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February 27th, 2009

Will San Francisco be the largest US city without a daily newspaper?

Will San Francisco be the largest US city without a daily newspaper?

“We will recover.” The defiant headline was emblazoned across the front page of American newspapers on Wednesday morning following President Obama’s first speech to Congress.
For the San Francisco Chronicle the headline was misleading. With audiences and advertising declining and 2008 losses of $50 million, the point of recovery may be long gone.

The Chronicle is one of the oldest newspapers in America. Like any regional newspaper, it’s a source of local news and opinions, and provides key emotional, cultural and historical references. The paper was founded in January 1865, following the explosive growth of the local population after the gold rush. The Chronicle has covered 143 years of Californian history and amassed many awards, including several Pulitzer prizes. Even Mark Twain has written for the Chronicle. With a daily circulation of 370,345 and a Sunday circulation of 424,603, it has the 12th largest circulation in the USA, and the second largest on the West Coast.
As I write this, there is still speculation as to whether the owner, Hearst Corporation, will close or sell the Chronicle. The prognosis is poor. This is not an isolated case. Regional newspapers are in decline – advertisers’ and readers’ habits are changing and technology has altered how we access and share information.
San Francisco may become the largest US city without a print newspaper, but in a city driven by technological innovation and entrepreneurial flair it’ll be interesting to see what takes the paper’s place.
It may already be in evidence. Some enterprising journalists have started a wiki to imagine a potential successor to the Chronicle. Its mooted blog-like format, focus on individual neighborhoods and willingness to publish stories from other sources, makes the ‘San Francisco Post-Chronicle’ an interesting glimpse of how local newspapers could survive in the age of instant, online, social media.
Newspapers may soon be part of history, but news itself will never stop. Newspapers that restructure for the digital age will survive. Those that cling to old-fashioned ideas and business models will not.
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February 24th, 2009

Foviance appoints Prompt Communications as UK PR agency

Foviance appoints Prompt Communications as UK PR agency

Foviance appoints Prompt Communications as UK PR agency

London arm of transatlantic agency to drive media relations and thought leadership initiatives that will increase awareness of Foviance and generate new business leads

London, UK, 24 February 2009 – Prompt Communications, a specialist in PR, marketing and social media communications, has been awarded the UK PR account for Foviance, a crosschannel user experience consultancy to the world’s leading brands.

Prompt will work with Foviance to develop thought leadership initiatives, increase brand awareness and ultimately drive lead generation through a mixture of traditional media outreach, analyst relations, social media, thought leadership communications, and speaker engagements.

Foviance uses expert consultants and advanced technology to improve customer experience, which enables companies to optimise usability, conversion rates and retention. Foviance’s capabilities include researching the customer experience across multiple channels, such as call centres, mobile, iTV, handheld devices and catalogue marketing.

“We see Prompt as an extension of our marketing department and selected the team to add a fresh perspective to the design and operation of our communications programme,” said Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance. “With our specialism in cross-channel customer experience and the recent addition of our data analytics capabilities, it is important to have an agency that demonstrates a solid understanding of our technologies, services and business model. Most importantly, we needed an agency with experience in delivering consistent, measurable results.”

“Working with Foviance is a fantastic opportunity to further utilise the depth of expertise we have in the cross channel marketing and technology arena,” said Hazel Butters, managing director of Prompt Communications. “Foviance’s unique value proposition enables its blue chip customer base to improve the customer experience globally. We look forward to helping Foviance achieve its goals by creating awareness across traditional and social media channels.”

About Prompt Communications

Founded in January 2002, Prompt Communications is a communications agency with European offices in Chiswick, London and US offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California.

Prompt Communications offers expertise across all marketing disciplines, teaming its consultants’ extensive knowledge of start-ups, technology market with experience of pan- European and American media, analyst and marketing campaigns. Using highly targeted marketing, PR, analyst relations, social media and corporate copywriting initiatives, Prompt helps its clients gain the visibility they need to achieve their business objectives, from increasing sales to enhancing reputation with stakeholders. The company has five business divisions: PR, Analyst Relations, Copywriting & Creative; Marketing Services and Social Media.

