Archive for the ‘PR’ Category

It is coming up to that time again.  Dissertations are in, final exams are looming and the prospect of leaving the fun university life that has been a reality for the past few years is becoming more and more real.

But, given the current financial climate™ what are the prospects for today’s graduates?

Rather than come up with a flimsy list of tips (that is the next post) I thought I’d speak to an expert.  Tony Byng used to work with me at The Weber Group before pursuing a career as a lecturer.  He is currently the programme Director for Leeds University Business School’s MA in corporate communications and PR. I asked him what he thought of the industry today and how tough it was for Grads:

… from what I gather, the market is still relatively open for those students who are prepared to ‘put themselves about’ or who have garnered some real experience during their summer vacations. Having said that, we have seen an increase in applications for our marketing-related Masters programmes of between 20-40%… suggesting many are hoping to ride out the economic storm by spending another year in education - if they can afford it!

We have a large Careers Service at Leeds and the University has a very good track record of graduate employment. While the ‘Milk Run’ is rather a sparse affair these days, Leeds is still targeted by many corporate employers - partly due to the quality of its education, but also down to the quality and background of the students we accept.

The issue with PR specifically, is that both agencies and in-house departments appear to be pretty poor at graduate recruitment. I have rarely come across agencies who start a recruitment drive in, say, November… interview in the spring with a view to employing in August/September. Most of them don’t seem to be able to plan that far ahead! And, it’s not just PR - most marketing agencies are the same, apart from the some of the larger ones. Of course, a lack of experience tends to shut the door pretty quickly as well.

I asked Tony what his advice is for this year’s graduates:

So, my advice to students considering a move in to PR is, perhaps, a little old-fashioned. I tell them to surf the web, read Guardian Media and PR Week, talk to anyone with even the slightest association with PR and encourage them to identify agencies they would like to work for (based on awards, client list, positioning, etc.) and then get on the phone… looking to find out who’s hiring, when they may be hiring and generally selling themselves and trying to get a network going. I even encourage them to ask for internships - even a day shadowing an account team. It’s difficult to say no to someone who appears keen and bright when they offer themselves for free! If they think this sounds too much like hard work, then they’re probably not cut out for the industry anyway!

How does the Uni help PR grads find work?

In terms of the University, I recommend that students look to the careers service for advice on preparing CVs, interview skills and using resources for researching target agencies. I also advise students to look at their whole CV and find something that differentiates them - not a just a rounded CV balancing work and play but something genuinely interesting to talk about. It is difficult for the education sector to do too much more when the industry appears to be less than organised. I would be delighted if you proved me wrong on this last point

I would also add a whole online dimension when targeting employers.  Many grads (see Jed and Michael to name but two) over the past couple of years have had success through building a digital network through twitter and blogging and this has really augmented the real life meetings they’ve had during the job hunting process.

To help prove Tony wrong, I will be speaking to PR students at Leeds over the coming few months and we’re also reviewing  how we promote the graduate scheme at Ruder Finn.

N.B. Cross posted on my blog

No matter how much work you do behind the scenes, as a junior PR consultant, a client will never know who you are or why they are paying for your time unless you take an active role in meetings. Getting started with this can be tough for many people, especially when there is a large team of more senior folks in the room.

Here are my tips:

1. Agree a role with your manager before you go in
2. Own a bit of the agenda to run through / update on
3. Keep something special to tell the client - a hit you got, an opportunity you secured or a new industry thing they might be interested in
4. Ask questions….think of something before you go in
5. Check their news daily - you won’t learn and feel confident offering an opinion if you don’t read
6. Look at the headlines before every meeting - any customer or competitor been written about that day?
7. Check the stock price, it’ll help you know what their focus is before the meeting
8. Introduce yourself and explain your role on the account
9. Listen in to as many calls as you can - good way of learning before you speak
10. Listen in to media briefings - helps you know the ropes before you host them yourself
11. Remember the client is paying for your time, always think about demonstrating value to them by making a contribution

Anything I missed?

This is cross posted with my own blog

Our director of digital strategies either decided he has far too much spare time and needs another platform from which to espouse his words of wisdom, or else his cruel boss has nominated him for a spot on the sparkly new PR Week site….either way, check out his new blog, called Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers? Life online.

From an interview with Dell to a useful set of tips to consider when naming a web site or community, Ged provides insight into agency life and the wider PR industry as a whole.  The official blurb is as follows:

Ged Carroll of Ruder Finn blogs on online curios, direct-to-audience comms and technology for PR Week

N.B. Ged also blogs here and at his personal blog - Renaissance Chambara.  He can explain the reasons behind the name(s) far better than I can!

