Archive for June, 2009

 Like the Conservative Party Leadership contests of 2001 and 2005; the contest for Speaker this week (Monday 22^nd of June) suddenly gave the media, and to a certain extent the public, a hook for their interest - for an intense period.

John Bercow won through amidst a group of the old, Richard Shepherd and Sir Patrick Cormack, the experienced, Sir Michael Lord and Sir Alan Haselhurst and the high-profile Ann Widdecombe and Margaret Beckett. Apart from Parmjit Dhanda, Mr Bercow was the only character who could convincingly propound reformist principles without being attributed to the old traditions of the past.

In this way his victory does mark a break - Bercow is young(ish), energetic and full of life - a welcome change from Speaker Martin. He undoubtedly has support from the Left, in fact his campaign manager was Labour MP for Reading West, Martin Salter. Also he has never been someone to toe the line. In the 1980s he was thought to be too right-wing for the Conservative party and then in the 2000s he switched to a new left-wing style (prompted by marriage to his left-wing wife) breaking rank to vote with his new found social conscience on issues such as gay rights.

So it is difficult to say there is any particular group he must appease - he is a lone figure, independent, as the Speaker must be.

But can he actually do anything?

Betty Boothroyd, in my personal opinion a great Speaker, was interviewed mid-way through the contest by the BBC and whilst explaining how important the job was and the sort of character it needed she was asked what tenable powers the Speaker had to change the House of Commons:

Of course the Speaker has authority, but not power (she said) just the power to persuade, it was not the Speaker’s job to interfere - he must speak on behalf of the House and abide by its decisions.

So when it comes down to the facts of this contest we find an empty husk. The election of Speaker Bercow sends a message to the public that the House of Commons is willing to appoint someone with reformist intentions, but it does nothing more. He has no remit except to make suggestions to party leaders and the Prime Minister; it is still the House of Commons, who finally decide.

All those who have been treating Speaker Bercow’s election as the rise of a new independent leader of the House, on a par with party leaders, have been deceived by an over eager press excited with a good contest.

Speaker Bercow can by all means encourage, nudge, assuage and egg on his colleagues towards reform - but he can do nothing more. He is just a Speaker of the House of Commons encharged with carrying out the business of the House, but not making the business or affecting its outcome. On the outside this seems like a big break - but in reality MPs must change the House of Commons themselves not just the Speaker.

The House of Commons will elect a new Speaker on Monday 22^nd June.

There are, at the last count 10 candidates who have all attracted enough nominations to be able to stand. It is always with looking at the procedure for a rare event like the election of the Speaker to help us to understand how this will work.

Nominations

Monday 9.30 - 1.30am - written nominations must be submitted to the to the House of Commons Table Office.

Candidates for Speaker must submit the signatures of between 12 and 15 MP who support their nomination and a signed declaration stating that they are willing to stand for election.

11.00am - the final list will be published on the Parliament website.

Any MP is entitled to stand and at present, there are 10 candidates thought likely to be nominated, including Margaret Beckett, John Bercow, Sir George Young and Ann Widdecombe.

Election

Monday 2.30pm - the House of Commons will meet to elect the Speaker - the Father of the House (the longest serving MP), Alan Williams, will preside over the election.

Each candidate will give a speech to the House; the order will be decided by ballot.

If there is only one nomination, that candidate will automatically be proposed to the House as the Speaker. Once all the candidates have spoken, MPs will vote for their preferred candidate.

Voting

The vote will be by secret ballot and will take place in the Division lobbies and each MP will be given a ballot paper to fill in and they will have 30 minutes to vote.

Results and further ballots

If any candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the votes, they will be proposed to the House as Speaker. If no candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the votes, MPs will be asked to vote again.

This time the following will be eliminated:

• any candidate with less than 5 per cent of the votes
• the candidate who came last
• any candidate who withdraws within ten minutes of the result

Successive ballots will be held until only one candidate remains or a candidate obtains more than 50 per cent of the votes. The remaining candidate will then be proposed to the House as Speaker.

If the motion for the Speaker is contested, there will be a vote. If the motion is agreed to, the successful MP will be dragged to the chair. The Speaker elect will then need to be approved by the Crown.

