Author: jeremyprobert

Brand Standards? Be Tolerant Of Social Media

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Corporate Religion, corporate reputation.

A word of warning. I’m posting this link in the spirit of acknowledging my sources and admitting that I have plagiarised content, rather than letting you, faithful blog snorkellers mine, believe that it’s all a product of my fevered imagination – however, for once, I strongly advise that you do NOT click on it. (Not that there was ever much chance, you lazy bunch of surfers, but just in case.) If you do click on it, you will find yourself transported to the homepage of Digital Transactions magazine, a wilderness in which your horrified screams will never, ever be heard.

Suffice it to say, it’s a publication that services the needs of the digital transactor, those involved in online payments – banks and so forth. And it is a sign of the malign growth of the social media cancer that even this benighted outpost on the media frontier has been tainted by it. Here’s a quotation:

“Banks and others scratching their heads over the exploding popularity of social networking and its close cousin, social gaming, can harness the online phenomenon for payments but will likely have to jettison decades of settled thinking, experts say.”

I know – sounds like the sort of thinking that was doing the rounds 18 months ago – but it was published yesterday. Welcome to today’s horrifying reality, banks and others!

Anyway, I didn’t come here to poke fun at the financial services industry, easy though that would be. No I come here to highlight an opinion provided in this piece which, for me, sums up the insanity and inanity of the whole social media thing and how it is supposed to work (to our benefit, apparently). Have a read:

“For example, people who use social media are accustomed to changing things on the sites in ways that suit them individually – and that can include corporate designs, said George Warfel at Fiserv Inc. He advised banks to be tolerant of this, even if it horrifies marketing officers. ‘Let people on MySpace change the color of your logo,’ he advised. ‘That’s not vandalism. It’s customer acceptance.”

What George is blithely advocating is ceding control of your brand identity to any Tim, Darko or Barry who wants to appropriate it for his or her own ends. Apparently customers will be more accepting of your expensive, hard-won identity if they are free to do what they like with it. Who knows, maybe they won’t just stop at changing the colour. Maybe they’ll include a couple of rude words and a lewd illustration and then post it on a Facebook page entitled “(your name here) Sucks!” Or maybe they’ll just change the colour of your logo, print it out and stick it on a counterfeit product.

This is, and remains, the problem with social media. From a commercial point of view, it cannot provide the reassurance and control that is necessary to make it a valid comms, marketing or sales tool.

And as for the bankers – well, I sincerely hope their attitude to looking after my money is slightly less laissez-faire than their attitude to their own brand identity.

Embrace Social Media Or Die!

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Corporate Religion, Public Relations, Social Media.

Well, that’s the only conclusion I can draw from this set of statistics collated and published on socialnomics.net by Erik Qualman, an evangelist.

I cannot argue with them or dispute them. They seem to come from a variety of reliable sources. The only conclusion I can draw is that the world and the bulk of people in it live for their social media. When social media becomes more popular than porn (which, as any fule kno, is what the interweb was invented for), then you know that momentum has grown into an unstoppable tsunami of Big Conversation.

And yet. I STILL don’t know of any company that’s making money through social media marketing. Mr Qualman includes this point – “the ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years” – which sounds like a bit of a bullying threat to me. Try telling that to Rolls-Royce, Marks & Spencer, Garrards and Cheney the Bootmaker. I’m in no way involved in the social media ‘phenomenon’, yet somehow I still seem to be able to function perfectly well in today’s society. Apparently products and services and news are now going to find me – well, if it’s OK with them, I’ll stick with the old way of doing things and choose which ones I want, in my own time, on my own terms.

Finally, apparently, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest, after China and India.

Better than that, I wouldn’t have to live there. Or even visit. And I would no longer have to put up with the endless wittering about social media being my future.

How good would that be?

How Language Devolves

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations and tagged , .

Yes, yes. Before you start – I know that devolution is not the opposite of evolution and that devolving language is not the black to evolving language’s white. However, as we saw in a previous post, when the American nation attempted to convince me that ‘bulletize’ and ‘big-businessification’ were words, language does appear to be quietly decaying, and this is because we have devoluted its care to those who are, quite obviously, not up to it. (See n. American.)

(Yes, yes (again). Devolved. I know.)

Anyway, today, in the course of my day job, I was sense-checking a quite technical document. One to do with measurement and encryption. One in which a – I assume – normally quite sane person had used the not-word ‘zeroise’. As in ‘after generating the result, zeroise your machinery’. I think it is probably intended to mean ‘reset’ or ‘return to zero’.

