Will the web become nothing and everything?

Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt gave a speech at London’s Science Museum last night where he said he sees the web becoming nothing and everything; how it will drive change in society and how he believes the world will become more democratic as a result.

I personally can’t ‘live’ without the web. It has changed the way that I work and go about all facets of my life. I use it at least a hundred times a day to do just about anything from research, to shopping for food, clothes and cars, to buying a house to booking myself into dressage comps. When I look back at how I had to do research when I was a student, it was a case of spending days in the library, searching through dusty books and looking through microfiche (I actually look back at this through rose-tinted glasses and when I regale such tales to my nephew he looks at me as though I am at least one hundred years old). However, the reality was, it took a ‘while’ to find what you needed. Now, a few keywords later and hundreds of references are at my fingertips, so productivity is so much higher.

The downside of this instant encyclopaedia is the issue of misinformation; after all, anyone can put anything up there. And the other big problem is access. How many people actually have Internet at home or work that they can use – there is without doubt a digital divide in this country let alone the rest of the world. Communities have even resorted to building their own broadband networks due to the lack of investment from operators.

However, one thing that cannot be ignored is that the web really has become significant when it comes to news. Once a story is on the web, it’s out there. No taking it back. But will the web become nothing and everything, well only time will tell.

PR and kids

If there’s anything more likely to cause a skirmish in a PR office than the battle over the last bourbon biscuit, it’s got to be the age old debate of footloose PR babe versus working PR mum.

Can a working mother with all her juggling balls flying through the air, ever be as committed and available as the 20-something year old who has to fit in a few trips to the gym and a Sunday visit to the folks, but aside from that, can give freely of her time?

Eagle eyed readers will note that this debate is confined to the women in the office. For today I’m leaving aside the fact that few daddies in PR ever stumble across this discussion and also stepping over the issue of ‘PR – a female dominated industry?’ and sticking to the basics.

Yes, if you work full-time and have children, then the chances are you will spend your life with lists of lists and a nagging feeling that you may have forgotten something. But that’s true of any profession and I’m betting my last chocolate button that most mums are (whisper it) more effective than most of their childless colleagues, mainly because they have to be. There are only so many hours in the day so you have to make every single one count. Conference calls are an excellent time to catch up with your inbox backlog, meetings can nearly always be done in half the time and decisions are made quickly – the spirit of ‘just do it’ lives in the heart of most working mums.

Kids bring challenges: when they’re sick you balance your laptop on their sleeping bodies as you work from the sofa and your day doesn’t end in the pub with colleagues. But children bring a huge wealth and quality of experience to you and your job and boy, do they give you stamina.

Negotiating a £100K contract is a breeze after you’ve done the pocket money deal, there’s no conflict resolution training like refereeing the battle over the wii remote and if you want to talk multi-tasking, then talk to a working mum in December. Aside from the 24 people coming for Christmas lunch, the client bash that you can’t miss, there’s also the small matter of an angel costume (to be conjured out of thin air after even the 24 hour Asda has sold out), the nativity to attend and let’s not forget, the endless Christmas present buying.

So young things with no kids take note – you may be at your desk until 7pm working hard when we’ve dived out of the door to drive like a manic to make the after-school club curfew, but we know that sometimes you use that staying late time to chat to your friends on Facebook and anyway, if you’re very lucky, it could be you one day.

Embrace mummy power. It’s a quality that works just as brilliantly in the office as in the home. We don’t stress the small stuff and if pushed, we can usually rustle up a pretty good cake although as every working mum will tell you, shop-bought, roughed up around the edges does exactly the same job.

What would you spend your last penny on…?

Bill Gates once said: “If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations.”

That may seem a little extreme but the sentiment really is quite savvy.

In these austere times, many businesses are feeling the financial pinch as reports of quantitive easing and double-dips become the norm. Competition is fierce with only the strongest surviving in an extremely turbulent marketplace.

Unfortunately, all too often marketing and PR budgets are among the first to be cut in a knee-jerk attempt to save money and cut costs.

What is ironic, is that it is exactly these areas that, I think, companies should be investing money and effort into to differentiate their brand and give them the competitive advantage needed to survive in what is becoming an increasingly ‘me too’ market.