When people ask me about social media: teach them how to do <insert an activity> on <insert the name of a service de jour> and I say sure I can teach you that (for a fee), but this is as much about the way think and look at things as anything else. You can pick up skills as you go along, once you know what you want to do.

However, services come and go, but the conversation remains. A classic case-in-point is GeoCities. Yahoo! has non-announced that it is shuttering this pioneering social network at the end of the year. GeoCities was founded in the mid-1990s and grew rapidly (ok so this was the dial-up era and the page building tools on it were the then equivalent of cutting edge-bandwidth hogging web 2.0 tools).

The site was organised into neighbourhoods of common interest: Silicon Valley for technology for example where ‘birds of a feather’ could ‘flock together’. The page creation tools were broadly comparable to MySpace profiles: people foisted poor aesthetics, bad web design and golden labrador digital photographs on an early online audience.

From a standing start in the middle of 1995, two years later they were the fifth most trafficked property on the web and a million-plus registered users (or Homesteaders as GeoCities called these web pioneers).

In college, I found lots of great content on GeoCities and cited some of the homesteaders pages as references in my essays and degree course work.

Yahoo! acquired the company for 2.87 billion USD in early 1999, this was cited as his ‘first rocket ship ride‘ by veteran VC Fred Wilson. There are obvious parallels to Facebook in this meteoric growth.

When I worked at Yahoo!, the disastrous terms of service debacle at GeoCities post-acquisition change in the terms of service where ‘the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures’ were held up as a lesson that we should learn from. Whilst Yahoo! quickly reversed this decision there was an exodus of homesteaders. It was an expensive mistake that we were loath to repeat when working with newer services like flickr. Again this sounds like some of the debacles that Facebook has faced. Indeed Facebook’s current terms of service includes rights on the user content that is far greater than in the current Yahoo! terms of service, here is the relevant section from Facebook’s Terms of Use:

… an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

GeoCities like Facebook with its Beacon service had a scandal on its hands over user privacy. The FTC found that GeoCities had engaged in deceptive acts and practices in contravention in their privacy act. Subsequently, a consent order was entered into which prohibited GeoCities from misrepresenting the purpose for which it collects and/or uses personal identifying information from consumers.

Time moved on and GeoCities became a key part spam email acting as a redirect page for online pharmacies and replica watch sellers alongside more conventional GeoCities user pages. Over the past years the site traffic for GeoCities dropped faster than shareholder value at Yahoo!. The lesson here is that the Twitter or Facebook or today, can be the GeoCities of tomorrow. In fact, only five of the top 15 web service of a decade ago still have a similar kind of profile today.

If we look beyond web services to world history we can all think about eras and empires that have past, yet thinking (from the likes of Niccolò Machiavelli, Sun Tzu | 孙子, Miyamoto Musashi | 宮本 武蔵 and Carl Von Clausewitz) is as relevant today as it was when they created it centuries or millenia ago. In the grand scheme of things being open and understanding the concepts of conversation are more important than the latest tools. Whilst I still get excited about the ‘new Twitter’, I still like to keep things in perspective. This is also cross posted at my personal blog renaissance chambara.

Before I started my first job, my Dad told me that ‘common sense never went out of fashion’ and the same could be said for the Cluetrain Manifesto ten years on. I had signed up to blog about one of the theses (number 83) in the book via this site.

Ten years later and providing the media with preferential treatment in comparison to consumers seems more ridiculous. My friend Paul Armstrong’s Twitter feed @themediaisdying chronicles the slow death march of traditional news media.

According to ReadWriteWeb the US newspaper industry suffered a 16.6 per cent decline of advertising revenue during 2008. A recent panel of senior media executives at the McGraw Hill Media Summit couldn’t even agree on what the nature of the disruptive problem the news media is even facing, let alone come up with an effective solution.

If you want a clearer definition of the problem the news media is facing then American academic and writer Clay Shirky has an excellent analysis on his blog entitled Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. paidContent recently featured former WSJ.com editor Bill Grueskin outlined what kinds of content that news media could make money from (and are therefore more likely to create in the future in order to pay the bills):

—Daily emails with actionable information, like the best-and-worst traffic routes during rush hour.

—Sites that offer real-time intelligence about the real-estate market.

—Survey sites that accept user submissions about the best-and-worst teachers in local markets.

—In-depth coverage of local government, including publishing bills and video.

This is all non-news content which runs an end game on traditional media relations from a PR perspective.

