Beanbag

With the persistently gloomy news agenda of credit crunches and house price deflation it’s a ray of light in a dark news world to read about a PR firm in Chicago managing to transcend money issues altogether with the introduction of an  employee appreciation programme which aims to reward staff with positive feedback rather than cash.

Here’s an excerpt from their press release about it:

Is this weird? I’m not sure. Looking at their client list which includes ‘the nation’s leading sex therapist’ and ‘Space Command’s stress doctor’ it looks like it may just be a classic case of the PR agency adopting their client’s values. As my clients are mostly in online marketing, I guess I’d eventually end up doing a PR blog on a website about marketing..

Kaplinski in PR suicide (blog)

As little as six years ago the majority of press releases still came by post. On DM Week, we used to have huge piles of them typed up so we could edit them on our trendy orange macs. How archaic that now seems. These days they arrive in unprecedented numbers by email and I’ve often wondered, as an agent now responsible for quite a few of them, how this change in volume and format has affected their impact.

Unable to find any research on the area I recently conducted my own small survey of B2B journalists.  The results were surprising – at least to me. They show the average number received to be 35 a day (far less than I’d anticipated) of which 50% were considered irrelevant or poorly targeted (better than I’d thought actually). The main complaint (apart from targeting) turned out to be a lack of clear labelling.

On this basis even if your press releases are relevant and clearly labelled, you’re still competing with around 17 other emails a day for a journalist’s attention. These are not great odds.

Your chances lessen even more if you happen to email the likes of Five News’s editor David Kermode who in the latest issue of PR Week says this:

 “One of my biggest bugbears is when an email arrives in my inbox that is obviously PR crap – it gets immediately deleted. One sure-fire way of not getting my attention is a bog-standard email. What irritates me about PR is the blanket nature of it.”

So the effectiveness of emailed press releases seems to lie somewhere between ‘not very’ and ‘suicidal’.

Note to self, best call Natasha direct.

Gordon Brown on You Tube

It's good to hear I'm not the only one who thinks Labour's spin doctors are letting the PR side down. No less than Colin Byrne, Weber Shandwick’s chief and former Labour party chief press adviser says in PR Week today, “there’s no way these mistakes would have happened when Alistair Campbell was there.” He also compliments Conservative comms chief Andy Coulson for outmanouevering his opposite number.

Meanwhile, the client, no doubt fed up with the state of his public image, has escaped online, bypassing journalists altogether to commune direct with the electorate on You Tube.  Good idea this, especially as press relations don't seem to be improving much under the charge of Labour's special press adviser whose approach is, according to Byrne, “just phoning up people and shouting at them.”

Perhaps with enough personal phone calls and vodcasts The PM can cut out the troublesome middlemen altogether. Might be easier to employ an effective PR though.

Murray's PR makeover

Well pull my sweatbands off and throw them to the crowd, when I wrote the blog below yesterday about Stuart Higgins's work with Andy Murray I had no idea he’d got as far as the union jack shot on the front of the sun – the holy PR grail for all aspiring Scottish, sorry I mean British athletes. Let’s hope his moment in the sun (thank you) lasts beyond his bigger biceped opponent Nadal this afternoon.

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Former Sun editor Stuart Higgins who was appointed Andy Murray’s PR adviser in March must have enjoyed the transition of his enfant terrible into centre court favourite last night more than most.

Just three months ago, Murray’s no show at the Davis cup tie against Argentina , the subsequent spat with his brother and a reputation for surliness with the press meant that despite his undoubted talent and the two ATP titles he’d already won in 2008, he was not exactly a favourite within UK tennis or with the British public.

I got into a bit of a spat myself at his last Wimbledon in 2006 when I suggested to a Scottish friend that Murray could do with a bit of PR advice. She felt that one of his most attractive qualities was that he wasn’t concerned about impressing the media and just wanted to play tennis. I can see that side of the argument – McEnroe was one of my favourites – and it would be boring if every tennis player was perfect on and off court. In any case, that’s Federer’s job.

But there’s a balance to be struck. Higgins has clearly given Murray media training and that is making a big difference to the reception he’s getting from the UK press this year. Whilst you’d never want him to turn into some hideous smiling media bunny, you also don’t want him to be given a kicking off court due to a natural reticence – or Scottish dourness - that can look surly to those not familiar with it. Higgins seems to have helped Murray find the right balance.

Whilst he’s improving with the off court stuff, his public image will principally be fashioned on the tennis court and for the most part in just two weeks every year at Wimbledon.  Based on last night’s extraordinary performance, he no longer has much to fear in either respect.