NewsBusiness

Just read this post by “New Rules of Marketing & PR” author David Meerman Scott on the dangers of using stock photography on your website – everyone uses the same images. In the article he refers to the image of one particular person that crops up on a number of websites – and I’m sure you’ve noticed this too – we have! Why not use photos of people that actually work at your business? I’d be interested to hear any comments on this.

Here is David Meerman Scott’s article:

Who the hell are these people?

This quote, from chief Executive of WebDynamic Dominic Gamble, on the importance of getting people to your site over and above just building it.

Interestingly, none of the points in the article talk about what is said on a website – the words. Do web developers assume this is part of the brief – or do they assume the client will come up with the words?

Read the whole article on smartcompany – 10 things your web developer must have

As people continue to debate the usefulness of Twitter from a business perspective, and as Twitter continues to think about what it can do to help businesses and in the process make money from the application, we can only speak from our own experience here at NewsBusiness.

Here are a few things we have been using Twitter for:

Looking for business

Over the past month or so, every week we have been typing into the search box “PR Brisbane” to see what comes up. Most of what appears is not relevant (unless we wanted a job in PR), but we have come across two Twitter users who tweeted that they needed a PR firm. So we replied. So far neither has actually turned into a client, but its early days yet!

In fact the other evening at a PR/marketing network event I was speaking with someone in web design who said that their firm had had around 4 new contracts through Twitter. Interestingly, the contacts had come through individuals who worked at the firm on their personal Twitter accounts, not from a corporate Twitter account.

When we get our first client over the line from Twitter, we’ll certainly let you know.

Brand monitoring

Want to know if anyone is talking about your business on Twitter? As above, just type your business name into the search box and see what comes up. I did this recently for a large multinational brand and came across some comments made by someone in Brisbane directly of interest to a colleague who works with that company. If you know what’s being said, particularly if it’s not complimentary, you can do something about it (see our previous post).

Meeting gurus

The other day I was sitting at my desk working when the Tweetdeck application I have in the background chirped and I checked my “Tweets”. A digital media guru I follow (@cameronreilly) was in a cafe about 100m away and had just complained about the coffee. I nipped down to say hi and he ended up buying me a beer (it was a Friday) and we had a very interesting conversation. If the cafe had been on Twitter (or perhaps their PR/marketing people) they might have been able to respond to a complaint that (in theory) could have been read by all of Cameron’s 9,653 followers.

By the way…

You don’t actually have to be registered with Twitter to search messages – you can do this straight from the Twitter home page. So, unless you want to be able to respond to people from within Twitter, you can do most of the things above without signing up or being an active participant in the system.

News Equals Business becomes NewsBusiness

After much umming and ahhing I/we/the team @ News Equals Business have decided to change the name of  the business. It’s not a big change. We’re just going to drop the ‘equals’ and call ourselves NewsBusiness.

We could have a marketing campaign along the lines of ‘NewsBusiness – no equals’ but unfortunately nobody would get it. A little like that car hire company that has the slogan ‘No birds’. I’ve still not worked out what that means.

I’m a little sorry to see the old name go, as it really did sum up what I thought at the time (and still do!) – that news really can equal business. But News Equals Business is such a mouthful – I’ve lost count of the number of people on the phone who say “Who?” or “Musical business?” that it’s just getting silly. So NewsBusiness it is from now on.

Thankfully the logo does not have to change and neither does the business web address – it’s always been newsbusiness.com.au. So the process of changing everything is laborious but not overwhelming or particularly expensive. About an hour changing everything over on the website and blog and about the same changing various listings on the web.

From a PR perspective, a name is very important – if you don’t think so just look at the hullabaloo here in Australia when Kraft wanted to launch their new Vegemite and cheese product with the name iSnack 2.0 (see this article from The Age). Personally I don’t think they ever really intended to call it that – call me cynical but I think it was a PR stunt – and if it was it certainly worked – Kraft got a huge amount of coverage for their new product, regardless of what it will actually be called.

I wouldn’t be surprised if their in-store marketing – when it does launch – has iSnack 2.0 crossed out with the new name next to it (you read it here first).

The name change for us is logical and straightforward – but this is certainly not the case for bigger or more established companies. In fact in many cases the sheer cost of a change of name and the dilution/eradication of the previous brand name has to be really worth it.

A (long) while back I worked for a subsidiary of one of the largest global publishing companies. Shortly before I joined, the business changed its name, in theory to reflect more accurately what it did. In practice it led to a huge amount of confusion and for many years – despite its best efforts – many of its customers still didn’t associate the old company with the new name. I’m convinced that the confusion did not help the brand and probably dented its profits as well.