People and Politics

Well this is a fairly shameless bit of self-promotion. But I felt it underlined a point about the need for clear agency difference, and coming after John Terry’s decision to collect another trophy without having played in the final, perhaps the climate is right for it.

I make a cameo appearance in this video about a certain agency having built a pub in the middle of its new office. Not a bar area, not a few fridges with drinks, a good old-fashioned British pub. The trinkets, fixtures and optics continue to arrive.

In the quest for creativity, perhaps it’s time to realise that most business premises are inherently uncreative places, and we need to think differently. This one was done on a tight budget, but serves as a kitchen and informal meeting space too.

The sort of idea someone could have come up with down the pub. Because they did.

Someone reminded me earlier today about a blog post I wrote three years ago while working at Speed Communications on a list of tips for people just getting into PR that could help them learn their jobs faster and get ahead.

I dug them out, thinking a load would need updating given how much PR has changed since 2010. But in my opinion, all of them remain equally valid today.

All I’d change is that while being on top of the daily news agenda remains crucial, being able to take advantage of new ways of understanding audiences in-depth, on any scale from global to hyperlocal, is becoming ever-more important. So PR folk should be getting their hands on any and all information to help them do their jobs better in that area too.

Another point is that today you probably need to be even more conscious of how PR’s remit is expanding than you were three years ago. That’s pretty obvious though, and something that I’m hamering home all the time as part of our work at Zeno.

And finally - these days news aggregation services can help to give that first blast of what’s happening in the world each morning – although nothing can truly replace the Today Programme, can it?..

Anyway, here’s the original post again.

————————————————————————-

30 ways to survive and thrive in PR today

I’ve been inspired to share some stuff I talked (nicely) through internally recently. It’s a list of 10 things that PRs should do consistently for their three masters: clients, media/client audiences and their own bosses. Not because it will get them a job in the first place, but because it will help make their jobs sustainable and help their careers to progress faster.

These are a mixture of tips picked up over the years, others’ views and plain old fashioned personal whims, so please take them in the (helpful) spirit in which they’re intended. Some are a little contentious so do leave comments if you disagree.

Clients: being on the ball

1. Progress something for every client every day: proactivity is mandatory

2. Shield your arse in steel: document everything accurately

3. Determine your responsibilities and make a name for yourself with them

4. Call every client every day, and surprise them as well as satisfy them

5. Think about the ‘evidence’ of results: make it clear and compelling

6. Find out what matters to them about their job, then help them do it

7. Get intimate with their budget cycles and approvals

8. Become a known-name on the client side: web, email, verbal

9. Think about/develop plans before they ask you

10.You’re an adviser, so underline that: use words like ‘advise’ and ‘recommend’, and offer an alternative if you say no

Media: exploiting every opportunity

1. Listen to a radio news programme when you’re getting dressed

2. Read/listen to news on the way in to work: know three stories each day

3. Get yourself known by every core target journalist/blogger for your clients (max 25)

4. Read and exploit all the media/sections you’re targeting for your clients

5. Understand how journalists work and what they want

6. Learn to write like a journalist

7. Pitch your content in less than 25 words

8. Blog/tweet about media changes and interesting stories

9. Read/watch some media at the weekend, learn about a new one weekly

10.Get to grips with new techniques for evaluating publicity 

And your employer: basic career development

1. Get in before your start time: not to be a slave, but to prepare

2. Do your timesheets on time

3. Look and act like you actually want to work there

4. Contribute your ideas and comments to discussions

5. Get to know people from across the industry

6. Check your email/voicemail when you’re out and take your mobile everywhere

7. Use your mouth (otherwise you’re just a person sat at a desk typing)

8. Do things before the deadline

9. Tell your line manager when you’ve done something towards your goals

10.Offer to take work off others if they’re struggling to get it done

I deliberately avoided spelling out conventional and social media references in the second section because it encompasses all media and applies equally to all kinds. And I didn’t want to make myself look like someone who thinks it’s big and clever to slip the words social and media into every bleedin’ sentence.

Equally, this is not particularly modern advice: most could have applied to PR jobs in 1990.

PR awards have long been a mainstay of how agencies build reputation and are typcially held in high regard by clients when looking for agencies.

