The Stick

I'm blogging at OfSpin

2011-07-08T17:59:00.001+01:00

I hardly blog here any more, so I can spend more time blogging over at OfSpin, Carrot's blog (here). I may resurrect this blog at some point, but for now if you're interested in my ramblings and rantings, I'll be over at OfSpin.

Thanks all,
Kate

The impact of student violence

2010-12-10T10:15:00.000Z

I’m deeply troubled by yesterday’s vote on tuition fees. I had the benefit of a free university education, bar £300 in my final term - the year that Thatcher introduced student loans. And so, I understand and support the students who want to protest against the vote and do so peacefully.

I absolutely do not condone violence in the protests. But it's no great surprise that what starts as a peaceful protest turns nasty. A toxic combination of various groups with an eye for trouble, high tension and emotions, and a student body that has been sold out by the Lib Dems they supported, makes it inevitable. This is a generation of young voters who are - at an age where they should be full of hope and political expectation - disillusioned with and already betrayed by our political system.

But today’s headlines make me incredibly sad. Ministers who voted for the bill are able to take the moral high ground by focusing not on the appalling implications for studentsand for a fair education, but on the violence from yesterday’s protests.

The effect of the violence has been to undermine the student’s message: that this coalition government has saddled them with a lifetime of debt, in an era when we’re told what matters above all else is to be rid of debt.

Who creates social media strategy?

2010-12-08T10:57:00.000Z

There’s a piece of ‘who owns social media’ research reported yesterday on PR Week, the results of which are, apparently, ‘relatively staggering’ (no, I’m not sure, either). The research, conducted by Wildfire PR, looks at who in-house marketers think should be responsible for their social media strategy.

Now I should say here that I think the report itself looks really interesting, and good on Wildfire for doing it - we all need to understand more about how in-house marketers approach (or don’t) social media strategy. It looks at the confusion over who should determine the role social media should play within the business, and the reasons marketers are adopting social media tactics (mostly because other people are, rather than for any strategic reason). I really like the approach taken by the agency of ‘sustainable social media’, and its report that gives some sensible advice to in-house marketers on how to develop a social media strategy.

But, as ever, the response from other PROs (according to PR Week) is to ‘express shock’ at the fact that social media responsibility is spread across a number of different divisions of the company, and not all outsourced to PR agencies.

Of course it isn’t. More often than not, these days, social media strategies include sales, customer service, marketing, HR and any other bit of the business that thrives from human contact. None of these business strategies are outsourced in their entirety to PR agencies. The bits that are outsourced to PR agencies are, er, the PR strategies. And I mean PR in its widest, proper, ‘today’ sense of social communications: building relationships and conversations with an organisation’s public.

The research, I think, reflect this. In-house PR teams come out on top for creating social media (as part of marketing) strategies. About right, probably. Presumably the customer service team is responsible for social media as part of customer service, and sales for sales, etc.

As for the 20 per cent of those who think responsibility for social media lies with the IT team - well, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and hope they mis-heard the question.

If you haven't got anything to say, keep quiet.

2010-11-08T17:49:00.001Z

This might be a bit of a rant, so sorry about that. But there’s some stuff being spouted by so-called social media gurus/experts/thought leaders [delete as appropriate] that’s driving me nuts.

The latest is a post I saw today by someone who shall remain nameless about the ‘optimum’ number of tweets you should send in a day (apparently it’s 22). This gem of marketing information is designed to help companies understand and plan how much resource they should throw at Twitter.

Is this really a valuable lesson in using Twitter as a marketing tool? Doesn’t it depend on what you want to say? I mean, I could fill up my weekly quota on a Saturday evening in front of the X Factor. It wouldn’t help our marketing much. And if you’re issuing company information 22 times a day, then God help you. And your dwindling band of followers.

It just smacks of the bad old days of PR, when a client brief would come in that made you want to cry, by claiming that one of the PR ‘objectives’ was to issue 48 press releases a year. No news, mind, just press releases.

I’m not pretending to be a Twitter expert (does such a thing exist?). But I think the only thing people care about on Twitter is whether you’re interesting. There are some people I follow who don’t say anything for a few days, but when they do, they really make me laugh. Or are a really useful source of information. There are others whom I’ve un-followed because they do nothing but self-promote.

If you’re a normal person, there will be some days when you just don’t have much to say. So maybe you just shouldn’t say anything.

And now I'll take my own advice, log off and have a large glass of wine.

No single discipline ‘owns’ social media.

2010-11-02T12:24:00.000Z

What's with the debate about who owns social media - is it marketing, is it communications, is it sales, is it customer service?

You might as well say, who owns the phone: comms or customer service? Print media: Advertising or PR? Facebook: comms, advertising, customer service and marketing? (Or just you and your mates?)

I remember this debate about search, when it was still a fairly new marketing tool 10 years or so ago. We were involved with Overture as it launched into the UK, and there was a big issue around whether sales, web development, IT, marketing or ecommerce heads ‘owned’ search. Now, of course, it’s seen as a broad sales and marketing discipline and is integrated (or should be) to every part of the business, depending on what outcome you’re trying to achieve. Communicators use search to support campaigns; as do advertisers; as do marketing heads in launching a new product; as do customer support teams to help people looking to resolve an issue; and so on. It fits into the overall business strategy.

The same will happen with social media. Every department in the business will ‘own’ part of it. PR / comms are becoming much more social. Advertisers are using Facebook, or highly targeted social advertising, and incorporating social media to their campaigns (is the Meerkat advertising or comms, now Orlov has his own Twitter feed?). Search is becoming social; BT Care is a great example of customer service over Twitter; and you can sell through Facebook.

The ‘who owns what’ debate is completely irrelevant. More to the point - where are your audiences, and what do they want to do over what channel? Ultimately, consumers own social media, and it’s up to businesses to respond accordingly.

The nice things clients do

2010-09-02T17:31:00.001+01:00

We all have favourite clients. And when you really like a client, you put in extra effort. You’ll stay late to finish a feature to make certain it hits deadline; you make sure the copy for an article is perfect; you think of them whenever an opportunity comes your way to get them extra coverage; you’ll brainstorm new ideas to get them better exposure; you point out details on their blog or website that could improve their positioning. It would be lovely to say we all do that for all our clients - but the truth is there are some that get special treatment.

A new client asked me recently in the pitch process what would make them an important client to us. I think they were expecting me to say the usual ‘we grow with your success’, ‘we value all our clients’ or even ‘increase your fee’. While I suppose those things do matter - cheesy as they sound - they’re not really what make a team go the extra mile for a client.

The beauty of having your own business is that you can choose your clients, and it really isn’t just the financial stuff that matters. Sometimes, it’s worth taking a hit and not working with a client you know is going to be a nightmare. (I’ve worked with a few of those in the past, and I’m never doing it again, if I can possibly help it.) Some people don’t need to like their clients, and they’re luckier (and probably much richer) than I am, but to me, it matters to get on with someone you’re working with.

The things that make a client really important to me are:

I care about what they do. They don’t have to be earth shattering, just interesting.
I get on with them, and they’re decent people (I’d find it hard to work with someone who was racist, or homophobic, for example). I think it’s a fact of life that if we like someone, we do more for them, fee or no fee.
We can laugh together. That might be on a conference call, or over lunch, but a completely humourless client is very hard work.
You get the occasional ‘thank you’ when something’s worked really well. It goes such a long way - if you’ve slogged over something it matters that the client appreciates it. I know it’s what we get paid for, but we’re people, not machines.
They treat us like grown ups. They pay us for our skills, not for their ego. There’s nothing worse than giving your best advice for it to be ignored, or your best copy for it to be massacred, or your best ideas to be nicked and passed off by someone else. If they ask advice because they want it, and listen to it, and even act on it, it makes us much more likely to give it our best consideration.

It’s hard to know whether the relationship’s going to work at the pitch stage. I always think the best clients start with meetings that don’t involve creds presentations, or pitch ideas, but just a conversation. You get a feel for whether the relationship is going to work or not.

Maybe we should build some more ‘gut instinct’ stuff into the pitch process (maybe the lead qualification checklist should start with ‘can we spend time with them without wanting to self harm?’). Do others do this already? Does it matter if you like a client or not?

