There’s a canny discussion taking place over on Mark Pinsent’s blog (no, not that one) about whether PR agencies should stop pitching to inhouse teams. Mark says, “Pitches should be banned. Agencies should get much better at presenting credentials and references and have the confidence to decline to pitch valuable creative ideas that in the main (and even if you win, for crying out loud!) you’re almost certain not to get paid for.”
Check out the comments. Solid reasons for both sides of the argument. There’s even a Twitter poll (but you don’t need to be on Twitter to vote) asking the simple yes or no question: Should PR pitches be banned? Go vote.
Me? Still unsure. However, do you think professional firms like PriceWaterhouseCoopers spend days/weeks/months preparing new biz pitch documents? I don’t either (unless @adparker can tell me different). You might say that’s because accountancy isn’t part of the creative industries (although there is creative accounting). Well, yeah, but often PR doesn’t have a creative element to it either.
Maybe the whole pitch process is why PR is not and never will be taken as serious as other professions like accounting or law?
Living in the bubble you may have thought the trend graph would have plateaued by now, but as you can see Google Trends tells us people are still increasingly looking for information on social media.
Even lifestreaming gets a look in. That said, the big spike is probably me using Google to find a business use for it. Can’t find one and I still stand by my earlier comments.
There’s quite a lot of talk lately about lifestreaming and how it is apparently the next big thing in social media. So much so, a number of seminars have cropped up dedicated to discussing what lifestreaming means in a wider context and how brands can utilise it for business benefits.
For those that don’t know, a lifestream is basically a central hub which aggregates all your daily online activities from different social media channels. The most well known lifestreaming application is probably FriendFeed.
The idea behind it is fairly basic. You sign up to Friendfeed, give it the usernames (sometimes a password is requred) or RSS feeds of your social media profiles and it will begin to pull in your content as you create it around the web. Meaning that on one day you could add an image to Flickr, save an interesting article to Delicious, make a tweet on Twitter or upload a video to YouTube and each will appear on your Friendfeed page.
“Great”, you might say. And if you’re of the geek persuasion you would probably say “cool!”. Other than that, though, I don’t see any benefits from a business and communications point of view. Sure, it’s great if you’re using it personally and you enjoy (to steal YouTube’s mantra) ‘broadcasting yourself’ but one wonders why it’s garnered so much attention from people in corporate roles.
To me it’s the same as lifecasting. Yeah the idea is good but it will have very little, if any, relevance in a business context. Or am I missing something?
From Brand Republic. “London advertising agencies have been made the butt of the joke in a new viral created by an Australian digital marketing strategist.
“The Melbourne-based strategist, known on YouTube as “Simontsmall” posted the clip in reaction to losing the account for the New Zealand vodka brand 42Below, to an unspecified London agency.”
Stephen Davies, an available-for-hire online communications consultant based out of the UK.
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