Edits to this article appear at the end (Nov. 4, 2007)
Well, this will stir things up a bit.
A few hours ago Google launched “Google Pages”:http://pages.google.com/. If you have a “Gmail”:http://mail.google.com/ account you can create your own web site on Google using a very nifty AJAX interface.
The application itself is great, although the standard templates leave something to be desired.
Some of the nicest features:
* An “undo” button
* Ability to add images, links and pages easily
* Testing links while in edit mode
* 100MB of storage
* Simple, memorable URL
You should really try it out. But you might want to *think twice before you hit “publish”.*
See that last feature (simple memorable URLS) is also the greatest weakness of Google Pages and I think it is going to cause a *huge* headache for Gmail users. And *a potential PR nightmare for Google.*
Why?
Category: Public Relations
_Jennifer Evans is President of “Sequentia Communications”:http://www.sequentia.net, a Toronto-based marketing and public relations firm that specializes in helping companies acquire and retain customers through community building._
*One Degree:* “Have blogs changed the role of PR professionals in the last few years, and if so, how?”
*Jennifer Evans:* The world of PR is changing drastically. It used to be that you needed to use media as an outlet to reach the public, so media relations was one of the primary tenets of a public relations strategy. However, the Internet has completely changed all that – first of all by making it not only possible but economically feasible and efficient to reach the public without an intermediary. Secondly, it’s introduced a new layer of voices and ‘content creators’ that PR strategists need to factor into their planning: the blogger.
One Degree Contributor and “Riya’s”:http://www.riya.com/ chief instigator Tara Hunt has written a great post on “Marketing in the post-Cluetrain era”:http://www.horsepigcow.com/2006/01/marketing-in-post-cluetrain-era.html. If you are at all struggling with what this whole “markets are conversations”:http://www.cluetrain.com/ thing really looks like in action you should read this.