Managed properly and integrated, a strategic PR campaign can provide a cost-effective tool that can positively affect businesses when skies are grey. Effectively communicating with your target customers and keeping your firm in the public eye; commenting on the issues that matter, can help you stay ahead in a difficult climate.

PR is an investment that can deliver real benefit to the bottom line so whilst I I would certainly advocate Mr Gates’ philosophy, I probably wouldn’t want to bankrupt myself in the process! But then, who am I to disagree with Bill?

PR: Crossing the border

Earlier this year, I travelled down to London to see some old friends from my first job in the world of PR. With our gossiping drawing to a close, the subject of work soon hit the agenda. I’d never told some of my former colleagues that I’d made the move back up North and it came as quite a shock when I explained that by ‘North’ I did mean north of Watford. Bemused and slightly appalled, one former colleague added: “I didn’t know they did PR north of Birmingham?” After I picked myself up from the floor, I quickly made a point of correcting him. This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered these issues, I was once asked whether Northern PR’s wrote their press releases differently. I don’t recall ever starting a press release with an “eee by gum”!

Now I know London is the home of the national press, the seat of political power and a cultural hub, but there is life outside of the M25. Over the last few years, the North West has seen an explosion in the media, creative and digital industries with the fantastic MediaCity playing host to some of the UK’s leading and pioneering media professionals. The BBC’s relocation up North is a great example of this. The move was greeted with much dismay in the capital but it presented the North West with an opportunity to cement its place as the ‘new London’, the second home of the UK media.

In the PR industry in particular, there was once a myth that only London agencies could successfully mount a national PR campaign, but there are a plethora of Northern agencies that can quite easily blow that myth out of the water including us at Bell Pottinger North.  Today, geography needn’t be a barrier to PR perfection; believe it or not, we speak to national journalists every day, giving them national stories from a regional base.

Don’t just take my word for it; take a look at some of our work here http://www.bellpottingernorth.co.uk/case-studies/consumer/co-operative-energy/

Social media for beginners

I could write whatever I like about my mother here as she’s never going to see it. You see, she doesn’t ‘do’ social media. No matter how many times I’ve tried to explain, she just doesn’t get it.

Blogs, YouTube, Facebook – it all blows her mind! And as for Twitter, well I may as well try and explain the purpose of tweeting in Japanese. It’s all absolutely alien to her. “Why do people feel the need to inform others of their whereabouts or what they’re doing?” she said. Now, some might say, she’s got a point, but like it not, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other social media platforms are shaping the way we share information and communicate both on a personal and professional basis.

To many, and not just my mother, social media is considered a bit of a dark art. New social networking platforms are emerging on a regular basis and unless you have a keen interest in what’s new, it can be difficult to keep up with all the latest developments.

While us PR and marketing types know that the majority of people are now active in social media, there are still some businesses that are just dipping their toes in the water.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are now essential communication channels and it sounds obvious, but if your prospects and customers are using these platforms, then you should be too. They are really effective routes to share news about your business and engage with your customers.

However, before throwing themselves in at the deep end, businesses should plan how they are going to use it, who within the business should use it, which platforms will best help support their business objectives, and most importantly what information or ‘content’ will be of most value to prospects and customers.

Social media doesn’t need to be complicated, and there are many different platforms which can help organisations in different ways. Still confused? I love this very simple explanation to social media. Surely even my mother will get this…..won’t she?

Words and pictures

Two image-led social media platforms, Pinterest and Instagram, are currently in the industry’s spotlight. They are both reporting dramatic adoption figures.  Pinterest attracts 245k unique visitors a month in the UK, whilst Instagram is recruiting 5 million new users worldwide every week.

However rather than a new phenomenon, this movement reinforces a basic principle that can sometimes be overlooked by PRs.  Pictures are more important than words in storytelling.  80% of people only read a story if it is accompanied by a picture in the national press.

So if you want your company news to be not only printed, but also read, it is important that imagery is a central part of campaign planning.  The visual side of a story should be researched, discussed and deliberated to the same extent as the wording of an announcement.

Picture desks look for pictures that define the news.  A strong image can raise the prominence of your story, and even enable a ‘softer’ story to achieve coverage that it otherwise would not have.  Make sure your picture is not an afterthought, but an image that captures both your message and also the news agenda.

