Hotwire Blog

PR conspiracy theories

2008-04-15T12:28:00.002+01:00

Reading Professor David Miller and Dr William Dinan’s story in The Independent Monday 14 April about the public relations industry I had to ask myself whether I had spent the last twenty years in a parallel universe. Miller and Dinan have written a highly emotionally charged article where they say that PR poses a real threat to journalists and news. Their main beef is PR in politics but they must have put pen to paper in a pretty sad moment and in their highly charged and negative article manage to criticise the industry wholesale.

Since Gutenberg invented the printing press humans have been given an increasing number of communications outlets. Today we are literally bombarded by opinions and news. Does it not make sense therefore that companies, governments, political parties, politicians and other groups and individuals that have things to say, issues to communicate and have interaction – reactive or proactive – with journalists and the media, have someone to help them do this? Journalists are people with natural scepticism and even with ‘us lot’ on board there is no way they will be manipulated. Miller and Dinan talk of control of the information environment. Having dealt with reporters through a long working career I just can’t see it happening.

Parallels with other industries drive home what nonsense this piece is. For instance, who does their own accounts and tax returns? Accountancy and finance is a specialist profession which requires a great degree of skill and very few people or companies would even dream of attempting to do their own tax return. We have teachers and university professors because society decided that teaching children and young people at home wasn’t as good as specialised places of learning. With the proliferation of media outlets, journalists working 24/7 and a very critical society where reporters and ‘commentators’ delight in bringing us down a peg or two, it is pretty unlikely that people and organisations with something to say would attempt to deal with the media on their own.

It may be that there are a few rotten apples in my industry but which profession doesn’t have those? Miller and Dinan come across as conspiracy theorists, digging up examples from 1919 and twisting new tools such as webcasts and the use of video as proof that the world of PR is rotten to the core.

If I come across as offended it is because I am. It annoys me immensely to read such nonsense. Even worse, in a newspaper I respect a lot. I am immensely proud of my industry. It is full of excellent people who do a fantastic job helping their clients and employers tell the world what they are all about. PR people work for charities to help raise funds to feed people living in areas struck by famine. PR people work for companies who sell products and services and who employ us all and pay tax to pay for university professors. PR people work for political parties who are keen that voters understand what they stand for. What is wrong with that?

PR 2.0 vs. Industry 0.2

2007-07-20T17:12:00.000+01:00

It’s as simple as Watzlawick once said: “You can’t stop communicating. Even when you say nothing, that’s a statement.” Over the last few months I’ve seen the debate intensify about how organisations might benefit from Web 2.0 technologies, such as corporate blogging, podcasts and Web TV, and how PR can assist with the communications.

But I feel that many are missing the point. It should be about dialogue. However, often whenever organisations talk about Web 2.0 they talk about the tools and how to use (or even abuse) them. The focus is on the speed and extensiveness of communications. But companies need to address communications strategically rather than from a tools perspective. They need to define their communications objectives, and embrace the opportunity for dialogue that the new tools give them.

However, there are lots of examples out there to illustrate how companies still need to embrace the basic principles of PR. Recently, there was an accident at a nuclear power plant in Germany, and it took more than a week before the operator Vattenfall provided a statement. Even the regional government was quicker to comment on the issue. And even worse, Vattenfall did something we in Germany call “salami tactics”: only when forced by the government, the media and the lawyers, did they acknowledged the inevitable. It seems before we can talk about PR 2.0, the industry standard needs to move from 0.2 to at least 1.0.

Might as well face it, I'm addicted to Facebook...

2007-07-18T10:05:00.000+01:00

“How many people have asked to be my friend today? Who’s tagged me in yet another unfortunate photo? How does my cousin always reply to a wall-post in a matter of minutes, no matter what time of day it is?”

Yes, my name’s Emma Cohen and I’m a Facebook addict.

There, I’ve said it. I’m not ashamed…well actually I am a bit…I mean how normal is it for a twenty-something (ok, pushing thirty), sociable London girl with a long-term boyfriend to wait with baited breath every time they log on to a website to see how many new friends they now have?

The answer, hilariously enough, is pretty normal actually.

