Archive for the ‘PR’ Category

Senior account manager/ Account director – Corporate & Technology
Fantastic opportunity for an ambitious, tech savvy SAM/AD who wants to make their mark and take a leadership role in a rapidly growing Corporate & Technology practice. The last six months has seen huge growth with four new clients coming on board and more expected to kick off in the New Year. Great balance between big global campaigns (working with our offices in the US and Asia-Pacific) and UK/European clients.

We are looking for someone who is both strategic and hands on. Who understands that clients are at the heart of our business and prides themselves on the fact their clients love them. Someone who isn’t scared to get out there and shout about the great work they do, but can be a strong team leader and an inspiration for junior team members.

Think you have all that? Get in touch.

Account executive/ Senior account executive
Fancy something a bit more challenging? Interested in an opportunity to play a key role in a rapidly growing practice? We are looking for a tech savvy account executive to join our Corporate & Technology practice. We are looking for someone who understands that media is at the heart of PR and wields their journalist contacts book with pride. Self-starting, ambitious, fun loving and organised – we want the lot. The team here at Ruder Finn is one of the best and we are happy to admit we are looking for more of the same!

Does that sound like you? If so, get in touch.

About Ruder Finn Corporate & Technology
The Corporate & Technology division has a broad range of clients from major blue chip enterprise technology providers through to science and engineering, digital and entertainment and professional services. The team works closely with our Digital division on a number of campaigns and both divisions have seen huge growth over the last year.

Ruder Finn in one of the world’s biggest independent agencies and you will have the opportunity to work on some fantastic brands on big, global campaigns. You would be joining at an exciting time – we move into some fantastic new offices in the New Year, have a new website soon to be launched and have great momentum going into 2012.

Competitive salary, great benefits, fabulous team…

I have been following the Olympus | Michael Woodford Tobashi scheme controversy with interest. I was curious to see where the debate was coming from and how vigorous it actually was. So using Sysomos MAP I had a look at the geography of the comments.

It seemed to be most heavily focused on California. The next obvious question that sprang to mind is should we start thinking about reputation management in a more regional way rather than thinking about the usual suspects in the media?

When I pick up a shiny new top off the shop rail, nothing makes my heart sink faster than a “one size” label.  Why? It never fits.  You’re pretty much guaranteed either your boobs, your tummy or your bum will be mercilessly exposed by a garment designed to be OK for everyone but that usually provides a poor result.  And it’s usually the one part you want to hide that ends up on show.

I hadn’t intended to start with a shopping analogy but hey ho, I am short of time so let’s press on.

We’ve been doing a lot of work recently with small to medium sized businesses and it never ceases to amaze me how many companies just don’t get what they need.

Small yet individually formed

In March this year, when David Cameron told the Conservative Party Conference ““There’s only one strategy for growth we can have now…and that is rolling up our sleeves and doing everything possible to make it easier for people to start (and) grow a business,” a line was drawn in the sand.

Only two months later, business secretary Vince Cable stood on a national stage alongside Lord Green and William Hague to announce that, “we’re rightly proud of British firms and making sure they can increase their exports to a worldwide audience is vital if we are to rebuild our economy.”

From grassroots campaigns to large-scale media pushes by the likes of The Mirror and The Independent; Google’s “get your business online competition” to HSBC’s small business confidence monitor, championing British small and medium-sized businesses and wanting them to succeed has never been more fashionable.

This is different.

If the UK is to recover from recession and bounce back from the economic woes that currently face us, we need small businesses to succeed.

Q. But how many large organisations truly understand the needs of small businesses?

A. Not many…..at least not when they are trying to communicate with them.

The most common complaint we hear from journalists (and the counsel we provide for our clients) is that the story IS different….solutions selling doesn’t work in the same way for SMEs as for large enterprises.  As for targeting audiences by job title, how does that achieve the desired results when the HR director is the finance director and the marketing director and the managing director all rolled into one?

From IT complexity to changing taxation; super-fast rural broadband to money laundering regulations; cloud security to the cost of “free”; understanding changing privacy laws to increasing remote working and the power of micropayments to the impact of mobile technology.  As the managing director of a small British business today, there is currently a LOT going on in your head.

And the end game? Cutting costs and achieving growth.

So where are the danger points? And why do (according to Experian) over 1800 small businesses a month fail in the UK?

According to Jonathan Hogg in April’s Independent SME supplement, “businesses fail to understand that the most successful time in a company’s life is its most dangerous time” and attributes this to what Freud called “totems and taboos”.

“Totems are ideas that become so sacred they cannot be questioned and taboos are the questions that cannot be asked. They arise from some very deep-rooted human instincts…reflect our natural conservative bias in the form of a reluctance to change….and the herd instinct where everyone wants to agree with the majority.”