However rather than an easy route in, picture editors maintain a high bar. They are also deluged with offers of images from staff, freelance photographers and PRs.  The Press Association alone add 25,000 new editorial images online each week.

Furthermore many of the most talented PRs were born to write, able to make the most turgid news sound groundbreaking.  However we are all not born with a good eye for a picture.  To address this we include people with picture editing experience in all PR planning meetings.

But for us without the gift of visualisation, here are a few tips to help:

• Get to know the pictures that publications use and make sure your picture story reflects this.  The satirical image of Nicolas Sarkozy today in The Daily Telegraph is in stark contrast to the close-up celebrity-led shot of Kate Bush on the cover of the Daily Mail and reinforces the difference in art direction and readership.
• A couple of great sources include The Guardian’s picture desk live, giving you the day’s best news photography ( www.guardian.co.uk/news/series/picture-desk-live ); The Daily Edit from blog aphotoeditor.com also gives creative inspiration.
• Work with freelance photographers who gain great coverage in your target publication.  There will be a handful.  Make sure you know who they are.
• Once you have your iconic image, don’t miss out due to failing on the basics – embed captions in your pictures, make sure your branding is subtle and get it to the nationals well before the 3pm editoral planning meeting.

I guess if nothing else, this all explains why the BBC’s most popular and successful schools programme of all time was called “Words and Pictures”.

Championing the underdog

Now I’m not a fan of football – don’t watch it, don’t know who’s who despite living in Cheshire where there’s a higher than average population of footballers; and I certainly have no idea what the offside rule is. However, I do know that Manchester City won the Derby last night.

There are people in the office that can’t keep their eyes open because they replayed the match over and over, and my colleague told me her husband insisted their children watched the match before they went to school this morning.  There are a lot of ecstatic people today and I think I am rather glad they won too!

It made me think that we really do champion the underdog.  (There are many Manchester United fans that will despise me for saying this, but I understand City now stand a chance of winning the league for the first time in decades?!)

It’s the same in business too. I work on communications programmes with a lot of start up companies, and I find that when talking to journalists, they find it refreshing to hear from someone other than the market leader or whoever monopolises the market. They like the fact that someone’s trying to be a disruptor and can respond to their requests quickly with often a more controversial opinion which makes far better reading – not something that has gone through the lawyers and now reads in legalese!

There’s something about the underdog that makes us root for them. So come on you Blues!

Twitter comes to the rescue for Katherine Jenkins

A recent Daily Mail article highlighted a fantastic example of how Twitter can be used to diffuse an issue or restore an image, in super-quick time. (To be fair, Twitter is also a great tool to create and issue, or destroy an image, in super-quick time. But that is a whole other issue for another blog entry).

The case in question I am referring to is that of Welsh opera singer Katherine Jenkins, who was lambasted in a recent documentary, ‘Katie: My beautiful friends’.

In said documentary, a burns survivor, Emily Savage, criticised Jenkins for an apparent quote she made in a paper appearing to bemoan her good looks, saying that ‘it’s difficult being beautiful’. Savage said she was annoyed by Jenkins’ remarks, asking whether she would rather swap lives.

Faster than the speed of lightning, Jenkins’, apparently after seeing the documentary, tweeted the show’s host Katie Piper, denying the quote and asked to be put in touch with Savage. Jenkins’ then had a tweet conversation with Savage, again denying the quote and even offered free tickets to her next concert. Situation resolved.

How do I know all this? Not because I follow any of the three women, but because the whole saga was reported in the Daily Mail the next morning, along with the twitter transcript for posterity.

Now, I may be cynical, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a PR guru doing an A-class job behind the scenes. If not, how did the Daily Mail get wind of this so quickly?

Put simply, Jenkins and her PR team did not just need to explain the misquote to Savage, they needed to share it with the world, to avoid any negative PR. That’s why Twitter was the channel of choice, rather than the traditional phone call or holding statement.  

I may be wrong, and the fleet-of-foot idea may have genuinely belonged to Jenkins, but don’t be surprised if you see a smiley Tweetpic of Jenkins and Savage, at the former’s concert, splashed across the DM in weeks to come.