Three points, if, dear blog snorkellers, you can be bothered.

1) Zeroise is not and never will be a word. If it used, however, it will pass into language. Use it and it will be spoken

2) The person who used it was not an American. So maybe I’m being a bit harsh on Americans. Or maybe it’s that they’re trying to idiotize the rest of the world

3) It was used in a PowerPoint presentation so, yes, it was bulletized

Let’s try and hold out against the nonsense, people.

How Language Evolves

Posted on by in External Communications, Public Relations.

This is a special post for one of my loyal blog snorkellers – you know who you are – who was kind enough to point out ot me that the word ‘equivalenting’ didn’t really exist. (I used it in a previous post – do keep up, Blog Snorkeller Minor!)

I, of course, pointed out that it did exist, and provided an example – which I found on the internet and, frankly, do not have a scooby as to its authenticity. But the point (which I didn’t actually make) was that – in reality – this is how language evolves and becomes the multi-syllabic mystery that has fascinated me practically for as long as I can remember.

But – he brooded, darkly – some things are beyond the pale. This morning, after having fought off the waiter who wanted to bring me some home fries and a ‘breakfast salad’ (whatever, in the name of all that’s holy, that is), I picked up a copy of the New York Times, in an attempt to wring some news from it.

Apparently, the American Army is losing the war against PowerPoint. There are, apparently, people employed simply to prepare update presentations and they are being called the PowerPoint Rangers. Also, it appears, the top brass are not terribly happy with it. All this led to the following quotation: “There are some issues you cannot bulletize.”

Bulletize?

Then the story about the college somewhere in the US which has had two deaths from heroin overdoses in two years. The college is now being patrolled – probably rightly – by US Federal Agents, who are concerned about the “big-businessification of the drug trade”.

Big-businessification?

These are made up words. They have no place in the evolution of language.

Makes ‘equivalenting’ seem almost erudite, do you not think?

Serving Mammon In His Communications Department

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Corporate Religion, corporate reputation, Corporate Reputation Management, media relations, Public Relations and tagged , , , , , , , , .

Yesterday I praised Lucas van Praag, Spinmeister-General at the Vampire Squid, for his audacious strategy of actually instigating an FSA investigation to shift the focus from the bank’s nausea-inducing profits and bonuses.

I was wrong – according to this piece by Jason Karpf (a four-time champion on the game show ‘Jeopardy!’) (which is, I can only presume, where the hapless contestants have to escape from a cage full of hungry jeopards? No?), this truly epoch-making piece of lateral communications thinking comes from Texas-based PR firm, Public Strategies.

So well done to them.

Mind, lest Mr van Praag be diminished in our eyes, here’s a piece from something called New York Magazine which compiled a list of the Praagster’s best rebuttals. I will leave the last word to @manic_impressive, who commented on the article:

“Dude, Goldman is just so much better than all of us.”

Doing God’s Work – And Serving Mammon

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, corporate reputation, Corporate Reputation Management, Crisis Management, Public Relations and tagged , , , , , , , .

Goldman Sachs, after a bit of a PR disaster last year (‘doing God’s work’, they were, apparently, according to that nice, humble and eminently charming Mr Blankfein) has taken what I consider to be the correct course of communications action – kept its head down, kept schtum and got on with its raison d’etre, which is the making of frankly obscene amounts of wonga. I’m not going to talk about its first quarter results – do the light clickdango here – but suffice it to say that amongst other little frissons was the figure of $5.5bn that they’ve given to their staff. Equivalenting to some $100k per employee, including the blokes who clean the loos. (No of course they didn’t – you figure it out.)

One of the recipients of some of the Goldman’s cash fallout – quite a lot, I am told by unreliable sources – is one Lucas van Praag (apologies to Mr vaan Prag if I got his name wrong), Director of Corporate Communications of the Sachs Parish. It should be said that, following last year’s PR shambles, some did wonder whether he’d actually earned his money.

So did I – until I read this. It takes a genuinely skilled exponent of the spinmeister’s art to come up with the idea of leaking the suspicion of fraud in order not only to initiate an investigation by the FSA, but also get none other than Gordon ‘Wingnut’ Brown lobbying for it.