If the recent stats from Facebook themselves are anything to go by, obsessing about Facebook couldn’t be more normal - apparently the site has grown 523% in the past six months with the average user spending around 143 minutes on there every month. Hmm, that’s funny, I have friends who I’m sure spend more like 143 minutes a day on there.

And it’s not just students anymore – Facebook’s original audience. Its appeal has spread to the masses, from my boyfriend’s eleven year old cousin to my best friend’s sixty year old mum! And yes, they’re both ‘my friends’.

So why is it we can’t get enough of this site? Why do we feel the need to reach out to people from our past who we either actively decided not to stay in touch with, were never really friendly with or didn’t ever even really like in the first place and instead ask them ‘to be our friends’?

It’s simple. Social networking sites like Facebook have captured the imagination of the always-on generation – people constantly looking for better and more immediate ways of communicating with others. With Facebook, you’re not just talking to one person, you’re talking to everyone you choose to call ‘your friend’. Why call everyone you know to let them know you just got engaged? Just update your status on Facebook and boom, the news is out faster than you can type JUST MARRIED. It’s all about community.

Of course the other reason we can’t stop logging on could be an inherent desire for popularity and to have as many – if not more – friend’s than anyone else. This coupled with our relentless need to know other people’s business is quite frankly basic human nature.

So am I addicted? Yes, but try to make me go to rehab, I say no, no, no…

Do you use VoiP? You geek!

2007-06-01T18:05:00.000+01:00

It’s official – if you use Skype you’re a geek. A Forrester Research report published earlier this month titled The VoIP Customer Experience: Work In Progress concludes the major VoIP players “have to radically improve the experience” to attract mainstream users.

So far, the big players such as Skype and Google have done very well at attracting the geeks… I mean early adopters (hey, I’m one too). But they have now hit a wall and can’t penetrate beyond the five percent of the population who love to download, wear headsets and don’t mind crackly calls.

“Bit obvious” you say?

I don’t think so. Skype sold last year for $2.6 billion plus stock. Surely this astronomical valuation was for more than its ability to reach the early adopters who are using Skype purely to make free PC-to-PC calls.

And the tech-savvy market is growing isn’t it? Uptake of new technology is increasingly swift and we are all now familiar with gigabytes and Googles, video on demand and megapixel cameras.

So why are the purveyors of VoIP failing to reach the mainstream?

I can’t help but think that the technology breakthroughs that make it are those that make our lives easier, not just cheaper. Don’t get me wrong, money is important, but is so important that we are willing to make calls while tied to our computers.

One of our clients in the VoIP space, Jajah, announced this week that they have received investments from Intel and Deutsche Telekom. While the amounts involved are fairly small, the impact is potentially massive. The big players are embracing VoIP for the first time, giving it the first realistic chance of reaching a mass audience.

This is one geek who can’t wait.

Measurements in a new media world

2007-06-01T18:00:00.000+01:00

On Thursday (31 May), we spoke at a Dow Jones Expert Series event on measurement and it raised some interesting questions about measurement in both traditional media, and increasingly new media.

It was clear from the interest of the delegates that measurement is an area where PR agencies and clients alike are seeking ways to improve and develop. PR has been for many years seen as the ‘un-measurable’ of the marketing mix. While it is changing (quite rightly), if yesterday's event showed anything, it was that there are still many PR professionals that put measurement in the 'nice to have but not essential' bracket. Unless measurement is put at the heart of a PR campaigns then how do you know it is effective? How do you adapt and learn from past activities? How do you justify PR spend?

In traditional media, there are lots of tools to help improve measurement. We already use several products with clients, as well as our own methodology, to help measure campaigns. However, measurement is a continual process and we (like many others in the marketing industry) are actively seeking ways to build more sophistication and tools into all our campaigns. Hopefully there will be more to say on this later in the year.

However, while clients are increasingly looking at investing in measurement of traditional media coverage in print, online and broadcast, the world of new media is a completely different world and many PR professionals have yet to grapple with it fully. We believe that in the new media world measurement really morphs into monitoring and our fellow speakers yesterday agreed. Indeed, how do you measure 83.7 million blogs (according to Technorati and growing at 180,000 a day)?

