media relations

Talking Sense About Social Media

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, corporate reputation, External Communications, media relations, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , .

Today, lovely blog snorkellers mine, I’m going to get all volte face on your asses.

Today, I would like to say that I am prepared to accept that social media can be a force for good – in a commercial communications, sales and marketing context. I am prepared to go as far as to say that interacting with them might even add measurable value to the bottom line of a company, brand or organisation. In short, I am ready to say that such a company, brand or organisation should have a social media strategy in place to capitalise on the opportunities that social media present.

The one thing that I am waiting for, in order to make my conversion complete, is some proof that all of this is – in fact – correct. Suffice it to say that in the course of a recent conversation, I was given hope that at least one organisation is actually measuring and evaluating the ROI of its social media strategy. If this is the case, and the results speak for themselves, then I will be a convert. I look forward to sharing more with you.

In the meantime – if anyone already has concrete examples of tangible ROI delivered by social media activity, then I would be genuinely fascinated to hear them.

In the meantime (2), I would like to draw your attention to this. It is a collection of ‘insights from a lively morning panel discussion’ entitled ‘Social Media For Corporates – essential channel or unecessary distraction’, which was held by CorpComms magazine and was a Precise.exchange.

Please, lazy, lazy blog snorkellers, do clickery on the link, and read the comments of Peter Morgan, Director of Communications, Rolls Royce. A case of genuine insght, cutting through the quagmire with the laser scalpel of clarity, or one of old dogs not being able to get their heads around new tricks? I leave it to you to decide.

(Personally, I agree with him wholeheartedly.)

Embrace Social Media Or Die! (Part Deux)

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Marketing, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , .

Oui, oui, my hydrophobic British chums (and dear, dear blog snorkellers of whatever persuasion, religion, creed, nationality or proclivity you may have assumed on rising, this fine matin) here we go again with the increasingly rabid and just-on-the-left-bank-of-sane meanderings of one Erik Qualman, evangelist of this parish and the Dr Evil-alike behind socialnomics.net.

You will know, because of your avidity in the following of this blog, that I have already dealt with the thoughts of Qualman (have a look here) but, to maintain a flimsy gauze of pretence, I will tell you about it again, as though I were addressing the needs of a new visitor.

Mr Qualman puts forward an entire raft of statistics which, on the face of them, appear to tell us that not only is social media here to stay, but that it is becoming fundamental to the core of our very lives. They go on to imply that by ignoring social media from a commercial perspective, then your business will no longer be around in five years, and from a personal perspective, you might as well rub yourself with a fish, don a hessian all-in-one and wander the highways and byways, ringing a bell and wailing ‘unclean, unclean’, for all the future you’ve got as a valid member of society. And I had a thing or two to say about that.

Now Mr Qualman has updated his statistics. Again, on the face of it, can’t argue. Facebook (by population) is the third largest country in the world? Check. Social media has overtaken porn as the number one use of the internet? Check. One out of every eight couples married in the US in 2009 met via social media? Er. OK. If you say so.

I’m sure it’s all true. “Some universities have stopped distributing email accounts…….instead they are distributing ipads” – so, if I’m understanding this correctly, enrol in University, get an ipad. Certainly beats the £5 I got for opening a bank account. And it’s a very attractive offer for those people who a) can’t afford an ipad of their own and b) couldn’t get one anyway because they’re in such short supply. In fact now we know why they’re in short supply – because all the universities had bought the entire stock to give to their students instead of email accounts.

Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined ) (now there’s a nasty thought) – or Allen Detcher – have more Twitter followers that the population of Ireland. No – that IS the population of Ireland, having a laugh. Some of the population of Ireland are finding it so amusing that they’ve been following Elshten Kuneres more than once. Wags that they are.

The point is – and still remains – that I cannot be the only one (or even one of a few only ones) who don’t really want ‘the news finding us’ (rather than us looking for the news, when we want it) or ‘products and services finding us via social media’ (rather than that quaint old-fashioned thang called shopping around when we’re good and ready, thankyou).

I’m sure social media is growing in leaps and bounds – statistically. I just don’t believe there’s any  longevity, loyalty, depth or substance to it. It’s millions of little voices, yapping into a void. It’s certainly not a valid marketing, communications or sales tool.

PR’s Groundhog Day

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

Here’s a piece from PR Week. (What do you mean you don’t read it, blog snorkellers mine? Go out and buy a copy immediately. This week’s cover price is – for the sake of argument – a highly reasonable £32.57.)

It’s about integration – and lest anyone be unclear – that’s the integration of communications disciplines through the creation of what used to be called ‘one-stop shops’.  PR Week see fit to grace the front page of their organ with this story, so they obviously regard it as ‘news’.

But – hold on, and correct me if I’m wrong, hasn’t this happened before (twice, as far as I can remember) – and then sort of un-happened, sort of dis-integrated, if you like? (And I do.)

Doesn’t it prove that the old adage ‘PR – it’s a young person’s game’ is fundamentally wrong? It’s not a young person’s game because young people can’t remember the hideous fuck-ups of the past and thus cannot learn from them.

Mind, as long as the clients are young as well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. They can all repeat the same errors together. Again and again and again. It’s like Groundhog Day, but it will never sort itself out and it’s somewhat less amusing without Bill Murray in it.

And the final bit of the ‘story’ just underlines what cack it actually is. “It’s not as simple as being in the same office” – no, you’re right, sunshine, it’s not – “there has to be a willingness…..to work together to understand…….” Yes, nail, head.