Prompt’s clients include Barros Technologies, Colosa, Corizon, GenSight Group, Hippo, Openbravo, Oracle Corporation, MIT Mobile Experience Lab, smartFOCUS, Steganos GmbH and Webtide.

For more information, visit www.prompt-communications.com

About Foviance

Foviance is a leading customer experience consultancy that works globally with some of the world’s best known brands to deliver measurable improvements in performance.

Founded in 2001 and with a heritage in website usability and data analytics, Foviance delivers consultancy to its clients about the effectiveness of their individual channels, such as mobile, web and call centre and how they combine in a cross-channel environment. For many clients, insight is provided not only in their home market, but also internationally through Foviance extensive alliance network.

Foviance engages with its customers wherever they are in their product lifecycle, and provides insight so they understand how to improve, create and deliver excellent customer experiences. Foviance boasts 43 of the UK FTSE 100 companies among its client roster, including Barclays, BSkyB, and Sainsbury’s. In addition Foviance works with International brands such as Astrazeneca, Dell and Nokia.

For further information please visit: www.foviance.com

For more information or interviews please contact:
Press contacts:
UK: Ellie Turner
Prompt Communications, London
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8996 1650
ellie@prompt-communications.com

US: Laurie SantaLucia
Prompt Communications, Cambridge, MA
Tel: +1 617 576 5763 / +1 617 291 9899
laurie@prompt-communications.com

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February 20th, 2009

Twestival goes global

Twestival goes global

Prompt’s roving reporters headed off to last week’s Twitter festival, ‘Twestival’ – a global flashmob organised to raise funds for Charity Water.

Here is a short movie covering what we found over in Shoreditch Studios on a snowy Thursday evening. Other events took place around the World including Honolulu, Sydney, Bangalore, Amsterdam, New York, Dallas and LA. It is estimated that a quarter milllion dollars was raised for Charity Water – a charity that funds clean water projects around the globe.

The London Twestival was sold out and had an attendance of over 600 people; all avid twitterers. There was a real community spirit and party atmosphere. It’s good to see online networks meeting in the real world; particularly as we become ever more consumed by our impersonal low-communication-bandwidth keyboards, screens, phones, inboxes and data feeds.

Many of the people we talked to actively use Twitter for business. Some using it to find new users, some to update regular customers and some to find new products for import into the UK. The event was attended by a sprinkling of VCs and many people with small startup businesses.

It get’s me wondering what the collective noun is for a gathering of people who tweet. A thumb of tweeters? A festival of tweeters? ‘Flock’ is a popular term for those who ‘follow’, but that’s all in cyber space. Leave a comment with your vote or suggestions.

Twitter
Follow Twestival @Twestival.
Follow Prompt @DigPrompt.

Resources
Everything Twestival : http://video.liveearth.org/
Charity Water’s Twestival page : http://www.charitywater.org/twestival/
Prompt Communications video : http://www.prompt-logic.com/twestival/london_highlights.html
Collective nouns : http://www.rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml
Twitter newbies start here : Video, Wikipedia

Thanks
Our thanks to the organisers of the event for giving us permission to film on location.

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February 17th, 2009

Prompt Communications launches Prompt Insight

Prompt Communications launches Prompt Insight

Cost-effective marketing services from Prompt enable B2B vendors to identify sales opportunities and engage prospects quickly and effectively in challenging markets

London, UK, and Cambridge, MA – 17 February 2009 – Prompt Communications, a transatlantic marketing, PR and copywriting consultancy has launched a new cost-effective and simply packaged market research service called Prompt Insight. The service targets the needs of sales managers looking to identify gaps in services and provide lead-hungry sales teams with quantitative and qualified insights into market conditions, demands and opportunities.

Comprising a broad range of services including mystery shopping, gap analysis, market demand and product comparisons, Prompt’s offerings are designed specifically for sales-driven companies that need to accurately build sales pipelines and rapidly engage with prospects. Prompt Insight ensures marketing investment is optimised by targeting top-level prospects based on relevant and compelling information.

Hazel Butters, CEO of Prompt Communications said: “In a recession, it is simply not enough to concentrate on your own market; the smart players are looking at their market’s market; identifying gaps and opportunities and then demonstrating how their products help other companies fill those gaps; driving return and leading to a compelling sales pitch.”