Managing a social media crisis

2010-07-22T17:02:00.000+01:00

Yomego, eModeration and Carrot have combined brainpower in this white paper/guide to managing a social media crisis. You can download it here. Would be very interested to hear people's thoughts / experiences, either on this blog, or over at the Breakfast Bunker Briefing blog.

How To Avoid A Social Media Disaster (eModeration, Carrot Communications And Yomego)

2010-07-19T13:55:00.002+01:00

Here are the slides from our breakfast bunker briefing. White paper on the subject to follow.

How To Avoid A Social Media Disaster (eModeration, Carrot Communications And Yomego)

View more presentations from eModeration.

Portrait of a social media crisis

2010-07-19T12:50:00.003+01:00

Last week, we got together with two great companies that we work with - Yomego and eModeration – to run a seminar on how to avoid a social media disaster. Yomego is a social media specialist, and has just launched a new online reputation monitoring tool (Social Media Reputation, or SMR) that, among other things, helps brands spot an issue early, so they can respond quickly and avoid a disaster. eModeration is a moderation and community management company, and there’s not much it doesn’t know about managing online communities through a crisis. We provided the ‘response’ bit – how to communicate through a potential crisis.

I should mention that both Yomego and eModeration are clients of ours, but it made so much sense to join forces on this issue. It also really proved to me – more than ever - that no single marketing discipline ‘owns’ social media. We need specialists, not generalists, in some areas – and we need to work with the agencies round us to provide really good advice (never more so than when a brand is facing a crisis).

Our ‘breakfast bunker briefing’ was a closed seminar for around 40 people in the Cabinet War Rooms, with some top brands in the audience. (The War Rooms are a great venue by the way, if you’re ever planning an event. We were in the old ‘switch’ room, where an emergency power supply for London could be switched on if regular supplies were stopped by bombing. Seemed somehow appropriate.)

Our slides from the day are on Slideshare (getting top billing today, which is great); and on the blog that we set up to address some of the issues from the day. We’re also issuing a thought piece on avoiding social media crises which I’ll post soon.

But first, we opened the seminar with Yomego’s Steve Richards, setting the scene for how an issue becomes a crisis on social media, which I’ve pasted below – it’s brilliant. Any resemblance to real social media crises / brands is unintended etc…

A portrait of a social media crisis (by Steve Richards, Yomego).

It’s a sunny Wednesday morning, the sun is shining and there are few signs of the menacing clouds of discontent soon to gather. Our protagonist is the MD at HUSH – that’s HabitKatBucks United Southwest Holdings – a recent merger of several companies who had had some ‘issues’ recently.

On this fine day, our man, who we’ll call Mr X to save his blushes, arrived at his desk at 8.30 as usual, double-shot caramel moccaccino in hand, to find an email from his PA Debbie who’d overheard a bad customer experience on the train that morning.

“Don’t worry, Debs” Mr X assured her: bad reviews are ten a penny, but sales are up and the HUSH brand has just crashed through the magical 100 likes on Facebook, or so his daughter had assured him.

Ten minutes later, Mr X’s new Marketing Director flagged up a familiar sounding complaint he’d found on Twitter. Sounded potentially damaging, but, undaunted, Mr X dismissed it. He was feeling bullish and besides, his double-shot was going cold.

“People whinge all the time,” he repeated. (The Marketing Director really should meet Mr X’s wife who has turned moaning into an art form.)

An hour later, HUSH’s PR Manager emails Mr X: there’s a video, apparently, on YouTube, showing the source of the complaint – an HUSH store manager appears to throw a cup of coffee in the face of a disgruntled female customer.

It looks bad. Mr X tells the PR Manager to get the PR Director to deal with it immediately.

Two hours later, the Daily Mail calls Mr X wanting an official comment on ‘Cappuccino Gate’ as it’s being called. Mr X’s blood is up. He’s furious. He calls the PR Manager to find out why it hasn’t been dealt with only to discover the PR Director’s on an outward bound training course in the Brecon Beacons. “No phone reception. Sorry.”

“Surely the PR agency knows this hack at the Mail?” Mr X demands, only to be reminded he’d had the agency dropped three months ago – “luxury item” was the phrase he’d apparently used at the time.

Mr X decides to Google ‘Cappuccino Gate’. There are links galore. He loosens his tie. This is not ideal. Not ideal at all. He watches the YouTube video (currently 15,000 views), reads the blogs. Trouble’s brewing. The forums are abuzz; Facebook is awash; Mr X needs ‘awayout.’

The content links have acted like candles and disgruntled moths are fluttering around, all too eager to share their bad experiences. Mr X does what everyone in his position would do - he concludes he is surrounded by idiots. Mr X was always a fan of Billy Ocean and when the going gets tough…

He resolves to snuff these candles out personally.

He demands access to the HUSH feed on Twitter, only to find out the @Hush hashtag was registered 18 months ago by a friendly neighbourhood anarchist called ‘Scud’, who has helpfully used Twitpic to broadcast the most damaging still of the event to his 716,000 followers, half of whom have retweeted it to their collective secondary audience of 6.2 million people.

“Breakout the Social Media Crisis Plan,” bellows Mr X to the PR Manager.

Apparently there isn’t one. Mr X draws on his military training and tells her to “Foxtrot Oscar.”

“Always fight fire with fire,” concludes Mr X – echoing his father’s motto which, incidentally, lead to Mr X Snr’s dismissal by the fire brigade. Mr X instructs his PA, Debbie, to post positive testimonials on every forum she can find under a pseudonym. The PR manager is told to delete as much negative comment as she can find on Facebook.

Bud successfully nipped, Mr X is now in his stride. He orders the Store Manager who threw the coffee to be sacked on the spot and instructs the PR Manager to post the following edict immediately on the company website: “With reference to the so-called Cappuccino-Gate fiasco, I can assure HUSH customers that this is an isolated incident. One swallow does not make a summer. (Even if the swallow in question was thrown all over a paying customer LOL). HUSH is a family company and refuses to be dragged through the ‘cyber-mud.’ (He was especially pleased with his turn of phrase.) This is a storm in a coffee cup and HUSH has instructed its lawyers to follow up on any libellous rumour-mongering.”

“That’s shown them,” he thought. Decisive leadership. Disaster averted.

But Scud has noticed the Facebook deletions and exposes the practice as ‘the most crass kind of ham-fisted corporate censorship’. Worse still, he has traced the sudden bout of flag-waving advocacy to ‘Debs’, Hush’s PA to the Managing Director. 6.2 million people are updated almost instantaneously. Mr X’s hole is suddenly a lot deeper.

Ten minutes later, Mr X receives a phone call from the Chairman. Mr X’s hardline policy has been picked up by CNN and the homepage is lead story of CNN.com. Why hadn’t they seen this coming? And what are they doing to make it go away?

The new Marketing Director hands in his notice highlighting as a parting shot that he’d just joined the ‘Bollocks to HUSH’ group on Facebook which already has 23,000 likes. The Chairman’s back on the phone; the company’s share price is down 15 per cent. Mr X stiffens his upper lip; time to draw on the Dunkirk spirit. He decides to blame the PR Director and jumps in a taxi to the Brecon Beacons. Best to tell him the news in person.

Turns out, the store manager who had thrown the coffee was conducting a staff training session on the perils of bad customer service. The hot coffee had in fact been harmless dietcoke. No harm done - it was all a misunderstanding. He was just about to seed a full explanation absolving HUSH on any involvement…until he found out he’d been sacked.

He decided to join the 'Bollocks to Hush' Facebook group instead.

Twitter rules

2010-05-18T13:55:00.002+01:00

I've blogged (ranted?) before about when not to follow someone on Twitter, but this is a rather more thoughtful post on the subject, by Tia Fisher at eModeration. Some good rules to stick to.

(Disclosure - eModeration is a client. I'm posting the link because I really like it, not because it's a client. Personal rule.)

2010-03-08T17:08:00.003Z

Paul Armstrong, in his blog Don't Fear the Firehose for PR Week, this week debates whether PROs are becoming 'glorified community managers'.

My view, for what it's worth, is that good community management is a highly skilled, specialised job that is separate from the role of PR. It may be a skill PR teams buy in, or work with, but it is not a core part of PR. PR does more to drive the discussions within the community, than manage the community itself. What do others think?

