Zing

Our fav blogs this week...

We're lucky here at Zing because part of the job description as a PR is to be very familiar with blogs and all social networks - so I get to read them every day! Being on Facebook is actually me doing work! Love it......As a result, we're continually finding great content that is not only relevant to our clients and our industry but also a great read in general. 

Below are few of Zing’s favourite reads at the moment. Some are old friends and others new acquaintances, but be sure to add these guys to you’re your google reader- otherwise you’re missing out!

Mooiness

From a dog eating fruit to political insights, there’s never a dull day with Mooiness. We first ran into this guy during our Mother Energy Drink adventures and he’s been a great contact ever since. Down to Earth, yet right on the money Mooiness knows his stuff.

2Threads.com

Forget ‘finger on the pulse’, 2Threads is the pulse! You couldn’t ask for a better mix of fashion, fun and fabulousness. The 2Threads team is incredibly approachable and always willing to offer great feedback (good or bad) on the products and brands we represent. What’s more, they welcome user-generated content so you can be a cool kid too!   

Beauty Editor

Your one-stop-shop for all things beauty, the gorgeous Katrina Lawrence gives you unlimited access to the hidden gems of the beauty world. Join the fight against free radicals with a simple click of the mouse.
 

Life Hacker

Plug in and log on, it’s tech time. The team at Life hacker are scrupulously professional but this attitude is certainly paying off! Their posts are consistently relevant and insightful, perhaps the reason why Life Hacker is one of Australia’s most popular websites.

Marketing Mag

The goss about the industry from those in the industry, Marketing Mag is your key to the PR/Marketing/Advertising treasure chest. 

Change you HAVE to believe in....

Ok - so contrary to what some people think of the state of online PR in Australia's PR agencies, here at Zing we pride ourselves as being pretty clued up with all things to do with social media marketing and the bloggosphere. And so we should, we've been doing it long enough.

We've been successfully  implementing online PR campaigns for many of our clients including McDonalds, Mother Energy Drink, glaceau vitaminwater, Bacardi Lion, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and more for about 1.5 years now. In that time I have seen the attitude to online PR change dramatically to the point where new clients are coming out of no where specifically requesting our services in this area.

All good news for my team! I'm the Account Director of online PR (or the "won't be redundant in 3 years' team). Which brings me to my next point. PR's,  I can't stress this enough, change and adapt or risk becoming irrelevant and redundant in your industry. 

I admit it's not easy to change....although it hasn't been that hard for the offline Zinger team to get their heads around it, I do understand that it doesn't come naturally to everyone. It is important to teach them the skills and give them the confidence necessary to think outside the box that is the traditional media landscape. Of course, now all the Zingers are super skilled up in that area and talk about bloggers and social networks as easily as they do editors and journalists.  As a result, we're seeing a whole new world of opportunities open up to us. 

Change = Good for business.  

Check out the poll below and let me know what you think about online PR. Is it something you use regularly or need to know more about it before dipping your toe in?

And of course, please feel free to leave comments...would love to chat more about this topic as  i feel very passionate about it. 

Sean

(Account Director - Online PR, Zing)

Zing goes to Mexico

Well I am back off to the US in January to visit and work with the Zing LA and NY offices, meet clients (lots of boozy dinners ahead) and chew the fat with Kirsten on a range of topics from company direction to future expansion plans.

As part of this trip all the US zingers will be joining me at Les Oiseaux Volants an amazing villa in beautiful Sayulita, North of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico  They will fly in from LA and NY for a four day off-site session with a mix of fun and strategic workshops, looking at the future for the US Zing offices.  I will post pics and a soundtrack when I get home.

At Zing we have a history of fun off-site days – every year in Sydney we sail and swim in February and we haven’t had a bad day in 6 years (touch wood).

So stay tuned for an update from Mexico and some cool pics of the Zingers on tour remember -  what goes on tour stays on tour!

Cheers

Preya

Zing Managing Director and Owner

Jump in, the water's fine...