Prompt was recently appointed by telecommunications solutions provider Telsis to design and analyse a consumer research project across mainland Europe including Italy, Spain and the UK to assess consumer use of short messaging services (SMS), to provide quantitative and anecdotal insight into the target markets of local mobile phone operators.

Gavin Ray, marketing director for Telsis said: “We knew that we needed to be able to present well orchestrated and compelling customer insight to mobile operators allows us to demonstrate the revenue potential of our products in their markets. We were delighted by the depth of analysis and simplicity of the engagement using the Prompt Insight programme.”

Prompt Insight begins with a set of objectives. From there, Prompt’s consultants devise custom methods of research, collection and analysis. Next follows data trend and gap identification, statistical breakdown and full quadrant analysis. The results are delivered in full with accompanying sales-ready presentations, reports and marketing flyers. Mail-shots, emails, mini-sites, podcasts and telemarketing follow up are also available from the Prompt stable.

Hazel Butters added: “As the markets tighten and the demand for cost-effective and results-based lead generation activities moves up the agenda of any sales organisation, we know that this is a service that will be in demand. Market research and the resulting uncovering of sales opportunities is a vital marketing tool, especially in economically challenging times.

“It’s all about understanding market pull. In business-to-business sales, there is always an end user; by identifying trends in the end user space we can advise companies where our products and services fit in, and demonstrate compelling ROI propositions.”

With consultants, researchers and businesses premises in multiple territories, Prompt Insight is available to technology companies across Europe, the US and Asia Pacific.

About Prompt Communications

Founded in January 2002, Prompt Communications is a communications agency with European offices in Chiswick, London and US offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California.

Prompt Communications offers expertise across all marketing disciplines, teaming its consultants’ extensive knowledge of start-ups, technology market with experience of pan-European and American media, analyst and marketing campaigns. Using highly targeted marketing, PR, analyst relations, social media and corporate copywriting initiatives, Prompt helps its clients gain the visibility they need to achieve their business objectives, from increasing sales to enhancing reputation with stakeholders. The company has five business divisions: PR, Analyst Relations, Copywriting & Creative; Marketing Services and Social Media.

Prompt’s clients include Barros Technologies, Colosa, Corizon, GenSight Group, Hippo, Openbravo, Oracle Corporation, MIT Mobile Experience Lab, smartFOCUS, Steganos GmbH and Webtide.

For more information, visit www.prompt-communications.com

For more information or interviews please contact:
Press contacts:
UK: Ellie Turner
Prompt Communications, London
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8996 1650
ellie@prompt-communications.com

US: Laurie SantaLucia
Prompt Communications, Cambridge, MA
Tel: +1 617 576 5763 / +1 617 291 9899
laurie@prompt-communications.com

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February 12th, 2009

Where does the Costa Brava start?

Where does the Costa Brava start?

The Costa Brava Girona tourism board was this week caught using photos of the Bahamas to illustrate adverts for the Costa Brava. Under the unintentionally funny headline “Where does the Costa Brava start?”, the board used stock photos taken in the Bahamas because, director Dolors Batallé says, they couldn’t find good enough photos of their own beaches. Journalists are also questioning where a photo used to advertise the Pyrenees was taken.

I almost felt sorry for the marketing team at the tourist board as I imagined them going home and asking “Mummy, where do photographs really come from?” (Clue: the answer doesn’t have to be Getty Images). But then I read the quote in Metro where Batallé was unapologetic: “The important thing is not whether [the photo was taken] in the Pyrenees, but rather that it represents them.”

Actually, no – the important thing is that your marketing is honest. Advertising will always be about presenting a company in its best light, but there has to be a core of truth there. Otherwise you’re damaging your customer relationship before it’s even begun.

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February 10th, 2009

Can Amazon re-Kindle our interest in the e-book?

Can Amazon re-Kindle our interest in the e-book?

Did you by any chance catch last week’s edition of The Money Programme on BBC2? If not, then the episode entitled ‘Media Revolution: Stop Press?‘ is still available on the BBC iPlayer and is well worth a watch if you have more than a passing obsession with both the media and technology. (We do.)

