Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Following Apple’s inclusion of podcast subscription capabilities into iTunes 4.9, search engine Blinkx. has added a podcast search option to blinkx.tv. More than 150,000 podcasts and video blogs are currently searchable.

Whatever it is that people (well, American people at least) are doing less of while they are online it isn’t watching TV, according to new research from Turner Broadcasting.

To celebrate their majority, Virgin Atlantic are offering free software called Podcatcher to customers and potential customers which will enable them to download mp3 audio files with content relevant to Virgin routes. The first 4 of these ‘podcasts’ are all species of New York audio guide. The firm behind the Virgin initiative is Loudish.com , and they are blogging away about their B2B and B2C podcast solutions. How long before downloading becomes part of exclusive in-flight entertainment?

Peter Merholz has encountered an eBay survey he doesn’t like the look of, largely it fails to measure up to two important rules of thumb he identifies:

Looks like Coca-Cola in Denmark has taken a hardline approach to policing the quality of their in-links. A fan site has reportedly received the following remonstration from the soft drink manufacturer:

“If you are to be allowed to link to a Coca Cola website (cocacola.dk) you have to send in a written application to us.I can not see that you have made such an application, and there is no agreement with you about this. So I have to ask you to remove the link to www.cocacola.dk.”

Great example of collaborative marketing from Penguin (courtesy of Gary Stein) in the form of Penguin Remixed:

We’ve gathered together thirty of the best spoken word samples from some of the greatest books of all time and the finest actors around.

Now they’re yours to play with.

Download the samples, use them in your music, submit your tracks and you could win a great prize, including your tune published in a Penguin Digital Audiobook.

The top ten tracks at the end of July will be turned into an audiobook, and sold via Audible.co.uk and iTunes UK. They’ve already had 84 submissions since 7 June.

I love what Penguin have done here.

They are a great brand with a unique visual identity (essentially unchanged since the overhaul by famous typographer Jan Tschichold – pronounced chick-old – in the 1940s). The combination of classical literature, audiobooks and remixing is an inspired one, and will allow them to reach an audience that probably doesn’t see any book publisher as particularly ‘cool’. Finally, the Penguin with headphones logo is one of the best examples of graphic wit I have seen for a long time.

But most important of all, when it comes to the concept of collaborative marketing they clearly ‘get it’.

Anastasia at Ypulse has some good general advice for brands “trying to figure out” how best to jump on the blogwagon. “Blogs are a great thing to add to already robust communities” she counsels, and “don’t create a product blog for a new product that nobody knows or cares about.” Sponsorhip is always worth considering she adds, before revealing that sge shares Niall’s faith in well-conceived character blogs.

Suw Charman over at Corante has a fantastic case study (PDF download – 2.3 Mb) examining the use of blogs for a competitive intelligence project within a large European pharmaceutical group. It’s a little heavy on pushing the software used, Traction TeamPage, but then again they are the sponsor.

Key quote:

Competitive information is always very unstructured and comes in lots of different ways — through the internet, internal sources, and various other ways. Using blogs to organise the data is quite effective because it doesn’t impose too rigid a structure where we need some inherent flexibility.

I think I know who the company is, but if I were their CIO I’d be making sure everyone knew it was my organisation.

I’m sending it to everyone in our Healthcare and Change & Internal Communications practices.

Matt Foster contacted us asking for a link to his new blog. He’s a radio trainer for the BBC, has a personal blog (a photographic documentary of his social life, by the look of things), and is running CitizenSpin.com as a research tool to support his MSc in Corporate Communication.

Having had a quick look a round, he already has some interesting posts so we’re happy to oblige. Heck, we’ll even add him to our blogroll.

He has a couple of good pieces on sources & credibility that make CitizenSpin.com worth adding to your favourite feed reader.

Last week the Electronic Freedom Foundation published this useful Legal Guide for Bloggers with some useful FAQs, albeit rooted in US law. However, they do reference the BBC’s online guide entitled How to Avoid Libel and Defamation.

Adrants believes it has exposed some unreconstructed search marketing practices over at the FT. 

A researcher found 138 hidden links (typically hyperlinked text that is formatted the same colour as the background) on FT.com. As it is probable that Google’s algorithms favour the FT as a “trusted source” any websites that benefit from in-links from that site may appear more regularly at the top end of Google’s search results pages.

Unfortunately, the Adrants piece is itself suspect as it fails to 1) identify the context of the research 2) assumes that the FT has charged for these links and 3) doesn’t say which pages were the beneficiaries. (Worth a bit of a play on FT.com though…)

“We don’t pretend to know a lot about search engine marketing but we don’t have to know much to realize it’s practices such as this that undermine the medium, affect consumer trust and make life that much more challenging for marketers who choose to play by the rules.”, Adrants concludes. Which rules are these? Surely a more serious factor affecting trust in the medium is the very ignorance they owned up to at the start of that statement?

Steve Rubel has written a thought-provoking post arguing that:

Good blogs don’t need to have opinions to become well read. They do need links; it’s their air supply.

As he says, this is quite an opinion from him (or Adam Weinroth) and it has started an interesting debate in the comments section. I’ve blogged before about a growing sense of circularity in the blogosphere and the need to add value when you post.

I’d argue that blogs need opinion; it’s the air supply that makes the blogosphere worth reading. While it is useful to have a connector, the real value is in the content they link to and the debate they engender. Links are easily replicated but opinion is the end product that the connectors need to survive. If that original content dries up, then the value of a connector that feeds upon them follows suit.

In the age of information overload, it’s better to arrive at the content destination than to travel, even if you travel by the likes of Rubel Airways.

Stephen Groom of European Law Firm Osborne Clarke has published a good summary of digital marketing legislation entitled ’UK digital marketers – you never had it so good’.

While the Churchill reference may make for a good title, I’m not sure I agree.

Certainly, compared to our European counterparts, we in the UK are fortunate when it comes to legislation and enforcement. However, the increase in recent legislation has created many headaches for digital marketers, many of whom had better days before opt-in rather than traditional DM opt-out – and let’s not forget those poor souls faced with non-compliant legacy databases.

That said, the industry as a whole should benefit from the recent legislation and best practice guidelines, with clearer lines between spammers and marketers and, ultimately, happier customers.

Fredrik reports that Laboratoire GlaxoSmithKline in France has started a blog called Avenir de la Santé (the Future of Health).

This is a bold move for someone in one of the most highly regulated industries, and one that should be applauded.

Fancy giving us a running translation, Joël?

Jeremy Wagstaff, writer of the Loose Wire column in the Asian and online Wall Street Journals, shares his frustration with Microsoft’s PR company (I hope it’s not us!) by posting a recent email exchange on his blog, under the title of Trying To Review A Microsoft Product, Or How To Extract Blood From Rock.

Every PR pro needs to read this and learn what it means to the interactions you have with journalists, many of whom have blogs and will not hesitate to write about their experiences on them.

“Do these people not do any basic research? Do they have no idea what a journalist needs? If they don’t, I can tell them: A quick response, an absence of searching questions that aren’t relevant and are, indeed, considered intrusive, and a good understanding of what the word ‘deadline’ and the phrase ‘not being hopelessly late with a review of a new product’.”

The comments to his post are interesting. Scoble says he has yelled and got the Tablet PC team on to it – he also apologises. I hope someone has yelled at the PR company too.

It’s a big reminder to us all that we can either continue to say blogs aren’t important, or we can try and understand what impact they are having on what we do and respond to it properly.