Our Podcasting partners Podcast Production have launched a new Podcast called Podcasting for business. The first episode is a brief (or should I say "shock") introduction to business Podcasting from an excited Hugh Broom.

Their Podcast promises to keep listeners up to date with Podcasting tips for high quality production and (where it gets interesting) how to use Podcasts effectively for business marcomms. I wait with baited breath !

The words "Edit this page." will be familiar to many search engine users - search for just about anythign you can put in a box and you will find it on Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedi that invites you and I to become the editor. I, for example regularly plug wiki on Space Blog whether for the definition of a Planet or the mission andf history of the Hubble Telescope.

Jimmy Wales, founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is planning to build an online commercial search engine that would compete with Google and Yahoo.

Information Week reported that the search engine, code-named Wikiasari, would combine open source technology and human intervention to deliver more relevant results, "Human intelligence is still the best thing we have, so let's let humans do what they do best, and computers do what they do best commented Wales. "Wikiasari combines the Hawaiian word for quick, "wiki," with the Japanese word "asari," which means "rummaging search."

At a time when a recent survey has suggested that more than 60% of Scots regularly surf or 'Wilf' (which stands for 'What was I looking for?') perhaps this is just what is needed. The internet is becoming increasingly big business, with online publishing and more to the point advertising (take YouTube as an example) being taken seriously this venture is not surprise.

However - as those of you on the bleeding edge of technologoy will be aware - all the major search engines are introducing elements of "social" or interactive web searches into their offerings as part of a move towards "web 2.0". Take, for example the advent of social bookmarking, RSS tagging and customised micro-search engines as a few examples. You can try a few "social bookmarks" by clicking on the link below and play your part in the web:

Our partners at Podcast Production have started up a new blog, which may prove to be of interest to fellow PR, media and marketing professionals. Keep an eye on the new podcast production blog for ideas on how to use Podcasting as an effective communication channel for business, with marketing and internal communications tips.

Podcasting is nothing short of a communications revolution, it’s a revolution that is sweeping the globe and one which you and is worth serious consideration as part of a wide range of marcomms plans.

OK, but what is a Podcast? Well, put simply it’s an audio or video file that is delivered straight to any computer and then on to an MP3 player. In fact, you can now even send a Podcast directly to a mobile phone. Users subscribe to a Podcast so subsequent Podcast “editions” are delivered automatically using specially designed software such as iTunes. If a listener has an iPod, they can plug in their iPod or alternative mp3 player and the most recent episode is automatically downloaded to the player for playback "on the road".


Build up Podcast marketing regular episodes

The thing that sets a Podcast apart from a single mp3 download is the subscription mechanism, once a listener has subscribed to a Podcast they will automatically receive each episode of a Podcast series. This means that a well thought out and sustained Podcast programme will generate an increasing listener captive base which is great news for marketing and PR professionals.

Podcasting as a communications channel

Now, what really differentiates the Podcast as a superb communication channel is that it’s personal. It’s an engaging one-to-one conversation with the listener. So, Podcasts are a great way to motivate staff, inform shareholders of company performance, enthusiastically communicate new products and services to customers and provide news updates to journalists and financial analysts. What’s more, Podcasts can be produced in any language and distributed quickly and efficiently, all at a fraction of the cost associated with conventional media such as printed newsletters.

Richard Frais works for Podcast Production, a professional and media experienced team with the Podcast production, scripting, recording and experience to support your communications plan.

The curse of mailbox full... Now that email is the accepted form of communication between editors and those wishing to bring news to their attention, why is it that so many editors use their mailbox as a method of blocking relevant news – is this deliberate or does it just stem from IT ignorance?

OK, so this criticism does not apply to the majority of editors, particularly those enlightened editors that subscribe to our customised RSS feeds, but it does apply to some major publications that should know better. Often, we will receive the message “mailbox full” having sent relevant news stories to an editor.

Surely, with so many Spam tools available within Outlook itself and from third party software companies it is possible to “filter” incoming email so that it does or does not contain key words in order to ensure that only relevant content gets through. In particular large emails, presumeably where some well meaning individual has sent a high res 5 mb picture suitable for print publication, can be filtered out. It is the responsibility of the professional editor to review all potential news stories as part of the publications service to their readers.

We PR consultants all know that editors receive a prodigious amount of information but as the old English saying goes, “If you can’t take the heat, get out [of] the kitchen”. With today’s technology there is no excuse for the “mailbox full” message.