Measuring digital PR

2010-02-19T18:00:00.004Z

The PRCA invited me to give a short presentation for one of its series of ‘Expert Briefings’ yesterday, this time on measuring digital, hosted by Ketchum Pleon. Up in the firing line with me were Fernando Rizo, head of digital at Ketchum Pleon, and Kristin Wadge, a director at Metrica. Although the three of us have quite varied clients, we all pretty much said the same core things:

Metrics have to have real meaning to the business: they must be things we can learn from, and feed back into the development / strategy process.

Online measurement must tie in to offline measurement. We set audience strategies ahead of channel strategies, and the ways to reach those audiences will be online and offline.

AVEs are completely meaningless in these days of digital communications and two-way engagement.

It is almost impossible to demonstrate a direct financial ROI for clients on their PR spend because of the difficulty in tracking action arising from PR. But, PR does have a clear business value which can be measured.

I was surprised at the reluctance of people to discuss the issue in a public forum (although I know sometimes I talk too quickly, which makes it hard for anyone to get a word in – the result of years working with Richard Houghton!). But a number of people did come up and ask questions after the event – these are the ones that dominated:

How do we pre define ROI? (ie what do you say to a client that says “If I spend 10k with you, how much will I get back?”)

Sadly, I don’t think we can pre-define financial ROI at all, in isolation from other marketing disciplines. We can do it in conjunction with others – Kristin talked about ‘econometrics’ that charts trends in sales / action against different marketing activity peaks (taking into account buying patterns such as seasonal trends, for example). She made the very good point that often this research is done with the ad and DM agencies, but PR just gets left out. Action: make sure PR is plugged into the research along with the other marketing disciplines.

I do think there are measurement criteria you can pre-define with clients. Set clear objectives, and set KPIs (not spurious ROI figures) against them. That might be reaching the right kind of audience (do some proper research into which media will influence buying decisions, rather than which will impress the CEO’s neighbours); and metrics against media placement and engagement within that audience.

What if your client’s product just isn’t very good? How do you manage social media response?

(Actually the problem was more precisely: “my boss has promised my client a social media programme for a product that I know people are going to hate”).

I think that digital is the death of spin. All the adjectives and shiny pictures in the world aren’t going to cover up that people just won’t buy rubbish. You won’t be able to manage the social media response; better to change the product, or turn down the client.

We need to give better advice to our clients – and this means either senior people having to do the work (that’ll stop them promising stuff that’s not deliverable) so they understand what will and won’t work; or letting the people who are going to do the work in on the planning conversations. Or walking away from clients who won’t listen.

There are some things we do for clients that we know lead to an increase in sales / activity etc. They have clear financial ROI – do we set targets for these and charge bonus payments for them?

There are always some ‘milestone’ articles that will see a short-term sales peak (for example). But those sorts of placements aren’t sustainable – if you know that getting into the Sun, or onto Reuters, has a positive financial impact on your client then of course you should target it – but you can’t achieve that every week.

Good PR is a combination of achieving these big goals that have short-term impact, and building gradual change in reputation / attitude / awareness to achieve a long-term goal. If you want to be bonused on the big hits, fine – but remember that you’ll focus more on that than on building the long-term stuff. So you may find you have a short-term client.

It was an interesting event, and many thanks to the PRCA for organising it. I wondered whether people were coming along looking for a magic metric to demonstrate ROI. But each client has different requirements – value means different things to different people. The key is setting clear objectives, and understanding what you can (and what you can’t) prove with measurement.

I’ll post the presentation points in more detail over the next few days. PRCA members will be able to access all three presentations from the PRCA site in due course.

Can PR drive sales?

2010-01-27T16:05:00.002Z

We're always being asked to demonstrate what return on investment we can promise to clients - and from various conversations I've had with colleagues in the industry, we're not the only agency to be asked. If a client spends 5k with us, what will they make back?

It's an almost impossible question to answer - and trust me, I've tried as hard as anyone to come up with a metric that shows the direct impact of PR on sales. Note here that I'm talking about a direct link from PR to sales rather than the things we can track rather more easily (reputation, awareness, positioning etc).

The problem is that mostly we have no real control over the end product we're promoting. We can choose not to get involved, or we can spot problems and feed them into the R&D process - but ultimately, we rely on our clients to produce things that people want.

Recently, we've worked with a company that lets people compare the best prices and buy stuff from their mobile phones. It launched a very clever iPhone app, and we thought it might fly. We drafted the launch release, got some great photos, and talked to a lot of journalists. A half-page in The Sun later, and the company was top of the paid apps list on iTunes, with 30,000 people paying to download the app the first three days (it was then used 400,000 times in the first week). Did PR influence the sales? Absolutely.

Six months ago, we did something similar for another company, operating in the same sort of market. It too produced an iPhone app, we helped the company gets lots of exposure, and... nothing. Very little impact on sales. And yet, the coverage was just as good - the journalists and we all thought it was a decent product. Did PR influence sales? Not at all.

The difference was that people wanted the first product, and they didn't want the second one.

While media coverage is great at bringing a good product to the attention of potential customers, it won't persuade them to buy something they don't want; and it won't gloss over something that doesn't work. Which is why I'm yet to be convinced that it is possible to guarantee a direct sales return on a PR investment. I'd love to know what others think.

Does PR 'own' online reputation management?

2009-09-16T13:10:00.005+01:00

It’s great news that Centaur is investing in the new Reputation Online project (launching end September). How to manage your reputation online is one of the biggest issues facing brands today. It’s also one of the reasons that companies can be so reluctant to get too heavily involved in the social media space. It still takes a brave company to entrust its brand’s reputation to its users.

PR at its core has always been about managing a company’s reputation. In the old days when print, broadcast and radio were separate entities and the Internet wasn’t a consideration, you had a fair chance of making a bad news story go away if handled right. I’m old enough to remember when managing an issue meant pulling in favours from journalists, fronting a credible spokesperson, and diminishing a bad story – often by creating another one to cover it. Spin, in other words. If you could weather the immediate storm (not everyone did), you’d probably be ok.

But these days, online engagement and user generated content means brands lose their control of a corporate message the minute they hand it over to their users. (You could argue that they always did – who can control what someone says about you in the pub? The difference is you didn’t know about it, and it wasn’t public. Or visible forever). Your spokesperson is no longer your CEO, it’s the customer who’s really, really cross. And is setting up a hate site, is smarter than you at SEO, or is leading a Twitter ‘fail’ campaign.

The only really meaningful way to make sure that the majority of what’s said about you is positive, is to make sure what you’re doing is right to start with. (That’s not to say there aren’t effective ways of managing an issue once it strikes – but that’s a subject for another time.) PR now needs to get much deeper under the skin of a company if we are to give real advice on reputation management. We need to get away completely from ‘we’ve just done this, can you promote it’ and take up a much more strategic role within a client company. We need to be involved in understanding how a company works from top to bottom. Not just marketing, but sales, business development, product development, HR, customer service and even SLAs.

Some clients just won’t let you get that far into the business. Some are just too huge, with marketing and PR team structures that don’t let you near a board director. But if the teams who supposedly manage reputations aren’t getting into the boardroom, then what they’re doing isn’t important enough to the company.

I don’t think there are many companies left that don’t consider reputation management or communications to be an important part of their business. Which means agencies that aren’t connecting with their clients at board level aren’t doing a good enough job. I expect that’s down to two things: the agency reporting to a PR or marketing manager who themselves don't get near the board (so don't really know what impact they're making); and the (connected) age-old problem of agency margins being squeezed, so cheaper, less experienced people are put on the client account, which means they can’t consult, which reduces the value of the agency, which squeezes margins.. and so on.

Reputation management is the core remit of PR. And yet this downwards spiral means the PR industry is consistently fails to manage its own reputation. Let’s take our own advice. If what we do is effective, our reputation will improve. If our reputation improves, we make more money. If we make more money, we invest in the best people, who give the best advice to our clients… and so on.

The biggest challenge facing brands online is managing their reputation. In PR, we manage reputations. It’s a huge opportunity if we choose to grasp it.

Is PR dead, or just changing?

