As we all know, the FT Digital Business is the holy grail for Tech PR consultants. I used to work for a major Telecoms company who ring fenced FT Dig Biz features for their own use. If I wanted to pitch an idea to the supplement it had to be approved by the in house PR manager first, then the Press Office before it was actually emailed to the journalist. Fast Response PR anyone?
Anyway, yesterday’s FT Dig Biz was very good and of particular interest was the article about VOIP and Mobile phones.
This line caught my eye – “The mobile operators aren’t offering bundles for VoIP; they’re positively trying to make it go away. So there is no immediate benefit for the business user or purchasing folks to adopt it.”
There is going to be a very interesting battle in the coming months about mobile technology as it seems to me that some Mobile operators have more to lose than others from VOIP technology. For example, O2 (my operator) prevents me from accessing Skype on my phone where if I switched to 3, I could have a skype phone which would enable me to talk to friends who use Skype and business contacts in LA, completely free! National mobile operators are going to have to face up to this communications challenge and it will be interesting to see how the big guns answer criticisms of banning applications like Skype.
In PR terms it’s going to be interesting to see how Businesses focused publications deal with VOIP, interesting because SME’s have the most to gain from VOIP over mobile technology. It’s also interesting to see BT offer their BT Office anywhere solution which think is the only major non mobile telecoms operator providing a business VOIP solution.
So O2, I want to use SKYPE on my N95, can you sort this out?
On a side note, whoever does the PR for Research in Motion, ( the makers of Blackberry) take a bow. There were several mentions of the company in yesterday Digital Business as well as a profile of the CEO. If that isn’t worth a ‘thank you’ from the client, I am not sure what is. Enjoy the Easter Break
PR and Comms Network 