Right, so I'm fighting to retain control of Formula 1 because the teams resent my authoritarian approach, my unsackable Chairman and best pal is the son of a notorious British facist and it's the build up to the German Grand Prix. What can I say to the world's press. Mmm, let me think, oh yes, I know, why don't I say something about how by not having to answer to a democracy, dictators get things done. Yes, that's good, now, an example that might resonate with the Germans...
There are some places you should never, never, never let your tongue go to and this is probably No1 on the list. Not so much foot in mouth as shotgun in mouth.What was Bernie Ecclestone thinking.
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So even the 101 year old FBI has announced it is now on Facebook, Twitter & You Tube.
John Miller, head of FBI affairs said "To reach out to the public, we need to be where the people are - and we know tens of millions of people spend their time in social media sites."
Fair enough, so where's MI5's or Scotland Yard's social media programme? We seem to be way behind the US in take-up of social media channels. Maybe we're struggling more with fears about content - something Gordon Brown's appearance on You Tube has not done much to allay.
After all, social media is not hard, just complicated as Jay Baer explains in this post on the six dangerous fallacies of social media: http://bit.ly/Aj0ph
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My very good local paper - The Wharf, interviewed Ogilvy Group Chairman & Chief Exec, Gary Leih this week (Ogilvy has a 1300 emp HQ at Canary Wharf). He comments on the pain of making 60 redundancies in January "it was awful" but also says something significant about the changed world we live in as marketers:
"It's not good enough to have a big idea anymore, you need a big ideal'.
Ogilvy research is showing that far more consumers now want to know what a company stands for before making their purchase.
If consumer buying patterns aren't enough to convince companies to get their house in order then the sort of citizen journalism that sent Domino Pizza into a panic last week maybe will.
Planned, or knee jerk, ethics moving up the corporate agenda can only be a good thing.
The full article is here.
I heard this week of a lingerie e-commerce site who'd boosted conversion by 23% by including articles in their blog.
So it turns out the knicker elasticity of demand is directly related to editorial content (sorry).
The serious point to be made is that blogs are a brilliant format for engaging your customers online and this is natural PR territory where writing skills meet commercial aims.
Some Media Prominence findings this month showed that in markets like lingerie, where research is involved before purchases are made, PR can also account for nearly half of brand value.
So that's PR that creates brand value, manages reputation, shifts stock and is measurable. Not too pants that huh.
We wrote a press release for a client recently on quite an obscure area of email marketing but it happened to contain some research information which revealed something nobody in email marketing knew about, which was of obvious practical value.
It ran in a couple of well known marketing portals to start with but the ripple effect was quite extraordinary, picked up on so many blogs and related company sites that we literally gave up counting. It was like throwing a heavy stone into a lake and watching the ripples flow out.
The implications for online PR is that story content is progressively king online, especially when you bear in mind that it is very tricky if not impossible to pitch to blogs. Add to that the SEO implications of all those mentions and we should all be looking on our client’s beach for the heaviest stone we can.
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A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University has suggested that now newswire services can send stories direct to consumers through the proliferating digital channels, traditional newspapers may end up ‘disintermediated’ – a word my spell check can’t deal with which means, I think, cutting out the middle man.
If proved right, this could have seismic repercussions for the quality and tone of received news. If stories at source (e.g. press releases) are not ‘intermediated’ by established gatekeeper journalists, their contents will need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
On the upside, less intermediated news means less negative spin which would be welcome to many like the man who phoned the BBC yesterday to ask what he should say to his eleven year old daughter who asked him why the news was always so ‘horrible’.
One of the best descriptions I’ve read lately on how social media is affecting traditional PR thinking came from Andy Sernovitz, CEO of The Blog Council in the FT last week: “It’s no longer just companies talking to the press and customer service talking to customers.