2009-09-01T10:39:00.003+01:00

Publicly, the PR industry is claiming that it is stabilising after a difficult 12 months, and that new business is on the up. I think this is true, although privately I’ve heard concerns that the quality of leads is reducing, the pitch process is becoming even more random, and resources are being squeezed harder than ever. This means lower fees, lower turnover, lower profits. Which means lower-grade people, and so lower fees…

We can reverse this, if we understand how our industry is changing. Smaller, smarter clients are investing more, not less, in getting their communications right across the board, in order to differentiate in a tough market. To me, this is taking PR back to its roots – building relationships with a company’s public audience – through direct communications, not just through third party media endorsement. Traditional media circulation and influence is in freefall (reflected by low ad rates). The greatest influence is coming from the media you can’t buy: social sites, word of mouth marketing (what your mates down the pub think), bloggers, online communities and so on.

Creating influence that supports business growth is about more than persuading increasingly cynical journalists to write about your client. It’s also about direct communication with a public audience (you know, public relations). This marks a real shift in how PR has been seen over the last decade. Web 2.0 (user-generated content, citizen journalism, blogging, online communities, social media, digital content creation etc) has meant that the third party endorsement by journalists that clients have always sought is just one way of influencing user behaviour. In an online world, users influence each other directly, making traditional media just one in a number of influence channels.

This has two major implications for agencies.

1. Our clients’ products have to be up to the job. If users are going to recommend something to each other, it has to work. No-one’s going to take our word for it any more. I’m old enough to remember the days when you could mass mail a press release and a dodgy photo and see national coverage from it, but those days went with the dot com crash. Journalists are observers, not changers, of behaviour. Some client-side marketing and PR heads - many of whom started their careers during the dot com rise – are taking a long time to realise this, not least because they’re getting bad advice from their agencies. So, we have to learn to consult to our clients and not just take direction. This means putting people with experience onto the job.

2. Agencies need to understand the fundamentals of communicating directly to public audiences, not just through a journalist filter. Although journalists hate wading through marketing jargon, they’ll do it if they have to (ie if the story’s important enough). But client customers won’t bother. If you want someone to explain your product to their mate, you’d better be able to explain it to them first. (To a consumer, a coffee maker is a coffee maker, even if it makes hot chocolate. It’s not a beverage solution). And if you want to retain control of your company’s message, you’d better make it so simple and self-explanatory that it will be remembered and repeated. Agencies need to be able to take a complex message and simplify it, to make it compelling.

I suspect this will be a battle with some of the bigger clients – those who delegate communications to a junior PR manager with little experience (and whose low fees only buy a junior exec at the agency). For every smart client-side marketing manager out there, there is another who’ll refuse to let go of their ‘multi-platforms communications device’ in favour of a ‘mobile phone’.

But clients will only change if agencies give them good advice. Which means investing some of our most senior people to consult, in order to increase the value of communications – in its broadest sense - within the client company.

The result? Spin may well be dead. But communications has a bright future.

The research that wasn’t – how PR agencies do offer digital PR after all

2009-08-18T19:20:00.004+01:00

Most people working in agency PR will know about that story from bigmouthmedia – a re-run of 2008’s research by the SEO company - that a staggering 60 per cent of the top 100 agencies in the UK (as ranked in PR Week’s annual list) don’t offer a range of digital services.

I was pretty surprised by this. A number of people, me included (via a Twitter conversation), queried the research and were told that bigmouth had gone through the websites of each of the top 100 firms to ascertain which of them had a digital offering of some description. Social media, online PR and various other terms were included in the research.

I didn’t really think much more of it, apart from being mildly annoyed – bigmouth is a reputable SEO company, and while I didn’t believe the results, it wouldn’t be the first time that statistics have been massaged for PR benefit. And to be honest, not many journalists are going to sympathise with the PR industry being out-PR-ed.

But then it started appearing all over the place, including Marketing and eConsultancy – which both have real influence in the client world – and I got annoyed again.

So a couple of us at Carrot re-did bigmouth’s research, in the way that it had done it (as far as we could tell from its own response to us, and to the PR Week article). Any agency that didn’t mention digital, online PR, social media, blogs, interactive PR and so on went onto the ‘don’t offer digital’ list.

Guess what?

Eighty-three per cent of agencies from that same top 100 list DO specify digital / online / social media, call it what you will, on their website. We’ll come on to those that didn’t, shortly.

So, I thought, what’s going on here? Did bigmouth just make it up?

Assuming that it didn’t, there’s only one explanation. Its research discounted any agency that doesn’t have a separate digital division. So anyone that integrates digital channels across all their work (you know, the way most people do things these days) counted in the ‘doesn’t do digital’ pile.

So who were the 17 or so agencies that didn’t offer any digital? Because we were doing the research in the way that it had been done before, some pretty big names appeared to fall onto that pile.

Freud, for example. This is the agency that works for Sky, TalkTalk, Sony and Lynx (so it clearly does get online. It just doesn’t see fit to list every service on its site). Another was Finsbury – the agency that, according to its website, advised on three of the top five European deals last year. I don’t imagine they’re going to be very threatened by this ‘research’, either. The rest were mostly heavy-duty financial or pharma companies, so less likely to list every means they use to communicate.

Now, I don’t expect to elicit any kind of response or sympathy from journalists (who didn’t check their facts), or for any corrections to be printed. (Perhaps we in the PR industry should have jumped on this story when it first ran in 2008 – we’re not great at keeping our own reputation.) But what I do hope is that bigmouth doesn’t do this research again next year, when even more agencies should be integrating digital across all their services, not offering it separately. Or at least, do it properly.

UPDATE: bigmouthmedia sent me this tweet last night: "Looks like you used a kinder technique than us; allowing a greater "scope" than us. Glad we've two sets to compare. Good work."

Some great links over the last 2 weeks

2009-08-17T15:20:00.003+01:00

I’ve been shockingly bad at keeping my blog up to date. Despite advising the odd client on how and when to blog I’ve failed to do it myself. Cobbler’s children…

But I’m back from a break in Cornwall where (too much) fine food and wine softened the blow of hitting 40, and am full of resolve to do better.

The first thing I do when I get back from holiday, after going through a ridiculous number of emails is scan Google Reader. These are my favourites from the last couple of weeks:

Chris Brogan on how to manage Twitter – a great post that will be really useful for clients starting out on Twitter.

On the subject of Twitter, Immediate Future has an interesting interview with Guy Stevens of Carphone Warehouse on how CW uses Twitter for customer service.

Brendan Cooper on words that should be banned (I can bore for Britain on this subject, so I’ll just direct you to the link).

Tia Fisher at eModeration analysing a report from ENGAGEMENTdb on how the world’s most valuable brands engage with consumers and the impact of doing so. (I should say here that eModeration is a client. I'd read its blog even if it wasn't.)

Sally Whittle on protecting yourself (and your fee) from misunderstandings about what was agreed at the start of the project. Very sound advice.

All Will Sturgeon's posts, but especially this one on our new dance minister.

10 reasons to love clients and 10 reasons to walk away

2009-06-22T16:27:00.005+01:00

I’m very lucky in that I have a lot of good clients. But there are a couple in particular that I really enjoy working for and probably do too much for, in truth. But the beauty of being your own boss is that you can choose to walk away from the rotten clients - oh yes, we have - and go the extra mile for the good ones.

We had to make a decision recently on whether to stick with a client or walk away, and it got me to thinking about when you'll go above and beyond; and when it’s just, well, over.

Here are my top tens each way.

When you’ll go the extra mile for a client:

They say thank you for something you’ve worked really hard to achieve
Occasionally, they ask you how you are.
They pay you on time. Or at least when they say they will.
They employ you for your advice and then listen to it. (Even if they don’t always take it.)
They let you have direct access to senior people in the organisation. It really helps you work out what’s needed for the business.
You get feedback. Good and bad. We need to know what impact our campaigns have.
You call, and they answer the phone (it’s the small things that make me happy).
They turn up for interviews / events / meetings (you’d be amazed).
They understand that effective communications is about more than just column inches.
They recommend us (I really love that). On LinkedIn, to other companies, I'm not fussy. It’s nice to be recommended.