Of course, it is a two way street and the professional international PR agency, and I class BCM in this category, can help. Make sure the email header - please note, not the headline - summarises the content of the news story and that the press release is sent in the right format.

Now format, that’s another frustration, but I’ll leave that for another blog…

If you are in the business of handling a consumer, or high level B2B PR campaign there are many pan-European clipping agencies across located throughout Europe that will take your money and, on the whole, do a good job in finding the PR placed in the printed media.

But, and this is a big BUT, they all fail dismally when it comes to monitoring any press in highly specialised markets, "Engineering" - especially automation and space technology - in our particular case.

Now, we should not be too harsh on these clipping agencies because if you look at the business case for monitoring the Engineering press the numbers just don’t stake up! There are insufficient businesses within the engineering sector that could afford a pan-European press clipping service. Put simply, the cost of subscribing to all of the appropriate media and paying for native language readers to scan those same media would cost more than the revenue generated by the service

When it comes to identifying news content of the world’s biggest magazine, the WWW, the situation is even worse!

The “lazy” PR agency often relies on some form of “wired” news distribution service, which is suitable for high level business and IT announcements but fail the trade media.

The story may get picked up by the main web search engines but very rarely appears in the specialist media websites as a direct result of this type of distribution. To get stories onto the specialist media web sites you need to have a relationship with the editor and send the story personally, while making sure that it is relevant to readers of that specialist media web site.

Now, let’s assume you have followed this sound advice and the editor places the story on the website. Will Google or Yahoo find that story when conducting a web search – probably not! Most specialist media web sites are not identified as “official” news sources by Google and Yahoo, and as such the chances are that the precious story placed will have fallen off the bottom of the website when and if it is indexed.

So what is the solution?

Subscribe to the magazines and scan known websites regularly - not perfect but what in this life is?

Let's begin with a nice quote, ‘Forget the 99.99% you get right, it’s the .01% error that’ll bring a chopper down’.

When dealing with military, engineering, medical and industrial documents, the life of your company and your clients resides in the detail. Over a quarter of APT’s business comes from ‘damaged goods’ – i.e. companies whose product has entered the global market with wince-inducing poorly translated literature. We believe that every translation, from a caption to a catalogue, is an undertaking of trust.

The international arena of translated technical material is an ever evolving language medium, which means that using subject qualified experts is essential. But, if they are non-native translators, they will alienate the company’s target audience in that country’s marketplace.

"When your overseas client receives your product and opens your manual, he is holding your company’s ‘silent ambassador’ – so he’d better speak the language well.", Tim Francis, APT (Bristol).

As an international PR consultancy, BCM have encountered similar issues. For example, a former German speaking client provided regular "English" translations of highly technical press releases that were undertaken in-house as a cost saving excersise. The result was a German (non-native) translation that would have confused even the most clued-up specialist in their technology.

The unfortunate Account Manager had to use a combination of the original "Deutsche Pressemittielung" and the English version to achieve an adequate press release.

This press release would then have to be re-approved by the German engineers, to ensure that the facts were correct before finally distributing the press release.

Now, ask yourself how many hours that takes and compare it to the cost of a professional translation undertaken by your regular translation partner. The sums, the delays involved and the number of stages introduced are undesirable. More importantly, as Tim explained above, the quality and company image is at risk if the work is not completed satisfactorilly.

From a PR perspective, of course, a holistic view is essential. Why spend money and time building a reputation for a company as an international player in PR materials when their product brochures say "We about us" or have completely meaningless translations?

XML on it's own doesn't rewrite the internet and put your website on top. The whole internet has gone xml mad, in some cases placing the importance of XML over human-friendly html!

In addition to our favourite topic, RSS, which is used to share data with other websites, blogs and users (yes, real people), XML is a standard for sharing structured data. It can be likened to a comma separated variable (CSV) file or an Excel (or other) spreadsheet. Like these formats, an XML file could contain data - analagous to the number entered in a cell - which could be contained within a hierachy of tags - comparable to rows, columns, worksheets.

Just as you can't import one company's custom accounting sheet into another's at the click of a button, you cannot import one xml file into another without using a common format. As such, sub-standards such as RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91 used for content syndication and ROR used to catalogue websites for search engines, are required.