Contrast this with how companies have performed when they have directly engaged with audiences.

Robert Scoble was christened Chief Humanizing Officer for Microsoft by The Economist back in 2005, who described him thus:

Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.

Former FT journalist Tom Foremski put it on a more commercial perspective:

Mr Scoble created many millions of dollars in positive publicity for Microsoft, on a salary of less than $100K. I don’t think WaggEd could have done a fraction of that, for 100 times the payment Mr Scoble received.

Through his blog Scoble spoke directly to customers, replying to their comments, empathising with their problems and becoming their advocate internally at Microsoft.

Dell has managed to move on from the ‘Dell Hell’ debacle through a more proactive stance in social media engagement and its use of a Salesforce.com CRM Ideas platform (a prediction market infrastructure) to power Ideastorm - a way of listening to consumers and allowing them to have a direct impact on product decisions. In the first week, Dell had 500 ideas from customers, this had grown 2,500 within the first month.

JetBlue managed to change the media agenda following its Valentine’s Day 2007 crisis by having CEO David Neeleman address customers directly via a video on YouTube. Disintermediating the traditional media allowed JetBlue to move the debate on, from how bad the problem still was as the airline recovered; to what JetBlue was doing to rectify the problems. Many US news channels ran the YouTube video on their coverage.

More recently, Patrick Doyle, president of Domino’s Pizza was obviously paying attention to the JetBlue debacle and wasted no time going on camera to apologise via YouTube directly to consumers over the ‘bogie sandwich’ video created by two (now ex-)employees of the fast food chain.

So when Becky and I recently met with a client, the counsel we provided them was: in order to future-proof their marketing in a time of disruption, community needed to be their marketing, because as the title to this post says an organisation needs to take its millions of stakeholders as seriously as a prominent news journalist.

This is cross-posted at my personal blog renaissance chambara.

Well, it has happened, the first big UK political name has been brought down by British bloggers. I won’t go into a detailed discussion on the events because if you are reading this post, you will likely know the story (here is a good synopsis here in the Telegraph).  But to quickly recap, Damian McBride, a senior figure within Downing Street, albeit behind the scenes, has been brought down by the power of blogging and it looks like another senior Labour character, Derek Draper, is also losing in the battle of the bloggers between his blog, Labour List and Paul Staines, who runs the conservative blog, Guido Fawkes.

The point I want to make here, instead of getting into the history of “Emailgate”, is that both Labour and the Tories are seemingly struggling to understand how to campaign online and their efforts seem all very ad hoc with no real direction. Draper himself admitted only in February that he didn’t know the difference between “my RSS from my elbow” and from my standpoint, there has very little positive interaction with the voting public so far. While Guido Fawkes, as the name suggests, is just trying to bring down the Labour Government, although his aim is to replace it with a Conservative one and doesn’t have the anarchic goals of his namesake.

Its obvious Labour has set up their web presence to try and get some kind of Obamaesque traction on the blogosphere and from voters, after all, I may be cynical, but it is an awfully big coincidence that Draper and Co. devised Labour List in November, around the time of Obama’s victory. And as I have mentioned in a previous blog, the Conservative’s seem to be behind in this regard.

However, Labour List, Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, another high-profile Conservative blogger, seem to just snipe and battle each other from across the political spectrum. While this is interesting from the point of view of a political junkie like myself, Becky McMichael, a colleague and fellow blogger, put it perfectly - they are just preaching to the converted.

There is no real engagement, no real message, no grass roots campaigning, no real harnessing of support from people who don’t already support either party.

There is a new post on Labour List by Mark Hansen titled “Labour is gaining fast online: Don’t let Guido wreck it“, where the author states “Just ten days ago a ragbag group of Labour bloggers and campaigners was gathered (organised by Derek Draper) to offer ideas as to how to build the resources on Labourlist and make it more useful to Party members at constituency level. How to build this Labour-minded community.”

Mr Hansen has summed up Labour’s and the other party’s problem quite succinctly without knowing it - they are trying to engage with Party members and registered supporters. These people won’t win you an election, it is the swinging voters who get you elected, any student of electoral politics will tell you that.  They must deliver their message outward, not just inward.

Peter Mandelson wrote in his first blog on Labour List about new media and the fact that “we have to recognise that the days of command and control are over. Instead we need to learn to embrace and engage.” I guess they are still learning.

Cross posted with my personal blog.

Although this piece covers POM-to-P drug switches (taking a prescription only medicine, POM, and making it available through Pharmacy, P) the principles discussed apply to any form of product launch, so please read on even if you’re not involved in a POM-to-P switch.

