Media Emerging

This week, PRstore unveiled PRstore Office, a low-cost approach to owning a marketing agency. Like our retail locations, PRstore Office gives the franchisee access to DesignCentral, our centralized creative studio. And with a low franchise fee of just $29,500, owning a marketing & PR firm is within reach of anyone.

I got to thinking…what else can you buy for $29,500? Not much, it turns out. $29,500 gets you:

• 8% of a house in Boston (median home price: $357,100)
• 85% of a 2008 Chevy Tahoe (MSRP: $34,600)
• One year of graduate school at Cornell University (tuition only)
• 48 shares of The Washington Post Co. stock (down 211 points since November ’07)
• Less than 60% of a DunkinDonuts franchise (average franchise fee: $50,000)
• 1.2 seconds of advertising on American Idol
• 3 gallons of gas

Kinda pathetic what $29,500 buys you these days, huh? By comparison, the low franchise fee of PRstore Office gets you some nice perks:

• Be your own boss (and ditch the cubicle!)
• Brag to friends and family that you’re a business owner
• Access to DesignCentral, a dedicated team of veteran copywriters, designers, web programmers and promotions specialists
• A major national brand backing you up
• Access to the experience and peer support of PRstore Nation — more than 30 entrepreneurs just like you who own PRstore franchises across the nation
• Expert advertising, marketing and public relations support
• Set your own hours, make your own rules, define your own success

For my money, being your own boss is as good as it gets. But hey, if you wanna drive 85% of a Chevy Tahoe, that’s cool. I’ll be sure to look for you on the streets…

I’m stumped, and I need your help.

For the past few weeks, I’ve neglected this blog while PRstore needed my attention elsewhere. But…and here’s the weird part…the less I wrote, the more people subscribed to the blog. Then, when I wrote a post last week, the subscriber count dropped. This week, I’ve been on hiatus again, and the subscriber count is rising.

Meaningless quirk or something bigger? Is there a marketing lesson in there somewhere?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…pageviews are increasing. Yes, increasing. I can trace most of the increased traffic to Twitter.

So is Twitter to blame (thank?) for falling subscriber count? I’m not so sure. If pageviews were simply increasing while the subscriber count was simply falling, that might explain it. But how, then, to explain the subscriber surge when I’m not writing?

What do you think? And what are the implications? Which metric matters more, subscribers (who read posts in RSS readers and don’t count toward pageviews) or pageviews? How does the answer affect marketing strategy?

Share your thoughts in the comments.