Wednesday 20 February 2008

Banking makes you happy

I love our bank. They brighten up my day. I’ve just had a call from our personal relationship manager’s office (not the relationship manager himself, note), asking if I’d like to upgrade to Internet banking. When I reminded him that we already use Internet banking, he corrected me, saying we actually use online banking. I asked him what the difference is, and he said (and I quote): “The Internet is more sophisticated.” Genius.

Thursday 14 February 2008

Unbelievably bad PR.

Please tell me this is a joke: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2245787,00.html

The kind of almost unimaginable tastelessness that gives PR a bad name.

Quite rightly flagged up by TWL: http://theworldsleading.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1980222%3ATopic%3A1087

Good PR starts at home

News that a Yahoo employee is charting the hourly progress of his redundancy from the Internet giant using Twitter made the BBC yesterday (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/02/twittering_a_yahoo_exit.html).

The job of PR just got a whole lot harder. We’ve long known that disgruntled employees and customers have a huge impact on how the company is perceived externally after a shake up. But the emergence of blogs, ‘tweets’ and status updates on social networks shifts the power balance significantly. ‘Control’ of any external message is impossible without the co-operation of everyone involved. Including those being laid off.

This might be a good thing for those of us who care about the reputation of PR. There’s never been the magic wand of PR that so many companies want, and ‘spin’ – a concept I find patronising to both the journalists and consumers who are supposedly taken in by it - is dying out. Now corporate employees have the same (or better) access to and influence on the media agenda as their corporate PR teams, really good PR will have to start at home.

Wednesday 6 February 2008

Tesco. Every little bit of communication helps.

Tesco’s status as the biggest and most successful retailer in the UK is attributable in no small measure to its instantly recognisable brand. One of the vehicles it uses to promote its brand is the Tesco Magazine. If it wants to make the most of this publication and actually communicate with its customers, however, it might be an idea to first promote the magazine a little closer to home.

When I was in one its London stores recently, I asked one of the staff for a copy. I was amazed when none of the staff knew that Tesco even produces its own publication, let alone whether it might be available in store.

This is where corporate branding comes crashing down. If the staff of this retailing behemoth don't know anything about their own company’s magazine, all the hard work that the brand puts in to create sub-brands, or spin off products, is wasted in one fell swoop.

Even if it’s only a small percentage of its 250,000 staff[1] that know nothing of the publication, it has undoubtedly a missed trick: think of all those unaware staff who could be promoting the title – and the brand – to customers.

Which begs the question, ‘Why do so many companies fail to acknowledge that their customer-facing staff are, quite literally, the face of the company?’. These employees should be treated as the first priority – over any other corporate message vehicle, including media – when communicating brand messages or company news.

Obviously, Tesco isn't going to suffer because I couldn’t get my mitts on a copy of the magazine. But what if I had been the author of a very popular blog and this wasn’t my first negative experience of Tesco?

In the old days, people could share their negative experiences only with friends and family, which effectively limited the potential damage to a brand. But the situation is very different today. The proliferation of blogs and forums means that word-of-mouth PR and the endorsement of a friend or trusted peer has never been more important. Unfortunately, if a respected blogger has one bad encounter with a company, he or she has the means and influence to rubbish the brand far and wide.

[1] http://www.tescocorporate.com/publiclibs/tesco/CoreUK.pdf