Equally, public relations is modernising and, steadily, beocming better reognised as a driver of clear commercial value. While there are threats too, it’s clear to see how we could command an equal footing to advertising and other marketing disciplines.

So given the drive for further integration, and the blurring of the lines between disciplines,  why is it that too few PR agencies make a concerted effort to enter broader awards that the PR-specific ones?

This comment leapt out at me this morning in a blog post from (disclouse: colleague within our group) David Brain. “Know how many CMOs read PRWeek or have heard of the SABREs? A lot less than you think. Enter the awards that are watched by the people with the big marketing budgets, not just your boss and the PR headhunting firm,” he said.

He’s right. There are a host of digital marketing awards that assess campaigns across bought, earned and social media. There are heaps of opportunities here for PR firms and we should be embracing them with open arms.

And while we’re at it, there are many more awards in the business world relating to best practice, growth, innovation and all the things that can make enterprise thrive. Few cost much to enter. Many firms are good at going for the best places to work accolades, but if we’re thinking more laterally for our clients, we should do the same for our own reptuations too.

These are tough but heady times for public relations. Tough because of all the change that’s going on around us as the greater commercial potential of what we do becomes clearer, and heady for the very same reason.

Which is why the election for the presidency of the CIPR this year is seeing more comment and seems to have attracted greater focus then in recent years. The contest between Dr Jon White and Stephen Waddington seems to pit two different kinds of practitioner against each other. Similarities perhaps, but one very much a moderniser prepared to stick his neck out, and the other seemingly favouring leadership by consensus.

Firstly, let me identify – loud and clear – a reason why this post may well be tainted: I have known and worked with Waddington for the best part of 20 years, while I’ve never even met Dr White. Big, fat, overpowering disclaimer right there.

For that reason, I’ve hesitated in writing this post. I couldn’t see a way of doing it without urging ‘Stephen knows what he’s doing, has the industry’s best interests at the centre of his heart and won’t rest until he has made a difference’. But I’ll try.

Here’s a honest assessment of the two candidatures on pixels. Firstly, Jon White’s statement impressed me by being progressive and shrewd. It touts a balanced, measured and sensible approach to capitalising on the CIPR’s progress of recent years by listening to members, assessing needs and then acting on them accordingly. It centres on the PR 2020 report, which seems wholly comprehensive and charts in good outline the challenges that opportunities of public relations today, and how to address them. In short, a proven methodology and it leaves no stone unturned.

By some contrast, Stephen Waddington’s statement is starker and, dare I say, bolder. I’d expect nothing less from him. Phrases like “shift from a craft to a profession”, “assert the role of public relations as a management discipline” and “displace Max Clifford as the mouthpiece” are vintage Waddington. He has also been true to his ‘manifesto’by engaging in debate with the industry rather than just publishing a manifesto– sleeves rolled up, dived in head first. Compare the extent to which the two have engaged in debate in the industry in recent years and Waddington clearly has an extensive track record with probably more content contributed and more ground covered than the very vast majority of his peers. Even if I had to tell him occasionally that the world might get fed up of seeing that big bald head on their screens all the time.

Anyway, it’s a competition between two guys who clearly know their onions and have set their sights on driving further change within the CIPR to build on its transition in recent years. Bring it on. Waddington, though, seems to have set our more clearly not just what we would do, but how he would drive through change and why that continued evolution is needed.

Waddington is one of the biggest preachers we have in PR about the opportunities this industry faces and what it needs to do to capitalise. He’s preaching, though, to an audience that may get it, but needs to be persuaded to sign up fully to the heady changes that are, I believe, inevitable.

The preacher is often preaching to the converted, but he’s got a good deal more people to convert yet.

Best of luck to both and thanks for giving us a contest worthy of an industry in transition.

With all of the facts and the fluster that surround the emergence of data as a weapon in the public relations arsenal, it’s not surprising that the unveiling of Salesforce.com’s new Social.com service has tongues wagging.

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool PR person, you may have stopped reading by now, thinking this is just another digital thing that may be advanced but just makes the job even more complicated. Partly right perhaps, but it may be worth you reading on anyway.

Social.com is significant. The ability to connect social advertising with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and social media monitoring is a big step forward in bringing persuasive marketing into a social business environment. In others words, bringing people and real needs to the fore, and matching products or services to actual desire or relevancy, rather than pinning things more on reach and hope. The ability to draw on content from social conversations when targeting people with advertising could be huge.