By monitoring the blogosphere organisations can see whether there are potential issues to manage or indeed, opportunities to predict big stories and take them out to the traditional media, as well as responding to relevant and influential blogs. In particular, monitoring can raise alarm bells before an issue hits the mainstream, or at the very worst, allows you to have messages and responses ready. Apple’s monitoring of blogs around its release of the iPod Nano is the perfect example of seeing an issue early (easily scratched screens) and responding in the appropriate manner to reduce the potential negative impact to iPod sales and Apple’s brand.

The PR industry is recognising that in the new media world we now live and work in measurement is changing. For traditional media, there are increasingly sophisticated tools to track and measure campaigns, yet in the new media world, monitoring must be brought into the fold. A combination of measurement and monitoring is required to give a full picture of the traditional and new media landscapes and for communication campaigns to be truly effective.

Calling excellent PR professionals

2007-05-21T17:11:00.000+01:00

We have lived with a skill shortage for as long as I can remember in technology PR. This was certainly true in the late ‘90s and although there were more candidates on the market in ’01 and ’02 it has always been a struggle to hire the really great people – the people we (and our competitors) are after. Recently the market seems as tight as ever and one top recruiter told us that they have handled only 10 technology candidates in the past twelve months – while having almost thirty live vacancies in tech PR on their books.

In terms of where the real shortage lies, it's predominantly for people with four to six years experience – account managers and account directors, the people who weren’t being recruited in 2001 – 2003 when many agencies stopped recruiting all together. The pressure to compromise on quality is huge, but is something Hotwire isn’t prepared to do; unfortunately some agencies have had to go that way.

There are two bits of bright news – first, as Hotwire gets better known, we are getting a gratifying flow of direct applications. We love these. Using a recruitment agency involves a hefty fee, so we always look first at applicants who contact us direct. It shows as well that they are entrepreneurial. We have recently taken on an amazing Australian Senior Account Executive who was enterprising enough to contact us directly from Sydney and two calls and some references later we made her an offer.

The other bit of good news is the ongoing success of our graduate programme. This year we had 600 applications for positions with Hotwire, and after a stringent filtering process we made 10 offers to graduates who we think are truly phenomenal.

My guess is that we aren’t the only agency taking on loads of graduates and over the next two years the skill shortage will ease and some semblance of a normal market will return. For the moment, it’s a candidate’s market and the whole industry is fighting over a small pool of the best ones.

The global media

2007-05-18T11:59:00.000+01:00

I recently contributed to a webinar hosted by Hotwire's US banking and finance practice agency partner, William Mills. The seminar was an introduction to the European market for US companies, and delved into all the idiosyncrasies of the main European countries from a demographic, cultural, political, social and PR perspective. Admittedly it was more the latter than the former as we only had an hour! The seminar was predominantly focussed on the wide and diverse FS sector, however it never ceases to amaze me, that while the industry preaches the growth of the global economy, how this is seldom reflected by the media make-up.

In the banking space, for example, we have only one true global title - The Banker. The space is fortunate enough to have a lot of pan-European titles and a fair smattering of smaller global titles, especially within the online environment. Yet still regional boundaries really, really matter. Isn't that odd within this new digital, online age?

How many of you, I wonder, are head of PR/marketing EMEA? A sizeable chunk if our client base is anything to go by. Now answer me this, how many pan-EMEA publications can you mention? Yup, I'm struggling as well.

OK, so obviously there isn't an enormous demand to cater for such a wide and diverse media…or is there?

This might be a niche example, but let's take a brief look at the smart card industry. The humble smart card has rapidly grown into a fairly ubiquitous platform residing, as it does, within every mobile phone handset and an increasingly healthy proportion of your debit, credit, travel and ID cards (plus a whole host of other emerging and visionary applications). If we focus on the debit and credit card for a moment we will see it becoming fairly standard across the Continent within the next two or three years. Now the Middle East is in the midst of its own EMV (the standard that underpins the debit/credit chip and PIN card) migration although it looks set to be less a Big Bang rollout and more a steady drip-drip. In Africa the smart card is seen as a vehicle to provide banking to the un-banked, bringing the possibility of paying by card rather than cash to remote and poor communities for the first time.

From my experience of doing outreach into the Middle East and Africa over the past three years they are crying out to hear about the European experience. They want to know what is going on and just because they are 'behind' does not mean they are going to slavishly follow the European migration path step-by-step. Instead they are more likely to leapfrog directly to where we are today or beyond. So why does the media not reach internationally to share the same information to such a broad audience?