One advantage of XML is that the structure and labels of the data are described within the data itself. This means that even if the data is not instantly understood, it may be simpler to work out how to map XML data into your program than a "bare bones" data file.

Also, unike a CSV file, XML is not read blindly, but parsed by element. In English, this means that if certain fields are not included in the XML file they can be safely ignored and the data that is present is read. This again links back to the fact that each element is labelled.

It makes great sense for RSS feeds to be added to news search engines and blog directories so that individual articles or blogs are indexed within the search. Another reason why RSS works so well is that it contains a data about when the content is published, thereby keeping websites current.

Google have recently started (yet) another new service called Google Base, that allows webmasters to submit pretty much any structured data. Is this too open ended and mindblowing? Well, it isn't too dissimilar to what the ROR movement are doing - and the format that they put the data into at Google isn't too much different either - see official ROR blog

More about XML and Search engines using XML soon.

Last week Industrial Automation Insider's Andrew Bond and Stephen Ballard of BCM recorded the second episode of Engineering News. The latest episode, available from the BCM, Engineering News, Industrial Automation Insider websites discusses the latest gossip in control and automation.

Engineering News will feature regular control and automation updates, produced and published by international engineering and technology PR agency BCM in cooperation with Industrial Automation Insider and special guests from industry bodies and the big players.

To subscribe directly to the Engineering News podcast please click the "RSS podcast" button below. If the code looks like a maths lesson at school then just copy the URL from the address bar of your browser and add it to your RSS reader or podcast reader software. You can either subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the podcast image below or simply click link next to the bullet below to download the chosen episode as mp3 directly



Right click do download

Have you ever had undesirable results from a translation ? One common pitfall is to use the nearest translator and not the best positioned, in particular BCM's experience is that the use of a native speaker is particularly important to get the right results. Over to APT to explain...

Languages are very complex and only well-educated native speakers know all the idioms and grammar, and can write in a style that is correct, fluent, follows standard usage, but can also be creative if necessary, and avoids ambiguities. Most languages have more complex grammar than English, and a foreigner will probably waste a lot of time looking in dictionaries and grammar books, checking whether he or she has used the right spelling, case, gender, verb form or inflection, while a native speaker will usually write the correct form immediately.

Very often, a dictionary will have the word you need, but not the expression or phrase you need. There are many set patterns of words which have to be used, and no dictionary can list all of these. Only an educated native speaker knows which verbs you can use with which nouns, for example, you can ‘write / compile / produce / draw up a report’, but you can’t ‘do / compose / construct / build a report’.

Only a native speaker knows all the slang and possible double meanings of words.For example, a description of a number of people sitting and reading in the reference section of the national library in Paris said that ‘the readers were spaced out at regular intervals’. Instead of simply saying that the room wasn’t very full, this also suggests that these people often take mind-expanding drugs.

After studying a foreign language at school and college for years, most people can only read it well. They won’t speak it or write it like a native unless they have spent years living in the foreign country, using the foreign language all the time. Most foreigners who speak English fluently after living in England for years still speak with an accent, and make more mistakes in writing than in speaking simple sentences. Most documents sent for translation are far more complex than simple greetings and chatting about what you did last weekend.

A foreigner who has studied English for 10 years, living here for half that time, may have a level of ability in English similar to that of a 10-year-old native speaker. Their spoken English is quite fluent, but their attempts to write a legal, technical or financial document would be laughable if they tried, and very often they would not realise what howlers they are making. If you know some technical terms, you might be able to understand a technical text, but you need more knowledge of the subject to formulate sentences that use the right terms in the right way.

An Italian trying to write English, for example, will often assume that a literal translation of the Italian words will be correct, and a dictionary will often give this impression, sometimes only offering a literal equivalent, or listing various options and the non-native speaker won’t know which is right. An Italian might think that the ‘Ministerio dei Alimenti’ should be the ‘Ministry of Alimony’ for example, since that will sound right to him, an official-sounding term, and the dictionary says ‘Alimenti’ = ‘Food; alimony’, but of course it should be the ‘Ministry of Food’.
Another government department is the ‘Ministerio della Sanita / Salute’, for which the ‘Ministry of Sanity / Salvation’ may appear to be a correct English translation to an Italian, but that is in fact the ‘Ministry of Health’ / ‘Ministry of Public Heath’.

