Online PR is a marriage, not an affair

I occassionally browse online sites where people post projects that they require freelance support for. This morning one caught my eye because it's right up my street - a small company wanting support to boost their online PR. Great! A small company thinking along the right lines. Many don't even yet understand the benefits of online PR, so fantastic to see one that not only understands the benefits, but realises that support is potentially needed.

Then, this line in the description of their requirements:

'We estimate approx 4 days, 2 days for each website should suffice.'

Not so great. 2 days work, then nada, for online PR for a website? Online PR isn't a 'project' that can be done and dusted in 2 days. It has to be a sustained effort, ongoing, nurtured and loved. Otherwise it is doomed to failure! Sure, in two days you can do enough to improve your SEO in the short-term, but for real online PR, companies should be dedicating much more time and resource to supporting an ongoing campaign. Think of online PR as a relationship - it interests you, yet you begin with caution at first, then you get carried away in the rush of excitement and can't tear yourself away, then you settle down into a nice comfortable routine - at ease, dedicated, devoted even - with the odd pleasant surprise but otherwise a nice routine of committment and sustained effort. Online PR is a marriage, not an affair!

International PR - focus on India

Some of my readers may recall that back in February I chaired a CIPR Education & Skills sector group panel discussion on international PR. Following that event I blogged about the ethics of engaging with PR 'norms' in particular countries (specifically in China) and how easily this sits with a UK perspective of PR conduct. This blog post was also converted into a shorter article for ConnectEd, the newsletter of the CIPR Education & Skills Sector group.

Today the headline 'Why do PR people pamper the media?' posted by @IndiaPRBlog on Twitter grabbed my attention. This blog post, written by Vikas Kumar provides an interesting insight into the practice of gifting journalists to get them to cover your story or event. I thought my readers might be interested to read this too, particularly in light of earlier posts.

THE headline guided by student blogger

It's a rather miserable looking Saturday today so I'm sticking indoors for now, instead choosing to catch up on reading this week's Times Higher Education (THE). There's a great example here of new media influencing traditional media, and showing that what gets said on a blog - even just a passing comment - can influence one's reputation on a wider scale.

The article, introducing the new Chief Executive of the BBSRC, Professor Douglas Kell, is delightfully headlined 'New BBSRC chief "Olympic gold medallist" of research'. Great headline for the BBSRC and Professor Kell, hey? However, the really interesting thing from my point of view is that the headline was influenced by a simple statement on a student blog:

If research were an olympic sport, the new chief executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) would win gold for "weightlifting with citations", at least according to one online blogger.

The article goes on to mention how Professor Kell engaged with the discussions on the blog that ensued, thus showing him to be 'keen to engage with students, colleagues and the wider public'.

I think this says a lot about journalism when the source that influences their headline is a student blog, but it also speaks volumes about Professor Kell himself. Go Professor Kell! Let's hope more academic leaders can be celebrated for engaging with publics in this manner.

How are journalists using new media?

My approach to using new and social media as a PR tool is to forget about everything that traditional PR approaches might have taught us (well, perhaps not everything, but many things) and view it as something altogether very very different from media relations. Never sending a press release designed for a journalist to a blogger is a good example of this.

I thrive on the fact that new and social media generates opportunities to communicate direct to key stakeholders without having to hope that a journalist will pick up your story and run with it. However, I often get asked how PR folks can use new media to enhance their traditional media relations aproaches, particularly how new media can help them engage more effectively with journalists. This morning an interesting insight popped up on my Twitter feed.

I follow (follow - not stalk!) a few journalists on Twitter. A particularly prolific 'tweeter' is Joanna Geary from the Birmingham Post. This morning she tweeted about the order in which she checks on everything when she gets into work every day. I thought it provided a particularly interesting insight into a technically-savvy journalist's communication preferences. Here's the order in which she says she checks things, check-out the high prority she gives to online communities:

1. Personal email


2. RSS Reader


3. Twitter


4. Facebook


5. LinkedIn


6. Work Email

I suspect that many journalists aren't as 'into' new media as Joanna is, but this is an interesting insight nevertheless. Many thanks for sharing this with us Joanna!

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.

