PR Studies

Festivals, events, apostrophes

Here's a graduate opportunity I recommend in Bristol (good people, great place). I've posted the details on my jobs and placements page.

This is an excellent opportunity to take on diverse and challenging role, working across a wide variety of the accounts, liaising with clients and the press, visiting festivals, events and exhibitions on behalf of our clients.

Festivals, events and exhibitions. Sounds fun. So please note this:

Candidates must have good writing skills... and knowledge of the use of apostrophes definitely preferred.

The emphasis is mine, but the words are the employer's. Think of apostrophes (here's another one) as bridges linking two separate words. Sometimes, the lack of an apostrophe can change the meaning; but a lack of apostrophes always shows a lack of attention to detail. It matters...

Photo of Clifton Suspension Bridge by ktvyeow posted to Flickr

Brand, value and advertising

How's this for a marketing strategy? Avoid expensive media advertising and undercut your competitors by 50%. A recipe for success or the road to ruin?

Let's look at a case study. Beer is expensive, mainly because of government taxes. Rural pubs are closing and people are choosing to drink wine at home. Last weekend a pint of beer cost me £1.37 in one country pub near my home and £2.70 in another just a mile or so away. The cheap beer comes from Samuel Smith, a small independent brewer in Tadcaster, Yorkshire - not to be confused with heavily advertised industrial brewer John Smith's from the same town. Sam Smith's is proud of its focus on product (all natural ingredients) and the lack of advertising support. I can name beer I prefer from several other small independent breweries, but none competes on price.

With low prices comes little choice: cask or keg. With low prices comes a general lack of investment in real estate, so traditional buildings are still partitioned into small rooms. This lends charm (I like to take my visitors either to the Gardener's Arms at Bilton or the Harewood Arms at Follifoot, both near Harrogate). But just to show it can invest, Sam Smith's has completed the renovation of the Dyneley Arms at Pool-in-Wharfedale. It looks great and the food's good too. (Update: since the budget, the beer here has risen to £1.44 a pint.) Not all reviewers share my favourable opinion, but a company that doesn't advertise needs all the free PR it can get, and should take the rough with the smooth.

Photo: Wharfe railway viaduct, posted to Flickr

Feedback channels

Thirteen students submitted practice exam scripts at or soon after our final 'Corporate and Specialist PR' class. I'd asked the group to email me to request feedback (there are no more classes and the exam is next week).

This was a cumbersome and unnecessary step that only four followed. (I don't keep all student email addresses because of the administrative effort involved and because of residual concerns about data protection). Add another two who had submitted by email where there was an automatic feedback loop, and I still had seven students to contact. Here's what happened next:

Continue reading "Feedback channels"

Freeconomics: having your free lunch and eating it

Wired editor and The Long Tail author Chris Anderson has a new book coming out. It addresses the paradox of free market capitalism in the internet age: that to make money, products and services will often have to be offered for free (think of Google). The book is trailed in a long interview-based feature in The Guardian (free registration), that doesn't shy from turning to another paradox: will the book be given away for free?

Blogs, fashion and the future

Blogging's no longer new; it's no longer fashionable. But that doesn't mean that it's no longer useful.

Mitch Joel makes the case well in Blogging gets a second wind. The one point I'd add is that because they're not twitch-speed (in Marc Prensky's phrase), blogs have been emerging as a useful tool to support reflective learning and reflective practice. Twitter and Facebook may be more immediate and interactive for digitial pioneers and digital natives, but there's useful thinking being expressed on blogs. (There's useful thinking on videos and podcasts, too - but published words are still the best way to achieve SEO, as Joel points out).

Let me connect some blogging threads. Helena Makhotlova has been reflecting on changes in the media and what this means for public relations. Meanwhile, Richard Millington asks which aspects of a PR job are most likely to be outsourced and Rachel Todd sees a future in refocusing on new media.

Inspired by these threads, I'd been contemplating a big post on the future of PR work, but I haven't found the big idea. In times of change, there are threats and opportunities (you see, I've nothing new to say). Students will be excited by the opportunities, while some older practitioners may justifiably be fearful of change. Many journalists will continue to find work in public relations (they have always done so) because their ability to research and write objective news is becoming even more important in a Google-mediated world. (Remember Jakob Nielsen's call for web writing to be 'concise, scannable, objective'? Of course you don't, that was more than ten years ago, but Google has a memory.)

There's one skills gap waiting to be filled. Even more than writing skills, the need is for editing skills. Can you edit a group blog? Can you produce a viral video or a snappy podcast? There's a future for writers in PR; there's a future for editors; but the glittering prizes will still go to the thinkers. Now what's the point of blogging?

