Archive for April, 2011

Earlier this month I forwent my usual lunchtime perusal of the Daily Mail website to attend a much more intellectually stimulating debate at the RSA. The topic for discussion was “Modern Parenting: Policy, Politics and the Illusion of Equality” and the turnout (surprise?) was around 3:1 in favour of women. The debate was centred around “Shattered” – the first book from Rebecca Asher, a former executive producer at BBC Radio 4.

As a female who up until this month was still in her early twenties, parenthood and its consequence for working women was not something that registered massively on my radar. Yes, I have seen all the news reports concerning working women and heard many of my colleagues discussing their experiences but surely it is not something I will have to think about for a while? Or is it?!

What struck me during the debate at the RSA was a phrase used by Rebecca early on as she described the confusion for women who mistakenly believe that equality exists in today’s world, only to have their conviction quickly quashed as soon as they have children. She calls this the “expectation gap” - the gap between the equality women see in earlier life and what they experience once they have children.

I’d be interested to hear what the mothers and fathers out there think of this theory – are we mistaken to think that equality exists? Or for that matter do we even believe that equality exists in the first place? In order to avoid future disappointment should I be setting my expectations quite low moving forward?!

[more info including footage from the RSA debate can be found here]

This is cross-posted from my personal blog. Last night was the spring edition of Mobile Monday London’s famous demonstration nights and there was an interesting mix of products, software and services on display.

Intel demonstrated their application store which sounded similar to others in terms of terms and conditions. One thing I got a sense of from them is that they are more determined to make MeeGo a success to spite Nokia. The demonstrations they had running looked more polished than demos of the RIM PlayBook the month before.

Threedom was an interesting experiment in inclusive design.

QRpedia was less of a business and more of a duh why hadn’t anyone else thought of putting QRcodes more effectively with Wikipedia.

Swiftkey and the later Nuance demonstrations were about information input for the Android platform which made me thin that the user experience design for input must be broken.

Kineto’s idea of piggy-backing on wi-fi was something that I found interesting. But I didn’t feel entirely convinced mainly because pretty much all the wi-fi networks I come across are locked down.

Insiteo’s indoor location play seemed equal parts science fiction and Big Brother. However if it can help me successfully navigate Selfridges I’d be sold.

Natural Motion’s demo of  virtual reality through a screen using the gyroscope on an iPad was impressive despite my dislike for games.

Parcel Genie’s real-world gifting was an e-commerce twist on the real-would voucher gifting that Asian social networks like Daum have been doing for years.

Mindings is a Chumby-like platform based on Android with a healthcare spin on things, allowing accessibility to social content for older people and e-health applications.

Starbursting is essentially breaking companies up into more profitable pieces and despite not being familiar with the term until recently, it is apparently seeing a revival at present according to The Economist.

Notable mentions of rumoured or high profile starbursts include Pfizer, Motorola, Fiat and Foster’s. The Economist cites the main reasons for the revival as:

… companies seeking buyers for parts of their business are not getting good offers from other firms, or from private equity.

…the “conglomerate discount”—when stockmarkets value a diversified group at less than the sum of its parts.

…that this discount is real seems to be confirmed by the positive stockmarket reaction to the latest starbursts. From 20 days before the announcement of a spin-off to 60 days after, the combined value of the parent and spun-off children has on average outperformed the market by eight percentage points

This trend is much more common in the US and Western Europe with emerging markets seeing the opposite,….hence a popular alternative seems to be diversification.

This may be why, in some parts of the world, conglomerates are becoming even more diversified: witness Samsung Electronics, which is moving into pharmaceuticals.America’s big tech firms are also bucking the starburst trend and diversifying. Oracle, a software giant, has moved into hardware, and Hewlett-Packard, a computer-maker, is expanding further into software and services. Their big corporate customers increasingly want a one-stop shop for their information systems.

Whichever path an organisation chooses to take, one thing is for sure, excellent communications will be imperative both with investment audiences but also customers and prospects. Interesting times for PR.

CROSS POSTED FROM MY PERSONAL BLOG

This was originally posted on my personal blog. I have been giving a little thought to Color the location aware picture sharing application that launched recently. My initial reaction was to be impressed by the kind of technologies that the development team had squeezed into it. It is almost magical. Particularly the use of light and sound to guestimate proximity reminded me of Bump Technologies authentication work. So if this iteration doesn’t work out they have the funding and the smarts to do a pivot or two.

