Andres Wittermann on European PR

The Age of Commercial Blogging Is Here

I just saw this on the web: Technorati launches an advertising network for blogs and targets IT companies.

This could become really interesting. Recent studies show that increasingly the "internet" is beating traditional marketing in influencing buying decisions. It is not too far-fetched to assume that "internet" translates to communities, blogs and other Web 2.0 platforms.

Technorati is the market leader in blogging search and this means they are ideally positioned as advertising network.Obviously this will mean bloggers are losing their virginity / innocence. They will become adult. Some may become boring even. It will definitely be interesting to see how this will change the blogging culture. I bet that money will "spoil" many of them and blogging will increasingly become lke traditional online media.

Here lies the chance for the traditional media who recently saw themselves increasingly under attack from the Web 2.0. They know how to handle journalistic "freedom" against ads.  Bloggers will have to undergo a cultural shift - and that is never easy.

Trying To Save Printed Media

Finally someone has the courage to save the world of printed press: The German government today launched the "Nationale Initiative Printmedien" (do I really have to translate that?). This initiative wants to encourage young people to read more printed media.

Whereas I am always glad to see how someone tries to save quality (and I think that is what they are trying to do or what they THINK they are trying to do). I am just not sure if this is a vain effort.

Just yesterday I attended a "Media Accused" event in London (ahem, organized by LEWIS) with Nick Davies, author of "Flat Earth News". This book basically deals with the loss of quality journalism in (formerly) quality press. No-one really argued this is happening. No-one really was able to find a solution to the problem.

I wish I would believe the German government is able to bring back quality into the printed media - as this is the only way out of the problem. Seeing how owners of the big quality papers all over Europe are continuing to cut costs (basically cutting back the workforce of editors) I am not sure how this initiative will be successful. Who wants to read old news? And who really wants to read entertaining stories in a newspaper when you can watch TV - or get it all on the internet?

The problem of quality journalism lies deeper. And one initiative won't help I am afraid. Especially when it is backed by journalist and publishers associations as they are at the core of the problem.

Nice blogging feature on Facebook

I just added Blog It on Facebook, a nice little app to directly send basic blog posts from Facebook. Looks like a useful tool (if limited), especially as you can also update your Twitter account as well through it. Not sure how widely spread this is, but it certainly serves Facebook well to become a central application in your day to day work.

Launch of TV on iTunes Going Bad

It seems that Apple missed a big opportunity when launching TV content on German iTunes this week.

The initial feedback showed that the audience was completely taken by surprise. E.g. Werbeblogger complained that he could not find the full offerings (it seems to me he simply had not downloaded a new version of iTunes yet). So I think the preparation could have been done better.

Now the users are feeding back on different forums, blogs and inside iTunes. Feedback is that it is too expensive (one old Harald Schmidt show for €2? are they serious?), only having shows on offer which have been on TV already, only offering German audio (and people really want the original version), etc. etc.

It seems that Apple trusts to be successful in the long run. A bit arrogant if you ask me. But in the end it will certainly be successful as it is from Apple, you may say. Well, I would not be that sure. There are so many other Internet TV offering s out there these days that it is only a question of time until people will be able to access at least old TV content in English for free (from Europe) without going to suspicious websites. I really wonder if Apple's TV approach can be successful - and if they should not have prepared this better at least this time.

Reputation management by Youtube

I just found an interesting video on Youtube where I am not sure exactly how old it is (seems about three days, but it might be much older).

Still, I find it very interesting - it shows Queen Rania of Jordan talking about Arabic culture and how surprised people will be learning everything about a country like Jordan. I find it very interesting they chose Youtube as a platform to launch a conversation / discussion on that topic. The 815 comments so far are showing this seems to work.

I wonder what happens next and how they will continue this dialogue. But it is (and will be) certainly something to learn from.

The end of the press

The end of the press is coming nearer. There still are some around who think this is a hype and that in the end this may not happen - we still have many clients who think offline coverage is better than online. When I ask them though where they are getting news from, they say (without a blink of their eyes) "from the internet". Can someone please explain?

Well, here you go - I just found the latest US stats on internet spend online vs offline on Techcrunch, my fav tech blog.

Enjoy the numbers and then let me know where you would spend your marketing budget, after having allocated most of it to PR obviously.

The Poorer, The Yahoo!

An interesting survey by Hitwise shows that socially struggling people tend to use Yahoo! rather than Google. And the more privileged ones are using Google rather than Yahoo! Don't ask me to explain this.

This certainly explains why Ali Baba is now interested in Yahoo! The power to the people, Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!

The Times Diggs It

My colleague Will Sturgeon just published a post on LEWIS 360 on an interview The Times had with Digg's CEO, Jay Adelson. It seems that traditional journalism does not only wake up to the challenge of blogs but is also increasingly embracing the other aspects of Web 2.0

Read the original interview here.