Yes, we can probably discount print publications through shear distribution cost - especially to Africa - but the on-lines are also peculiarly tied to their regional localities.

Let me give you another example of why I feel this is odd. Part of the SOA dream is the erosion of silos. These silos are not only inter-departmental but also cross-border. I appreciate that the number of examples of companies with cross-border IT implementations are few but the wave of M&A activity is going to make this increasingly commonplace - after all, one of the significant parts of the business case for the Santander/Abbey merger was supposed to be the IT rationalisations. Now name me a pan-European IT title? In fact, let me go one further, name me a European IT title that will accept a non-national case study. Other than the occasional rogue example that slips past the editorial controls it isn’t easy, is it?

It's nothing more than an observation at this stage but actually I think it is time that the publishing houses woke up and accepted that the world is globalising. Some aspect of globalisation creeps into virtually every edition. The majority of vendors are global or certainly have global aspirations. China is the next big market, not just for IT vendors but business as a whole. Basically, globalisation is not just coming, it's here. That's not a bold statement, it's a statement that simply underlines the fact that the media, not just the trades, but also many of the on-lines, are falling out of step with the evolution of the global economy and I think it is time they considered this a problem.

The battle for the empty chair

2007-05-09T09:59:00.000+01:00

Hotwire's seminar last week, The Battle for the Empty Chair, provoked a lively debate with the help of two great speakers in Gareth Jones from Marketing and Derek Owen from NEC. We were discussing the future of marketing and who will be the owner of the marketing strategy in this age of digital media. Rather than a being a land grab between marketing and communications the consensus was that these departments need to adopt a much more integrated approach to working together. Nothing new there then you might say.

Do we need to acquire and learn new skills to adapt to the growth in digital media? Yes. Do we need separate departments to focus on digital media? Probably not (worth noting at this point that there was broad scepticism of agencies who have attempted to ride the digital media wave by doing this).

In fact, while the way we deliver the message may be different via a blog or a podcast, the essence - in terms of the message - must fit within a broader and integrated marketing communications strategy. Some of you will no doubt remember how this same debate kicked off 10 years ago when everyone was asking whether we needed separate online teams to cope with the Internet.

More then anything, what I took away from the debate is that we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes, we need to get a proper grip on digital so that we can respond to the changing media diets of our customers, but we need to approach these new channels in the same way we do others. Working towards an overall strategy and with clear objectives and measurement, and then choosing the tactics and media channels that will best support these.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying put the brakes on digital media. In fact, I would say that many businesses, particularly in the B2B arena, are missing a trick by not exploiting digital media more that they are. I just feel we are in danger of fetishising digital media as a new channel, at the expense of the bigger picture of understanding and influencing our customers.

Is there room for calculated experimentation? Absolutely! Without experimentation our approach to public relations and marketing won’t evolve. But just as in science where experimentation is followed by rigorous assessment, so it should in our industries. Only by doing this will learn and move forward.

CeBIT 2007

2007-03-28T11:53:00.000+01:00

For one week, Hanover has again been the centre for IT and telecommunications. And, as every year, there was a lot of speculation about the validity of CeBIT: is it now more a local rather than a global show? Is its influence declining now that some of the big companies like Motorola and Nokia have dropped out? And as always, will it snow?

Against all odds, CeBIT seems to have made the final turn: for the first time in years CeBIT saw its visitor numbers grow, although it is probably fair to say that some of the tickets were sold at dumping prices. Still, nearly 480,000 visitors attended for an update on new technologies and trends. And the overall quality of the meetings seems to have been quite good – all of our clients attending the show were very pleased with them. And from a PR perspective, the show was a great success and a fantastic opportunity to reach out to media from other territories like Eastern Europe or Asia.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that we would not see the unveiling of any revolutionary new technology this year – instead there were a lot of enhancements to existing technologies. Ahead of the show editors were expecting seven big trends: Blu Ray and HD-DVD (where we German’s are pretty far behind), Full HD, Vista/Hybrid Disks and Solid State Disks, Quad Core CPUs and IP TV. Navigation was also a really, really hot topic. But as our client Factiva found in their CeBIT Index, which we had placed in the trade show magazine “Messe Zeitung”, the dominating topic turned out to be mobile internet (and you can include navigation here).

