Andres Wittermann on international media relations trends

VW Delivers Great VM

So far BMW was the leader amongst German car manufacturers when it came to using the web for marketing - everyone has seen or at least heard of the famous BMW Films.

Today I received a great example of viral marketing videos from VW (thanks to PR Blogger for letting us know). Nice entertainment before the weekend.

TV is really getting worse and worse

It has been a long time since I last wrote anything. Probably I have been too busy watching the Winter Olympics. Or I have fallen asleep watching them. OR I could just not believe what I saw and just kept watching it.

Well, I have realised that there are countries which are hardly interested in these games at all. Like the UK (at least some articles I read in the UK press seemed to indicate into that direction). I think they are just ahead of us.

Because if you watch the Olympics on TV (in Germany it is the public TV - which every TV owner supports by paying high monthly fees), you wish you would spend your time doing something else.

The sport is actually not that bad (apart from that everyone is either doped or wearing Ukrainian curtains as clothes - sorry, you Ukrainians). The real problem are the 'journalists' commenting. Actually, they don't comment. Or - to be more precise - the older generation still knows how to do that, but the younger ones are reading the very 'informative' sheets and databases they seem to have on every participant. I was watching the Giant Slalom last weekend and during the whole competition the commentator hardly EVER mentioned what was really going on. He was rather interested in telling us what the specific sportsperson had achieved four / eight / twelve years ago in a similar event.

Does that mean the journalists are generally getting worse? I just find it interesting that the survey from the Austrian university that I blogged about recently is proven right by this it seems: journalists don't do anything on their own anymore, they rather use agency information  - or in this case the backgrounders they are receiving from the IOC's press office.

Well, time to read a good book I think (see my recommendations on the left hand side).

Half of Austrian articles based upon PR

PR Report Germany writes that only 28 per cent of articles published in the Autrian press are based upon research being done by the journalists. These estimate that the actual number is more closely to 50 per cent. (Research being published by Institut für Publizistik of University of Vienna)

In both cases that means that more than half of the articles you read are based upon PR. The reason is said to be economic pressure. I think that also the quality of many PR agencies' work is also just good enough today to being published straight away. Which underlines the importance for PR agencies to employ journalistic savvy people.

I am sure that Austrian number also speaks for other countries.

Blog buzz over breakfast

The Munich blogging elite met this morning for the first so-called Nextperts Breakfast - organised by Mr PR Blogger himself. I think there may have been a dozen or so people who hope to have launched a tradition this morning.

The Nextperts discussed the current state of German blogging culture, how corporate blogging currently looks like and how it will change, how PR will be affected by blogging - and we all agreed how important blogging / podcasting / vodcasting (we preferred this over vlogging) already is. And how it is surprising that still there are many corporate people and journalists (!) who don't see this.

I was also quite surprised how many of those who are business-consulting, technology-consulting, designing, writing on, CMS-spacialising on or around blogs don't actually have their own blogs. It is probably just a metter of time, as some said they were planning to set up their blogs.

It seems everyone has been at the Digital Lifestyle Day - so next year I expect this to be much bigger.

Next time there will be speakers and a topic we all will discuss, so things are getting serious then. Thanks to Klaus anyway for having organised this, I enjoyed it very much and look forward to the next time.