In May 1995 I was asked by Tony Murray, the then editor of the marketing title Adline to write an article on the subject of e-mail for the magazine. When I was researching for the book “Public Relations and the Social Web’ (companion to this blog) I discovered the article on an old disk. It was reprinted in full in the book and shows how much has changed in a decade and a half. Here is an extract.
“So is E-mail a waste of time? Emphatically no. At the moment it is a bit like having one of the first fax machines. The quality is a bit dodgy and no one else seems to have one. In ten years time if you don’t have E-mail your business won’t be taken seriously. For the PR industry in particular E-mail will change the way we work. You will send a press release for approval and get it back maybe minutes later. It can then be sent directly into the computers of all of your target publications, in seconds. You will even be able to attach a high quality photograph in a format ready for the paper or magazine to drop straight onto a page. All this without leaving your desk. Better still you could do it all from a gite in the south of France because unlike a fax or phone your E-mail address number is portable, it goes with you.”
The reason that I wanted to refer to the article is that I am currently in a gite (well an old moulin to be accurate) in the south of France. I can e-mail from my blackberry and as this demonstrates I can post to a blog. This is in a part of Gascony that just a few years ago had no mobile coverage. I think when I wrote article I envisaged being able to spend endless weeks of summer in the sun, instead the holidays are the same length but work sneaks in. That’s progress …I suppose.
PR and the Social Web 
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