Very useful visual guide for how Broadcast PR people need to rethink PR

I know I am always banging on about how PR people need to rethink this and rethink that, but today David Cushman has posted a really useful presentation on slideshare that really helps PR people to visualise the differences and challenges them to find ways to engage with what he calls 'P2PR' (I like this expression, might adopt it myself!). Seeing as the embed tag is available on his presentation, here it is:

From broadcast PR to P2PR

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: new networks)

Bringing the genius of Wilkes University to a UK audience

I attended a Higher Education External Relations Association (HEERA) meeting week before last as a representative of the CIPR's Education and Skills group. They were chatting about different events that they might put on. Having recently become aware of Wilkes University's highly targetted advertising campaign that ran in Spring 2007, I mentioned this to them as an interesting case study for a conference session. It seems that none of the marketeers at the table had heard about this campaign, so I thought it worth putting a blog post up here with the link through to this New York Times article about the campaign. Personally, I think this is very daring and a genius approach: a clever marketing campaign that is so clever that the PR value it generated as a consequence is probably worth more to them than the actual marketing!

A PR Beast of a Feast

As I sat with my other half yesterday evening watching Channel 4 news I couldn't help but comment on how inappropriate it seemed that the news item reporting on G8 leaders discussing food shortages should be accompanied by cutaway shots of said G8 leaders sitting down to dinner. It was therefore no surprise when The Guardian dropped on my doorstep this morning to see as front page news the incongruous G8 feasting and the leading subject of conversation of the day being hailed as hypocrisy on the part of the G8 summit.

As ever when I see items on the news or making the front pages, I always think about the PR people working for the various organisations behind the stories or battling with them. Sometimes I inwardly congratulate and even envy them at times for pulling off such great publicity. Sometimes I pity them. Sometimes I get angry at them. This time, however, I just can't see how they could possibly win! If I were asked to organise an event to which 8 of the guests were going to be the leaders of some of the most powerful countries in the world, you can bet your bottom dollar that I would be recruiting top chefs to provide a sumptuous feast for them! However, if knowing that on that same day they would be discussing a global food crisis you would see a certain irony on putting on such a feast. So how do you win? There's a cultural difference at stake here too - the difference between what we might consider to be a feast in the UK and what the Japanese consider to be a feast. Is eight courses really that uncommon in Japan? I served five courses to guests in my little two-bedroom Coventry terrace house on Saturday evening.

I therefore pity the PR person who might have had any say in this. On the one hand the annual gathering of eight of the most powerful people in the world is something to celebrate and ought to be celebrated in style, on the other hand if they're discussing food shortages then only the most modest of dinners (or better still perhaps no food at all) was really going to keep people happy. I think perhaps with a budget of over £200m, perhaps there are some other extravagances of the G8 summit that ought to be looked at instead of the food, but no PR person is going to draw attention to any of those now, are they?

"Green" "Sex" "Cancer" "Secret" "Fat"

Great article in the NYT yesterday flagged up thanks to a new contact I've added on Twitter.

Need Press? Repeat: ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Fat’

I don't often blog about more traditional PR approaches, but this is such a great article (though it does confirm what most of us PR peeps know already).

Back in my days as Head of Research-TV we ran several stories to the press on cancer. I remember many of our contacts and clients saying that they wouldn't do these stories anymore because they were tired and overdone, but the message of course is that it isn't they who set the news agenda and if the press are still carrying stories about cancer and you have a good and credible one to tell, then you'd be foolish not to, right?

Pitching to bloggers

There has been a great deal of discussion recently about how to pitch to bloggers. Many bloggers are adding PR companies to spam filters in order to stop being pestered by pointless press releases.
I'm currently preparing a new media training session for a client and searching for useful resources to give them. I came across this really great discussion on Matt Haughey's blog about how to pitch to bloggers. Well worth a read.

Does anyone know what the 'P' in PR actually stands for?

I've heard myself over and over again recently explaining to people that aren't particularly familiar with the PR industry that the 'P' in PR stands for 'Public' and not 'Press'. We are not all simply copy-monkeys churning out press releases and trying to win column inches for our clients or employers. Public Relations is exactly as it says on the tin: managing relationships with publics. The media, or more specifically, journalists, might be just one of those publics - one of many I might add!

So, I'm a little disappointed today that Damien McCrystal's article in the Guardian - Don't bite the hand that feeds you - places such emphasis on the media relations role that the PR professional plays. To his credit, he is trying very hard in this article to establish the credibility and the importance of the PR industry in the UK. I applaud him for that and welcome his thoughts and opinion. However, with an industry that has such a poor reputation amongst those that work outside of it, I think we PR professionals should be doing so much more to show the sheer breadth of the work that we do. Yes, relationships with journalists are crucial, but they are not everything. Sadly, to some PR companies and PR Officers they are everything, and their clients and organisations are the worse for it.

