W Public Relations acknowledged that a senior executive was involved in misconduct by impersonating a client when leaving a comment on a blog.

The incident arose when 5W Senior Vice President, Juda Engelmayer, left comments under a client’s name on the Failed Messiah blog. More...

... and that's exactly what journalist Sally Whittle has been doing.

In a post titled "I'm not cut out for PR", Sally describes her experiences as she takes on the role of a PR for a short while.

"In a slightly odd turn of events, I have been doing some PR and copywriting for a business in recent months (nothing to do with what I cover as a journalist), and I have to say: journalists suck."

She pitches a story idea to one nationals journalist who rather snootily sent a reply saying: "That's not a story." Next, she pitched the story to a hack who told her that her story was rubbish, but then came back saying her editor liked it, and could Sally write up 800 words for her to customise slightly, which then ran in a paper under the journalists byline. More...

Is there no end to the supreme power of the text message? Now it seems that even the Pope has got in on the act. Hundreds of thousands of young Catholics have gathered for the opening of World Youth Day (no, I didn’t know it was happening either) - a festival aimed at revitalising the church. And what’s one of the easiest, quickest and cheapest ways to reach the masses? With a text message, of course.

Pope Benedict XV1 texted thousands of young pilgrims, urging them to renew their faith. “Young friend, God and his people expect much from u because u have within you the Fathers supreme gift: More...

As I glanced through my regular Monday morning news feeds from various e-magazines about mobile advertising and marketing, one particular piece caught my attention. In between all the stories about the 3G i-phone launch and the varying views on what it can and cannot do (saddo’s) I read a very interesting piece in MobileMarketingWeekly about Fiat's new mobile portal (http://mobile.fiat.co.uk). This is not the first time Fiat has gone mobile so I was eager to see the output.

The portal is the work of AKQA Mobile (one of our industry friends). On a basic level, the site is swift to use, provides clear instructions and very detailed illustrations. More...

The CIPR needs to update their event booking process so that people can book online. Amanda Rose has been complaining about this for months, as months is how long it took for the CIPR to cash a cheque from Amanda from an CIPR event that took place over 3 months ago.

At the moment if you want to book an event or training course with the CIPR, you must send a physical cheque more than a week in advance, which is a bit rubbish. Does anyone actually own a cheque book anymore?

Amanda has started a petition that says the CIPR should integrate an online booking system for their events, a system such as Eventbrite. More...

Here’s a link to a profile in the Evening Standard of Ian Livingston, BT’s CEO. It’s an object lesson in how and why to inject humour, intelligence, humility and anecdote into a conversation with a journalist.

I had the good fortune to work with Ian at what was then the Dixons Group (now DSG international). I’d like to be able to say that I taught him something about media relations, but I didn’t, being a relative newbie at the time. Instead, I learnt a great deal through osmosis and observation – and much of it feeds into the advice I give clients today. More...

I popped down to MoMo London (Mobile Monday London) last night, which was held at the CBI Conference Center in Centre Point Tower.

Titled “Enabling Location in Applications”, the evening was sponsored by Skyhook Wireless. Whereas the last MoMo London featured a high-level panel discussion on current mobile trends from a media and marketing perspective, this event was more of a show and tell.

The people presenting their ideas were:

• Ted Morgan – Skyhook Wireless
• Ben Ward – Yahoo! Brickhouse
  
• Charles Wiles - Google Gears
• Andrew Scott – Rummble
• Justin Davis - BuddyPing
• Mark White - Locatrix

There were also some special guests in the from of various representatives of MoMo from around the world, including Germany, Estonia, Sweden, Spain, Boston, Italy and New York. More...