say what? starbursting

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

Starbursting is essentially breaking companies up into more profitable pieces and despite me not being familiar with the term until recently, it is apparently seeing a revival at present according to The Economist.

Notable mentions of rumoured or high profile starbursts include Pfizer, Motorola, Fiat and Foster’s.  The Economist cites the main reasons for the revival as:

… companies seeking buyers for parts of their business are not getting good offers from other firms, or from private equity.

…the “conglomerate discount”—when stockmarkets value a diversified group at less than the sum of its parts.

…that this discount is real seems to be confirmed by the positive stockmarket reaction to the latest starbursts. From 20 days before the announcement of a spin-off to 60 days after, the combined value of the parent and spun-off children has on average outperformed the market by eight percentage points

This trend is much more common in the US and Western Europe with emerging markets seeing the opposite,….hence a popular alternative seems to be diversification.

This may be why, in some parts of the world, conglomerates are becoming even more diversified: witness Samsung Electronics, which is moving into pharmaceuticals.America’s big tech firms are also bucking the starburst trend and diversifying. Oracle, a software giant, has moved into hardware, and Hewlett-Packard, a computer-maker, is expanding further into software and services. Their big corporate customers increasingly want a one-stop shop for their information systems.

Whichever path an organisation chooses to take, one thing is for sure, excellent communications will be imperative both with investment audiences but also customers and prospects.  Interesting times for PR.

a new conversation…..from the CIPR

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

Following on from the relaunched website last year, the CIPR is rolling out “The conversation” – a one-stop shop for blog posts and industry news pertinent to all things PR and can benefit PRs in the following ways:

– it contains masses of content from leading practitioners, consultancies, academia and students, from the UK and further afield

– you can register and syndicate you personal or company blogs to increase the audience you receive

– you can upload consultancy profiles and link to the wider industry online

– you can comment on posts and receive points of view on your own content

– there’s no need to fill out lengthy registrations, you can log in with existing social network permissions

This is the first attempt by a professional body to run such a large social network and it will be launched officially at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ (CIPR) s social media conference, 11 April.

See the official launch post here on the CIPR site:

It will mean that syndicating blogs couldn’t be easier, as it will allow the wider PR community to find your content, find your personal, business and consultancy profiles, and respond to your news and points of view.

What’s more, this is an open community – you do not have to be a CIPR member to take part in The Conversation. Everyone is welcome to register themselves and their organisation.

Happily, we don’t need to ‘make friends’ all over again. We can give The Conversation permission to link up with our existing social networks and those relationships are established immediately. One of the many good things about The Conversation is that you won’t need to share your passwords with us. It is, as the CIPR’s Social Media Panel say, ‘instant social glue’.

The Conversation is therefore a really exciting addition to the CIPR’s website – and we want your input. It won’t match Facebook for functionality or LinkedIn for seeing who’s connected to whom, but it is the first platform of its kind provided by a professional body. We hope you’ll jump in, and work with us as we iron out the inevitable glitch or two.

I am looking forward to having a nosey around when it is live next week – hope to see you there too.

Cross posted with my work blog

links for 2011-03-28

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

  • Social media monitoring tools set to return to basics | Opinion | New Media Age
    Since the launch of Reputation Online in 2009, there has been one type of vendor that I receive pitches from on a daily basis above all others: social media monitoring firms. Partly because of the lack of knowledge about social media and the subsequent rush to do anything that looks like you’re trying to understand what people are saying about your brand online, this space has exploded over the past year. It’s still growing at a rapid pace, with larger technology companies getting in on the act (and often adding analytics into the mix), as well as PR agencies themselves launching solutions, and more granular tools cropping up that focus on specific networks (like Facebook) to provide very targeted insights.
    (tags: social media, monitoring)
  • Google reported to be launching iTunes competitor – Marketing News | UTalkMarketing
    Rumours of a Google music service were mentioned recently at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (last month), sparked by Motorola Mobility chief Sanjay Jha suggesting that the benefit of having its upcoming Xoom tablet run on Android Honeycomb is that "it adds video services and music services."
    (tags: itunes, google, apple, music)
  • renaissance chambara | Ged Carroll. – Social search debate
    Put together by iSpy Marketing. I find this fascinating given the work that I was involved with at Yahoo! six years ago where social search was considered as a way that could provide a blue water strategy to compete with Google’s dominance in algorithmic search.
    (tags: social search)
  • List of common misconceptions – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    This list describes fallacious ideas and beliefs that are documented and widespread as well as the actual facts concerning those ideas, where appropriate. Inclusion criteria are as follows: a misconception's main topic must have its own article; the misconception must have reliable source(s) which assert that it is a common misconception (or synonym thereof); the misconception and its reference(s) must be present in the topic article; and the misconception must be modern rather than ancient or obsolete.
    (tags: wikipedia reference myths)