Reading the Financial Tea Leaves in Tech PR

Browsing through the headlines in the WSJ and NYT today made my head spin.  It reminded me of  a book I read when I was a child called Fortunately, which described events in the day of a little boy that were alternately fortunate and unfortunate.

I am no economic whiz, and am not sure what the following news items really portend for the state
of tech PR spending.  But they do sound relevant, so I thought I would share them:

Unfortunately...

Headline from the New York Times:  Gadgetry Takes a Hit as Nervous Consumers Plan for Lean Holidays

Sounds bad for those of us doing PR in the CE sector.

Fortunately...

Profits are apparently on the rise at Intel.  Intel is supposed to be a bellwether of the tech sector.  Its health and pipeline of business mean good things for other companies in enterprise tech, and hence enterprise tech PR.

Unfortunately...

NY Times Headline:  Profits Rise, but Intel Chief Offers a Gloomy Outlook

Fortunately...

According to this story in the WSJ - IT Spending Seen Decelerating - (sounds like an "unfortunately" doesn't it?):

While spending on information technology is being curtailed by global financial turmoil, the IT industry won't see the dramatic reductions that accompanied the dot-com bust, research firm Gartner Inc. predicted.

Yippee!  Let's party like it's 1999.

Unfortunately...

The WSJ also had a story with this headline today:  Marketers Cut Back on Digital Media

This does not sound good for those of us focusing on social media, an area that many have considered to be a hot spot for growth.

Go figure.

Comments

[Steve]

Bob,

Insightful as always and nice to see someone bringing more than doom and gloom to light. I wonder if any media watchdog group has ever looked for hard economic numbers on how much negative reporting costs the economy? My bet is it would make the lost productivity numbers of the OJ trial pale in comparison.

[rgeller]

Steve

Thanks for stopping by and commenting!

That would be a pretty interesting study indeed, psychology has a lot to do with booms and busts and feeding a cycle of fear and retrenchment via doom and gloom buzz will not help things, that's for sure.

Bob