Andrew Smith's Blog

Friday Roundup 27th August 2010

27 Aug 2010 10:33 5 comments

The transformation of the CIPR

I’ve always been a bit of a Marxist. Of the Groucho variety.

As he once famously stated: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

That has pretty much characterised my view of official UK PR bodies over 23 years in the industry.
 
If you’d asked me even a few years ago about my view of organsations like the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), I’d have said my stance was hardening. Especially in its perceived slow response to the escalating developments around online PR and social media. More...

Why poor backlink requests are like bad PR Pitches

18 Aug 2010 16:52 2 comments
The SEO vs PR debate continues to rumble on. However, on a very tactical level, it occurred to me that certain SEO practitioners are starting to emulate some of PR’s worst habits – specifically, the bad pitch. Or at least it’s SEO equivalent – the poor Backlink Request.

The key qualities they share are irrelevance and lack of personalisation.

Journalists hate getting mass-mailed irrelevant junk. And in a similar way, if you run a website or a blog (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of us these days), it is just as annoying to get spammy link requests.

I’ve yet to receive a carefully crafted and personalised request for a backlink that shows the person making the request understands what my blog or sites are all about. More...

Does the average UK Facebook user spend 24 hours per month on the site?

16 Aug 2010 14:17 1 comment
According to Hitwise, the average amount of time spent on Facebook by a Briton has decreased from 30 minutes in December 2009, to 27.36 minutes during June and July 2010.

According to Google, the average session time was 26.40 mins – not wildly dissimilar to Hitwise’s estimate. Perhaps even more interesting, Google claims that the average number of visits per UK Facebook user last month was 51 (worldwide average is 33).

On Google’s figures, that would suggest the average UK Facebook user spent 1360 minutes on the site last month – or nearly 23 hours.

On Hitwise’s figures that would come to nearly 24 hours per month. More...

Friday Roundup 13th August 2010

13 Aug 2010 11:42 No comments

PR is a people business. And that’s it’s biggest problem.

I’ve long been a fan of Michael Gerber’s E-Myth Revisited (Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It). The E stands for Entrepreneur - the myth being that Entrepreneurs start businesses. Gerber contends that it is technicians or craftspeople that start businesses. Under Gerber’s broad definition, pretty much everyone is involved in technical work of some kind - be it carpentry, book keeping, or PR and marketing. People who start businesses wake up one day and have “an entrpreneurial seizure”. More...

Reach versus engagement: the new online battleground for PR and media

2 Aug 2010 11:32 3 comments
For decades, PR has been seen by many marketeers as “cheap reach via editorial” – in other words, the goal of PR was to gain editorial coverage that provided the greatest number of opportunities to see – at a significantly lower cost than advertising.

Because the means of providing a verifiable link between editorial coverage and business impact was either prohibitively expensive or just not possible, there has been a largely accepted assumption that positive press coverage is valuable – period.

In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical.  Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement (if a newspaper has a readership of 2 million, then we assume that a large proportion must be in some way engaged with some or all of the content – we just aren’t sure which content and to what degree. More...

Friday Roundup 30th July 2010

30 Jul 2010 13:39 No comments

Social proof: why we bother about people "just like us"

Remember this scene from the Life of Brian?

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me, you don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
 
The Crowd (in unison): Yes! We're all individuals!
 
Brian: You're all different!
 
The Crowd (in unison): Yes, we are all different!
 
Man in Crowd: I'm not.
 
Another Man: Shhh!

Having read Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, I have become even more intrigued by the concept of social proof - in other words, the means we use to determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct. 

He cites consultant Cavett Robert who says that: More...

Friday Roundup 16th July 2010

16 Jul 2010 11:10 2 comments

Three degrees of influence - or marketing success as an artificially induced cascade

Back in January 2009, I wrote a blog post about a New Scientist article on “social contagion” and how maths and hard data were being deployed in a wide range of areas to reveal some curious aspects of how social networks of all varieties seem to work. 

At the time I said: “Having a greater understanding of the dynamics of social network behaviour and as well as what constitutes the “critical mass” of interconnected individuals for a given client goal or situation is surely going to be a key objective for any savvy digital PR specialist.”

I firmly believe that remains the case - albeit with added layers of sophistication. More...

Pogoplug allows printing from iPhone, iPad, Android or any other device, no matter where you are

30 Jun 2010 10:25 No comments
Here’s an interesting new development from Pogoplug (a client) -  web printing. Or cloud printing if you prefer.

For the first time, Pogoplug users will be able to print from an iPhone, iPad, Android or other mobile device from anywhere in the world.

Pogoplug cloud printing will initially support all HP printer models and all Epson printers released since 2005.  Set-up is simple and straightforward; once a printer is connected to a Pogoplug, it is ready to use.

Additionally, users can email any document directly to their Pogoplug for printing.  Printers can be shared with friends, family and colleagues or used to create printer ‘hotspots’ for temporary access to a printer in a public location. More...

How UK PR firms can improve their SEO capability overnight for £85

25 Jun 2010 11:53 No comments

About 18 months ago*, I paid around £85 for a piece of software called Market Samurai. I can hand on heart say it is has been one of the most valuable tech investments I’ve made in that time.

To describe it as a general internet marketing tool doesn’t really do it justice. Whether it is drastically reducing the amount of time to handle keyword research or detailed analysis of SERPs, I constantly refer to it.

One of things that stands out for me is the vast amount of useful training material provided by the Market Samurai team – for free. Just watching a few of these videos would probably save PR firms many man weeks and hundreds of pounds of Mickey Mouse training from less reliable sources. More...

Friday Roundup 18th June 2010

18 Jun 2010 10:15 1 comment

Why are search agencies more profitable than PR firms?

One of the big worries tonight for England football manager Fabio Capello must be whether goalkeeper Robert Green can be trusted not to make another big fumble as he did in the previous game against the USA.  By way of comparison, have PR firms also taken their eye off the ball in relation to SEO?

I say this because the latest NMA league table of UK search marketing agencies seems to show that profitability (compared to the PR sector) is much higher.

Unlike the PR Week Top 150, the NMA table ranks agencies based on gross profit rather than top line fee revenue. More...
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Andrew Smith
Director at escherman

Joined industry in 2008
Based in Richmond
Member since 28 Jan 2008
Last login 31 minutes ago

escherman is the brainchild of Andrew Bruce Smith.With a career spanning 23 years of public relations and journalism, he has developed and implemented many highly successful strategic PR and marketing communications programmes for some of the world’s biggest consumer and enterprise IT brands including IBM, MySQL, Checkpoint, ZoneLabs, Novell, Siebel, FileMaker, Internet Security Systems and Hyperion Software.He was one of the first PR professionals in the UK to exploit email, the Internet and World Wide Web as high impact public relations vehicles. Described by journalist Sally Whittle as “the de facto godfather of PR blogging”, he provides regular, pithy industry commentary on his personal blog, In Front Of Your Nose.

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