There has to be a mutual respect, an acceptance that the ‘idea’ can come from anywhere, and an innate ability to recognise what makes a good idea. These three things do not come from making the poor, hapless drones sit together and share the same canteen. Didn’t work in the late eighties, didn’t work in the early noughties, won’t work now.

Oh, and for the record, PR Week has been around for much, much longer than a lot of agencies and most account execs. Why, then, is PR Week slavishly reporting this, rather than working from its years of experience and pointing out that ‘integration’ is not new, not big and definitely not clever.

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.

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.

I’m Michael – Fly Me

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

British Airways – what a shambles. A once-proud organisation inevitably succumbing to the terribly British tendency to take something good, and solid, and FUBAR.  (See Sly Stallone and Kurt Russell in that meisterwerk of the silver screen, “Tango and Cash”.)

Mind, this time round, you have to give some credit to ‘Wee’ Willie Walsh, who – it must be said – is not doing a completely rubbish job – of the communication of it, anyway. His tactics, of dividing and conquering and picking off elements rather than addressing the whole, seem to be paying dividends.

For the first time, it seems that media sentiment is not wholly against BA’s management. It seems that, perhaps, the tide is turning against those on strike or threatening to strike. What the truth of the matter is, I don’t pretend to know, but the way public perception is being handled is excellent.

And the latest strike-quelling tactic – the threat of appointing Michael O’Leary as CEO – is a stroke of genius.

(OK – it’s not true – but it is very funny.)

Public Relations – Owning The Media Agenda?

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

Here’s an interesting piece from O’Leary Analytics in Ireland, who’ve done some work on the media profile, and the coverage achieved by, Ryanair – purveyor of ostensibly cheap, yet somehow slightly threatening, airline travel to the masses.

Their conclusion is that the team at Ryanair, love ‘em or loathe ‘em, actually ‘own’ the media agenda – by which I understand that they manipulate it to their own ends.

Which is fair, and probably true – but what is genuinely interesting here and a real lesson for all communicators is not that Ryanair own the media agenda, but how they have achieved that ownership.

Until I saw O’Leary’s work on this, I presumed that it was the force of personality of (Wee Angry) Michael O’Leary, the airline’s head honcho, a man with a real flair for charm, diplomacy and stakeholder relations. (No, of course he hasn’t.)

But it’s not. What it is, is the company’s fearless willingness to court controversy and – most importantly – to isolate the stories (or make them up, if necessary) that are certain to create that controversy. There’s also no doubt that success and profitability are key imperatives that run throughout the business and occupy everyone’s mind. (Take the case of the Ryanair ‘we’ll make people pay for using the toilet’ story – started as a PR stunt, now seems set to become a reality, presumably because there’s a few euro to be had out of it.)

If you look at the peaks of Ryanair coverage, they’re mostly around stories that are completely calculated to grab media attention – and they’re not all positive. A set of bad results? Discount fares some more! Halve your order for new aircraft? Give some money back to shareholders! Even if it’s bad news, Ryanair do not seek to hide it – no! It’s just another opportunity to court controversy – to take control of the media agenda.

No – lest I be pilloried here – I’m not saying that this works for all companies in the same way it works for Ryanair. Ryanair is happy to have a devil-may-care, abrasive, unsympathetic, non-customer-centric image – O’Leary (Michael, not Analytics) would be the first to say it’s all about keeping prices down – that’s all that matters (in tandem with making some money for the shareholders, obviously). Not all companies – in fact very few companies – would wish to be seen in the same way.

But that’s not to say that we can’t all learn something from the Ryanair example – adapt their mindset and way of doing things to suit our own set-up, and our own corporate culture. And in so doing, maybe get a greater level of control over our media’s agenda.

Social Media – PR ‘Students’ And Twitter

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

You couldn’t make it up. This is another one of those jaw-dropping, what-the-f*ck moments. A moment when – for someone who’s spent the best part of two decades in the corporate communications business – I actually begin to question why I’m here and why the industry exists.

Here is a link to a post on the Teaching PR blog (May 2009), from Grady College, University of Georgia. I can only presume that this is a seat of learning with the same level of gravitas and respect that is accorded to Keele here in the UK.

It provides some hints and tips to PR students on ‘what not to tweet’. I’m not going to paraphrase it here. Trust me, you need to read it in all its truly frightening originality.

Without beating about the bush, the hints about ‘what not to tweet’ are not bad. Basic, but good guidelines for those embarking on a Twitter feed. But they’re all about image and communication – things that, arguably, a student of PR should have a natural feel for.

Personally, if I came across a potential communications practitioner making any of these mistakes, I would advise them that perhaps they have made the wrong career choice and that they should f*ck off and trouble some other industry with their ridiculous and naïve viewpoints and attitudes. (Hey – call me harsh.)

On top of that, if Grady College feel the need to give these hints and tips to their students, then they have wholly failed to engender any sort of PR sense into them – thus, arguably, their course should be shut down.

It’s this sort of misunderstanding, naivety and ill-informed behaviour that will provide the comms industry with the next generation of PR lovelies – all blonde hair and parties – that will perpetuate the crass mythology of PR as a business of fluff and spin and will continue to deny the industry its seat at the top table.

My faithful blog snorkellers will know my feelings on social media. This scary nonsense does nothing to change my opinions, or give me any faith in the future of our profession. I’ll leave you with the following:

“Earlier this semester, @BarbaraNixon tweeted a wise suggestion to her students: go to the Web and look at your last page of tweets. Is that really how you want to represent yourself to the world?

If not, it’s time to rethink your twitter strategy.”

No, it’s time to rethink your life.