It’s a stroke of genius. So Goldman Sachs gets investigated – worse, it’s found guilty of misleading investors in the area of toxic stocks. It gets fined. It has to lose the middle-ranking member of staff that (apparently) landed it in the mess in the first place.

But – but. The fine will be but a fraction of its profits. One gets the feeling that the middle-ranking member of staff is persona non grata anyway and is already washed and in the laundry basket waiting to be hung out to dry. The loser in the whole toxic stocks issue was RBS – hardly the most popular or stainless of financial institutions.

No. On balance, all this investigation will succeed in doing is making people see that nice Goldman Sachs as the underdog, unfairly pursued – nay, scapegoated – for something that could have happenend to anyone. And while people are thinking this, they won’t be thinking about the telephone number profits and fat bonuses that have never stopped being a part of the Goldman’s culture.

Mr van Praag – there’s another big sack of money waiting in your office for you. Enjoy.

Volcanic Communication

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Crisis Management, External Communications, Public Relations and tagged , , , , , .

Well. I know that this has been rumbling on for a while now, and, frankly, from a communications point of view, there’s not been much to say. Volcano, ash cloud, danger to human life, ‘planes grounded. As Aleksandr the Meerkat would have it, simples. But we’re now entering a smoke and fire scenario, or possibly, a smoke scenario involving mirrors, depending on who you are and your point of view and it merits a few moments thought.

Firstly, and obviously, there’s no smoke without fire. (Or in this case, no ash without superheated gases.) By which I mean if the aviation experts say that ash in the atmosphere can cause aircraft engines to fail – and provide examples of same – then it’s fair to say that flying when there is ash in the atmosphere is most definitely Not A Good Thing. There was a bloke on the TV last night who spelt it out quite well – so well that I almost choked on my glass of wine – when he said “if the engines fail, everyone will die”. (I’m paraphrasing slightly.)

Then there are mirrors within the smoke, which is there, obviously, because of the fire. The airlines are losing hundreds of millions of pounds through not being able to fly. And as the situation continues, there’s been an increase in the number of airlines voicing the opinion that it’s perfectly safe to fly – if you’re careful – and that they’ve sent ‘planes up (one with a CEO on it – see how safe it is, if we’re prepared to risk our CEO!) and the ‘planes have come down again completely unscathed. Now I’m but one cynical step away from suggesting that, despite the fact that there is a risk (and I’ll misquote bloke again “if the engines fail, everyone will die”), it isn’t a big risk and – well, set the risk against the money being lost and – hell – get the ‘planes in the air!

Despite the fact that two F-16s flew into the ash yesterday and sustained damage to their engines.

Meanwhile, here on the ground, I can’t see the ash, and I’m relying on the media to assure me that it’s there. Cue the conspiracy theorists who would have me believe that there IS NO ASH and, in fact, the closing of airspace is in reaction to a real and present threat of international terrorism identified by the European governments. Which, if true, wouldn’t make the airlines’ decision to start flying again any less reprehensible.

And as this is, in some small way, a communications blog, spare a thought for the communications people within the airlines with responsibility for crisis management – in fact those crisis communicators working for all the interested parties – aviation authorities, airports, government, weather agencies etc etc.

One ‘plane. That’s all it’ll take and this will be the biggest communications bunfight that we’ve seen in quite some time.

Oh – and if you’re due to fly somewhere in the next week or so – are you sure? I can’t say I am.

Make Or Break For Social Media

Posted on by in Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , .

Here’s a link to dailyfinance.com and a piece about Twitter’s new ad plan, which you can only be ignorant of if you have spent the last day with your head in a bucket of ostrich poo. The journalist calculates that Twitter needs to make between $146 and $241 million in order to justify the current (and apparently sane) valuation of its service of $1.4bn.

(I cannot help but remember Mark Ritson in Marketing magazine saying – and I’m paraphrasing – ‘Twitter worth $1bn? Bollocks to Twitter!’)

Tha means a revenue of $1.95 to $3.21 per user per year. Which apparently is nothing compared to Facebook’s per user revenue of between $3 and $5. Which brings in more than $1bn a year, for the hard of thinking. (I cannot help but suspecting, mind, that this is nonsense of the horrible horseshit variety, but – hey – that’s just me).

Anyway, suffice it to say that there is an opposing school of thought which says that the Twitterads simply won’t work – no matter what anyone says, it’s not like Google (a search engine) and the ads are limited to 140 characters (difficult to communicate at the best of times). On top of that, these ads rely upon people re-Tweeting them and passing them on – a concept which I, personally, find difficult to understand.