With each vote possibly taking up to two hours, MPs could be in for a long night.

Since I have been working in PR there has been much discussion about digital and social media. Ruder Finn has even conducted its own research into the future of communications. I have grown up with digital and count myself part of the digital generation as social media and the Internet have boomed over the past five years and been an integral part of my life and education.

In order to become a master of digital and do my job better, I attended a ‘meet the journlaist’ event on Tuesday night. The journalist in question was Jimmy Leach, Digital Editorial Director of the Independent. I like the Indie, it was a staple paper throughout university and have always enjoyed reading it in print and online.

Normally these events are an excuse to network, drink some free booze and listen to a journo whine about how they hate PRs. So I was pleasantly surprised when Jimmy gave an honest and open account of the media landscape in the UK and his thoughts about the future of the press.

In these Twittering times it was refreshing to hear a digital director view Twitter as a social experiment and a place to catch up with mates rather than a valuable, reliable news and search tool and that in six months time most people will be embarrassed at using it so much. Jimmy went on to say that he prefers a more traditional approach when being pitched such as that old tool the telephone and good old email. His relationship with PRs is generally good but doesn’t have time for people who don’t know the publication they are selling in to. So know your editor, know their audience and know their publication!

In digital terms he said that whilst online is the future for publishing news, there is still a value put on print and that the Independent has to catch up with the likes of the Guardian and BBC in terms of audience figures. He did talk about the push for more pre-made content from TV networks to supply video stories as they don’t have a large team to do their own editing and production. What was more interesting was to find out how much value the Independent places on opinion and comment over breaking news. The focus of the Independent is to be the highest source of information providing readers with the best comment and most honest analysis on news, sport and features. For example you may get the headline and the basics of a story from the BBC, but they hope to attract readers to the Independent to get the best in-depth analysis on a story.

I came away from listening to Jimmy a born again Independent reader and picked it up the next day and scanned through the online site. It does need a re-vamp but from the ideas and plans Jimmy has for the Independent, I look forward to seeing them. Plus he supports Man Utd so he’s ok with me!

The New York Times recently ran an article entitled ‘Blog Falling in an Empty Forest’   which discussed the increasing trend towards people starting up a blog only to give up on it shortly afterwards. The article quoted a 2008 survey by Technorati that found that ‘only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days.’

One of the main reasons cited for people abandoning their blogs was their disappointment at the lack of interest. And yet you only have to read the above statistic again to get some idea of why engaging people with a blog might be harder than it seems. If there are at least 133 million blogs out there (assuming Technorati has missed some and remembering that the statistic is from 2008) how can you expect people to flock to your blog just because you have written about your day?

 Setting up a blog takes more than just deciding you are going to start writing posts and then waiting for people to come to you. First you must put in the groundwork. Identify your target audience, follow others, comment on their posts – this is the best way to draw attention to your blog and start driving the traffic through.
 
And once you have them there you need to keep them – but how? Update, update, update…..oh and be relevant otherwise they won’t stick around long! 

I have been thinking a lot about the right approach to campaigns and product development. One school of thought is to focus on the client delight: this was exemplified by former colleague Pam Edstrom who constantly asks of clients and their account teams ‘What is your business problem’? There are advantages to this process:

• Hopefully your clients main focus will align with the overall goals of their business
• The focus on client delight will also cope with the client’s ego. If you play this right, you have a client for life
• It also works best in an environment of gradual evolution rather than disruptive innovation

But what happens if the goals change, you have a client who is more driven by ego than making a difference to their business, you get a new client in the driving seat or the company changes and evolves?

The second option is to empower the end customer, this is what Dell has done with Ideastorm and Starbucks has done with MyStarbucksIdea. There is a number of pieces of work indicating that prediction markets can be a powerful planning tool providing not only sales forecasts, but also which ideas may work.

This second process isn’t likely bring you disruptive innovation: if you’d asked people what they would have liked in a better PC you wouldn’t have got the Macintosh (or Windows for that matter.)

A third way is to observe consumers and get insight, and, from this insight gain the knowledge of what consumers need often before they know it themselves. I was told a story in college when I was studying marketing by a lecturer: the story went something like this: instant coffee granules were successfully launched in the US, and then sales dropped off. Conventional marketing support tactics such as in-store sampling and discounts didn’t work out.