I've made a new friend recently. He's an opinionated chap who has moved in with a close friend of mine and thus has joined our social circle. I like him a lot. However, he has made it very clear to me that if we met under any other circumstances than the social circle of which we are part, he would have taken an instant dislike to me. Why? Because I am a 'PR person'. His staunch dislike of PR people is, in my opinion, purely founded on his misunderstanding of the good works that we 'PR people' (or communications professionals, as I prefer to call myself), actually do. We only met a few weeks ago but we've already had several good (and good natured, I might add) debates about the sins of the PR professional. Articles in the popular press that simply reinforce that perception of PR people as column-inch hunters, no matter how well they might try to paint the profession, just don't help us to improve wider perception of our abilities, skills, know-how and contributions to society and industry. We need to do more.

Twitter drives traffic to the PJC website

I keep saying this and I will say it again - I love Twitter. I am a big fan. This week as I was updating the Pickle Jar Communications website, I was twittering about my progress. This was simply done as an update to what we have been upto at PJC - not with the pure intention of driving traffic to the site because I think you have to be very cautious about this kind of approach to micro-blogging. However, I was delighted to take a look at the web stats and see that by simply tweeting about this, I saw the highest ever peak so far in unique visitors to the site. Interesting how something as simple as 140 characters that took 30 seconds at most to publish can make a difference to site traffic.

'Best Answer' on LinkedIn

I'm delighted. I'm chuffed to bits. I'm estatic ... I'm now an 'expert' on PR on LinkedIn!

If you've been following my blog this week, you might have spotted my post earlier this week pondering just how many questions one should actually answer on LinkedIn. This is because I've began answering questions on LinkedIn in the subject areas that I know best. It's part of my own committment to a) establishing myself and my company as an 'expert' in communications and PR and b) sharing best practice and ideas with other communications and PR professionals, and those engaging with PR, comms and marketing.

So, after answering just a few questions on LinkedIn, I'm somewhat delighted to have had my answer selected as the 'best answer' in a recent question. Then when looking at the question page to see what others had said, I spotted against that this answer gets ranked as 'best answer' in the Change Management category too. Bonus!

I guess what I'm trying to do in this blog post, therefore, is share with you my own journey of how using a service like LinkedIn can help to raise one's profile. In itself, it is a PR/marketing tactic with an altruistic edge.

The outcome of my answer to the PR question is that the person answering the question, Justin Foster of The Tricycle, has also now included my answer in his blog post about the question with a link through to the PJC website (the shiny new PJC website I might add!). It's a great blog post in its own right, so go ahead and take a look.

Creating good podcasts

I love reading updates from Mashable - the social networking blog - and their posts often provide content for my own blog posts for all the right reasons. Sadly, though, today they're forming a blog post for all the wrong reasons. I decided while grabbing a quick bite to eat this lunchtime to delve into their post 'For the Love of Podcasting' and listen to a few of their podcasts. I was really disappointed. I can see they're aiming for a certain style and tone to these podcasts, but the attention to the quality of production is poor. The introduction is rushed, the sound quality is very bad, they don't tell you (from what I can see) how long each podcast is, and the presenter doesn't sound particularly well prepared. This is such a pity because the content should actually be quite good, and is certainly appealing, but the quality really put me off of listening beyond the first 30 seconds or so of each one that I launched.

So, while podcasts are a form of communications that you can produce yourselves, there are a few basic tricks really worth following in order to make them just that little bit more friendly on your listeners' ears:

• be prepared for your podcast. Have a plan (this doesn't have to be a script - in fact, it's sometimes better if it isn't scripted) of what you are going to say and what you might ask the person you are interviewing
• check correct pronounciations of names, and check job titles of the interviewee before you begin recording
• always log the length of the podcast for your listeners to know just how much time they need to put aside to listening to this
• slow down your speech just a little so that what you are saying is clear
• wherever possible, conduct interviews face-to-face. Using a telephone line isn't ideal but it can be okay if face-to-face or ISDN interviews just aren't possible
• invest in decent recording equipment
• edit your podcast. It's well worth spending just a little time cutting out some of those ums and ahs or even full questions and answers that just haven't quite worked to make the podcast flow better
• CIPR members should also check out Karen Ainley's guide to podcasting for PR in the member area of the CIPR website (under PR guides).
  