There is a particular problem with Italian, Spanish and French, with which the English language shares so many words with the same Latin origin, but they have quite different meanings or usage in English (‘false friends’), and if just one word is wrongly translated, the whole sentence can become meaningless. We also have many words of Germanic origin in English too, and the meanings have often changed.

With unrelated languages, there will also be problems with words that have several meanings in either language, so there is very often no one-for-one matching of terms in the different languages. Almost every word has connotations or associations, and only the native speaker is really familiar with these. Set phrases are often quotes from a work of literature, a standard legal or religious text, or maybe a popular song or TV programme. The non-native speaker will be implying and referring to all sorts of things without realising it.

www.aptplc.net

The apparently poor state of industrial marketing in Europe for a number of years has been a source of despair for magazines - most of which derive their almost all of their income from advertising sales - and for magazines editors who were often forced to work in isolation without the traditional support of junior assistants and full time journalists.

This is largely the result of a downturn in the manufacturing and process industries and various government and tax controls. In the meanwhile, public relations was maturing as a discipline. This meant increased awareness of PR as a form of marketing communications, and more reason to use it in the absence of astronmical advertisign budgets.

These two trends have resulted in companies focussing more effort on PR, an abbreviation for both public relations and press releases. Many companies, driven by the quest for an immediate return and justification produce only the latter, whereas even a well written, well targetted press release is weak in isolation.

Modern public relations is about strategy, and how tactics integrate into that strategy. BCM's US partners Tiziani Whitmyre have recently published a white paper entitled The Five Deadly Sins of B2B Marketing on how to avoid common pitfalls and get the most out of PR.

Needless to say that advertising is not a waste of time and should be encouraged as part of a long term strategy! More on strategy, PR and industrial marketing coming soon.

Google News is still in an experimental, or what you might call "beta" state. If you are lucky enough to get news on a site which is a Google News source such as www.ballard.co.uk, then you might find it gets listed under an appopriate category - in our line of work this is invariably "technology".

One of the problems with RSS, both for editors and for information consumers, is that there are lots of RSS feeds to subscribe to on any topic from Intimidating Technology to Automation or "my mate's Psychic Development blog" (we have no affiliation to this blog!).

No matter what the topic, a Google News style grouping or "clustering" algorthim could be very useful indeed. It seems that the PR blog, Micropersuasion has discoved such a system in development from Yahoo! This would, of course be tricky for personal blogs which by their very nature can cover a wide range of topic from UK space to what spin doctors do in their spare time.

The world awaits super-clever coding from (or at least bought out by) the likes of Yahoo! and Google to solve this riddle! In the meanwhile, we'll keep you posted on the developments.

The IT world has been talking about RSS and XML until they are blue in the face, but the broader community has been slower to catch on. In particular IT publishers and bloggers use RSS extensively. As a technically proficient communications agency, we have harnessed the technology for the purpose of news distribution and syndication. General purpose newswires such as PR Web have since independently recognised the potential of RSS for use by the press.

Recognise these?



An "XML" or "RSS" icon is there to advertise the fact that a feed is available to subscribe to, the BBC Telegraph and IT Analysis all have great feeds to subscribe to. Note that these aren't supposed to look good in a web browser but to be viewed using a special reader or aggregator (more about these later).

Since World War 2, public relations in Europe has developed from a “public information” approach adopted by governments where press releases are the sole point of contact with the media to a more interactive relationship. This push of information is still common, but the inquisitive journalist will seek the information they require. With the RSS aggregators [readers] available today, they can search recent news headlines and open up the information that they require.

The internet has revolutionised communications, new media re-writing the rules for public relations. For the first time, anyone with an internet connection can actively seek information on a topic. For us, RSS the natural evolution from an information push to the provision of timely and relevant news.

When I upload PR to our BCM virtual press office, it is automatically pushed onto the relevant RSS feed for clients or editors to view.

Clients love RSS, because they can keep their distributors and their own internal marketing team updated just by getting them to subscribe to the relevant RSS feeds. They can also add up to date news to their website without wasting valuable time maintaining their own press room. I have used our test website Engineering News to demonstrate this. Ugly, but neat I would say.

RSS feeds complete our system, now the news that is sent to editors also pops up on the first page of search engines like Google during the same week. What use is a press room if your “news” is only updated every 6 weeks like typical web pages?

More about this and podcasts later...

Translation is a challenge in technical and industrial organisations, due to the specialist nature of a your company's product or ...   more »