Only make a PR effort when you're prepared to receive the response

As an avid reader of the Mashable blog and a communications professional working largely with the Higher Education sector, I was quite interested to see the recent Startup Review of Unigo 'a free online platform for college students to share their opinions, photos, videos and documents'.

It's important that I keep aware of sites like this given that I work so closely with universities, and it's always good to see if any of these have the potential to migrate to the UK. So, I clicked on the link to take a peek at the site and was greeted with a pop-up asking me for a username and password. Now, not only has this site had excellent coverage through Mashable, but according to some of the commments, it appears they have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine. So, why oh why would anyone get such great publicity and mess it up by having a site that doesn't work just when thousands of people will attempt to visit it? I couldn't resist but to express my opinions through the mashable blog post and my own blog.

There's a key message here, and a real fundamental of good communications and PR practice, that if you are going to get some great publicity (and good on them for getting such great mentions) you really need to have everything else in place to back that up, such as a website that actually works otherwise all of that publicity will just go straight down the drain. Such a pity.

Ofsted should be congratulated for their committment to communications, not criticised for it

Ofsted have come under criticism today for spending around £400,000 per year on salaries for PR staff. I was somewhat enraged by the BBC's report firstly for the continued negative perceptions of the PR industry, but more so for a) criticising an organisation for showing a committment to communicating well with its stakeholders and b) failing to take into account the fact that many other government departments spend considerably more money than this by outsourcing PR services to expensive city agencies. I think Ofsted should be applauded for developing a strong in-house communications team.

The criticisms hit home with what regular readers of this blog will know to be one of my pet-hates - the continued perception that 'PR' is just about press and media. The BBC online article quotes Mark Wallace:

Mark Wallace, campaign director of the alliance, said: "Who could possibly think, 'we've got nearly half a million to spend on education - let's spend it on Ofsted press officers'?

"It's obscene. Shocking. If the government's got half a million to spend on education it should go on schools or teachers' pay not PR men. OK maybe they need one or two press officers - but 12?

Firstly, as a woman working in PR it's easy to take issue with the term 'PR men', though that is by the by. What I really take issue with is the assumption that a team of 12 PR people actually means 12 press officers.

So, I delved a little deeper and checked out the job vacancies on Ofsted's website. The communications roles advertised (none paying particularly exciting salaries I might add, particularly at the most senior level - the salary is quite modest for this level role based in London) include press officers, a strategic director, a PA, events managers, intranet developers, internal communications staff and publications professionals. Hardly '12 press officers'.

For an organisation employing 2,700 people spread throughout the UK, with all the associated difficulties of having a geographically spread workforce, and for an organisation responsible for inspecting education and training services being used by one third of the England population (according to Ofsted's website), a communications team of this size is probably about right, if not a little small given the sheer numbers of stakeholders with whom they are clearly committed to communicating.

I can't help feeling that once again this is just an unfounded criticism of the PR profession and a gross underestimation of the good and essential works that communications and PR professionals actually do. We in the industry need to do more to improve public understanding of what PR actually is and does, and the media need to start understanding that their own encounters with PR through press officers sending them press releases is not the entire industry. The guy or gal that swipes your card at the cash desk when you pay for your petrol is not, after all, the only person representing the oil industry, so why do people think that press officers are the only people in the PR industry?

Blog vacation is over ... though social media vacation didn't even begin

Hello my dear readers. Apologies for the little gap in posting to this blog over the past couple of weeks. Having signed off on a number of successful projects towards the end of August, I took two weeks out to spend a little time in Mexico. Boy could we learn a lot from the Mexican's in this country about customer service. And knowing the power of new media and how people can and will use it to say bad things about hotels, etc, I couldn't wait to get back to right some of the wrongs that I had read on Trip Advisor about our hotel.

One of the most striking things for me from the holiday though (with the exception of releasing newly hatched turtles into the sea, swimming with sea lions, scuba diving during a storm at night, bathing in the warm Pacific ... sorry, I digress) was the way in which new and, particularly, social media changes the way that we behave on holiday. We announced our safe arrival with text messages back home, I 'tweeted' (just to make the folks in grey, rainy England envious of course) on the blackberry from the beach or out at sea, and instead of writing a good old fashioned postcard we created a PowerPoint presentation with some of the photos (thank goodness for digital cameras and small laptops) with the aim of sharing it with everyone via SlideShare. SlideShare failed me on this occassion, so instead I uploaded a pile of photos onto facebook using the hotel's wifi connection and emailed everyone the link. So, for those thinking that I'm sad for taking my blackberry and laptop on vacation with me, please don't - it was great to be able to share with my friends and family the wonderful time I was having. Isn't social media great?