Edelman digital trends series

Edelman’s Steve Rubel is publishing a series of  ‘insights‘ into digital trends.

I’ve read the first one (17 Feb, pdf 2mb) and it’s a pretty good overview.

Corporate blogging

Had to stop and think when I read the corpcomms magazine’s feature story about corporate blogging.

According to the article PR departments don’t get it:

“Blogs are supposed to be personal, opinionated, informal and discursive. The idea is to create a buzz, to start a debate and to stimulate interest. But a lot of buttoned-up, controlling PR departments just fail to understand this.”

What does the article’s author want: corporate courage? For the sake of what? A low-cost marketing tool?

Press releases, templates, activity over passivity

Todd Defren, Shift Communications, has posted the company’s updated social media press release.

Helping companies structure their online content is always a good thing. It’s quite generous of Shift to offer the template for free.

One of the template’s strengths is it’s using the medium’s innovative structuring potential and moving beyond the metaphor of the *page* (avoiding using the web as a kind of backlit book).

Online crisis communications. Bearing the pressure

Is Bear Stearns doing online *crisis communications* (about its sudden rescue and sale) or *communication avoidance*?

Its homepage on Sunday 16 March looked like this :

(click to enlarge) The headline / pull quote reads: “Bear Stearns moves up first quarter 2008 earnings conference call to March 17″.

Over-tubed

Definition: when a company’s web 2.0 presence out-ranks its official or sales sites on Google and other search engines.

Overclocking the web activity for an organisation might go like this:

A contentious blog posted the Xmas before last by the ex-web editor comes top in Google rankings.

Why PR staff will love/hate their corporate websites

Corporate communications websites cost money; they don’t (often) generate revenue (not directly anyway).

That makes them low priority for the marketing people who would ditch all that blather about missions and community commitments if only they could. It also makes it really difficult to justify spending any money on them, which is why some are so poor.

So what do you do if you’re an online communications monkey/web editor/manager and your sites are second, third or fourth tier to the national media coverage that the PR bunnies are all chasing? After all, PR bunnies are cheap compared to a CMS, server space, IT support, content contributors, translations, skilled editors, redesigns, etc.

You could say to your director that you need investment for your corporate sites because they’re really frayed around the edges; they make the company look bad; they don’t reflect the mission statement and commitment to quality every company says it’s got (leaving out that the sites reflect poorly on the staff that run them).

That won’t convince him or her.

What might is turning your corporate site into a revenue stream (ha! fat chance), or its only equivalent for cost centres: saving money.

But that might mean proving some of your PR bunnies are better allocated to other tasks as the websites will be doing part of their jobs for them. Hmmm. That might be good for the ones who are also under-funded and doing two-people’s jobs. But for the others? Well, take that colleague off your Facebook friend list.