That’s all great, but how does this relate to PR? Isn’t Salesforce.com trying to woo brands and ad agencies directly with this? Well if you’ve been paying attention to developments in paid media and how PR firms may look to utilise it in campaigns, you’ll understand that PR people knowing and doing more about paid media, and advertising folk doing the same about earned, is where things are heading. Converged media forces are making that inevitable, as I heard from Rebecca Lieb at Altimeter Group last night – see here for more grown-up insight from her.

One of the things Rebecca pulled out as driving force for PR to contend with is that while more traditional PR agencies may be working hard to embrace digital media, and work in an integrated way across all forms of content and output, digital agencies tend to create more of a divide by specialising further. Rather than joining the dots in order to work out how people can best be influenced and persuaded in a world where data is more readily available and can be better tracked, some digital disciplines are in danger of fragmenting further and widening the gap with conventional earned media work.

Social.com is an extremely powerful platform and way more than a mere tool, but if communicators take it and use it to target paid media content at specific audience groups in isolation from other communication, it would probably defeat the object of being smart about the targeting and execution in the first place. Because converged media means that other words and pictures could be pulling the audience in different directions or fanning inconsistencies.

It’s a big step forward, but highlights a need for agencies – and in particular planners – to be more joined up than ever. While Social.com promises to bring agencies and brands closer together, and make campaigns more effective through the application of data-driven social business, agencies and in-house PR teams need to apply data to bringing what they do closer to audiences too.

And plans to bring social paid media activity to bear on public relations campaigns need to be thought through carefully. Integrating it with customer management data and what people are talking about on social media is great, but doing it in isolation from the rest of communication could leave brands looking less social, and more anti-social. First though, agencies and their departmental teams can’t be anti-social in how they operate.

I almost drowned in my first proper job interview. Thankfully, a feisty response to a feisty question from a veteran local newspaper editor saw me resurface. Just.

So this brilliant blog post set out as an open letter to millennials both brought a smile and made me remember that while it’s OK for PR people who’ve been knocking around in this business a while to grumble about young people trying to get a first foot in the door today, we should also be clear on expectations.

To me, much of this stuff is obvious. I spent most of the 1980s in school watching an economic boom and the rise of an ultra-competitive work ethic. I came out into the jobs market in the early 1990s fired up and ready to be aggressive in order to develop a career quickly, but was hamstrung by the economic slump of the time. It made me and most others fight harder, with 15-hour days and working weekends the norm. We didn’t particularly like it, but it was that or nothing.

Yet in the boom years of the mid-2000s, PR firms were mostly falling over themselves to hire entry-level people. Grads – often whatever their degree – could often take their pick. In the past few years the intense competition for limited job openings has forced most applicants to try far harder and many have endured lengthy waits to get an interview, let alone a job.

Still though, employers talk about the challenges they have with managing initial expectations and with piles of unsuccessful candidates who simply don’t get what it takes to land that first job. In jobs market terms, they’re not house-trained.

Building on the open letter post, here are a few more tips, in the interests of clarity, and in the genuine hope that it’s helpful:

1. Flawless application letters – yes, absolutely. But also keep them brief. As the initial post said, it’s not about you, it’s about the agency you’re joining and what you might bring to it. And if you can’t communicate your own benefits in a few potent, incisive words, what good will you be to clients?

2. Digital formats, such as a video-based application, can be neat and will make you stand out, but don’t sacrifice substance for style. What we do, ultimately, is all about words and pictures. I’ve received many a glamorous photo to accompany CVs over the years, but the words are what count most.

3. Think about what you’re going to wear, what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. You’re applying for a job as a communicator, so you’d better show you have the initial capacity to do so well.

4. If you turn up late, forget it. Have a contingency plan for travel problems and communicate any issues to the interviewer. You’ll have to do the same if you get the job, so start as you mean to go on.

5. These days, YOUR story is public. Of course you’ll think about things like what you’ve posted on Facebook, but it’s very easy to dig further and get a rounded view. Simply changing your Twitter info to ‘Bubbly PR girl’ a day before the interview won’t cut it if you’ve a legacy of mischief lurking elsewhere. Think about it, and be prepared to address it directly in the interview.