Pr has been getting a bit of a bad rap around the blogosphere lately. From PR’s being blacklisted by bloggers to nasty and aggressive emails sent to companies blasting their internal PR staff.

I agree that some PR’s probably have zero respect for blogger relations and probably deserve to have a fire lit under them to make them understand that spamming is not cool and that bloggers are people and not purely a marketing channel for them to exploit.

However, I also believe that these (over) reactions to PR by some bloggers has succeeded in creating an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty about PR/blogger relations which makes dipping one’s toe into the already treacherous water of the blogosphere even more frightening and risky.

Spend a few weeks at any PR agency and you’ll probably find that you have a new respect (or at least a healthy tolerance) for the day-to-day workings and effort required for a PR agency to obtain coverage for a client on a daily basis.

They need to be quick thinking, to jump on any opportunity and often to create an opportunity where non existed before. They’re resourceful and don’t often take no for an answer. That’s what makes them good at their job.

As the digital account director here at Zing, I get to observe them in their element but still sit outside the pure PR sphere and can truly say that I have a deep respect for the arduous, relentless and often thankless job they perform.

No other communication discipline is as fast changing as that of PR. That’s why it’s my job is to make them comfortable with new and developing methods to outreach to consumers and online media and to help engage new products for clients to drive internet traffic, increase search results and monitor the bloggosphere.

“Treat them like rock stars” is a sound bite that gets bandied around our office to describe how we should treat bloggers.  The only problem being, many of the PR pros are too concerned about negative reactions from bloggers no matter how sensitive they try to engage with them to even consider contacting them.

PR’s and bloggers need to work together and most of them do but when PR’s get too scared to even make contact with bloggers at all then there’s something out of balance, which needs to be addressed.

Sean O'Byrne is the Digital Account director at Zing. Email: sean@zing.net.au

Is predictive text spelling the end for grammar?

I’m a stickler for correct grammar!  A careless typo, a misplaced apostrophe or an omitted word is simply sloppy and embarrassing.  In PR, language and words have always been our trade, but so few PRs these days put any value on attention to detail when it comes to the written word.

And it’s hardly surprising.  Who needs to be able to spell when predictive text and autocorrect do the hard work for us.  When was the last time you had to write a difficult document from start to finish without a virtual spelling bee guessing the words as you typed?

The worst thing is I’ve started making mistakes too!  Where I used to proof read everything before pressing send, I now look for red squiggly underlines as typo heads up – no red and it’s green to go!

But does it really matter anymore?  We are on the cusp of a written revolution where technology rules and the pen is no longer so mighty.  My prediction is that our ability to master grammar will only deteriorate further and no-one will actually care or even notice – including me! 

Jocelyne Simpson is a Zing employee and definitely knows the difference between your and you’re.

email: Jocelyne@zing.net.au

Don't adjust your television sets - the lines have blurred

There used to be a time when working for a PR agency meant your main responsibility was simply to act as a conduit between media and your client. However today, especially in Australia, working for a PR agency is something altogether different.

At Zing, we're fortunate that our client base is one that really understands that PR in 2007 isn't just about a press release. It's a mix of things - fantastic media relations, on-the-ground activity, promotions, and corporate identity - among the rest. At our agency, the zeitgeist of PR from ages ago has been updated with a newer, fresher take on representing clients.

The fact is, if we weren't constantly updating and embracing the new, there would be no blogs, no emails, no mobile phones or DVDs. We'd all probably still be sitting in our lounge rooms rewinding our Beta Tapes and waiting for the kettle to boil.

You could describe what we do now as taking a holistic approach. We present clients, present and future, with a plan that incorporates traditional PR elements with new and adventurous online and digital solutions such as the social media release (SMR), search engine optimisation (SEO) and link building in order to improve search engine rankings. It’s our job to know these things – to present our client with every possible avenue for a successful campaign.