Factiva’s Index assessed 146 dailies, magazines and newswires during the show and identified the most frequently mentioned topics. Mobile applications were of the most interest to media (and consequently consumers). Besides new devices, many carriers were introducing flat rates for mobile internet on handhelds like BlackBerry or other smartphones.

Another frequently mentioned topic was “growth”. The business climate in Germany is quite positive and companies are predicting good growth. The IT and telecommunication industry is no exception, although it is no longer perceived as the “economy driver”. Still it seems as if more and more companies in the industry are investing in their product and brand image.

So while some companies decided not to participate, CeBIT was again the most important technology trade show in the world. And with IFA, the Berlin based show for consumer electronics now taking place annually, we will see another highlight in the German technology calendar.

Btw – to maintain their position the CeBIT organisers are revamping CeBIT next year. The show will start on a Tuesday and finish on the following Sunday evening. Good news for most of us who either dreaded the weekends when loads of young consumers streamed in, on the hunt for giveaways or who had left at the weekend to go home, only to have to return again on Monday. And it means we will have nearly four days for successful media relations.

P.S. Yes it did snow, but only a little bit.

Simplicity and the art of communication

2007-03-23T15:41:00.000Z

This year in Italy we supported the second ‘Meet the Media Guru’ seminar organised by MGM Digital Communication and promoted by Forum Net Economy and BlackBerry.

One evening a few days ago, one of Milan’s prestigious centres of culture, the mythical Mediatec, was crowded, queues of people were at the gate all eager to get into the seminar.

A famous ‘guru’ was the reason for the crowds. Hundreds of people, including many from the new networking generation were all wanting to hear John Maeda, a graphic designer, artist and leading professor at MIT media Lab. Famous for making art with computers and a noted collaborator with important tech companies such as Samsung, Toshiba and Sony…

And what were people clamouring to hear: his current thoughts on the concept of simplicity, on which he founded the MIT SIMPLICITY Consortium.

He began by saying: “I am not a media guru, I am a media guy!” He went on to discuss his appreciation of simple and small things, the things that you do everyday, which can become extraordinary. He says that the world is full of fantastic things and he likes to live in it. His approach to life and technology is the Zen way “right is easy and easy is right”.

Thinking about marketing and communications, simplicity sells, look at the iPod and at the BlackBerry. People like things that make their life easier. The key to targeting a market is the creation of strong relationships, underpinned by love: the love of doing things in an easy way. Think also about social networking through blogs, online communities and new media. They are a simple way of communicating: simple things that create big ideas. See YouTube or SecondLife, they are the result of new ways of communicating, and which in a very simple way develop an emotional attachment to a community…and this is what people like…

http://www.meetthemediaguru.org/

Never fear - PR is on a roll

2007-03-06T10:50:00.000Z

Every quarter, “news aktuell”, a major German newswire service, conducts a survey among in-house and agency PR professionals in Germany. The “PR-Trendmonitor” tracks their views on the latest trends and developments in communications. This quarter’s PR-Trendmonitor highlights three challenges that PR pros are facing today.

1. Increasing pressure on budgets. (27.8 per cent of responses)
2. Web 2.0 and its implications for PR (17.5 per cent)
3. Measuring the success of PR (11.4 per cent)

Let’s take a look at budget pressures first. In our experience at Hotwire, the recent uplift in the technology industry has contributed to a drop in budget pressures. While this may not be true in other sectors, technology companies have learnt their lesson from the bursting of the New Economy bubble: brand building is not about spending millions on advertising campaigns, it’s about building a reputation with ever more fragmented audiences. There’s a job for Public Relations! While overall communications budgets may be shrinking, PR for technology is on a roll.

Quite possibly, our relatively comfortable position in terms of budget pressures has to do with our approach to challenge number three: measurement of PR success. Since day one, we’ve been doing virtually everything with measurability in mind. While the academic discussion about measuring PR success seems to go in circles around fairly abstract approaches, such as “communication scorecards”, we’re taking a pragmatic stance and deliver results that make a difference to our client’s bottom-line.