And once you start the job:

6. Look to impress from the off, ideally by achieving things that the new employer wouldn’t necessarily expect of you.

7. Aim to achieve something of note for every client every day.

8. First and foremost it is you that have to make career development happen, not your employer. If you’re not driven to succeed, expect to spin your wheels for a long time. It’s a two-way street, so don’t sit there bitching that you feel ‘they’re not developing your talents fast enough’ – do something about it.

9. Be ever-keen, eager to take on more responsibility and ever-ready to help others out. But apply that effort in the right places so you don’t burn yourself out.

10. Do your own PR really well. Don’t undermine others, but equally make sure that the good stuff you’re achieving shines through. After all, you’re a communicator.

I’ve known for years that it surrounds me.

The flagrant misuse of apostrophes envelops my eyes, my mind, my very soul like a rancid curtain of wrongness. Others see these transgressions too, and wince on the inside. Like me, they know.

And like me, they know it’s so tough to do anything about it. We are not fighting a losing battle, but it is a sustained conflict of ideologies. On the one side, people who care that things are done right (and when I say things, I mean the Engish language). On the other, people who’re too sloppy to really care, or who’ve never made the effort to learn, or just not been taught. Not necessarily their fault, but that doesn’t make it any easier to witness.

We are communicators. Communication matters to us because it is the air that we breathe. So language matters to us. And the apostrophe might be the little guy of language, but he really matters. Without him, things can change or lose their meaning. So a.) have some sympathy and b.) do your bit.

I’m not deluded into believing that a single blog post will change this, but I am optimistic that if PR people get their heads around the apostrophe and do their utmost to get it right, together we stand at least a slim chance of educating others. One simple, misunderstood, abused and world-weary little punctuation mark at a time.

This is how to use apostrophes correctly.

But to get started, let’s look at the error that I see each day, all around me, that can be fixed as easily as, well, not bloody doing it in the first place. Just leave it out.

It is not 50′s or 1980′s. It is 50s and 1980s. Unless of course, with the latter example, you’re referring to something that occured in the year 1980. But you get my point hopefully.

Why would a plural figure need an apostrophe? Why? My guess is that someone bottled it once, thought it looked right and people started following like sheep.

Look where we are now.

Anyway, rant over. Think about it. We wield influence, so let’s try to use it wisely.

If we can at least start with dates and get those right, then perhaps use apostrophes correctly elsewhere, and even use correct punctuation writ-large, then our language must stand a fighting chance. Apostrophe’s loss could be our gain.

Spin is dead, if you believe the popular protagonists of the rise of digital, transparent, democratising media. Only authenticity will really win through, they say.

So why is it that every week I still trip across stories that make the audience wonder, and journalists ponder, ‘is this for real or is it just another covert PR stunt’?

The recent Spamhaus DDoS (internet slang for screwing with your traffic big time) attack and spat (though the attacks were later denied) with organisations apparently blacklisted over spam may have threatened to clog the internet, but it also brought questions over whether the whole episode was really just a propaganda war played out in public, done largely to spotlight concern and put the issue on the public agenda.

This week’s rising tensions over North Korea’s stance towards its neighbour and the US has prompted more scrutiny of the communication techniques used by the North, and whether it’s all a cat-and-mouse game with the intention of winning favour. An extremely high-risk move but, but one that some analysts think may just be a bizarre public relations exercise to help work towards a peace treaty.

Do PR stunts that aim to shield the audience from the truth of their intentions, at least initially, or seek to double, treble or quadruple-bluff, have any real place in the communicator’s arsenal today? Can brands both seek deeper and sustained levels of audience engagement while deliberately trying to fool the audience at times?

While changing media may have changed the nature of stunts, they remain virile, with events and activities being orchestrated in the flesh that can drive engagement by social media and accelerate or validate the purpose of the story using regular media. In other words, digitising media can both bring the audience closer and fan the flames. So the stunt can have more potency than ever.

Equally, a strategy of hoodwinking, unless the audience will appreciate the sentiment or find the whole thing funny, runs the risk of backfiring or the cover being blown pretty quickly.

There’s no real role for that kind of ‘magic’ when the audience not only second-guesses your tricks, but holds them up to scrutiny, regardless of the level of talk it generates.

This blog is called People and Politics. Today though it’s more about people – and one special thing I wanted to share with you, particularly those of you with young families.

