MarCom Professional

Like Mr Waddington at Rainier, I’m heading off for 2 weeks holiday - though France rather than Corfu. Will be disconnected from the t’Interweb for this time - so look forward to catching up with the world on Sept 8th.

Have fun in the meantime - I know you will.

Depressing news via Alan Patrick at the Broadstuff blog that pioneer Internet music discovery service Pandora may be on the verge of folding.

As Alan says, “it’s a real pity if this happens.”

Sadly, the odds for Pandora’s survival don’t look good. And judging by the comments of founder Tim Westergren in the Washington Post, he sounds (understandably) like a man who really hasn’t got the energy to continue the fight. The double whammy of being forced to retrench the service back to the US and Canada only and trying to reach an acceptable compromise on royalties has taken its toll. More...

Management Today Editor Matthew Gwyther has just come back from holiday to find 1,024 e-mails in his in-box.

As he points out, 95% of those emails are “dross”. Sadly, the blame can’t be laid at the door of spammers offering him “four gross of Cialis for $129.99.”

No, unfortunately, the culprits are “desperate PRs” who have sent him “no-hope press releases”.

Assuming he want away for 2 weeks that suggests he was sent around 900 useless press releases - or 450 a week or around 90 a day - assuming a five day working week. Or assuming an 8 hour day that’s just over 11 press releases per hour - or one press release every 5 mins (if we was only away for a week, it looks even more dire). More...

SEO for Dummies author Peter Kent has been making some pretty scathing comments about the SEO industry in a new interview:

“Over the last few years as I speak to more clients and hear their stories, it has led me to believe that 80% of the business is scam.” Kent qualifies this remarkable statement by adding: “By that I mean that 80% of people in the business doing SEO consultancy are either running an outright scam, or they thought it was good to get into SEO because it’s a hot area - but they don’t really know what they’re doing.”

Web designers also get it in the neck: More...

Gordon Macmillan at Brand Republic reports on a new survey which claims that “most PR people professionals still favour offline media coverage over digital despite recent consumer research identifying online as the more influential medium.”

He continues: “More than half, or 53%, see it as more valuable, but the real story is that it’s their clients who are still deeply attached to print. Apparently nearly two-thirds or 64% of PRs believe their stakeholders prefer print coverage more than online, television or radio and more than half or 53% believe their stakeholders are more influenced by print coverage than television, online or radio.”

He rightly picks up on the word “believe” and asks: More...

I wasn’t planning to add more to the general hype around Cuil. However, Mr Robert Schifreen has pointed out in another place that the new kid on the search block may have some work do.

Specifically, he is referring to the search term Mike Hancock MP. (WARNING: the results for this term in Cuil may offend some people and could be considered non-office safe).

Perhaps Mike may prefer the results he gets on Google. Then again, according to TheyWorkForYou.com, he has voted moderately in favour of equal gay rights. So who knows. More...

NMA recently published its “league table” of UK search marketing agencies - the equivalent of PR Week’s Agency top 150. Admittedly it only contains 36 firms, but it is interesting to compare with PR Week’s list - both for general PR and tech PR.

For example, the number one search marketing agency is The Search Works recording an £88m turnover for 2007. Quite impressive when you consider that the company was only founded in 1999 and employs a mere 64 staff. Number one in PR Week’s league table is Bell Pottinger with fees of £52.5m and 467 people (and before anyone asks, of course, we aren’t comparing like with like ie turnover with fees - but I’ll come to that in a minute). More...

I’ve been looking at Google’s new Ad Planner tool. As Google says, it is “a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.”

They could also add that PR firms may want to look at it in terms of building an online media target list.

As ever with Google, the Ad Planner tool reveals a host of interesting data based around demographics and interests as well as access to aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries. More...

How’s this for a piece of zeitgeist?

I posted yesterday about Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin. Overnight, he picks up a Google Alert about my blog post and in turn, comments - and posts a very nice response in return.

Might need to look at updating my sketch to map the ongoing impact….

I’ve already blogged about Google’s Keyword Tool now displaying absolute search volumes. I thought it would be worth looking at a practical example. I keep hearing from various freelance journalist and writer friends that it is tough finding commissions these days - not just journalistic work but also PR and general copywriting. It occurred to me that perhaps they could put their writing talents to good effect by testing the water with some PPC advertising (this presumes of course that they have a blog or website - and that it is properly set up to capture and convert traffic).

Here’s a quick look at some fairly obvious keyword terms - the first figure shows the search volume in the UK for June 2008 and the second figure the expected cost per click for a 1 - 3 ad position. More...