Search Sense

About 100 years ago today, a Pensylvania Railroad train plunged into the waters of the Atlantic and tragically over 40 people were killed.

The Railroad company hired Ivy Lee and he created the first press release. Following the accident, Lee convinced the railroad to make a public statement and more amazingly provide a special train to get reporters to the scene of the accident.

The result was a lot of positive press about the railroad company and a complete absence of pressure for US railroad companies to do anything about the 6,000 deaths or 35,000 injuries on railroads that year.

Perhaps a good engineer may have been the more prudent long term hire, but Ivy Lee it was and so PR was born.

Today, much has changed. Social networks have revolutionised PR and increased the challenges facing PR professionals and businesses alike. In fact SEO.PR, PR 2.0 and Social Network Optimisation are the new children of PR. An old article, but one worth a read is this over at mad.co.uk.

Right now confusion and excitement abound. Bloggers, wade in and rightly debunk the control freaks. Marketers try to hold onto the last vestages of traditional brand management. Others hail PR as dead and usher in new business models - it does look rather like a train wreck again.

It needn’t be.

We at Spannerworks believe passionately in engagement and the power of social networks.

The fundamental issue business and PR professionals face is not how to reach people with a press release or how to optimise that releases for Google News, De.licio.us, Technorati, etc.

It is how we release our minds and engage with customers, have dialogues rather than make statements, listen and respond with actions rather than words and it’s tough. It’s starts by understanding your place in the ever changing internet ecosystem and the effect you, your peers, your competitors have.

If you need any guidance in gaining this understanding or taking your first steps, you’re more than welcome to contact us and join the revolution and debate.

PR is terminally ill, but with a little help can be a vibrant, dynamic and incredibly useful dialogue that opens up a new world of oportunity.

Even for a new media company there are a lot of people here who blog. But we were still surprised (and pleased) to see not one but two of our people in a list of the top 100 blogs in the UK.

The list was put together by PR Blogger, aka Stephen Davies, a PR consultant at the London office of Edelman.

The two top-ranked Spannerworkers were:

• Dean Harvey (Director) who runs the Brighton Daily Photo Blog.
• Antony Mayfield (our Head of Content & Media) whose blog is Open (minds, finds, conversations)…

Well done to both!

Antony’s disappeared off muttering about the important thing in social media being prominence in the right networks not bestseller lists, but we can tell he’s actually quite pleased about it.

NXTbook Media has published our “What is social media?” eBook as a virtual book.

It works very well in this format and is well worth a look!

And don’t forget you can still get the eBook as a PDF at www.spannerworks.com/ebooks

Cross-posted from my blog:

Following the CNNMoney story “Cuban: Only a ‘moron’ would buy YouTube“, the Google YouTube rumor couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.

For those still wondering why Google needs to go there - here’s a straight and dirty synopsis from Shoe Money - 10 Reasons Why The Google YouTube Deal Makes Sense - His point 9 about legal issues makes a lot of sense. There aren’t many companies that would be willing to take on the legal copyright challenges that are already in the post to You Tube. Copyright violation has never stopped Google from ‘organising the worlds information’.

Cross-posted from my blog:

It’s offical - search is much more than just a cold hard document retrieval algorithm - it’s a medium of art.

Google is the 100th most powerful entity in the contemporary art scene according to the ArtReview magazine. See the full story in The Guardian. The top spot went to François Pinault, but, it was the inclusion of the worlds favourite search engine that caught my attention (not that surprising for a search geek). Even Flickr was mentioned as having the potential to be an exhibition area - but Google was already seen as an invaluable source of art information:

“And while we quickly concluded that Flickr has a way to go yet, it did make us realise how much we rely on Google for our art information. In a strange way, the number of hits an artist, curator or even a dealer gets can legitimise him in the same way it can anyone else.”