When you start working to rule:

The only time you speak to the decision maker is at the 6-month review. And s/he hates you.
The objectives shift half-way through a campaign. Or it dawns on you that the objectives you agreed with marketing have nothing to do with the expectations of the person paying your invoice.
You don’t get paid. Or you’re lied to about getting paid.
The client sales team junior thinks s/he can do a better job than you. And tells you so. (I’m getting braver at saying, “fine, you go for it. Oh, and our crisis management rate is XX.”)
You don’t get a thank you. Ever.
You hear the words: “Can you get our new widget on the telly?
Your story gets rewritten to include 18 corporate messages and a sprinkling of grammatical errors. (My own errors, of course, are fine.)
You hear: “My wife / partner / friend / cousin has a mate who’s in PR, and they say we should be in the national press with this story.” (Of course they do, they want your cash. See previous blog on giving good advice, and why agencies lie to get business).
They resent you going on holiday. Or worse, think that where you’re going is too expensive, and ask for a fee reduction as you’re being paid too much (that really has happened).
Slowly, you feel your soul draining away, drop by drop. Get out, people.

Getting a good brief and giving good advice. How hard can it be?

2009-05-21T14:56:00.003+01:00

Thanks to Becky Mcmichael who pointed out this blog from Seth Godin that talks about the importance of a good brief to manage talent.

I’m lucky enough to work mostly with smaller, fast-growth companies, where we're involved at board level, and what we do can have a real impact on shaping the business. But we still come across the odd badly thought-through PR brief from a bigger company, written by someone who is so far away from the business that often they can’t even answer basic business questions, like what the company’s turnover is, or what their business objectives are.

You know the kind of brief I mean. Where the ‘objectives’ are to write press releases and get coverage (anywhere); and ROI is ‘measured’ in terms of column inches and AVEs. And you’re required (along with the other 8 people on the short list) to do a media audit among national editors to find out what perception are of the company. (Actually, that last bit’s usually pretty easy. If the company hasn’t had any coverage, journalists either don’t know who you are, or think you’re crap.)

I sat in a pitch recently for a large company that deep down I knew we shouldn’t be pitching for, but greed got the better of us. The minute we walked into the room, we knew we were a bad fit.

We were pitching to a large team, but overall responsibility for the pitch had been given to a junior PR manager who hadn’t been part of the initial briefing process. She wanted to know:

how much guaranteed coverage we were going to get from corporate press releases that she was going to write (also pretty easy: none. Guaranteed).

how many national journalists did we know well enough on a personal level to guarantee they would cover her (as yet undefined) press release containing corporate messages? We confidently estimated that no journalist would do this.

I wish we’d known at the briefing stage that these were the criteria we’d be judged against. We’d have saved the tube fare. Unsurprisingly we were ditched in favour of a large-ish agency who had, amazingly, given these guarantees.

The result is predicable. The agency A team who pitched will start to be unavailable once it comes to that nasty business of actually having to deliver on promises. Responsibility will get shunted down the team until it reaches a sufficiently lowly person whose job depends on phoning his or her way through a media list (hoping that someone still does colour seps).

The relationship between agency and client will start to decline at this point. The agency’s least experienced PR person will work with an inexperienced client contact to deliver rubbish to an increasingly frustrated group of journalists. That’s not helping the client’s reputation, or the agency’s.

But it's not just the agency in question that will suffer. PR at its best is about creating and managing reputations. And yet the reputation of our own industry is in the pan. There is some great work being done by PR teams, but the whole industry is damaged when an agency lies in order to win business.

Relevance of Twitter to business - article links

2009-04-15T13:26:00.002+01:00

I often hear colleagues in the PR and communications industries saying that some of their clients still need persuading that Twitter has a relevance to business. So I wanted to start making a note of some of the uses we’re seeing of Twitter, and start collecting links to articles that might be useful in helping to show how businesses are using it in a meaningful way. I’ll also put these up onto my delicious profile.

Today’s links are:

Retailers: article from Retail Week by Joanna Perry. Includes analysis of how Shop Direct is monitoring what consumers are saying about the ‘old’ Woolworths, as it prepares to relaunch the brand online.

The Twitter world: a great article from the New York Times that I’ve mentioned in a previous blog

And the flip side: do Twitter and other social media give too loud a voice to a minority of people in some cases? This is a great analysis of the Motrin and Skittles social media issues, from eConsultancy. Very relevant in light of the Dominoes incident.

The emerging view of Twitter

2009-04-15T08:50:00.002+01:00

If anyone asks why Twitter matters, here is a great article from the New York Times that opens the door to a world where Twitter is much, much more than what someone had for breakfast.

The article states: “Individually, many of those 140-character “tweets” seem inane. But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it.”

A great summary; thanks to Marshall Manson for Tweeting the link.

My company did some work a while back with a customer feedback company called Fizzback, that essentially aggregated SMS feedback from customers of any given product or service, to get both individual feedback (a bad experience that could be put right, for example), and an overall picture of what collective customers were experiencing.

The emerging view of Twitter for companies shown in the NYT article is that it allows companies to do something similar: collect insight into the consumer’s world, on which a company can act. (Combined, these tools would be powerful - a technology to aggregate, segment and prioritise Twitter feedback, tailored per company.) This world is about so much more than just one-way message exposure. Experiences that would have been shared in the pub, privately, between groups of friends are now being shared between thousands of groups on Twitter – and for the first time, companies can monitor and respond to these views. Powerful stuff.

10 people not to follow on Twitter.

2009-04-09T13:58:00.003+01:00

I'm marginally addicted to Twitter, but there are some scary people on there. In the interest of public safety, here's my personal list of the kind of people never to follow, or be followed by, on Twitter.

I’ve tweeted one or two of these, so apologies if a couple are familiar. I’m pretty sure it will lose me a few followers, too. Hey ho.

Anyone with ‘killer’ in their user name, or murderous background pictures. Self-explanatory.
Anyone who takes an unnatural interest in the health of my love life. Get your own.
Anyone who says they’re passionate about life. You’re going to be way too happy for my liking.
Anyone who has more than one exclamation mark in their Twitter biog. See above.
Anyone who auto-DMs the message “I can help you make money online!!” (and see 4, above.)
Anyone who claims to have psychic powers.
Anyone who only tweets quotes from dead people.
Anyone who wants to ‘initiate you in the ways of Christ’. Or any other religious figure. Trust me, you’d have your job cut out.
Obvious spammers (10,000 following, 2 followers, 1 update).
Anyone who claims to be ‘a really cool / crazy guy’.

Anything I’ve missed?

Twitter, Moldova and broken windows

2009-04-08T14:28:00.002+01:00

I’ve just been reading a piece in the Times of India about protests in Moldova against the election results, where Twitter has been cited as helping organises rally protestors. Palin Ningthoujam (@palinn) of Weber Shandwick India tweeted a link to the article, which I happened to pick up just after a colleague told me about protests near her house, which is close to the Moldovan embassy. A neat example of how we hear about issues these days: directly (protests), by word of mouth, search (I Googled it to find out more), via Twitter, and the good old-fashioned “I read it in the newspaper”, albeit online.

In the article there’s a reference to an embassy window being broken by protesters, against which is an in-text ad (delivered by Kontera’s ContentLink) advertising a window and glass repair service.

This it is contextual advertising at its most literal. A bit like the Google ads that show an ad for Dell at the top of www.explodinglaptop.com (first words on the site: ‘your Dell laptop’s on fire’). There’s context, and then there’s context.

Although it’d be handy if the Moldovan embassy caretaker reads it, I suppose.

A very welcome return to TWL

2009-03-31T12:30:00.002+01:00

This week sees The World's Leading burst back to life with its (until now) much-missed sideways view of the PR world. I'm unreasonably pleased that's it's back. Any industry that takes itself as seriously as PR needs someone to poke fun at it now and then - and who better than TWL. Welcome back!

AIG, bonuses, PR hires and the media response

2009-03-24T12:36:00.003Z

I don’t want to get into a debate about the whys and wherefore’s of AIG hiring Burson Marsteller to ‘clean up its image’. I haven’t seen Burson’s brief, so I don’t know what they were hired to do.

But a few things interest me about the way this has panned out in the media.