What I haven’t worked yet is how it fits into people’s lives. I suspect in its current form that this may need some work as early adopters have already been hacking the location to better pair with friends rather than strangers. I don’t think that its a nail in Flickr’s coffin as it is a different social context to Flickr in terms of the type of sharing and the type of pictures.

I am posting the below on behalf of Zeynep -

My name is Zeynep and I am a 14 year old student who, for the last two weeks, has been working at Ruder Finn as part of my work experience. All of my friends had chosen basic work placements, and with me being the only one choosing an office job all the way out in central London, I was very sceptical at first. But I’m so pleased that I did.

I admit that before working at Ruder Finn I had a pretty crude idea on what PR actually was and so my first day on the job was scary and I was filled with nerves and anxiety not because the people around me were cruel, but because of the completely unfamiliar environment and the tasks I was expecting to do. But as the days went by my feelings changed. One of the people who made me feel welcome was Katie, who looked after me and educated me in great depth about what PR was.  Not forgetting Charlotte and Sarah, who were unbelievably kind and guided me on what I was doing and who I should go to for help, which really made my experience even better. There have been so many other people who I’ve enjoyed talking to and who have helped me and have made my experience of working in an office so beneficial including Alison who made me feel really welcome.

One of the things which I enjoyed the most about working at Ruder Finn is the time in the morning when newspapers are handed out and everyone in healthcare goes through them to find any interesting articles relevant to the healthcare business - that was the part of my day I really looked forward to because being able to read about current events and seeing the variations between each paper has been really entertaining, plus now I’ve developed a favourite. Another part I’ve enjoyed is seeing all the ideas behind coming up with a pitch and the process everyone goes through.                                                                                     

My time at Ruder Finn has been completely beneficial and I’ve gained so many important and lifelong skills, such as the ability to work in a professional and positive work place, it’s also given me a different perspective on work itself. I’ve learned the meaning of PR and all the hard work that goes into it along with the inner workings of Public Affairs, thanks to Matt. Overall I’ve 100% enjoyed my time here at Ruder Finn. It was totally cool!!  

I have to admit that the Independent is not my newspaper of choice, yet last week I was pleasantly surprised when I attended Gorkana’s breakfast briefing with Independent and i editor-in-chief Simon Kelner to find out more about the paper as well as hear how the first new national newspaper for 25 years - i - is doing. What struck me was how passionate Simon was to the Indie and his views on why i is and will be a success – he claims to receive 50-100 letters a day, mainly from readers saying they like or love the paper. He firmly believes there is a future in newspapers but that the format is changing, which is why they launched i, with a loyal set of readers that are already very attached to it. He also thinks his job is the best in the world.

So who is i aimed at? There is no typical reader – i is aimed at a broad demographic but mainly aimed at young 20-30 year old professionals – a bit like all the people in the audience (hint hint).

How many people read it? Simon claims that i has helped to expand the newspaper market and that they’ve taken market share from the Metro. In terms of readers of the i and the Indie, he believes that i may have taken about 6,000 readers from the Indie, and that i has a circulation of 175,000, which he expects to grow and even become more popular than the Indie. He think that the two papers complement each other:“without the Indie, i wouldn’t exist”

Will it ever become free? He has no plans to do this yet, but wouldn’t rule it out; especially if a new competitor came on the scene

How does the editorial team work? Do Indie journalists work on both papers? Yes, the Indie staff writes for the i too – he mentioned there was no resistance from staff during the changeover

What does he think of social media? He’s not a fan of Twitter (which he sees as a competitor) but uses Facebook for the i fanpage, which currently has 11,000 followers

How is it working for a Russian boss? As opposed to the media in Russia, he believes in the free word and Simon is given a free hand in editing the paper – no one tells him what to write!

Also see Gorkana’s write up of the briefing.

As I’m the target audience I should really buy myself a copy of i and see if this changes my mind about the Indie…oh sod it I’ll look online instead…

This is cross-posted from my personal blog where it started to garner some feedback. I started thinking about this post when I caught up with Stephen Waddington over a cold Red Bull at De Hems in Soho. We were talking about the nature of the public relations sector and the way it has become a craft rather than an industry. Whilst at the top end of the industry there are some multi-million pound enterprises the vast majority of it seems to be one-or-two person operations that have more in common with the crofters who weave Scottish tweeds than they do with major business.