You may have read in the media about the launch of an over-the-counter (OTC) weight loss pill called Alli. Previously only available on prescription the European Commission announced at the start of the year that it could be made available through pharmacy. I have a lot of experience in POM-to-P switches and have followed Alli‘s progress with great interest. Alli will soon be available from a pharmacy near you so I thought I’d take this chance to review the coverage it has received to date.

What has been fascinating, and ultimately what prompted me to write this blog, is how the media, and then the public, have reacted to this announcement. This is a classic demonstration of no matter how hard you work to get a responsible, non-sensationalist message out to the public about a product, when you finally make an announcement what actually gets printed can be very different.

Exhibit A – The Daily Mail, 6^th Jan, runs the following headline “Diet pill helps woman drop a dress size”. ‘Drop a dress size’, could this be any further from what a diet pill for the clinically obese is designed for? It makes it sound like it’s a quick fix to get you from a size 12 to a 10 for your holidays. I’ve checked the GSK release about this announcement and it largely contains responsible messages like “lose weight gradually and steadily” and “in conjunction with a reduced calorie, lower-fat diet”. It never mentions or even alludes to the ‘drop a dress size’ opportunity at any point. When the story eventually appeared online 2 weeks later the headline was thankfully changed to a more appropriate “£1-a-day anti-obesity pill is going on sale without prescription”.

Exhibit B – That week a colleague of a friend of mine sprints into her office and proclaims, with some excitement, that there is a new pill that is going to help her lose weight. To provide you with some background my friend works in a highly respected profession and her colleague is someone I would put in the “successful, intelligent, rational human being” category. Furthermore, despite having two children she is at most a size 10 and if she wanted to lose weight it would be for purely personal rather than medical reasons. Now if someone like this can reach such a conclusion then where is the hope for others? Now I’m not saying it was the Daily Mail’s fault but coverage like theirs surely contributed to such a conclusion being drawn.

Exhibit C – The Daily Mail (yes again), 26^th Jan, runs the following headline “Revealed: The true cost of the £1 diet pill hailed as a weight-loss wonder drug”. Hang on, 2 weeks ago you were the ones “hailing” it as such. This article was about the ‘terrible side effects’ this treatment has. Well, it is true it does have nasty side effects but these are well publicised, so why didn’t they mention them 2 weeks ago when they were ‘dropping a dress size’. Whereas the first article focused very heavily on the positives, this article solely covered the negatives, again not what you’d describe as balanced coverage.

The worst part of this is that it is the media that are always quick to criticise Pharma for inappropriately marketing its products but it should really take a long hard look at itself before it starts wagging its finger.

So what’s the answer? How can we navigate our way through this minefield and gain balanced coverage for POM-to-P drug launches (or any product launch for that matter).

Well the truth is there is no simple answer. It’s always going to be hard to gain balanced coverage, especially in areas such as weight-lose where people are desperate to believe that there are quick fixes.

What you can do though is stick to the following:

• Plan for milestones – Understand when the media touch points are (in the case of POM-to-P switches it is during consultation, when the licence is agreed and when the product is launched) and prepare for them.
• Stakeholder management – Ensure you have undertaken a wide ranging, solid stakeholder management campaign. Knowing who will say what and when is half the battle to predicting media coverage.
• Due-diligence – Anticipate the sensationalist angles the media can take and pre-empt them i.e. this pill is not about dropping a dress size it is aimed at…
• Stay close to the media – Know what they are writing / broadcasting and when. If you don’t feel it accurately reflects your story, react quickly.

I attended an industry awards dinner last week and, as is customary with these events, much alcohol was consumed and much debate was had.  I’m writing this because one of these debates struck me as more interesting than most.  Can Brand PR really deliver?

The question was posed by the head of marketing for a global company with a long list of well known brands, so he’s well placed to make such an assertion.  His exact comment (obviously filtered through the hazy fog one tends to have following such an event) was this; “if it is a choice between spending 100K on Brand PR or buying a 100Ks worth of additional media, I would take the media spend every time.”

His point I thought was incredibly valid.  Here’s an in-house marketing person who is judged on sales and sales alone and who must ask himself always; “is this money well spent and will it deliver increased brand awareness and therefore increased sales?”

This got me thinking.  Is there truly a place for Brand PR in these current gloomy economic times?  Can we all put our hand on our hearts and say Brand PR has delivered time and time again?  I thought not. The bottom line is Brand PR is difficult.  Trying to get your brand intrinsically linked to a story is no mean feat.  Why? Because Editors don’t want your brand there and certainly not if it is saying anything positive.  They can smell a PR story a mile off and want your brand forcibly removed from it.