Among many other interesting things, the programme saw Janet Street-Porter examining the declining fortunes of the print media industry. Falling circulations, reductions in advertising revenues, economic strife, and above all, our changing lifestyles have been blamed for the fact that some of our most familiar newspaper brands are likely to disappear over the next decade.

Of course, the ready availability of multiple free quality news resources online was always going to have a dramatic effect on the number of paper-based products a finite audience would continue to shell out for. Not only are we now familiar with reading our favourite ‘papers’ comfortably at our desks without charge, we are also happy watching and listening to the news online gratis as well, freeing up our inkless hands to eat posh bagels or share the inevitable wealth of bad news from our keyboards.

Unsurprisingly, none of this slow turning but inevitable revolution is being lost on Rupert Murdoch, the always controversial and now venerable head of NewsCorp. This man who has helped drive the global transformation of our tabloids, television, online news and commercial social networks now has his sights on a new, literally more hands-on source of information – the e-book reader. Why? Or more accurately, why now?

Catching up on the news on the move is of course nothing new – far from it. Like many others I regularly get my fix of the BBC, Guardian, Indie and the rest on the train thanks to my iPhone, and of course, a Blackberry, MiniPC or pretty much any smartphone can also do a similar job to varying degrees of success. So why the concurrent fascination with e-book readers? There must be a significant early adopter incentive in it for the likes of Amazon, Sony, Sprint, Fox and the rest for them to throw their weight (and R&D; cash) behind the e-book concept, and Amazon’s take on it in particular?

Murdoch told The Money Programme: “Everybody wants choice and thanks to the personal computer, people are taking charge of their own lives and they read what they want to read or what they are interested in and young people today are living on their computers. The world is changing and newspapers have to adapt to that.” He continued: “I don’t think it’s available in England yet, but there’s a wonderful new machine called the Kindle. You can store six or 10 books in it or you can have a newspaper subscription on it and you get every word of the newspaper for a subscription rate. And it’s mobile. You don’t need to plug it into anything. It all comes over the airwaves.”

Murdoch actually underestimates the capabilities of the Kindle, but you get the gist. Amazon.com announced a slimmer, prettier Kindle 2 just this week, which includes more storage, improved battery life and some other nifty new features, Sadly it also holds on to its anything but nifty original $359 price tag. Amazon sold half a million of the fatter, uglier, older ones in 2008, so many industry observers perhaps understandably believe the digital reading market is now ready to go stellar when the Kindle 2 goes on sale next week.

Personally, I don’t believe we’re anywhere like ready for widespread adoption of the Kindle just yet. I had a play with a similar e-book, the Sony Reader, in UK High Street bookshop Waterstones recently, and wasn’t convinced. The matt screen was terrific, the variable reading speeds were great, the desirability was definitely there to an extent. But the device itself felt somewhat fragile, and even the £225 price tag of this more dated device with less capacity, simply isn’t realistic. It also makes me think the vendor community isn’t sufficiently behind the concept at this stage to make even a tentative push into a mass market space. When a humble phone can be loaded up with scrolling books for free or minimal expense, and a friendly paperback is just £5.99 on the very next shelf, £200-£300+ is just too much of a leap for a one-trick-plus pony, however elegant.

Also, perhaps, it is our culture that has some way to progress. When on the rare occasions I have noted someone struggling to find space on the tube to read their Kindle, my first thought isn’t: “That’s a cool, sensible gadget, I wish I had one”. More likely it’s: “That cost her over £300. I think I’d choose a crumpled free paper at close to midnight in Shepherds Bush, or stick with the old Nokia.” And maybe that’s the rub – e-books may need a few more years yet to win our hearts, minds AND wallets.

Amazon launched its first Kindle in November 2007. The latest Kindle has 2GB memory (enough for 1500 books and more than enough newspapers, magazines or personal documents) and 25 per cent longer battery life. It also has a ‘Read-to-me’ widget that turns text into spoken word. It is already available for preorder and will ship from 24th February in the US only.

Amazon UK told The Times: “We are looking internationally and we know that customers are looking forward to getting their hands on a Kindle but we have no announcement to make at this time.” The Times also reported that Amazon shares fell nearly one per cent to $66 after the recent launch of the Kindle 2 by CEO Jeff Bezos.

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