To think about this further, I want to break PR down into a number of components:

• There is the brand of PR, which I think is broken. It is viewed as; media-specific rather than defined by relationships, tactical rather than strategic (the budget is often assigned after media planning, purchase, creative, advertising etc, corporate communications and corporate/social responsibility (CSR) is used as a sticking plaster when systemic change in product and process is what is really required), low value – which is the reason why we have an industry of PR crofters
• PR as a philosophy – organisations are becoming more relationship-orientated, the organisation is moving towards the academic definition of PR being about the relationship between an organisation and its publics
• PR as a practice – particularly on the agency-side of things, technology has accelerated marketing disciplines towards a singularity where different methods are used to achieve the kind of outcomes one would have previously expected from PR campaigns. In essence they have all become PR people. This in turn has brought forward a question of what is a PR business any more? In organisations, its a bit easier; a PR person holds a PR budget, what they spend it one will be largely determined by how much they have and the results of realpolitik internally within the organisation

The brand of PR or public relations holds businesses back in terms of growth and scale. The way it was once put to me was like this: going and buying a campaign from an advertising agency is like going and buying a car from a BMW dealership. You will go to an impressive commercial space, be reassured by the clean room-esque environment of the service area and pay a large amount of money over for your car.

Buying a campaign from a PR agency is closer to buying the same BMW in front of someone’s house as a private sale. You turn up, it doesn’t feel particularly reassuring and pay by banker’s draft at an appropriately discounted price.

PROs have tried to hide behind ethereal concepts like reputation and strategy over-egging the complexity of the process. Reputation in its purest sense has been around since the dawn of civilisation and was the reason why craftsmen and merchants formed guilds way before the ancestors of most PR people were literate. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People distilled much of this wisdom on reputation down into an easy to read book in 1936. Reputation is, as reputation does, and is seeing to have done. As for strategy; the definitive tone was written some 2 and 1/2 millennia ago by Sun Tzu in his 13 chapters of The Art of War.

Ditching the ‘PR brand’ has allowed some agencies a wider range of tools to look after their clients:

• Managing reputations
• Encouraging a call-to-action
• Encouraging behavioral change
• Reducing post-purchase dissonance
• Encouraging message propagation
• Providing customer insight to clients

The tool box to address these issues has become much wider including:

• Paid, earned, curated and self-penned media content
• Stakeholder outreach
• Co-creation, anthropology
• Online social services
• Commerce
• Experiential events
• Product, process and service design

Classic examples of this is Edelman being listed in Ad Age’s A-list, my own agency Ruder Finn being as much a Webby award-winning interactive agency as a PR consultancy and wearesocial winning ‘PR’ briefs. We’ve also seen this shift in advertising when agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners designed an iPad sleeve that would allow it to use a Sprint 4G mi-fi device, instead of going down the traditional 30-second TV commercial route. Wieden + Kennedy have recently done campaigns for both Old Spice and Coca-Cola that were efforts to develop a dialogue and connection with consumer audiences. One of the smartest people in this area, Philip Sheldrake brands his post ‘PR’ activities as ‘influence’.

A ‘PR brand’ business now means one which is rejecting many of the tools available to effectively and efficiently delivering what clients want. The generalist skills of a PR crafts-person are valuable to have, but they need to be extended much further through lateral thinking, creativity and openness to new techniques.

From the perspective of the PR professional, this has created three problems in its own right:

• Given that there is a marketing singularity descending on the heartland of public relations (if you think of public relations as the relationships between the organisation and its publics) then PR has become a business ethos; just as in the 1990s people used to talk about marketing organisations (as opposed to sales organisations; despite the fact the marketing-orientated organisations tended to sell more at higher margins with greater success). But are PR professionals equipped to deal with this? Probably not, I would imagine that the body of PR professionals probably mirrors the kind of faults that CEOs levelled at marketers in research conducted by McKinsey and the Marketing Society back in 2004
• Because a PR person doesn’t understand business processes or product design doesn’t make this a non-viable element of a PR strategy. For many companies the CEO wouldn’t have the skills or the knowledge to do all the tasks that specialist employees do, yet he (or she) can set the direction, find the right people and ensure that the right mix of expertise, talent, processes and products are put in place. Like the CEO, the PR person (particularly if they are agency side) has to work out who to work with and what to do rather than burying their head in the sand about concepts like product design, customer services and commerce on online social platforms
• Pretty much any consultant needs to remember what they are selling rather than just advice. Whilst most organisations problems are at least partly internal in nature, the answers are often self-evident to those inside the business; what the consultants usually sell is validation, an ‘independent’ external political voice and assurance. Part of the reason why problems (like how to address social media) have complexity wrapped around them is as much about the theatre of assurance as much as anything else. Whilst social media people may be the bête noire du jour of this theatre, PR and marketing people have equally been guilty in times past from marketing funnels to proprietary storytelling and reputation planning models. The theatre is as much an enabler as the pristine BMW dealership showroom or the department store make-up counter with its mock science props like magnifying lamps and lab coat-clad shop assistants. And like the car dealership or the cosmetics counter, unless the product actually does its job the theatre will swiftly become meaningless