Multimedia PR flying high

Scott Berinato's post, Delta-Northwest Create the Press Release of the Future, on the Harvard Conversation Starter blog highlights an exemplary use of a micro-site for PR purposes. In my mind this is a great example of a multimedia release. Clear thought has been given to the stakeholders and communicating direct with key groups (staff, customers, communities), but this is also coupled with an excellent news centre with extensive quotes, web videos available for use, broadcast-quality video clips available to access, audio clips for download, and a great selection of images too. This is a great example of best practice for such issues, and one that really isn't difficult to replicate by other organisations with a bit of foresight and a modest budget - it really need not cost a lot of money, and I expect many organisations would see significant return for investing in a site like this for certain issues.

A del.icio.us solution!

Really useful blog post here on how the Missouri University of Science and Technology are using del.icio.us to help them evaluate online coverage of their brand.

Be Patient

Do 'patients' exist any more in the UK health and social care sector? I've been out of the office for most of this week working on a video project for the health, social and child care sector and not one of the people working in health care were allowed to refer to the people that they work with (or on behalf of) as 'patients'. Instead, they are referred to as 'service users', 'clients' and 'customers'. Yes, I appreciate that the NHS wants to foster a culture of 'customer service', and rightly so too, but what's so wrong with the word 'patient'?

What a clog!

Julia Finch reports in today's Guardian of yesterday's drop in share prices at Tesco being largely the consequence of a little too much information provided in Simon Uwins' 'Fresh & Easy' blog. According to Finch, traders blamed yesterday's drop in share price by 11.25p on Uwins' blog post of 26 March, Pausing for Breath at Fresh & Easy. Tricky one from a communications point of view. Uwins is suggesting in his post that the reason they are slowing down the new openings of new stores (or 'taking a break') is to allow them time to listen to customer feedback and respond or make the relevant changes. Good PR practice on the one hand. In fact, excellent PR practice following the correct 2-way communications, feedback, revision, rollout cycle. Perhaps not such good PR practice from a business point of view though if his post genuinely did assist in the fall of the share price. What a lovely case study for a PR student somewhere to take a look at! Hint: there might be something slightly amiss at stage 3 of Cutlip, Center and Brooms' PR planning cycle in this case study.

Digital Media for Business

As part of the work we've been doing for Ideas for Life TV, we were recently involved in a conference on digital media for business hosted at Alton Towers (18 March). Working with Ember Regis, we interviewed the key speakers from the event. Two of them were specifically speaking about how digital media can be used to communicate science and can be used by business. Both videos are available below. The first features Magic Lantern Chief Executive, Anthony Lilley, while the second is an interview with Adam Rutherford, online editor for Nature.

Is it right for journalists to use social networking sites for source material?

So, here is a dilemma that has been rife in the press recently. Supposedly journalists are dipping into individual’s profiles on social networking sites like facebook, MySpace and Bebo to find out more about them for stories they are developing. I’m ever so slightly surprised that this has caused such an outcry, in truth. I think the biggest question to be asked here is where do we draw the line?

Let’s make a comparison. If the paparazzi climbed a tree outside a celebrity’s house and took a photo of them in their bedroom wearing their PJs, or lounging around with no make-up on their sofa watching TV, then there would be outcry and we would consider that wrong. However, if said celebrity pulled on that same jogging suit and ventured out of their house to buy some milk at the corner shop, we would react differently to a photograph taken then.

So, the dilemma is really one of space – personal and public space. In this case, the only difference is that it’s virtual space that we are talking about. As such, if an individual chooses to reveal aspects of their character or personal life online, then they have made a conscious choice to move something that might be private to them into the public domain. How can they then complain if the media uses that information? All the media is doing is exposing such information to a wider audience, any member of which audience could have found out this by searching online themselves.

Using photographs or videos or the like is a different issue, and we have copyright laws to protect against that. Just because I publish a photograph of me at standing on the Statue of Liberty Plinth against the Manhattan skyline on facebook does not mean that I am freely allowing anyone to use that. I still own the copyright. I’m not suggesting for one moment that any journalist would want to use that photo, but I’m sure you get my point. And in the interests of my own self-publicity, here is said photo.