2 ONLINE PR(c) Blogs, podcasting and RSS
Web logs or ‘blogs’ give an easy method of regularly publishing web pages which are
best described as online journals, diaries or news or events listings. They may include
feedback (traceback) comments from other sites or contributors to the site. Frequency
can be hourly, daily, weekly or less frequently, but daily updates are typical.
An example of a useful blog which can keep marketing professionals up-to-date about
Internet marketing developments is http://www.marketingvox.comwhich is coupled with daily
e-mail digests of stories posted. Another example, with news items and articles structured
according to the chapters of a book, is Davechaffey.com (www.daveChaffey.com).
Business blogs are created by people within an organisation. They can be useful in show-
ing the expertise of those within the organisation, but need to be carefully controlled
to avoid releasing damaging information. An example of a business blog used to
showcase the expertise of its analysts is the Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs
(http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com). Technology company Sun Microsystems has several
hundreds of bloggers and has a policy to control them to make positive comments.
There are many free services which enable anyone to blog (for example http://www.blog-
ger.comwhich was purchased by Google in 2003). Blogs were traditionally accessed
through online tools (e.g. http://www.bloglines.com, http://www.blogpule.com) or software readers
(www.rssreader.com) but were incorporated into mainstream software in 2005–6.
Podcastsare related to blogs since they can potentially be generated by individuals or
organisations to voice an opinion either as audio (typically MP3) or less commonly cur-
rently as video. They have been successfully used by media organisations such as the
BBC which has used them for popular programmes such as film reviews or discussions
and for live recording such as the Beethoven symphonies that received over 600,000
downloads in June 2005 alone. Virgin Radio has also used podcasting, but cannot, at the
time of writing, broadcast music (due to copyright restrictions) but only the presenters!
A big challenge for achieving visibility for podcasts is that contents can only currently
be recognised by tags and it is difficult to assess quality without listening to the start of a
podcast. All the main search engines are working on techniques to make searching of
voice and video content practical. In the meantime, some start-ups such as Odeo
(www.odeo.com) and Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) are developing solutions.Online communities and social networks
Companies can also potentially form or post to forums to promote their services, but it
must be done in a sensitive way – it must actually contribute value to the community.Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
Really Simple Syndication (RSS)is an extension of blogging where blog, news or any type
of content is received by subscribers using the systems mentioned above. It offers a
method of receiving news that uses a different broadcast method from e-mail, so is not
subject to the same conflicts with spam or spam filters. Many journalists now subscribe
to RSS feeds from sources such as the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm)
which publishes RSS feed for different types of content on its site.(d) Managing how your brand is presented on third-party sites
As part of online PR it is useful to set up monitoring services. It is also necessary to have
the resources to deal with negative PR as part of online reputation management.
Microsoft’s PR agency reputedly has a ‘rapid response’ unit that can respond to online
PR. Examples of alerting service include Googlealert (www.googlealert.com), Google
Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) and paid services such as Market Sentinel (www.market-
sentinel.com), Mark Monitor (www.markmonitor.com), Reputation Intelligence
(www.reputationintelligence.com) and Brand Intelligence (www.brandintelligence.com).Blog
An online diary or news
source prepared by an
individual or a group of
people.
Podcasts
Individuals and
organisations post
online media (audio
and video) which can be
viewed in the
appropriate players
including the iPod
which first sparked the
growth in this
technique.
Really Simple
Syndication (RSS)
Blog, news or other
content is published by
an XML standard and
syndicated for other
sites or read by users
in RSS reader software
services.