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

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

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

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.

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.

1. Anyone with ‘killer’ in their user name, or murderous background pictures. Self-explanatory.
2. Anyone who takes an unnatural interest in the health of my love life. Get your own.
3. Anyone who says they’re passionate about life. You’re going to be way too happy for my liking.
4. Anyone who has more than one exclamation mark in their Twitter biog. See above.
5. Anyone who auto-DMs the message “I can help you make money online!!” (and see 4, above.)
6. Anyone who claims to have psychic powers.
7. Anyone who only tweets quotes from dead people.
8. 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.
9. Obvious spammers (10,000 following, 2 followers, 1 update).
10. Anyone who claims to be ‘a really cool / crazy guy’.

Anything I’ve missed?

Twitter, Moldova and broken windows

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.