The opposing school of thought also points out that Twitter’s infrastructure costs $25m each year to run. Currently it makes no money at all. It simply HAS to find a way of monetising itself – and no, Biz Stone, there’s no time left to do this in a gentle and questioning fashion. It’s acts together time boys, or you’ll go the way of MySpace, Bebo and Friends Reunited.

In fact, now I think about it – and as predicted on this blog last year – there’re only two social media sites left (when I say left, I mean with any sparkle in them). It’s Facebook and Twitter. (LinkedIn is a business medium – and even that, if you listen to the rumours, is on its way out.)

Two big social media brands, one of which will inevitably be eaten by the other in their rush to ‘monetise’ and justify their valuations.

TwatFace, anyone?

Integration – It’s In The Idea

Posted on by in advertising, Communications Strategy, Marketing, Public Relations and tagged , , , , , , .

This from the Evening Standard. For the hard of clicking, it’s a piece about the challenges facing the advertising (and by association, the marketing and PR) industry. It’s about integration being the new black (which was a trend in the mid-to-late Eighties, as I recall, but that’s another story).

“”It is a myth that the rise of digital means the death of ‘traditional media'”, adds Woodford (Stephen Woodford, chief executive of agency DDB London). “It just means there is more media for consumers and advertisers to choose from. The winners will be those who use old and new media and play to their respective strengths. A brilliant print campaign can transform a business just as a brilliant digital one can. But it would be better to have both, working together as one.” That’s what integration means.”

Yes, it does. And I, for one, am a great fan of real integration and the power and longevity it instils into any campaign. The example that is cited in the Standard piece (if you STILL, dearest blog snorkellers, cannot be bothered to get jiggy with the clicky on the link I have so thoughtfully provided) is that of comparethemarket.com and its truly excellent Aleksandr Orlov the meerkat campaign.

Which makes me think that all this guff about integration, and how difficult it is to get the respective teams working together – and it is, it is – is actually missing the point.

The starting point for true integration – and genuinely great campaigns, that reach out to the target audiences through all forms of media, using all the communication tools available – is, and always will be, the great idea.

comparethemeerkat.com and the inspired Aleksandr is a brilliant example. It’s a great idea. I bet nobody needed convincing or cajoling into working with that one.

The real issue, therefore, is not getting people to work together. It’s getting them to agree on the great idea.

CIPR Fail

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, corporate reputation, External Communications, Public Relations and tagged , , , , , .

Before anyone has a pop – while, yes, I am having a rant and poking fun at the expense of the industry (specifically the CIPR – of which I am a member), there is also a very serious message underpinning this post. And why – blog snorkellers mine – would I waste time in delivering the message? So here it is.

We, sad sailors on this ship of fools that we call communications, are supposed to be sensitive to shit. With me so far? Part of our function, and a part that fills the fee coffers of so many of of our finest agency purveyors, is counselling clients (internal and external) on how to present themselves. What to say. What not to say. What to align with. What not to align with. What to embrace. What not to embrace. We are supposed to point out the pitfalls of courses of communications action and – most importantly – recognise when it is best to keep your head down and just say nowt.

So it is with mouth-dropping incredulity that I read this. For you lazy bastards who never click on a single link I post, it’s a story about the Northumbria Police Force who entered the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) PRide Awards (even the name makes my skin crawl), and won an award, with their handling of the fallout from a fatal crash in which one of its officers drove into, and killed, a 16-year old child. The officer was doing 94mph in a 30mph zone without lights or a siren, and he was jailed for three years.

Now. Where to start. CIPR PRide Awards judges – what made you think that it was a good idea to consider this for an award, never mind actually naming it a winner? Northumbria Police Force – who amongst your communicators was so thick-skinned, blind and self-centred as to think that a pathetic PR award was more important than the feelings, grief and privacy of a family missing a daughter? Did no-one involved in this predict the (yes, inevitable) fallout?

Once again, the PR industry gets a shoeing in the national media and the stereotype of the airheaded, oblivious PR practitioner gets a bit of reinforcing.

We’re our own worst enemies. Let’s try and tighten things up shall we, and bring the same rigour that we claim to apply to our client work to bear on the communications we do on our own behalf. Let’s try and be – genuinely – a profession.

And not just a cheap fucking joke.