Meanwhile, the advertising agency on its own initiative took a different tack, by interviewing the target purchasers and watching how they interacted in their homes. It seems that the housewives felt that a key part of being a good homemaker was brewing coffee through more traditional (presumably a french press). Women that used instant coffee were perceived as being slovenly and sluttish. So a programme of advertisements and sponsored programmes was developed showing instant coffee being used as part of life within a happy and healthy family.

The rest as they say was history until Starbucks managed to get us to drink coffee on-the-go and pay 5 USD per cup.

Sometimes insight can be distilled from surroundings by an individual, it was the reason why Steve Jobs insisted that the Macintosh was able to create lozenge shapes despite being opposed by his development team, or believed that people would want a nicely designed MP3 player when there was plenty of machines already on the market.

The moral of the story is that in understanding a market asking the customer is often not enough, you need to get under the skin of the market dynamic and understand the why. This is where research and planning comes to the fore, supported by diplomacy because telling someone what they really need isn’t what they want to hear sometimes. This is cross-posted from my personal blog renaissance chambara.

I’ve had a client over from the US this week and chatting with him has really brought it home to me what a strange few days it has been. First we elect two BNP members to the European Parliament, despite widespread outrage and condemnation of their policies.

Then our tube drivers go on strike, which although is massively inconvenient for many (not me, god bless Streatham’s surplus of overground stations) does seem to bring out a real stoicism in Londoners. Whatever the city’s faults, its citizens rarely let things faze them and just shrug and carry on with their business in the face of adversity.

Will this stoicism last another 48 hours though? Fighting for bus space is no fun and I wonder how people will view the dispute between LU and tube workers on Thursday evening? I broadly support the right to strike but when tube workers do so the impact is such that I suspect public sympathy will be scarce. Especially when you see that they earn a decent wage (£40K) for a 35 hour working week.

With an estimated cost to business of £100m over the two day strike, what do you think? Justified action or holding bosses to ransom? To paraphrase Alan Sugar I’m going to get me a cushion and sit on the fence. Ask me again tomorrow evening though and I may have shifted to the political right a little.

If you’ve been following our blog you’ll know the story behind the photos on our business cards so I won’t repeat it – here are mine:

I live a minute’s walk away from Richmond Park, and when it snowed this year it was the busiest I’ve ever seen it. Loads of people had obviously bunked off work to enjoy it (not me I hasten to add) and everyone was ridiculously happy! It was as if everything was right with the world…at least until the snow started to melt anyway.

I met these orangutans in Borneo on my honeymoon. It was humbling to be so close to them and scary how similar they are to us.  Save the orangutans!

Marrakesh 2006. A party-party weekend with some of my favourite people in the world and we even found time to visit the souks.

I took this photo of an amazing glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly – ‘The Sun’ – when he exhibited at Kew Gardens in 2004. It’s one of my favourite pics because his art is genuinely awe-inspiring. This doesn’t show the scale of the piece - check it out here.

And finally, this is me aged three-ish. It pretty much sums up 70s interior design and the brown flowery wallpaper was soon to be replaced by woodchip painted in a delightful deep brown mud colour (I’m being kind calling it that). I look like I’ve got ear-muffs made of hair stuck on the side of my head.

So Gordon Brown survives to fight on and by all accounts his performance at the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) meeting has strengthened the support of the Party’s MPs for their leader.

This doesn’t mean though that Brown is safe, it doesn’t mean that the threats of a leadership challenge have ended, rather that he has bought time - perhaps until the autumn to demonstrate that he can make the most of his Premiership and attempt to take the fight back to the Conservatives.

Gordon Brown was by all accounts very candid at the meeting and admitted to weaknesses which he said he would work at improving as well as concentrating on his strengths. This seems to have gone down well with the PLP.

Some members of the PLP have made the point following the meeting that Brown is as good a leader as they can hope for in the short term and although they accept that under Brown Labour is unlikely to win the next General Election, changing the leader now would make little, if any, difference.

This does beg the question, has Labour essentially given up hope of winning the next Election? With the results from the local elections and especially from the Euro elections in which Labour were pushed into third place and the latest polling figures, it certainly seems so.