Watch Your Mouth - WOM, the new marketing approach

Yesterday I attended a breakfast event where Germany's first word of mouth marketing agency, trnd, presented this new marketing tool. Some may already be aware of this new approach, there already have been many campaigns in the US, in Germany, even in Poland already.

The idea is to involve a selected group of opinion leaders in your marketing campaign directly. They receive products to check them out - and to talk about them to their friends. These may even also receive some product samples - because the idea is they again talk to their friends and these to their friends - an so on. There are blogs being created as part of the campaigns (like this one about an Opel campaign) and generally the WOM'ers are creating lots of stuff around the products they review and talk about (like videos, pictures etc who then will be sent to the usual platforms like Flickr, Youtube, Sevenload etc).

WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing is taking PR directly to the opinion leaders and let them do the marketing for you (you don't even have to pay them directly - although I have been told in the end WOM campaigns are far from inexpensive).

Interestingly with many products traditional WOM really had a strong impact on buying decisions - because people trust their friends more than ads or even journalists (!). My fear is that once people realize that WOM is now being part of a professional marketing campaign and the WOM'ers are directly supported by the vendors, the value of WOM is decreasing fast. Like no-one today trusts ads anymore and people even start disbelieving TV. Still, it will be interesting to see how WOM is going to develop and how we will come across some of the campaigns in the future.

Vitter yourself - Seesmic merges Twitter and video

Yesterday TechCrunch wrote about Loic LeMeur's new company, Seesmic. Here is a good short summary about what this is.

I have not tried it yet, but it sounds interesting. Twitter itself is not that widely spread in Europe yet, but Seesmic may man a jump ahead - and some people may just go for this straight away. It allows interaction between users through their self-generated and professional content. You can upoad your videos from Seesmic to plaforms like Twitter or Youtube, but you can also copy videos (their URL's) from Youtube onto Seesmic and thus generate your own video story.

Loic's vision is to build a new Online TV platform. Seeing how some video portals already can be subscribed to by Tivo and others, Seesmic may jst well be another step towards how IPTV may look like soon - and what challenges traditional TV is going to face.

I would be interested to hear about people's experience with Seesmic and also feedback from some European Twitters - I have the feeling that people only slowly are realizing the value of it.

The Country of Two Speeds - Lithuania

I have just attended a conference on e-marketing in Vilnius, Lithuania. I had never been in any of the Baltic countries,, so it was quite an experience. The city is vast, although there are 'only' half a million people living there. The city is a mix of some socialist-era left-overs and quite Scandinavian-looking buildings and streets. In 2009 this will be Europe's cultural capital and I can only recommend to go there and check yourself what a beautiful city this is.

The conference itself was another experience. There were discussions on if it really makes sense to sell things online, I also learned that in Lithuania there are hardly any online auctions - and in Poland eBay is miles behind a local competitor. On the other side 75% of all Lithuanians are doing their tax declaration online - a figure which puts most of Western European countries to shame (or all?).

The interest is definitely there, some entrepreneurs are quickly developing interesting campaigns and technologies - but it seems to me that there is still a bit to go to convince the whole country of what Web 2.0 really means.

The press was also there, but there is not a very large press landscape in Lithuania. The country still falls into three languages (Lithuanian, Russian and also a bit of Polish), so there still are some language and culture barriers to overcome.

I am already looking forward to the next event and wonder how many  journalists we will see next time.

SAP Changes Growth Strategy

So far Germany's biggest software company (not that there would be many around), SAP, had stayed clear off acquisitions - their main competitor's (Oracle) key strategy to grow fast.

Today SAP announced the acquisition of one of the few left business intelligence (BI) software companies, Business Objects. At a price tag of EURO 4.8b ($6.77b) this does not only mean SAP's biggest acquisition ever - it also means a general shift in growth strategy as the company so far tried to grow organically.

This to me seems to indicate two things:
1) The stock markets are hotter than ever (Germany's tech index, Tecdax, just jumped over 1,000 mark for the first time) and it seems this still will continue for a while
2) The IT and especially the software industry undergoes the fastest change in its history with more companies than ever merging or being acquired by others.

This fast consolidation will certainly mean a big change in culture across the industry. Let's hope customers will benefit from it (and not only shareholders) and that creativity will continue to drive the developments. Most developments which recently changed the world (like the internet) were developed by initially small companies and it would be a shame to see the industry grow big, old, mature and satisfied.

Germans - the new Chinese?

Today there is a great article on TechCrunch covering the German Web 2.0 scene (by Gregor Hochmuth). You can learn a lot about why Web 2.0 took a bit longer to take off there (technical limitations, language etc.) and what German start-ups in that area look like. The key tune of the article is that there are many companies around who are copying other (US) ideas - and that really original ideas are rare.