More often than not, I find it’s vitally important to include non-traditional elements to a launch campaign in order to effectively reach the target market and to get the client’s messages heard above the ‘noise’ that permeates the Internet these days.

If your PR agency is not suggesting these new online methods of communication and information sharing for your campaigns then maybe it’s time to look for one that does.

For when it’s done correctly the impact and exposure can have amazing results. It's 2007, the lines have blurred between what PR is and what it isn't - and thank god for that.

Our new Xmas E-card

Today Zing have launched a cheeky new E-card featured some of the Zing crew.

Check it out here

Below is the email that clients and friends recieved that clicks through to the e-card..

Not just air kissing and bubbles

The many misconceptions of PR by Adam Cubito

Yes I'm a man and I work at a PR agency. Grab a pencil and strike that one off your list. Right, glad we got that out of the way.  Now let's move our way down the rest - but be warned, you’ll probably need a sharpener, the list is pretty long.

Since I first started in the industry (just over one year ago now) I've been amazed at exactly how distorted the view is of people who work in public relations. Coming from journalism to PR was an interesting transition but I found the challenges came more from the perceptions of my job rather than the job itself.

People - my friends and family included in this one - think we PR's sit around the office on a daily basis downing champagne and lunching indulgently while squeezing in some time to compare ribbon swatches for creative mailers. Sure, they know there's the odd press release to write and phone call to make, but most of the people I hang around use the word "glamorous" before they use word "challenging" to describe my job...which to me is just as
ridiculous as calling a checkout chick at Woolies an "Assistant Sales Manager".

The reality of the fact - and sorry to burst your bubble here - is that PR is a very demanding career and one that has you questioning so many things in your life on a daily basis. Sure, there's champagne on Friday's and a few freebies, but I reckon some people would be surprised at exactly how much work goes into a new product launch or producing media materials that inevitably end up being deleted from the inboxes of journalists who get bombarded on a daily basis.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming we work harder than anyone else - not at all - it just annoys me when people look at what I do for a living and dismiss it as easy. It's fun and I wouldn’t swap working in this career for anything else, but trust me, it's hardly 365 days of frivolity.

But if you're guilty of harboring those misconceptions you'll be glad to hear it's not entirely your fault - at least I don't think it is. The world of media would have you believe we PR's are all truth-bending, black suit-wearing, Otto-lunching egomaniacs.

I can't speak for our global counterparts, but I sure as hell haven't met an Aussie PR person who lives up to that reputation...just yet. That’s not to say they’re not out there – it’s just like alien life, maybe you’ve had close encounters with PRs of the ego kind before – and if you have, I’m truly sorry.

At the end of the day I put it down to a series of stereotypes being peddled by those who have never even worked in the industry - or maybe they've watched an episode of Absolutely Fabulous and thought PR must all be about air kissing and bubbles, sweetie, darling - again hate to shatter any illusions, but it's not all that.

I hope this first Zing blog has helped shed some light on the so-called "dark side" of PR. There'll be plenty more blogs just like this one so be prepared!

Now if you'll excuse I'm going to pop open some champers - I've got a couple of hundred press kits to pack.

Zing PR - First post off the rank...

It's official - we've jumped in with both feet and have started our very own Zing PR blog! 

There's so much cool stuff happening in the world of online and offline PR at the moment that we couldn't help ourselves any longer but just had to get involved in the exciting conversations happening out there.

As PR experts, we're hoping to be able to contribute something useful to the blogosphere especially as here in Australia the idea of brand blogs or corporate blogs as they're also known as has really yet to take off (Telstra being an exemption).

I've been regularly reader of about 15 blogs for about 8 months now, most off which are based in the US or UK. We're  hoping that as one of Australia's leading PR agencies, we'll be able to give you the Aussie online perspective on all things PR including the social media landscape, trends, cool stuff, gossip, campaigns and maybe even the odd white paper etc.

This is only our first post and we're excited already! Stay tuned...

In the meantime, here's some photos of our office....

zing social media PR online