What has Gordon Brown left to pull out of the bag to turn the tide back in Labour’s favour? He has effectively promoted Peter Mandelson to the position of Deputy Prime Minister, he has shuffled his pack for probably the last time before the Election and he has established a number of new Cabinet Committees, designed to input into policy direction.

Is this enough? Time will tell.

In the meantime, against a background of some of the poorest economic indicators for some time against the Government and what appeared to be an increasing opposition to Gordon Brown continuing as PM, this demonstrates that it is not particularly easy, nor straightforward to remove a sitting Prime Minister.

So here at Ruder Finn UK we decided within the Corp/Tech team to personalise our business cards with photos and pics that mean something to us as individuals. Included were, favourite place, pet, best pic taken, pic of baby me,  and something funny. So far they have been well received with some people taking a long hard minute to decide which one they want, so I guess that’s positive.

Here are mine explained;

Favourite Place

I went to Queenstown in 2003 during my gap year and had the best time ever. There is so much to do such as bungee jumping, paragliding, snowboarding etc and then there is the nightlife and parties which were all great. Plus the views aren’t too shabby either!

Pet

This is George when he was a kitten. This little lad is a legend and enough said!

Best Picture taken

This is by the best picture I have taken. Again it was during my gap year of 2003 and the rocks near Krabi are some of the best in the world. If only the bloke to right wasn’t in it. But it reminds me of good times and a stunning place in Thailand.

Baby me

Me aged two-ish - Not much changed but I’m no longer blonde so does that mean I am having less fun?

Funny/Comedy

Evil eye baby - Possibly the funniest thing ever

This baby loves to give people the evil eye look and then cracks up laughing afterwards. Cute and comical!

So there you have it a few shots that make up my life and things that make me laugh.

Poor old Jacqui Smith, her husband’s adult films; her sister’s accommodation; Bob Quick’s security leak - there seems to be an endless cast involved in her long drawn-out decline. With the latest wave of media attention over hiring an accountant to fill in her tax returns, it became obvious that the game was up; Jacqui Smith was so exposed and vulnerable that she was ineffective as Home Secretary, attracting copious media attention and derision.

But more so than Jacqui Smith herself, Gordon Brown has been seriously damaged by this latest headline. Like the election he never called in 2007; his indecision over expenses and Hazel Blears’ resignation (after he criticised but did not sack her), Gordon Brown’s thoughtfulness and desire to weigh up decisions have cost him dearly. Clearly he is a highly intelligent man and as Chancellor of the Exchequer this assured, thoughtful approach brought him plaudits. It was always rumoured he ran domestic policy and was instrumental in election strategy, as the consummate policy setter. At the time that same character trait was reassuring, contrasting very well with Tony Blair: Brown the man of substance, Blair the charismatic media man.

But sadly when he took the country’s top job in summer 2007 no-one mentioned that whilst a formidable presence and thinker in politics he was sorely untested at leading decisively. After his initial success in the first few months the pressure was focused on him in the autumn and he was so aware of acting in a measured and substantial way, he appeared to delay in whether or not to call a snap election. His delay and radio silence seemed like plodding.

From then on the problem has grown. He has become accustomed to allowing David Cameron to produce sound bites, steal the headlines and dictate debates, while he sulks in the background and declares he is “getting on with the job”. In the financial crisis, his area of expertise, his desire to think technically about the problems and weigh up options made him look slow to react over Northern Rock. He and Alistair Darling were criticised for not seeing the signs and acting earlier. It emerged that they had an idea of the scale of the crisis, but seemed to wait to see how it turned out.

Even now the reason this premiership seems so doomed is because there is no-one willing to say it is not. The media jumps on every error and despite a terrible spring there has been no reshuffle, no decisive measures, nothing that stands out - the nothing Budget showed this. It seems apparent that although intellectually astute and good on policy, when backed into a corner Gordon brown would rather talk over the problems than strike back. It is this deliberate, thoughtful approach that in 2007 was so craved, which has now made his premiership seem like it is comatose. Sadly as a man of substance it is unlikely he will change his ways and it seems now his peak was already behind him when he became Prime Minster in 2007. He is just not suited to the time-sensitivities and decisiveness that being Prime Minister requires.