Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Creating awareness is one thing, changing attitudes is another. Changing behaviour is the most difficult of all. - Martin Higgins
The IGDA has announced the formation of a special interest group “focusing on ‘the issues and challenges facing the use of adult sexual content in video games’” in the wake of the Grand Theft Auto [...]

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas - George Bernard Shaw
If you listen [...]

Pinky - What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Brain - The same thing we do every night Pinky…try to take over the world!
TechCamp got a nice mention on Silicon Republic today (Cheers to Damien Mulley for the heads-up.) It’s a nice turnaround for the press release I issued earlier today. We’ll have [...]

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics - Mark Twain (Sorry about the recent repeated use of this quotation, you’ll understand why I used it again by the end of the post.)
Despite the fact that most Irish people moan about our country’s inability to change with the times, we do have [...]

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance - Franklin. P Jones
I think the potential of podcasting is being vastly overstated. I used to subscribe to about four of them, but now I’ll just download them from time to time depending on their content. The reason [...]

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics - Mark Twain
I’m just after reading in the Sunday Business Post that as part of the latest JNLR survey, TNS MRBI researched New Media habits in Ireland.
Here are the survey results:
14% of Irish adults have an mp3 player
45% of Irish adults have internet access [...]

Too bad that all the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair. - George Burns
Andrew Marr, the ex-BBC political editor, thinks that British politicians suffer from a “fundamental lack of professionalism” when it comes to communicating with voters.
He pointed out that they lacked public speaking [...]

It was impossible to get a conversation going; everybody was talking too much. - Yogi Berra
The Irish media are going wild about Social Media at the moment. There’s an article on blogging or podcasting every week at this stage, it’s a struggle to keep track of them all.
The Irish Times had a big feature [...]

I love it when a plan come together - Hannibal Smith
Preparations for Ireland’s inaugural TechCamp are in full swing. Many thanks to the Media Co-op and Gavin Byrne for supplying a venue for the inaugural TechCamp.
They’re based in the Northside Civic Centre in Co. Dublin. They have a large conference room which can be [...]

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences - Norman Cousins
Stephen Davies reveals that Just The Flight has become the UK’s first online travel agent to offer flights via RSS feeds. I’m waiting for Ryanair to follow suit. Make no mistake this will be a huge development in the online market.
RSS/Webfeeds is about making [...]

Rome wasn’t built in a day
The latest Irish radio listnenership figures have been released. While RTE Radio One remains top of the pile, it suffered a slight fall, dropping one point down to 26%
NewsTalk 106 gained two points and is up to 6%. Let’s hope they get their national license and then I [...]

And reputation bleeds in ev’ry word - Charles Churchill
One question that’s been flying around the Net of late is whether one man can make a difference. Everyone has been harping on about Jeff Jarvis’ dissatisfaction with Dell of late, but last week I found proof firsthand that negative Consumer Generated Media does affect your [...]

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save. - Will Rogers
Timing is everything when it comes to the world of Public Relations. Despite your best laid plans a terrible tragedy could strike and that’s your client out of [...]

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Immanuel Kant
I was pleasantly surprised to see that South Dublin County Council are turning to RSS as a means of distributing their news (apparently Leitrim County Council are also using the tool.)
The really exciting thing about South Dublin County Council using RSS is the fact that they’re [...]

Ask and ye shall receive
James Corbett wondered how come there aren’t more tech get togethers in Ireland, so myself and Ed Byrne decided to pull our thumbs out and organise the inaugural Tech Camp.
Don’t worry, despite the name you won’t need a tent. Better yet, it’s free! However there is one catch, while [...]

Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. - Abraham Lincoln
What’s worse than a pop-up ad? How about when you click on a link and get something else instead? That’s what the PRII have decided to do with their jobs listings page. Obviously [...]

The Internet is the death of everything secret. If one person knows it the rest of the world will soon follow. - Lance Storm
Blogging has grabbed the fact that the Internet is the death of everything secret and driven the point home to the extreme. Anyone can now set up their own website [...]

Ed Byrne has an interesting blog entry on why blog post titles are important. It got me thinking that the same is true for press release headlines.
Ed says:
“I know I miss a certain amount of good articles everyday, simply because the headlines are not descriptive enough. When your flying through a couple of hundred [...]

The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk they’re sober - William Butler Yeats
I don’t know how nobody has mentioned this before, and perhaps this is just a sober moment of madness brought on by the Irish Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell.
A question suddenly flickered across my mind, would Hugh MacLeod be [...]

Audio taping is killing the music industry
If any industry could drive Social Media forward then it’s the music industry.
With iTunes and podcasts so intertwined, podcasting is one such Social Media technique could offer a flagging industry that is out of touch, a new way to connect with its audience.
By nature, music fans are into audio [...]

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe - John Muir
EirePreneur posts that the openness of the RTE website and its RSS feeds means that it is linked to by high profile blogs (and even lesser blogs like my own)
In media terms there is [...]

What we see depends mainly on what we look for - John Lubbock
Everything Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson is a definite read for those who are tired of their parents giving out to them for playing video games or watching TV, but everyone else who’s long past the stage of arguing about [...]

Good advice is certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it - Agatha Christie
It looks like my rant last week about no mention of blogging, podcasting et al when the Irish government announced an overhaul of how the country is promoted was well justified. Paul O’Kane wrote a great piece [...]

Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is not enough - Janwillem Van De Wetering
Last Sunday’s Business & Media section in the Observer has an interesting article on the ever bulging size of newspapers. The article notes that Starcom has estimated that papers have bloated by 9% [...]

A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money - Everett Dirksen
RTE reports that tourism promotion in Ireland is to get a major revamp due to falling visitors numbers outside of Dublin. I bet they don’t start a single blog, make a podcast or start any RSS feeds.
Why am I [...]