Today AIG announces that nine out of 10 of its top execs will repay their bonuses . I’m guessing they didn’t need to hire a PR firm to work that one out. And media interest was such that no journalist needed PR's help to get this story.

Hiring a PR company isn’t enough to improve your image when you’ve ballsed up this badly. You have to put the wrong right. Act responsibly (call it part of your
Corporate Social Responsibility programme if ‘doing the right thing’ sticks in your throat). Apologise. Publicly. And above all, don’t pay your top execs billions of public money in bonuses for the single biggest failure in financial history. Then spend public money on PR. Oh, and then have to give back the bonuses anyway.

I find it really interesting that the very act of hiring Buson Marsteller has got AIG such bad coverage via the Rachel Maddow show (including the follow up story that was supposed to make it better). AIG is made to look even worse (is that possible?) by being associated with previous B-M clients. It’s not exactly a great start to the relationship.

Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to do the right thing first, and then hire the PR company?

"We were going to do that": protecting pitch ideas

2009-03-19T13:36:00.002Z

This piece from PR Week started me thinking about the issue of IP in PR pitches. It’s almost impossible to copyright an idea or concept – as Graham Goodkind points out, it’s easy for the client to say that the winning agency also had the same idea. And indeed they might have done.

I think expecting the PRCA to ‘do something about it’ is a bit ridiculous. If we insist on giving away ideas for free at the pitch stage, then we can’t expect them not to be copied. Of course, we could build in pre-pitch contracts that state we own the IP, and put the onus on the prospective client to prove the other agency had the idea (by showing original pitch documents, for example). But if a prospect isn't put off by that, they could get round it. It's a bit heavy handed, too – and in this market, I'll bet agencies won't do it, for fear of getting struck of the pitch list, now or in the future. I suspect this is a bit of PRCA-bashing, because individual agencies can’t work out how to manage the issue themselves, and want (shock) a bit of press coverage.

The problem is deeper than a rather petulant “they nicked our idea”. If we’re offering prospects something that anyone else can do, we’re not really differentiating ourselves, nor are we demonstrating the value that we could bring implementing that idea. Until we can do that, there’s not much the PRCA or anyone else, can do to help.

Why should companies use Twitter in their communications?

2009-03-09T14:08:00.004Z

We often get asked by clients: “What’s the point of Twitter?” “I’m not sure I get it.” “Do we need to use it?”

Darren Waters of BBC Online has written a great piece about how he / the BBC uses Twitter in reporting / researching.

In his words:
1.Talking to and responding to queries from readers, fellow professionals and colleagues.
2.Asking the audience questions and using the crowd as a source of information
3.Reporting updates, breaking news, and giving colour and texture
4.Pushing out headlines and blogposts to Twitter via RSS and TwitterFeed.com
5.Getting a very fast and very global sense of events
6.Using hashtags to find viewpoints around breaking news as well as a source of user generated content
7.Unifying different threads of reporting - news website, blog, Flickr etc

I think this sums up nicely why and how Twitter is a useful tool and is as applicable to businesses as to the BBC’s reporting. Twitter is a great tool for companies to talk to and respond to their audiences fast – customers, prospects, influencers (including journalists – particularly in tech areas); to test new ideas; to inform audiences about new products, services or updates; and to create and monitor conversations between groups of consumers.

Also worth a read is Forrester’s blog about its 'POST' approach, which is really about applying common sense to using blogs, social media, Twitter etc. In summary, work out: who you need to reach and where they are gathered; your objective; your strategy for engaging with them; and the best technology / place to do it.

“Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things.” (Michael O’Leary)

2009-02-20T14:32:00.002Z

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary is quoted today in the Guardian on plans to introduce mobile phones on flights, with a level of candour we don’t usually get from chief execs. I love it – it’s a breath of fresh air. We all know Ryanair for what it is – cheap (ish) flights, a rubbish website, aggressively commercial approach to selling us more than just flights (they even sell you the option to check in) and almost no customer service. He’s out to make money, not make life easier, or provide better quality. And he’s honest about that. If only Ryanair took the same honest approach to their ‘free’ flight promotions.

SEO and PR – all part of communications

2009-02-19T15:43:00.003Z

The SEO/online PR debate continues. Some good blogs worth reading on this from, among others, Marshall Manson, Stuart Bruce and Jed Hallam .

I think that SEO and PR could sit alongside each other quite happily, if we were – as Stuart points out – much clearer about what PR is. Reputation management and communications strategies are not led by SEO programmes, and SEO agencies are the first to admit it. (The good ones, anyway. I’m sure we all know some who break this rule.)

I’ve posted (read ranted) in various other forums about this – but life would change for the better if we all, clients and SEO agencies included, stopped assuming PR is just about media and blogger relations programmes.

So, let’s ditch the term PR altogether. It would make life so much easier. Let’s talk about what we do as ‘communications’. Of which media relations, social media programmes, blogger outreach, developing direct relationships with the public, and SEO are all part.

Was the Evening Standard out of touch?

2009-01-23T18:34:00.004Z

I've always found it hard to reconcile the Standard's political agenda (particularly over the Mayoral campaign) to my personal beliefs, and so wasn't sure whether my view that the paper was doomed was led by personal bias. I do think the paper has been out of touch with the popular view in London for some time now, and a much more features-led style has become preachy at best, dictatorial at worst. Its sale to Alexander Lebedev for the price of two copies is a real shame for a paper that, whatever your political views, used to be a symbol of London life. It'll be interesting to see whether the London Paper will be able to take over while the Standard's future is uncertain.

What happens when a product doesn't live up to its messaging?

2009-01-23T17:50:00.003Z

I was going through some old photos and came across one that made me laugh. A great example of a product not living up to its hype:

Great links on social media and comms

2009-01-23T13:15:00.003Z

Two great blog articles that should be required reading for all PR teams involved in social media. One from Jon Clements and one from Mat Morrison . A great basis for educating clients on how to approach social media.

Do we need to define social media?

2009-01-13T18:44:00.004Z

I think we’re all starting to over-complicate how to define social media, what it includes and what it doesn’t. We need to understand where people are talking to each other, recommending or slating stuff, but I think the terminology we use is largely irrelevant. It's like 3G - when that term was first lobbed around, consumers didn't care (or even know) what 3G was – it was an industry definition. What people cared about was “I can get video on my phone”, or “my Internet's really quick". (And while I think of it – do most people know what ‘media’ includes? Most people I know outside of media / marketing industries say ‘I saw it on TV’ or ‘I heard it on the radio’ or ‘I watched it on YouTube’.)

Maybe we should apply the same approach to social media. If you work for Top Shop, then your customers are all over MySpace, but not Facebook. If you’re iPhone, you probably want nice things said about you on the zillions of iPhanatic forums. And so on. So whether social media is media or not probably won’t matter in the long term.

I know that we need to advise clients, and clients use these terms – but I don’t think we need to worry too much about tight definitions. Social media to me is anywhere that people gather to talk about stuff, where they run the environment. Any marketing definitions we apply now will change in five minutes, anyway.

iPhone and social media

2009-01-13T10:53:00.002Z

Although this video’s been knocking around since August (here analysed in a piece by Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans - always worth reading on social media issues), it is a great demonstration of how a brand’s service should live up to its advertising claims - in this case the iPhone’s usability speed on 3G.

Just to be clear - I’m sure it won’t stop people wanting an iPhone. But that’s because it’s beautifully designed, lovely to use and has so many features. So it does seem odd that Apple has focused so heavily on the one thing that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny – speed. Network speed is so reliant on outside factors that surely this is setting up customer expectations to be disappointed?

Social media and word of mouth marketing - a huge part of iPhone’s promotional mix –are by their nature only successful if the service lives up to the claim. Why waste time focusing on promoting the one message that is pretty much guaranteed to let people down?

2008-12-17T14:59:00.001Z

The e-Consultancy Online PR Industry Benchmarking Report is creating a few ripples. It seems to me that PR experts are running round in small circles trying to agree: what is digital or online PR?; b: should it be run by specialists, or integrated across the agency?; and who owns it – PR, advertising or, god forbid, SEO? .

Wendy McAuliffe of Liberate Media says that the core element of PR is creating two-way conversations with a target audience. Online forums, social media, blogs (etc etc) – are ideal channels to do this. So I guess online PR is creating two-way conversations with a target audience. Online.