All these other people showed up in the middle. They may not be press and they may not be customers, but suddenly their collective voice is bigger than the traditional channels.” The company departments developing to cope with those ‘people who showed up in the middle’ seems to have most in common with crisis PR. Johnson & Johnson appointed a director of social media in December in the wake of consumer outrage at an advert they produced for baby carriers and Dell’s VP of corporate communications has long had a large department of people monitoring online activity to ensure Dell hell 2 – the sequel never gets made.
Blogs on the other hand seem to be developing into a viable new business channel for companies in the US. Some new research from Hubspot in the US says that blogs and social media currently generate 8% of sales leads for companies, which is perhaps also why three-quarters of those that have tried blogging said their company blogs were "useful," "important," or "critical" to their business.
Meanwhile, PR agencies are getting to grips with developing online PR strategies using social media and blogs. Understanding the new channels would seem to be the easy part, putting together a convincing case why companies should use them is perhaps more challenging, so Hotspot’s research findings come at a good time.
With my part time motoring journalist hat on it was with sadness that I read the letter from Audi’s press office this week about the proposed replacement of their printed press packs with email.
Frankly, I’ve marvelled for years that they could still afford to send out all those sumptuous glossy photos on a weekly basis but at the same time I congratulated them for not doing a Mercedes and lazily referring you to a website where you are expected to mine for the information.
And the direct mail approach worked, I used a release only last month for a Christmas round up piece and there’s no denying you felt good towards Audi for investing in you. On the flip side, it’s going to be far more convenient to receive information by email, we’ll no doubt get videos as well as jpegs and the information will be more frequent and relevant – assuming they get their email marketing right.
Audi’s line is that it’s a move to offer optimum efficiency to the UK motoring press, though it doesn’t take a genius to see that the impetus was financial. I fear we may be seeing the last of its kind but whilst the hard copy press release is still an option (by request) I’ll cling on.
Through no fault of his own, the 2008 prize for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in your PR career probably goes to former FT Editor Andrew Gowers. It was March 17th and in the wake of one investment bank's collapse, Gowers and three colleagues had just spent the day reassuring journalists that everything was fine with the bank they worked for. Then the voice of the chief executive, legendary for his aggressive confidence in the company he'd come to embody came on the speaker phone in their Canary Wharf office. He said:
"I don't think we're going bust this afternoon but I can't be 100% sure about that. A lot of strange things are happening ..."
The chief executive was Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers.
(The final part of Andrew Gower's account of the fall of Lehman Brothers is in The Sunday Times next week.)
There was a time, before the rise of social media and user generated content when organisations could get away with scurrilous acts of consumer extortion safe in the knowledge that the muted customer had few ways to hit back other than writing to Watch Dog.
Then came user generated content, forums, websites like ‘ihatedell’ and this week the magnificent ‘www.trainsardine.org’ a platform for commuters to complain about the million pounds a week they pay to travel like sardines in this country.
As a result, ethics suddenly has an elevated place at the board room table because a lack of them can now seriously damage a company’s profits.
Makes you proud doesn’t it.
The Citigroup logo I’m used to seeing blazing proudly at night atop their Canary Wharf office block has been extinguished this week, perhaps out of respect for the 50,000 redundancies announced on Monday and what with Lehman’s once proud sign now unscrewed and lying in the liquidator’s skip, Auden’s words ‘pack up the moon and dismantle the sun’ seem weirdly apt for the financial sector these days.
However, in other areas of the economy we may be over- gloomy. “It’s a recession not Armageddon” said the CEO of Next, Simon Wolfson today in Drapers and the belief that financial journalism must bear some responsibility for talking us further into recession is something also spotlighted this week in a timely report from POLIS – the LSE think tank which analyses the affect of media on society. They say:
“Whilst the root causes of the crisis appear to lie in the behaviour and regulation of banks and other investors, many have asked what role financial reporting may have played in the crisis, and whether the crisis would have been so sudden and deep if a different approach to the practice of financial journalism had been taken.”
