Guess what! We've been pitched to. That's right, The World's Leading has received a press release. It's come from the rather splendidly named Natalie Shamshoum at Johnson King.
What a laugh, I thought, if we'd been pitched a press release from a company that claimed it was 'one of the leading...' but of course, they'd never be that silly, would they? Off I scurry to the Johnson King website to find that...no, they haven't been that silly. The homepage tells me that Johnson King is 'one of Europe’s foremost providers of public relations services in the technology and telecoms sectors'. So that's OK then. Mind you, stick 'foremost' into the Microsoft Word Thesaurus and the first suggestion chucked back is 'leading'! Everything's well with the world.
I digress. Back to the press release. The big news is that Johnson King has started a blog! It's called ‘Whatever…’ I love the use of the ellipsis in the blog’s name…where did they get that idea? Very original.
They have a ‘self-styled Blogmeister General’ (oh dear) called Joe Banks. Joe says:
"We thought long and hard about what we wanted this blog to be before launching it. There's a trend among PR agencies to have their own blog - but more often than not, they either just feature links to news stories without comment or are the product of an anonymous corporate culture. We really didn't want to just jump on the bandwagon, but instead wanted to produce a blog that was interesting and engaging, and actually said something.It's a bit of a funny thing to launch a blog in this way though, isn't it? Normally, I'd have thought, you just start one, make it interesting, word of mouth kicks in and before you know it, you've got yourself a lovely new highly-paid job (hey Mayfield?).
It was also really important for us that it gave a voice to everybody at Johnson King, reflecting the depth of expertise and quality of thinking that we pride ourselves on. It is my hope that 'Whatever...' becomes a destination site for anybody involved in technology, PR or the media."
Maybe nobody's been reading Johnson King's blog? The first post was, after all, published on June 6th...and it would seem that the few comments that have been posted have all come from Johnson King's own people.
Still, we've done our bit. Best of luck.
5 comments:
First off, thanks for the PR! Who needs word of mouth when there are kind people like yourself willing to publish a nice link to our blog.
Why the 'release' (that's 'alert', thank you very much)? Well, being a PR agency, we just couldn't resist having 'an official launch' for the blog (and we're hardly going to do that on day one, are we?). And with the power of email at our fingertips, why wait for this word of mouth thing to happen - we want people reading it NOW, goddammit!
Also, far be it from me to suggest that somebody in the PR industry needs to check their facts, but I think you'll find (by looking in the archives) that Whatever... has been operational since 26 April - which rather holes below the waterline your suggestion that we nicked our ellipsis from you, since according to your achives, you've only been blogging since May...
Oh, and foremost/leading? Bit of a cheap shot, but fair play - surprised you needed a thesaurus to come up with this though.
Whatever... we love ya really and thanks again. All comments welcomed here or on the site (we'd REALLY love to hear from some other agencies - there's a new posting up today).
By goodness you're right Joe...the ellipsis is all yours. Mind you, we've got one at the front and one at the back. So there. And you still called yourself the Blogmeister General.
I love that a PR agency has the balls to send a press release to presumably hundreds of hacks about its new blog, though. It's kind of like sticking a bleeding stump into shark-infested waters, innit?
Plus (much as i wish it wasn't so) the blog's a bit better than some of the sanitised, pompous, i-can-use-fancy-terms-like-web2.0 bollocks that too many PR 'thought leaders' are inflicting on the world these days.
And still do (sad type that I am)
Is it me, or is there something slightly disingenuous about 'promoting' a blog? Look out, here comes another bandwagon....
Post a Comment