Why 3/10 is not bad

When our 'PR and new media' class began on 31 January, I knew I would have to allow a good three months for our student bloggers to find their feet and have some chance of achieving wider recognition. What I didn't know was how accurate my prediction would be. (Google indexing has been getting even quicker, but PageRank has become a cruder measure according to commentators). Yesterday, 30 April, Google registered some of these blogs (scroll to end) with a PageRank of 3/10. Only 30%? That's poor in university assessment terms, but not bad for novice bloggers.

PageRank may not be recalculated for another three months by which time I fear that most of these blogs will be untended. But here's another prediction: a few will keep going, and may creep up to 4/10 or 5/10 (this blog's modest PageRank). The scale is logarithmic so each step up the scale requires something like a doubling of inbound links.

Does any of this matter? Well, I'm assessing the blogs in another two weeks and I've decided to use a mix of hard and soft measures. PageRank is just one of these 'hard' measures; numbers of posts, numbers of comments, inbound and outbound links are others.

More important, student blogs are living CVs (resumes). If you want to provide PR or marketing on a commercial basis, then practise promoting and protecting your personal brand first. We know employers are searching.

If Twitter's the key, what does it unlock?

I can't quibble with this (except over the capital letters, perhaps):

In the Social Media era, getting better at Public Relations means getting better at the Relationships, not the Publicity.

Todd Defren's conclusion is more challenging though: Get Into Twitter or Get Outta Public Relations?

But his point is well made. It's not about the tools (a few years ago it was blogging; then podcasting; last year it was Facebook; this year Twitter); it's about engaging in the conversations and gaining a licence to join in or to comment.

The word on storytelling

Children love stories; Jesus taught through parables; journalists call their output 'stories'. But corporate storytelling sounds like a fiction ('one upon a time...'). That's until you remember that there's a limit to facts unappreciated by Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times:

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

What value is the fact that WPP was originally Wire and Plastic Products, a manufacturer of shopping baskets? It's now a quoted advertising and marketing services group and the interest is in the narrative (how did they get to here from there?)

So corporate storytelling has an important and respectable role (and a large and growing literature). Steve Rubel predicts a great future for digital storytelling. I filter out ads but stopped to read a persuasive advertisement from Shell in The Economist print edition; its narrative is the greatest story ever told. The story of how a nomadic people became city dwellers but never gave up the restless urge to travel. No greenwashing, but a persuasive case for the need for energy.

But what of those professional storytellers, journalists? Adrian Monck discusses stories, truth and trust in Media Guardian.

Search me!

Paul Taylor of the Financial Times has been trying out some new search tools designed to find people or check their digital footprint. He seems to have found more use for Spock than I can (it's still in beta).

I still find Google most useful because I have the toolbar on each PC I use, and because Google favours blog entries over static web content. One example should demonstrate this: take Katya Trubilova, a final year student who has blogged as part of her dissertation work. It helps that she doesn't have a common anglo-saxon name, but she owns the Google search result on her name and we can learn quite a lot about the life of an Estonian studying in Yorkshire. She's also on LinkedIn (though her profile is a year out of date).

Facebook has become such an unremarkable aspect of our everyday lives (sorry about us and them, but most people I come across exist on Facebook) that the efficiency of its search often goes unnoticed. It works because it does more than return names from a database; it filters these names through several layers. First, those I'm already friends with. Second, those in my existing networks (eg by location). Third, friends of friends and so on. It's so efficient that it rarely lets me down - and then probably only because the Gillian I'm looking for calls herself Gill. What's in a name? A whole lot of personal brand and reputation assets.

Networking is working

My taxi driver in Bracknell yesterday was noticing a downturn in the local IT-driven economy, though I tried my best to help out by shuttling between Bracknell and Slough visiting placement students and their employers.

Here's one thing I noticed: you can view it as a downturn if you like; I view it as good business sense. One student was managing highly competent trade and technical media relations for a division of a large organisation. This student is paid more-or-less £1,000 a month. 15 years ago, I was a senior consultant (ie account director) with a PR consultancy in Slough specialisting in the technology sector. We aspired to charge our clients more-or-less £1,000 a day. For highly competent trade and technical media relations. Spot the difference?

Now I'm back I've posted several new vacancies on my jobs and placements web page. One came via email from a university colleague; one via email from Heather Yaxley, who is well connected in the motor industry through involvement in MIPAA; one via Andrew Smith to a Facebook group; one via Paull Young to a PROpenMic group. These are some of my networks; they're proving useful.