Firstly, a big disclaimer: this centres on something my employer Zeno does, but forgive me that if you will. This is not an overt attempt at a plug, it’s an attempt to show the value that can come from PR agencies doing little things for their staff that can mean a lot.

Every year Zeno organises a Day of Play – on the first day of spring, everyone in every office around the world gets a day off to recharge. That’s a massive commitment, but one that pays big dividends with a strong culture and sense of unity.

The focus is really on rest. But for me, it wasn’t all rest. And there was no rest for the wee kid. Well, not much anyway.

I decided that the thing I really need to do today was recharge my relationship with my three-year-old son. Some context first: he has a mild form of autism, as a result of which he has only been attending school nursery in the afternoons. In the weekday mornings, he has mostly been looked after by childcarers or my wife while he waits to join nursery full-time after Easter. What he’d been lacking though was any time from me in those mornings, and I’d been feeling a little guilty for not being able to be there at a time in his life that will soon be behind him, and when all of his friends are at school.

So this morning, he got to tag along with me and do something special – a boat trip on the Thames, given he’s fascinated by boats yet had never done that before.

Of course, best laid plans were blown wide open when I had to go into our new office in Soho at 8.30am to manage a big delivery (everyone else being out Day of Playing). No matter, the wee kid jumped on the Tube with me, dodged the commuter throng and got down to some serious deskwork. Breakfast in front of a screen – welcome to the world of work.

Then it was down to Embankment Pier to board a boat – a wonderland for small boys, given the cars, trains, boats and planes all in one place.

I’d been a little unsure about how all this would go, but he didn’t stop beaming from ear to ear the whole time. Nor did I.

In fact, the only difficulty was getting him off to dry land after everything he’d been able to see along the riverbanks – and a moment when the captain decided to turn on the afterburners.

So there was little real rest for me, but it was a one-off experience that was enormously valuable amidst the normal hustle of agency life.

And there was definitely no rest for the wee kid.

PR firms were relatively slow to get to grips with remote working.

And fair enough really. In those early days of the mid to late 1990s, dial-up connections were slow, laptops were relatively enormous and mobile calls were more costly (and you couldn’t get email on your phone).

Some remain hesitant to actively encourage their teams to work from home regularly or give them the tools to work from wherever they are. While the motivational, productivity and practical implications of remote or flexible working are pretty widely accepted these days, working from home in PR agencies remains something that some do well, some don’t do at all and many still grit their teeth about. Many agencies have struggled with getting policies right, communicating intentions properly and being fair to all.

I’m putting this out there, of course, because of the story about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s apparent memo revoking a previous policy allowing employees to work from home. It has stirred debate all over the place, including on this site already.

I’m a big advocate of flexible working. When I started Rainier PR with fellow blog scribe Stephen Waddington in 1998, we allowed it from the start, with clear policies, and developed those over the years as technology improved and people’s circumstances changed. For me, PR agencies and the ability for people to work remotely as and when they need to go hand in hand.

But building location, and the ever-presence of people in it, isn’t the real issue here. We’re missing the point. The point is trust in your talent.

All flexibility in employer/employee relationships is based on trust, and flexible working is no different. If you have the kind of culture that attracts great talent and fosters trust, flexible working should be just a by-product of it, rather than a political football. If you trust your people to work hard in the office, you can trust them to work hard wherever they are.

The problem is that many agencies dabble without really committing, which is about as unrealistic as being half-pregnant. Agencies should either commit to allowing remote working and be clear on it, or not offer it at all. Offering the prospect of remote working but then being reluctant to let people do it is pretty counterproductive.

Agencies should focus on developing the right positive, selfless culture first, then build out remote or flexi working as a manifestation of it, rather than getting bogged down in the remote working debate.

And while I’m on a roll with this here, we should also focus on culture and environment in the office. Too many workplaces these days are often quiet and lack atmosphere. In public relations agencies, basic comms skills like phone pitching can suffer. But if you have strong culture at your heart, your people should be falling over themselves to want to work from the office just as they are from home. They thrive equally on the bustle of the office and the solitude of home.

At that point, location becomes pretty irrelevant, whereas trust in talent is centre stage.

I’m writing this from the Zeno office by the way. Our current London office. We move to a new one the week after next, but more on that later.