Web 2.0 and what comes with it for PR is definitely exciting as new technologies contribute to a shift in media usage. While newspapers, TV and radio programmes are consumed in a linear way (the media makers defining content and the sequence of presentation), Web 2.0 technologies (RSS news aggregators, social book-marking, video-on-demand, etc.) will ultimately lead to non-linear patterns of consumption. The reader/viewer/listener will start re-mixing content independently of the medium and time constraints to fit his/her individual way of life and daily routine.

While this is a massive threat to classic advertising on television and in print, it’s a fantastic opportunity for PR. If PR today is about good arguments and good content presented to the right audience through the best-fitting channels, ‘PR 2.0’ will be about making that good content re-mixable. The odds are that PR will loose control over the channel and context of presentation. But one new economy vision is now closer to becoming reality than ever: “content is king”. And PR will lead the coronation ceremony.

“The press is dead, long live the press!”

2007-03-01T12:03:00.000Z

Is there a future for the press in our countries? Will it be paper or digital? This issue hit the French headlines last week with the publication of a report for the government by Marc Tessier, former director of the French public TV channel, France Televisions, and Maxime Baffert, financial inspector (http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/rapports/tessier/rapport-fev2007.pdf). This report - as has been widely reported elsewhere – showed how the paper press has been losing its audience for a few years now. And the digital revolution, initiated by the specialised press and the classifieds sector, has only contributed to the acceleration of this phenomenon.

A lot of areas were researched in the report in order to solve the issue and to find a positive way to exploit the ‘digital era’s’ arrival. The report also included a comparison of the French market to other countries, including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, the Nordics, Japan, and South Korea.

It showed how the French press is particularly touched by this phenomenon compared to other countries; with Italy and Spain beginning to face the same kind of situation. The report mainly highlights the weakness of the national distribution channel networks. For example, in 2003, in France 181 newspapers were distributed per 1000 people, compared to 274 in the US, 371 in Germany, 383 in the UK and 543 in Sweden! This has had a direct impact on French advertising budgets, which went down to only 9.3 % in France against 14.3 % in the UK, 17.2 % in Germany and 18.9 % in the US in 2006.

However, over the last three years, two free publications have entered the top five of the French national daily titles: Metro and 20 minutes. There are two ways to look at these two publications: the first one is to consider them responsible for the “malaise” of the French newspapers, the second is to see them as alternative offerings which help boost French readership, in a way similar to the web: free, short articles, easily available and easy to read. This success confirms there is a problem with distribution. But it also invites us to imagine that there are alternative solutions, rather than just claiming that the press is dead…

How influential are blogs?

2007-02-20T16:11:00.000Z

At the tail end of last year we hosted a seminar on the impact of blogging on PR – yes, I know a common topic in 2006 – but we were keen to offer our delegates something different and original from the five other blogging seminars and conferences they had no doubt attended during the course of last year. Discussing the topic in the agency beforehand what was clear was that the blogging debate was built on a series of assumptions and intellectual leaps and what was missing was up-to-date hard facts to back these up. With this in mind we partnered with Ipsos/MORI to conduct some credible research both in the UK and across Europe, specifically looking at the role of blogs in influencing consumer purchasing behaviour. We were lucky enough to be joined at the seminar by MORI founder and keen blogger Sir Bob Worcester.

I'm not going to run through the entire research (check-out our White Paper for that) but given all the hype around blogs I was at first a bit surprised that only 1 in 5 people claim to have read a blog, but there was equal surprise amongst delegates that the figure was actually that high. What is clear is that the number of blogs is increasingly rapidly, and it will be interesting to see when we repeat this research whether readership is increasing at the same rate.

Another interesting aspect is that many consumers are reading blog content without actually realising it. Many news sites are increasingly adopting a blog format where the public's comments sit alongside that of the journalist's so user generated comment is penetrating traditional media and influencing the editorial which people are reading. It’s funny that in the UK which has one of the highest readerships of daily newspapers that the British public appears to have such disdain for the national press. The specific figure for the UK is 14% of people trust content in a newspaper, with trust in blog content actually 1% point higher. Today the internet has become the 21st century garden fence for the exchange of opinion and gossip. The blog author is the equivalent of the guy down the pub trusted more than the expert tech correspondent.