And why this reluctance to change? At an enterprise level, businesses usually have non-executives to lean on.  To spot trends, point out pitfalls and to provide experience from learning the hard way.  But what do SMEs have?  Very often a combination of gut feel and a very small amount of spare time.

Doing well by doing good

In the UK at present there is a real opportunity to provide not only support, education and competitions/giveaways to the SME market but genuine help. The media want this, the government wants this and only a very few global organisations are really doing it.

I believe here is a wealth of industry knowledge, support and mentorship sitting within vertically-focused global businesses that can be shared to mutual benefit with the SME market in the UK.

What does this mean for PR and social media?

Where the focus on technology in the broadsheet media has shrunk over the past ten years, the tabloids, regionals and small business/consumer titles have seen an increase, particularly online.  An increase in blogger credibility, search and link-led marketing, has meant that ideas MUST be good enough to be shared amongst friends and colleagues and campaigns must deliver more than just news.

What works?

Businesses that are succeeding in reaching SME and industry audiences through print, broadcast and social media are using a simple but successful communications formula:

Simple language + human angles x strong support from real businesses= PR success

In the UK, there is a real opportunity to take initiatives such as business mentoring and community partnerships a lot further.  PR-wise, it amazes me that still companies are not talking the language of small businesses, instead burying all the interesting stuff under mountains of product marketing speak.

The smart company that can couple the wealth of interesting business news that its end users generate EVERY day with the political, social and macroeconomic picture in the UK today (alongside providing genuine support for British businesses) is a PR success waiting to happen.  So come on then, who’s game?

(cross posted with my personal blog)

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

A really simple PR idea well executed. The executive profile pages of the Microsoft online press room was taken over with X-Box avatars as part of Microsoft’s drive to promote the Kinect controller; its response to Nintendo’s Wii-mote. I could see this idea extended into plush dolls or a limited edition of Kubrick-type figurines, however a bloody boardroom popularity contest may ensue. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

One of the key criteria that you should have when joining an agency is looking around at your potential colleagues and working out whether you can learn from them and grow as a PR professional.

At Ruder Finn, I work with a number of people across our offices who are pretty smart across a number of different issues from transmedia campaigns to global health campaigns. Some of this knowledge is captures in an annual publication called Move. You can find an online archive of previous issues here.

I have the latest copy in a large coffee table print format and have a number of copies that I can give away, if you would like a copy drop me a line with your full contact details.

On Friday morning I attended Echo Research’s Fit for the future event. I have scanned in my notes from some of the talks and shared them below:

Miguel Pestana, Vice President Global External Affairs, Unilever PLC

Basil Towers, Founding Partner, Heselden

Maril Gagen MacDonald , Chief Executive Officer, Gagen MacDonald

This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

Earlier this week, I was at a lecture at the RSA where Sky’s Adam Boulton was in conversation with Stephen Green, chairman of international banking group HSBC. They had both just returned from the G20/G8, which provided a backdrop to discussions on financial turbulence, money and morality. The presentation was especially interesting as it took a long-term historical view: King Edward III was noted as the first British sovereign to default on his debts; Franciscan thinking from the middle ages on poverty versus wealth was quoted; the ebb and flow of world trade was examined. You can watch the RSA’s video of the talk here. Well worth a look.

Mr Green was questioned on his book, Good Value: Building a Better Life in Business. He gave his perspective on the current macroeconomic climate, talking about a clear rebalancing to the East. He says ‘emerging markets’ is a misnomer, preferring the re-emergence of markets. China was the world’s largest economy until 1820 – before the growth of super powers – and was the dominant economic power in 18 of the last 20 centuries. Over a generation, he says, we will see the rise of the ‘new G20’ states, and the relative marginalisation of the G7/G8.

However, he is positive about the opportunities for business offered by this rebalancing. Companies that plan responsible, sustainable business strategies, in tune with the cultural needs of growing markets will thrive. Real CSR will have real impact.

As a spokesperson for the global banking community, Stephen Green is impressive. Highly engaging and authoritative, without a hint of arrogance. He expertly batted away questions inviting comment on BP’s current problems and focused on broad issues of strategy and morality. As an ordained Anglican priest, his views on ethics in business are especially interesting. From a reputation manager’s perspective, he is a valuable asset. A thought leader with original, coherent thoughts and a distinctive view of the world. Good value.

I spent my formative years in agency life working with a senior colleague who loved champagne and fine wine - and a weakness for new shoes. Alcohol is often a good social lubricant when building relationships with influencers, but it is lethal when it is mixed with a journalist looking for a story.

Whilst Stanley McCrystal may appear has a footnote in the history of the war on terror for his championing of counterinsurgency warfare tactics in Afghanistan, his most prominent mark was made with a number of cases of BudLight Lime on a coach from Berlin to Paris.

This is where Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings got the juicy material for The Runaway General feature which nuked McCrystal’s career.

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe alcohol and public relations don’t mix. This was cross-posted from my personal blog.