We spend a lot of our time as a business working out ways to communicate our clients’ core values and messages in different representations to different audiences. In light of that, I enjoyed this article about a circus troupe of Colombian street kids who now tour the world and thrill people with their skills, and in particular a quote from their trainer, who said: “What we do is change the representation of these kids … because when somebody who before maybe sniffed glue or begged on a corner is suddenly doing a double somersault, you’re not looking any more at a poor, illiterate delinquent, but you’re saying, ‘Wow, that’s a double somersault.’?”
PR tools
online communities becoming a female world
More young women are embracing online communities while fewer men feel their online communities are as important as their offline equivalents, according to a new study.
This is apparently a sharp reversal in attitudes and has taken place over just a couple of years.
Researchers at the University of Southern California say 67 per cent of women under 40 feel as strongly about their internet communities as their offline ones, while only 38 per cent of men said the same. In 2007, the numbers were just the reverse, with 69 per cent of the men and 35 per cent of the women feeling that way.
If the numbers turn out to be accurate, it could be a pointer to a rethink by us PR hacks over how we plan online campaigns.
search engines that reach places others can’t
It is said that Google reaches about 167 terabytes of information on the open web but there are another 91,000 terabytes sitting in the ‘deep web’ that Google, Bing, Yahoo and other mainstream search engines can’t reach. Here’s an interesting article on 10 search engines, such as Infomine, DeepWebTech and Scirus, that can search the deep web to find those hidden libraries of knowledge you never knew existed.
congratulations to Weta Digital for all the VES nominations
It was great to see a big bunch of Wellington-based Weta digital artists getting nominated today – for their work on Avatar – in the prestigious Visual Effects Society Awards in the US. The nominations are here.
Weta had nine nominations, more than any other effects house working on the movie. Weta Digital was also the only effects house to be mentioned by director James Cameron in his Golden Globe best picture acceptance speech last week.
It’s been a privilege working with Weta’s digital artists over the past 12 months and fantastic to see them getting recognised for their groundbreaking work.
avatar everywhere
Having worked with Weta Digital over the past year on its Avatar (the latest movie from James Cameron, the Titanic and Terminator director) project, it’s great to see all the movie’s amazing digital art work from Weta’s seriously talented and dedicated crew finally being seen in public before the release mid next month. There are clips all over the internet.
See the official trailer here, and here’s a clip, kind of The Making Of …
blogs are your friends
With blogs fast becoming authoritative sources of news in their own right, the avenues you need to reach to get comprehensive publicity coverage can sometimes appear infinite. But you do need to communicate with far more than just traditional media outlets.
Spend a bit of time online researching who is writing the most authoritative and informed blogs on topics relevant to your business. You will easily be able to find the blogs you should be talking to.
People in your industry will be aware of leading blogs. The Technorati website shows who the most popular global blog sites are. Google’s Blog Search works well if you type ‘New Zealand’ after whatever topic search you are after.
What is news on a blog?
How does news develop and grow in the online age, where blogs are taking on papers in the news-breaking game and often winning? American journalist and new media expert Jeff Jarvis defines it as “product versus process journalism.”
“Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”
The way blogs work include “collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections,” Jarvis says.
Traditional news outlets like to project the impression that their story is the definitive version .
Whereas, as the Irish Independent reports, journalism – as practised by bloggers – exposes the workings of a scoop. “[High-profile technology blog] TechCrunch, for instance, publishes the beginnings of a story that may only be a rumour. The responses to that rumour, often from reliable sources, generate updates to the story, which is polished with the help of readers to get closer to the whole truth.”
“This is journalism as beta,” Jarvis writes. “Every time Google releases a beta, it is saying that the product is incomplete and imperfect. It’s a call to collaborate.”
And that call to collaborate is drawing millions of blog readers and comment writers. If you want your company to be where the word-of-mouth action is, you need to be noticed in the blogosphere.
… And, lastly, just to add to the proliferation of news sources you need to pay attention to: Is Twitter the news outlet for the 21st century?