As you can see in the comments there already, there are some copycats looking / working better than the "original". I for example like Xing also better than LinkedIn (I'm on both).

The problem remains that Germany just does not have the same entrepreneurial spirit and money as let's say Silicon Valley. That becomes obvious to everyone who ever has spent some time on the West Coast (like I did last November).

There also is a nice overview about Original vs. Copy which I pasted in here from Gregor's article:

Second Life Conquers Germany

I can not resist telling everyone that one of our clients, Second Life, has made it to DER SPIEGEL's cover page. DER SPIEGEL is still the most important weekly news magazine in Germany and I am sure this story will boost German presence on Second Life (currently around 3.8m people present there) enormously.

PR Blogger also reports that Mercedes-Benz has opened a strong presence there. It becomes more and more evident that Second Life is changing the way marketing is being done in the future.

Magazines Moving Online

Visiting our office in Milan, I heard interesting news yesterday.

VNU Italy's CRN magazine (leading channel publication) will publish their LAST HARD-COPY ISSUE on March 1. After that it seems they will publish exclusively online. I actually have heard rumors that a number of magazines are moving online and will shut down their off-line publications.

This is a major challenge for many. For journalists (as many of them will lose their jobs), for readers (as the nature of the news will change and traditional news outlets are already changing their news content) and for advertisers and PR people.

News move online, background and features will be the main content of paper copy. It will be interesting to see how many magazines in other countries will follow this example.

Microsoft And Wikipedia Clash Over Paid Writer

How to influence articles on Wikipedia is an ongoing topic in the world of media and PR. There have been articles about Siemens changing articles on the company - and now Microsoft wanted to pay a writer for changing an article about an open source technology and Microsoft's competing standard.

AP writes that the writer and MS have confirmed the facts around Wikipedia's accusations - it is a well-known "Don't Do It" to pay people (or PR firms) to change entries on Wikipedia. MS thinks IBM-related sources have been behind the original article and says they wanted a neutral writer to represent the story as it is.

The lesson to learn from it comes from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. AP reports that he "advises to write or to commission a "white paper" on any subject with its interpretation of the facts, post it to an outside Web site and then link to it in the Wikipedia articles' discussions forums."

Web 0 - Do We Really Live In An Online World?

Do YOU understand why in so many hotels you still need to pay for getting online? I really am tired of it and just never thought of complaining.

Computerwoche Online just notified me of an interview between John Negroponte and sueddeutsche.de, where he complains about a Munich 5-star hotel , where he had to pay to get online. I actually have had that experience in London, in SF (!) and many other places just over the last couple of months.

If you are aware of a campaign which is fighting this, please let me know and I sign up immediately.

The Russian Challenge

Probably since the Bolshevik revolution the Russian reputation has suffered a a lot and Russia was seen as the home of evil in books ("Tintin in Russia"), movies (most of political thrillers) and other media.

Modern Russian companies don't only have to cope with the heritage, but also with the often dubious facts around the time when they were privatized, management members who are perceived as suspicious by the public in the West and a lifestyle of prominent Russian business figures, which also raises concerns in the public.

Today there are reports about a Russian billionaire who was taken into custody in France after a party, which police thought was an orgy with illegal prostitutes. It seems they didn't prove anything to be wrong in the end - so it seems the guy was really a victim of general perception.

It probably will need more than millions they are throwing into European football (Chelsea, Schalke) to get their image sorted. With all the money involved in their businesses it is a miracle they have not been able to get a better image so far.

Fun To Start The New Year With

First of all I wish everyone a happy, healthy and successful 2007.

I thought it would be a good way starting the new year with some fun. In Germany there is a huge discussion going on currently about a new Hitler movie, which will launch this Thursday. It is a comedy - and now everyone discusses if Hitler can really be the topic of humor and if - how he should be dealt with. In an article by Harald Martenstein in this issue's of DIE ZEIT I found a great link to a movie, which combines footage of a Hitler speech with a sketch by famous Bavarian comedian Gerhard Polt about a badly gone leasing deal. If you understand German, this is absolutely gorgeous - if not, you may still get it.

Enjoy the movie and a great new year!

Really cool news website

I recently have been traveling a lot and attended many interesting events. And once in a while I came across some really cool applications and websites. Here is one of my current favorites.

Imagine to have a website which visualizes the relevance of certain news articles. Listed by country, by category. Cool? Check it out here. It is the Marumushi Newsmap and I just don't know why I haven't heard about it so far and why not more people are referencing it.

This is a great tool to see what the world is writing about. So if you want to know the hottest tech story worldwide - it now really is just a click away.