Mat Morrison said recently that his role at Porter Novelli is to get everyone in the agency to ‘be a little bit more digital’ in the way they approach all their PR campaigns. This has got to be the right approach in my view. If you’re trying to get someone to buy something, get to them wherever they are. Whether that’s listening to the radio, on Facebook, on Twitter, in front of the TV, reading the paper, looking at a billboard. All of which might be done online or offline.

Which brings us to who owns it. Of course, PR should own PR. As Wadds says, there are a number of specialist start-ups out there, and they are vital for innovation But whatever they call themselves, they’re still doing PR. Unlike the SEO companies claiming to do PR – I’ve yet to see an SEO company attempt to lead a serious online media strategy. Although it might be good sport.

Cobblers’ children? PR and blogs

2008-11-25T14:36:00.001Z

Sally Whittle has some interesting observations on how well (or not) PR companies do at keeping their own blogs updated and interesting.

It raises some good questions: do PR agencies need to be active in all areas of social media to qualify as experts in the area? Do we have to maintain blogs, twitter feeds, Facebook groups and flickr profiles? Is blogging evidence enough in itself that we ‘get’ this space?

Without doubt, if we do this stuff ourselves, it helps us give our clients advice on how they should do it – but I suspect that in an attempt to be seen as cutting edge, PR teams are trying to take on more than they can manage effectively. But what we do, we need to do well.

Participating in social media is not just about being seen, but being heard – and building relationships. Potential clients will Google you. They’ll skim through your Twitter posts; check out your Facebook page, your LinkedIn profile, blog and website to get the truth behind the pitch, just as any modern recruiter would do for a candidate. We should be incorporating social media into our overall marketing plans and insuring that we:

1) Only participate in social media that is truly relevant (how many micro-blogging services do we need?)
2) Actively participate by updating our own blogs and profiles whilst contributing to others
3) “Trimming the fat” – regularly assessing what we have signed up to and its assessing its true value
4) Make sure that whatever you take on, you do well.

We’re all guilty of not doing all this – even the biggest agencies. Certainly my new year’s resolution is to spend more time focusing on social media that really works well for me, and for Carrot.

America decides

2008-11-04T11:24:00.002Z

So the election with what seems like the longest preamble in history is finally upon us. Today is the day that Americans get to vote on the next leader of the free world.

This election campaign is historic. For the obvious reasons - of course - of race, gender, a vice-presidential canditate under investigation until the 11th hour, record amounts of money raised despite (or because of?) the economic crisis. But also for the way that social media has been used by both campaigns.

Voters and candidates alike are twittering, blogging and being your friend on Facebook. They are posting You Tube videos and texting rally cries to get out and vote. Even the traditional podium debates have achieved their widest audiences on record - watched not just on TV, but online, the primary battlefield of this election.

Does this teach us anything about our own campaigns? Okay, our clients may not be running for president. But we are devising communiations campaigns to precipitate action. To engage in debate. We should be taking a lead from the US election campaigns in how to use social media to create advocates of action.

Nokia - PR accident or comment spam?

2008-10-21T17:48:00.000+01:00

Nokia appears to have been caught out comment spamming – possibly the work of an over-eager PR person trying to build links and Nokia’s word of mouth PR programme (though this is not certain at the time of writing).

It’s a timely reminder that as part of every agency’s basic account handler training, they should include how to use social media programmes responsibly (and legally). It is increasingly difficult for companies to keep a handle on everything that is being emailed / posted on public forums by eager account handlers, so educating them at the outset of the campaign before you get caught out.

Will sueing make Absolut cool again?

2008-10-16T14:15:00.002+01:00

Absolut Vodka is suing Absolute Radio for infringement of its trademark. What’s going on? Last I knew, absolute was an everyday descriptive word (to use trademark language). As you can’t trademark everyday descriptive words in the UK, I’m not sure how it will infringe on Absolut’s trademark.

Although I can understand Absolut trying to claw back its ‘we used to be achingly cool when we were only sold in style bars’ image (and therefore not wanting to be associated with an endless stream of Coldplay and Keane), I’m guessing people can tell the difference between a radio station and a vodka brand.

Oh, and the process of suing makes you look more corporate powerhouse than style brand.

Media shame

2008-10-16T11:53:00.000+01:00

Showing an unusually optimistic side to my character, I had hoped that the days of ‘are we being run by a gay mafia’ (The Sun) reporting were over. But the return of Peter Mandelson to politics has shown an unpleasant side to media reporting that seems to be setting us back 10 years. Extra-marital affairs, prostitutes and nazi-themed orgies aside, few straight public figures are subjected to the level of snide comments that Lord M finds himself having to put up with.

While he has had his share of controversy, none of it as far as I know has had any relevance to his sexuality, about which he has always chosen to remain private. Love him or hate him, there is no excuse for the kind of reporting that sees him referred to as ‘Dandy Lord Mandy’, ‘sashaying’ into the House of Lords (and worse), Brown’s ‘new darling’; or that takes snipes at his long-term partner.

2008-09-25T14:54:00.003+01:00

I had a great call last week. It went along the following lines: "Would you like to do PR for my website? We don't have a revenue stream, or any possibility of a revenue stream, but we want to build up a community of users. Oh, and we can't pay you, but we could offer you a small amount of equity."

I declined.

Future for PR?

2008-08-15T10:48:00.001+01:00

There’s been a huge amount of debate about whether or not there is a future for PR in the conversation-based, web 2.0, web 3.0, whatever you want to call it, world. There's a great summary of this debate at Robert Scoble's very thought provoking blog. Which made me think, how could web 2.0 suddenly stop the need for companies to promote themselves, or manage their reputations? Doesn’t it make it even more important now that there is even less corporate control over a message?

And then I realised – ‘PR’ is being substituted in this instance for ‘bad PR’. In other words, the kind of PR that makes no differentiation between online and offline, newspapers and social media sites, bloggers and journalists, a real story and a press release. And so on.

PR is changing, fundamentally. Agencies have a real uphill struggle to pull our clients on board with the new approach to PR – one that doesn’t rely on AVEs to prove return on investment, but actually considers the impact that a good PR strategy could have on end users. This approach involves two-way communication, not one-way ‘push’ communication, as many agencies have been used to in recent years. Companies don’t ‘launch’ any more, they are discovered. A new product won’t achieve national press coverage, until enough people use it to warrant the attention. I’m old enough to remember the days when you could send out a press release on a new company and expect at least one bit of national business coverage, if you positioned it right. These days we have to work much harder, and be much more humble in our approach.

I’m not pretending to know all the answers, not that our agency gets it right all the time. It’s a new world out there, and we’re all finding our way. But if we get it right, we could just strike gold – give good advice to our clients, and be a helpful resource to bloggers, journalists, and industry influencers.

Angry brides and Facebook: media heaven

2008-08-06T13:49:00.000+01:00

At 4 o'clock this afternoon, ‘angry brides’ in their wedding dresses will march on HSBC in Canary Wharf, to protest HSBC’s apparent role in the demise of Wrapit.com, the wedding list company that went into administration earlier this year, leaving a long list of undelivered wedding presents in its wake.

The protest has been arranged through Facebook, under the event heading: “Bridal March to HSBC Canary Wharf”. Great press fodder, and according to the organisers: “There is a flood of media request for interviews.” The story is all over the national media.

And understandably so. What could be more emotive than the site of thousands of unhappy brides in full wedding gear, who have been let down on the happiest day of their lives?

But look closer, and as I write this, two hours before the protest is due to start, there are only 31 brides confirmed to attend the march. No doubt the actual number will be much higher, thanks to the media furore surrounding the campaign run on Facebook.

Thirty-one people? Making the national media agenda? It really is a testament to the power of social media as an issue and campaigning tool that this has any media interest at all. But good on them; I hope they all get their gifts and or money back.

It makes for a very interesting PR dilemma. HSBC’s role was financial, not operational, and as such has no real role in the company’s collapse, a fact that the bank has issued in a statement. But clearly the pressure is now on for it to finance the return of goods promised. Were it not for the lobbyists, there is a reasonable chance that its involvement wouldn’t have been given a second thought. It will be interesting to see how the bank handles it from here.

