Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Bill Balderaz has a good example of a practical marketing use of MySpace. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably a bit frustrated by people who are telling companies to set up a MySpace page and leaving them under the impression that kids will suddenly find their product or service “cool” and buy it [...]

Last week while sitting at my computer my interest perked when I read the following news headline - “Fire fighters bid to contain Cork quay fire” (The story has been updated since.) The reason why it caught my interest though was because I remember a popular Irish blogger posting about a fire in Cork [...]

My viral viewing is normally restricted to YouTube these days, but David Cochrane pointed me in the way of this great campaign that his agency have developed to promote the new Scissor Sisters single, “I don’t feel like dancin’”
Who doesn’t want to see the Irish taoiseach have one last dance with the former leader of [...]

I mentioned before how Microsoft are enabling people to make their own games for the Xbox 360. Unsurprisingly gamers are not the only people excited by the news. Joystiq reports part of the promotion for the new Toyota Yaris includes developing “a Yaris driving game for the Xbox Live Arcade.” This reflects [...]

Technology has enabled us to communicate with each other in ways that would have been completely unimaginable a couple of years ago. There’s quite a learning curve that goes hand in hand with this. Over the past few months we’ve seen people fired from their jobs because of their blogs or MySpace page. [...]

A lot has been made recently about Snakes on a Plane’s failure to live up to the hype after if took only $15 million dollars at its opening. Mainstream audiences simply didn’t see the appeal. I’m an example of one such consumer who simply couldn’t be bothered with it, despite every blog post, [...]

Interesting sidenote on Nicholas Carr’s website, Wikipedia pages rank high on searches. All the more reasons for your company to have its own wikipedia page or have a link in relevant entries. The easier it is for consumers to find you, the easier it is for you to get your grubby paws on [...]

It looks like it@Cork have started a trend, as the International Wireless Conference has just launched a blog for their upcoming event. Word on the street is that it’s the first of a number of similar blogs which is a nice sign to see. Nice cost effective way to build up more awareness [...]

Interesting discussion with another Irish blogger about receiving mail from PR agencies. He has received relevant press releases due to his line of work from an agency in the past, but recently received a completely random release and he’s annoyed about it.
I’d say that the email was sent in error, but it does highlight [...]

I was recently interviewed for a piece in the irish Independent’s eThursday section, here’s the article. The journalist asked me for a few pointers on how blogging can improve a company’s bottom line. I also got to point out some Irish business bloggers. Here’s my response:
Blogging improves your company’s bottom line in [...]

Quick thought about how a lot of companies are approaching the Internet and the blog phenomenon. A lot of companies are eager to “embrace” bloggers in order to promote their products or services. By embrace though, I mean sell.
Do I really want to hear about your product or service via email though. [...]

Adrian Weckler raises a few interesting points in a recent realityBYTES column in the Sunday Business Post from a communications perspective. Adrian highlights the fact that consumers aren’t going to download movies in their droves to watch them on their iPod.
Looking past the obvious point that consumers prefer to watch films on the big [...]

One of the most frustrating things about reading PR blogs is that most commentators talk about how the profession has changed overnight, rather than pointing out that it is evolving like other industries. It is claimed that if we don’t adapt and embrace new trends like word-of-mouthing marketing in its various guises such as [...]

I had an article in this weekend’s Sunday Business Post in the Marketing section. As time permits I’m going to submit more articles to the press in the future. This article is about the evolution in viral marketing thanks to Youtube et al. Here’s the article for those of you who don’t [...]

The Sunday Times reports that the Irish Labour party has hired Zack Exley to help them with their online strategy ahead of the upcoming Irish election. Damien Mulley gives more in-depth coverage on the story, pointing out that “Exley worked on the Howard Dean Campaign, the John Kerry Campaign and recently worked for the [...]

A couple of months ago I wrote about the online media restrictions FIFA, the governing soccer organisation, were putting in place ahead of this year’s World Cup. Since then FIFA have seen sense and recinded on the amount of restrictions they had put in place.
In the warm-up to the World Cup though, I cannot [...]

Forgot to mention this after attending the IIA conference last week. The IIA (Irish Internet Association) has launched a quarterly newsletter with AMAS which will detail online activity in Ireland. It’s quite useful given that the statistics that are usually quoted at us are from the UK.
The statistics show that we’re pretty much [...]

Most of the talk about YouTube, an online video sharing website, in marketing/PR/ advertising circles up until now has been about user generated content, whereby consumers post videos which they have created themselves and whether brands can be featured. There are other interesting aspects to YouTube though as a number of different organisations have [...]

One.
It takes the rest of them to talk about it.
While Irish bloggers are busy waffling about a cease and desist letter. PR bloggers created their own storm in a tea cup last week about the launch of the Social Media press release by Shift Communications.
I agree that the press release is evolving, but I [...]

I had to ring a press office the other day. The only thing was I didn’t have the company in question’s number. Went to their website and searched high and low for the number. My search quickly turned from the press office number to any number at all. Needless to say [...]

A recent comment on my website by Stuart Bruce got me thinking. Not about what he said though, but about the fact that he put MCIPR after his name.
It’s quite clever because it makes him stand out, look authoritative and increases chances of people clicking through to his site to specifically read about PR.
Given [...]

When I started this website, I thought of it as more of a personal resource where I could track emerging trends and educate myself. The scary thing though is that I’ve built an audience. People at work are aware of this site, as are some clients and journalists. Funnier still, people I [...]

One of the most regular questions I get asked when I’m out and about is how do you trust you trust your staff with blogs. It’s a good question to ask, but in asking the question they’ve answered half of it themselves - you’ve got to trust your employees.
The second half of the answer [...]

There’s a lot of companies out there at the moment that are engaged in a number of initiatives for publicity purposes. While many experts are urging others to jump onto the bandwagon, one has to ask when similar initiatives will come across as boring.
For example, Wired reports on a political viral campaign on the [...]

Steve Wilson, a senior director of Global Web Communications at McDonalds, posted about a series of video vignettes that McDonalds are running on his personal website. The vignettes are running under the themes of community, opportunity and food quality.
Food quality is the big one for me. Personally, I wouldn’t put the phrase ‘food [...]