Take a look. One requires evidence of an ability to 'form relationships with online communities (this could include blogs, message boards, social networks and other emerging web communities)'. Another describes their expertise in this way: 'We’re media relations experts, brand guardians, copywriters, event managers, social media gurus and marketing strategists.'

We may be in for a period of readjustment (note how another job is full-time, but temporary), but change creates opportunities. Good luck.

Reasons to love PROPenMic

He's done it again. Robert French, the educator who offered the world PR Blogs, has now gone further with PROpenMic. Someone has described it aptly as 'Facebook for the PR community'.

Here's why I like it already.

• There's something fun and anarchic (lords of misrule, world turned upside down) about the speed at which the tradional model of education is being reinvented. In the old world, old people knew more than young people, so young people tried hard to become old(er) people. See where I'm going with this?
• You never know what you'll learn. One lesson for me came from Robert French, responding to my teacher's angst with this: 'I try to motivate every day. I fail every day.'

That's worth the entry fee alone, except that this is another Web 2.0 site with no fee and no ads. There's no catch, but like any social network, its value grows as people gather and conversations develop. Please come and join us.

Here comes everybody

One side-effect of falling ill is the need to slow down and the opportunity this gives to catch up with reading. Clay Shirky's new book Here comes everybody is a delight from first page to last, so that's some compensation.

But where does this book belong? Is it about economics; social science; or technology? Yes, and a bit more too as it's also about politics and publishing.

Why publish a book? Because books are slower and more reflective than online publishing, and Shirky gives us a wide-angled view of the effects of social software on society. It hardly matters that Twitter took off after he started writing, as he'd adequately covered the convergence of the internet and mobile technologies in forming groups and supporting conversation and collective action.

The book, subtitled 'the power of organizing without organizations' tells some familiar and some unfamiliar stories in lively language. There's Linux and the open source software movement; Wikipedia, the reader-edited encyclopedia; and many ordinary people gathering for a variety of social purposes. Shirky's central argument is that humans are intensely social animals. While technology doesn't determine our behaviour, we will adapt technology tools to our purposes. So he charts the transformation of the social web from (mainly male) geeks discussing programming languages on bulletin boards to (mainly) young women using Facebook to facilitate their real-world social lives. In doing so, he proclaims the death of cyberspace (since the social web is now so well adapted to our social lives and is no longer another place).

Continue reading "Here comes everybody"

Reflection: on blogs and natural selection

Some student bloggers: from left to right, with country of origin. Tor Martin (Norway); me; Elif (Turkey); Olga (back row, Russia); Margarita (front row, Russia), Anderson (Brazil); Nina (Poland); Radhika (India). More students, representing many more nations, were on the other side of the camera. Other class blogs can be found here (scroll down to end of page).

We have a last chance to meet up at the 'PR and the digital frontier' talk on 1 May (here's how to register for free if you're a student), but otherwise classes have ended, so it's time for some reflection. Reflection, remember, is something that appears to have been lost according to Marc Prensky:

Reflection is what enables us, according to many theorists, to generalize, as we create "mental models" from our experience. It is, in many ways, the process of "learning from experience". In our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people. One of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in teaching Digital Natives is to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical thinking in the learning... We can and must do more in this area.

Continue reading "Reflection: on blogs and natural selection"

On comments and conversations

So, you've started a blog. Why not manage expectations by establishing your house rules (here's an example from Wolfstar Consultancy)?

One of the most important considerations is how to handle, and encourage, comments. Karen Russell offers a useful primer.

And here's a superb example of blog-as-conversation (or rather, as blogging as the new public sphere.) First came the thesis: Brendan Cooper's claim that we should get over our squeamishness about ghostwritten blogs. Next was the antithesis: Simon Collister's defence of the importance of trust. Finally, the synthesis. The discussion has continued in the comments on Brendan and Simon's posts (over 20 comments in total).

If there's anything as important, lively and dynamic being discussed in any academic PR forum today then I'd love to be made aware of it. Two impressive practitioners from two heavyweight consultancies debating an important issue in public, with some significant contributions from around the world (Gerry McCusker, Doc Searls, David Jones, Ian Green, Stuart Bruce and many others). Good stuff: now who said blogging's dead?

PR and the digital frontier

I'm looking forward to the next event arranged by the CIPR regional group. Called PR and the digital frontier, it's on Thursday 1 May at Leeds Metropolitan University.

There are some free places available for students, but you do need to register in advance by emailing Nicky Wake at Don't Panic Projects (follow the link in the paragraph above for the details).