More information

The Art of War by Sun Tzu at Project Gutenberg

How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie at Tripod.com

I was reading an interesting article from Charlotte McEleny this afternoon about the next steps for social commerce and it got me thinking about my general attitude to shopping online. With the proliferation of retailers embracing social commerce it seems more of a norm than a rarity when you go onto an online store and can interact with others, read reviews and share experiences etc. I would be interested to know however how many of us feel that social commerce really does make a difference to our shopping habits? At the end of the day, yes I read reviews for products online but I will still send an email round the girls at work or to my mum to get a final opinion before I buy. In fact I’m not sure I find the reviews online massively helpful at all - just confusing – as they all tend to contradict each other and I know far too little about these people to know if their intent in buying matches mine and therefore if our opinion on the product will be the same. Do you trust the views of a complete stranger when making a decision to buy or not to buy?

As Charlotte points out, what is missing in social commerce of today ‘is a human element’ – ‘If we can now watch The X Factor or The Only Way Is Essex together online and comment and discuss what’s going on live, why can’t I take my friends shopping?’. We need more than just a static review on a site – we need proper interaction. Recognising this, Dell’s global VP of online Manish Mehta told new media age last year that the company wanted to take the social aspects of high street shopping and recreate them online by letting people interact and have discussions in real time when buying products from Dell’s website.

Perhaps this is also where the new Facebook shops will prove their worth? One of the first companies to announce a fully transactional Facebook shop was Asos in January. With its new application users will be able to buy directly from a brand without leaving the ultimate online social destination that is Facebook.

So what do you all think? Have you been taken in by social commerce or are you waiting for other retailers like Dell to push the technology even further? Do reviews help or hinder your purchase decision? Any and all thoughts appreciated…..

The talk that Doug Wills, Managing Editor of The Evening Standard, gave on Thursday night at the PR Newswire Meetthemedia event was one of the most charismatic and interesting media events I have been to. It is clear that after over twenty years at the publication, Doug is passionate about the newspaper “that happens to be free”, is “a celebration of London” and “a part of the city”. He shared some fascinating (and humorous) statistics and insights into the newspaper - I have looked at it in a different light the last couple of evenings I have grabbed it on the way home.

• The Evening Standard has been around since 1827
• It has a circulation of 1.5 million
• In February 2009, it was bought for £1 by Alexander Lebedev
• It has fought off competition from The London Paper and London Lite – both of which have ceased to exist
• 200,000 papers used to be distributed from 7,000 outlets, now 700,000 are distributed from fewer than 1,000 outlets – a more focused model
• The Dispossessed Campaign raised £5 million in three months. A sensitive and highly emotional topic that Doug feels many papers might have walked away from
• Between 4-7pm, 60 copies of the Standard are picked up every second
• The Standard remains a quality newspaper, even though it is free. It is written by a high quality team of journalists, analysts and commentators – they have a reporter in Libya and one in Japan
• The last papers for the evening are printed at 5pm – this means the paper is as up to date as possible, including news from the afternoon
• ES Magazine – is no longer distributed automatically with the main paper – this has tripled its readership. The print copy has a new executive editor – new design coming up in next few weeks
• Does Doug see the Independent’s “i” as competition? Not so much – it hasn’t taken copies from the main papers or The Evening Standard or the Metro – it’s a different readership
• Media Week awarded The Evening Standard ‘Brand of the Year’ in 2010 which Doug said was “quite cheering”
• He also said that Obama learnt that Gordon Brown was leaving Number 10 from the paper – “so that was quite fun”

Advice for PRs – Unless it’s jaw-dropping, your press release will go in the bin. If you have a relationship with the journalist, and build up that confidence, PRs will be treated with respect (he didn’t say what would happen otherwise)

And finally, Doug said that the majority of the many emails he receives from readers are complaints that they haven’t been able to get hold of the paper. His characteristically modest response? “I’ll settle for that.”