Spam

2008-07-28T11:45:00.001+01:00

A quick apology to anyone who got a spam post appearing from my old blogspot address (and thanks Mat for pointing it out). Feeds are now reset and the old page blocked from feedburner, so hopefully it won't happen again.

Social media and reputation

2008-07-17T18:11:00.002+01:00

Attended a really interesting session yesterday on social media and privacy issues, based around Ofcom’s new research into social networking (thanks to the PRCA for organising, and to Mat at Porter Novelli for hosting).

The Ofcom research confirms as fact what most people would instinctively know: young kids (many under the 13 age limit) compete for friends, teens and young adults dominate, none of us take privacy issues seriously enough, most people have profiles on more than one site, and so on. But as well as giving numbers, the research gives a really useful and interesting insight into the types of users of networks, and qualitative research into people’s attitudes towards communicating with each other over a social network.

This led to a broader discussion around social media and reputation management. Do most employees under 30 understand the implications of putting up dodgy photos of themselves on their Facebook page? Or that discussions (even between friends) on forums about their company can impact that company’s reputation? This is becoming a bigger and bigger issue for corporate reputation management and one that companies can’t ignore. Most companies will have contractual clauses saying that employees shouldn't bring the organisation into disrepute. But how many will have specific guidelines on social media and reputation? The risk of (probably inadvertent) damage by an employee on a social network, or forum is significant. And guarding against reputation damage is PR's remit. We should all start advising our clients on this, and fast.

Measuring social media PR

2008-05-28T10:34:00.003+01:00

At a recent conference on social media, organised by ‘Don’t Panic’, the question that came up again and again was around evaluation. Edelman’s Marshall Manson, a very inspiring speaker at the event, was honest enough to say that there is no silver bullet on how to change our ancient evaluation methods to fit the brave new online world. Clearly AVEs have no place here (I for one will be glad to see the back of them - I'm amazed at how many clients demand them still), nor placement numbers.

I think we need to change how we see evaluation. Effective use of social media is all about creating dialogue with third-party influencers (ring any bells from the old world of pure media relations?), who then have an impact on the commercial success of a business. How you define that success is the key to measurement.

If you know that one particular blogger has a real influence on, for example, driving sales leads to a b2b site, then PR should be measured against how messages have been a. communicated to that blogger, and b. communicated by that blogger. The rest can be measured by an analytics tool to assess the business impact of the blog.

Going further back up the chain and our first job as PR practitioners is to identify who those social network groups, bloggers, forums etc are that have the greatest impact on business success. There are specific tools – Attentio is one – that use technology to do this, measuring bloggers for instance by prolificacy, message and impact (links, readers etc).

So, in summary, we need to:

1. agree on what it is we’re measuring. I would like to see this include a combination of:
a. output: conversations with influencers
b. out-take: messages conveyed to and communicated onwards by those groups (this is word of mouth in its purest sense)
c. outcome: lead generation targets – to fit in with overall marketing targets

2. identify who the influencers are. These might include a mix of third-party influencers such as journalists, social network 'activists', bloggers, forums and advocates, analysts etc)

3. put out money where our mouth is, and measure against the real impact PR has against the objectives outlined above.

So it is possible to measure the impact of PR in this new world. In fact, it's easier than it was before. If we get it right, PR will become on of the most important parts of the sales and marketing mix. Get it wrong, and we’ll watch social media being taken off us by our colleagues in online marketing and even SEO agencies.

The potential power of PR

2008-05-02T20:22:00.000+01:00

A very interesting day last week at the Omniture Summit, where much of the focus was on measuring the impact of social and rich media. There is much talk in the PR world about the impact of all things online – how to target social networks, whether we should pitch using Twitter, the value of the social media release, use of vidcasts etc – but the really interesting thing to me is that finally, PR online has become measurable in a meaningful way.

The digital world is utterly transparent – you can track way beyond site hits these days. Imagine seeing not only which search term (key message), campaign or article drives a visitor to your site, but also what that visitor did once they arrived; where they engaged and where they didn’t; what they bought and what they ignored. By creating a dialogue with that visitor, you can track exactly what messages and themes resonate with target audience, and which networks / blogs / tweets have had the most impact. It’s incredibly powerful. Once we’re doing it properly across the industry, I’ll challenge any sales team to call PR ‘just an overhead’.

2008-04-10T18:10:00.001+01:00

At an event hosted by start up company, Pikum (run by entrepreneur, Sean Glass), I met Jure Cuhalev from the very cool new 'semantic' blogging tool, Zemanta. It recommends links on your blog, as you type - I'm fascinated by how it works, so will try it out for a while to see what links it recommends.

Online ad spend

2008-04-10T17:52:00.001+01:00

So, Internet ad spend will outstrip TV by 2009, says the IAB in its report out this week. Not surprising, given the increase in time spent online over TV, and also the transparency of online as an advertising medium.

But this doesn’t herald a decline in TV advertising, just a shift in what we mean by it. As more and more people watch TV via the Internet (either streamed or downloaded), it is inevitable that the ad spend moves with it. This is potentially a marketer’s dream: a captive audience of viewers who have actively chosen to watch (rather than having it on in the background – or while they’re on Facebook on a laptop while in front of the TV). And you can track what works and what doesn’t. What will be more interesting, is to see how the payment models change, and how ‘pure’ brand advertising will fare.

Can PR agencies produce good copy?

2008-03-06T13:25:00.003Z

This excellent piece from Sally Whittle (Do PR execs really use social media?) on the social release, highlights a real worry for the PR industry: that most releases are “just not terribly well written”. How hard is it to hire someone who can write?

Or is there a greater obstacle to overcome? The best clients are those who recognise that a well-written story will work better than pages of jargon. But, admit it, there are some who insist on cramming every marketing message they can into what may have started life as a decent bit of copy. With predictable results: journalist cans release; client berates agency for not getting coverage. Worst case, the relationship between all three is damaged.

The trouble is, everyone thinks they can write a good news story. Particularly people who can’t. Part of an agency’s job is to a) write good copy and b) to tell a client when to back off on the marketing messages.

There are two ways to get round this. 1. An in-house copywriter is probably an agency’s best investment – someone who has just enough detachment from the day-to-day account handling for a client to listen to their advice. 2. Don’t expect coverage from so-called news releases that are written like corporate brochures. Mostly they’re written for legal reasons and the website, and I can’t see that there’s much advantage to a journalist in receiving a standard “company XX works with company YY” release at the same time as the rest of the world, and if they do, then an RSS feed is probably the best way of providing it.

Instead, how about short, pithy news ‘bites’ - and maybe a link to a release if you have to? Focus instead on high-quality feature content and quotes (no “I’m delighted to announce…”, obviously), written specifically and exclusively for one medium at a time.

It may be too much for some clients. But it will help the reputation of PR teams with media; which will have a positive impact on coverage, which will build the reputation of PR with clients. Which just might pay your copywriter’s salary.

Digital fences

2008-03-05T15:18:00.002Z

I find it vaguely depressing that so many PR agencies have set up (and continue to make good revenue from) separate digital divisions. While obviously its good news that PR agencies are making money off digital arms, is it really the best approach for their clients?

I strongly believe that every person in every agency should understand ‘digital’ – social networks, blogs, how to bookmark, feeds, vid/vodcasts etc etc – but surely you can’t create boundaries between them and other media. These days, we can access our newspaper, TV, radio and online content through a single device – our PC. TV and radio can be streamed over Internet, or downloadable to view later; online and offline media have their own blogs, twitters and social media pages. Everything is linked to everything else.

So how can you possibly create a unified approach to converged media if you separate your digital experts from other divisions?

Government + Laptops = (Horse + Bolted)

2008-03-03T15:26:00.008Z

Apparently, almost 200 Government laptops have been stolen since 2001. But at least the Government moved swiftly and only waited until January 2008 before it insisted that all personal data held on mobile devices be encrypted. And there was us fretting…

Banking makes you happy

2008-02-20T14:44:00.001Z

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.

Unbelievably bad PR.

2008-02-14T13:44:00.001Z

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

2008-02-14T13:33:00.001Z

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.

Tesco. Every little bit of communication helps.

2008-02-06T09:46:00.000Z

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