Can Brand PR, and I’m being specific here, no one is questioning whether other types of PR e.g. crisis, financial PR etc work, but specifically can Brand PR, show value against other, more guaranteed, forms of marketing.

The answer is categorically, Yes…sort of.

The classic PR answer, I know.  But I say ‘sort of’ for a reason. It can work but provided it is undertaken in the right way and, more importantly, for the right reasons.

So the first of these is the right way.  I see two fundamentals to Brand PR:

1)    Through the line campaign themes - If you don’t have one consistent theme that is running through every aspect of your campaign it is hard to get good Brand PR.

2)    The brand must be integral to the story - If you have 1), it makes 2) much easier.

If you have a consistent marketing theme running through your campaign and a creative angle that intrinsically links your brand to that theme, and therefore the core of the story, you can get great Brand PR.  Most importantly you can get Brand awareness above and beyond that which a straightforward advert could achieve.

Two great examples of this.  The first is the recent ‘Take a Benylin day‘ campaign.  A campaign that was clearly helped by a complaint from the Federation of Small Businesses which rocketed it on to the 10 o’clock news.  Either way it can’t be denied that it was based on a solid and creative idea that ran through the line.  It also boasted a link up with the British Chambers of Commerce which helped provide credibility for the campaign when the criticisms started flying.

Another example is the comparethemarket.com campaign ‘compare the meerkat‘.  No one would deny these are clever adverts but this theme is carried all the way through the communications.  The meerkat even posts on Twitter and has a Facebook site!  This raises a further important point.   With the diversity of communication mediums at a PR practitioners disposal there is so much that can be achieved with a good creative theme.  A creative theme, I hasten to add, that doesn’t have to be driven by advertising but can start from any one of the marketing disciplines.

So if the first consideration is the ‘right way’ the second is the ‘right reason’. The big question to ask, and this is my final point, is why are you doing this?  That should really drive whether you undertake Brand PR or not.  If it is to get a simple brand message to a hard to reach audience, then a bit more media spend might be the answer.  However, if it is to educate consumers / professionals about a broader issue relating to your brand, demonstrate 3^rd party endorsement or create a brand experience over and above that which can be achieved in a simple advert, then Brand PR should definitely form part of your marketing mix.

So can Brand PR deliver?  Yes it can.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.  This was the reaction of my University friends when I told them that I was venturing into the glamorous world of PR.  As I had already done a period of work experience with a PR firm I knew that this was not the case, however I was more than happy to play along with the stereotype.  And with a certain level of smugness I tell them that I am a Junior Account Executive.  This is because executives stroll round in pin striped suits, slam doors and shout, “Come on, we need the Japanese report done by six o’clock.”  It is amazing how deceptive a job title can be.

It comes as quite a shock when you first realise how ignorant you actually are to the industry you have been appointed to work in.   Not since my first day at primary school when I managed to get myself locked in the toilets have I been so out of my depth.  But, there is light at the end of that long and murky tunnel.  My head has finally stopped spinning and some of these abbreviations that fly around the office actually make sense.  All going to plan, I will be an Account Executive before I know it.  So when people in the pub ask what I do I can sound just as obnoxious as I tell them that I am an Account Executive.  That is unless they work in PR and actually know what that means.

As a 26 year old woman it’s hard not to feel moved by Jade Goody’s battle with cervical cancer. Not only is Jade having to face leaving her children and partner, but also her own mortality. At an age where Jade should be going out with friends and buying shoes, she is writing her will, settling her affairs and preparing her funeral.

However, Jade’s legacy may extend beyond Big Brother, bad boyfriends and racial slurs. Women across the nation have followed Jade’s story and booked the smear test they’d been putting off for months.  The Daily Mail reported that the number of women having smear tests has gone up by more than 20 per cent as a result of the publicity around her story highlighting the significant role she is playing in increasing awareness of cervical cancer.

Today Sun Woman launched Jade’s Legacy - a campaign with her backing - to raise cervical cancer awareness and to get the screening age in England lowered from 25 back down to 20. Through exploiting the media to ultimately raise money for her children, Jade has caused a ripple of consciousness that may in turn save the lives of hundreds of women across the county.

The Jade Effect doesn’t stop with cervical screening. The subject of palliative care is finally receiving the media attention it deserves with an article in the Sun today dispelling the myths commonly associated with the treatment of terminally ill people.

Although there is no longer hope for Jade, her lifelong courtship with the media has finally paid off.