Not that it’s all the journalist’s fault - PR strategies are seen as one of the four major problems facing financial scribes. I wonder if by PR strategies they mean lack of them. If food companies can stem consumer fears over contamination by announcing immediate action why didn’t the banks and the government? It seems the knee jerk reaction is to keep a low profile, issue as little information as necessary and perhaps even go as far as to turn the light off on the logo of your company headquarters.
Big problem with that is people will wonder what else you’re hiding.
Listening to Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, I was reminded of Shaw’s quote about how different we are in our use of language. Obama’s genuinely inspiring speech, referencing Martin Luther King in his call for supporters “to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day” while magical in a US context, sadly wouldn’t work for our politicians.
If, for example, David Cameron became Prime Minister and started quoting Churchill in the tone of a US politician on the podium, he’d be derided as pompous, possibly crazed and certainly a bit ‘up himself’.
The differences continue in business language. A favourite US phrase at the moment is ‘reach out’ as in, ‘company x is reaching out to its customers’. I quite like the feel of this phrase but put that in front of a British journalist and they’re unlikely to read any further.
The best a PR can do is write the release in the language and style of the publications they are targeting and in the UK this means free of any hyperbole or blatant self promotion. If this is done well, the release may appear verbatim in the target publication – the ultimate accolade for the anonymous PR.
Incidentally, one other thing that doesn’t always translate is abbreviation. Hearing one supporter referring to Obama as BO was a bit of an eyebrow raiser.
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And so are blogs according to a journalist from US Wired last week - a story that somehow made it into the Telegraph, Times, Sunday Times, Radio 4, Brand Republic in the UK - and those are just the one’s I happened across. What’s interesting about this isn’t the idea 'blogging is dead’ – which is obviously a preposterous notion, but the amount of coverage making such a controversial claim can get you.
With the imminent launch of a UK version of Wired – I detect some non- coincidental PR at work here. Whoever you are, congratulations, you truly hit a media nerve point. I think for my next press release, whatever it is, I shall claim it is dead.
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Back in the balmy financial days of June I was bemoaning on this blog the absence of Mandelson and Campbell and the general decline of the spin doctor. All hell breaks lose politically and financially and suddenly they're back, Campbell masterminding Brown's speech at the Labour conference and Mandelson returning from european exile to number 10. I guess there's nothing like a crisis to make PRs feel needed.
Of course In the business world, many large companies have crisis PR strategies and dedicated agencies for the task in place for if the worst happens - to manage their shareprice and protect their brand. Disasterously the US & UK governments don't seem to have had anything of the sort in place and so we've been treated to an unrelenting tide of negative coverage punctuated by occasional unconvincing statements of action by politicians while the world's stock continues to fall off a cliff.
An hour ago Mervyn King at The Bank of England released a statement designed to ease fears on the PA website. Predictably, his release headlined 'Bank loan move to help ease crisis' became the negative and emotive 'British banks bailed out' on the BBC.
So this leads to two 'systemic' PR issues the government needs to correct if we ever get out of this mess. Where was this statement and others of its kind two weeks ago and how much responsibility does the media bear for talking us into more of mess than we'd otherwise be in.
Having steadfastly refused to ‘do a Cherie’ Sarah Brown has finally stepped out of the shadows today and by introducing her husband at the Labour Party Conference, set the tone for a speech which appears to be doing the impossible in inspiring the party to get behind their beleaguered party leader – at least for a while.
A former Brunswick PR, Sarah Browns appearance reminds us that Gordon is not just a politician but a family man who cares about people and the country. OK, he’s never going to be a charismatic speaker but by demonstrating his human side and his party’s past achievements, he’s going some way to re establish his leadership on a solid footing.
Alistair Campbell had also been drafted in to handle the BBC’s coverage of the speech in a dual with John Sopel and appears to be winning,
Nice to see PRs doing a decent job for Labour at last.
ROSS FURLONG
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