The research also found that those who spend more than 145€ on-line actually have a higher trust in blogs; I think this statistic really answers the ‘show me the money’ question when it comes to blogs. It’s interesting that those who spend more than 145€ are more influenced either negatively or positively by blog content. 45% of them decided not to make a purchase after reading a negative comment on line. I think this is quite striking and indicates the growing importance being placed on ‘impartial’ sources of advice and information.

What’s going to be exciting to watch is the influence that blogs begin to have in the B2B arena where purchasing decisions can be far more complex. The impact of blog content on the buying cycle would be an interesting one to quantify.

Hotwire at 3GSM - Day Four

2007-02-16T09:42:00.001Z

Fourth and final day, and you find the last of the Hotwire team blogging from the long check in queues at Barcelona airport... Home time, and time to count up some of the results:

15 clients
172 media and analyst briefings
11 broadcast slots
5 speaker slots
1 award shortlist
1 award win!
15 team members...

... And too many Show Daily pieces of coverage to count (until we unpack them from our cases anyway!)

Hotwire at 3GSM - Day Three

2007-02-15T10:36:00.000Z

Day three has come to an end at the 3GSM World Congress and tiredness has started to set in for many of us as we hit the midweek madness of the show. Today has been as busy as ever, but the sun is still shining and the end is in sight as we move closer to the final day – where things will hopefully start to calm down!

Last night the winners of the 12th annual GSM Association (GSMA) Global Mobile Award’s were announced at Barcelona’s National Palace. The GSMA hosted another spectacular event, showcasing the very best in mobile innovation from companies across the globe. Hotwire’s very own client Telepo was one of the stars of the night when it won the Best Mobile Enterprise Product or Service in the Mobile Services category. Well done Telepo, this is a truly amazing feat and we hope you celebrated in style, especially when there were over 600 entries for the awards this year.

Much of the buzz around the showground continues to be about the convergence of the mobile and entertainment industries. This year’s show has demonstrated that we are now entering a new era within the mobile industry, as the mobile ecosystem evolves at an incredible rate and heavily embraces new media and entertainment. This will provide huge opportunities for the industry as the mobile platform becomes the ‘fourth screen’ for consumer entertainment.

As the show draws to an end we can’t believe it is nearly over for another year. A lot of hard work and effort has gone into this and I think everyone would agree that it has paid off with another successful event. It’s unbelievable to think that as soon as we are back in the office we will need to start planning next year’s event.

Hotwire at 3GSM - Day Two

2007-02-14T09:34:00.001Z

Day two of 3GSM and just when we thought it couldn't get any crazier, it did. Today was even busier than yesterday, with the halls and Avenida packed with the great and the good of the mobile industry. We had a fun day catching up with old friends, with a jam packed schedule of media briefings. There were a few sore heads after Jamelia rocked the kick-off party last night and our client parties started in earnest.

Yesterday was all about the hunt for news and today we saw journalists looking for more detail and analysis. We're starting to see the main themes of the show emerge. Everyone's talking about WiFi and dual mode handsets, the debate about content rumbles on, and how to make mobile TV work is a big issue.

It's amazing how global 3GSM really is - we've spent the day talking to journalists from India, Japan, South Africa, Israel, South America and pretty much anywhere you can think of. The countries may be different, but the issues are pretty similar.

This year Barcelona feels like a more established venue, and some of last year's teething troubles have been ironed out. But despite that, and despite the industry news and debate that's going on, the state of our feet, the lunch queues and the bocadillos tortilla (as well as where we are drinking tonight) remain our key concerns.

Hotwire at 3GSM - Day One

2007-02-13T10:23:00.000Z

The mobile industry was in high spirits today for the opening of the 2007 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona. Aside from a few hangovers after the Hotwire bash the night before - giving our clients, journalist and analyst friends a chance to mingle before the event kicked off - there was a positive and vibrant mood around Fira Barcelona.

Word on the street centred on user-generated content and the role of content, media and operators in the new mobile value chain. Fuelling the debate, father of the internet Tim Berners-Lee set the debate rolling with a call for openness and user control on the mobile web in his speech to the Innovation Forum.

Our carefully planned interview schedules ran like clockwork, the news announcements hit the headlines and the sun shone. All in all, great start to the biggest event in the mobile sector calendar!