Great PR writing isn't always about the "wordsmithing"

Don Bates, Academic Director of The George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management:

"Great PR writing isn't always about the "wordsmithing," though that's what people may think of first when they hear the phrase. The truth is great communications is really about the logic and insight behind the words on the page. So I think that's largely what's missing at a junior level in PR these days—the cursory research, talking to the client, backgrounding and true reportage that makes a release or whatever you're crafting solid, successful and really worthwhile."

And from his colleague, Jim Horton:

"I've often said I can teach anyone to write well. What I can't teach easily is how to think well. PR writing is explanatory first -- relating facts and the story in a clear manner such that reporters can use the information quickly. There is little need for adjectives and adverbs. Writing is nouns, verbs and objects. To some, it might seem flavorless but to journalists, conditioned to read hyped PR prose, clear writing is fresh air. It is bracing. It makes their jobs easier. It is credible. But, to write clearly means one must know what to write about and present it logically."

(Via Online Public Relations Thoughts)

PR - Problems Recruiting, not Public Relations

In an industry that is meant to be all about communication and transparency, it is a shame that events like the ones Stephen Waddington describes still happen (not to mention people posting abusive comments anonymously on his blog...).

I was fortunate enough to experience a smooth recruitment process with my current employer. A good recruitment agency followed by a good interview process followed by a good introduction to the job, all with good communication throughout from all parties - rare, I know.

Also, it was the first and only job I applied for after graduation and I managed to land it - even rarer (and much to the jealousy/annoyance of many of my friends).

But friends of mine have horror stories to tell similar to Stephen's. One friend got a graduate job with a PR agency that turned out to be not to dissimilar to a call centre. She was made to put a list of 100+ journalists together, push out a press release, then follow up call every single journalist on the list.

Not only does this lazy practise give that particular PR agency a bad name, but it also further poisons the bad name that these practitioners give to the PR industry.

Furthermore, the experience has disillusioned my friend from pursuing a career in PR, a career that I think suits her perfectly, not to mention putting off other potential PR greats as after her bad experience she tells them not to get into PR.

It's also a shame when you consider the excellent PR graduates and young PROs trying to get quality jobs in the industry.

Stephen's post is a wake up call for those who are thinking of playing the recruitment system. Let's hope it doesn't happen again.

Legendary PR Pitches

My colleagues were telling me over lunch about a legendary PR pitch, one that they thought you just wouldn't get away with now.

It goes something like this...

Back when the UK's railways were nationalised under the name British Rail, the British Rail PR account came up for tender.

A few agencies were invited to pitch and a team from British Rail visited the offices of those agencies they think would be up to the job.

So they go along to one office of a agency, are greeted by a receptionist, and told to wait in a waiting room until one of the PR Execs comes to meet them.

To the British Rail Execs surprise, the waiting room was in a terrible state. There were dirty ash trays spilling out onto the coffee tables, stains on the seats, and empty drink cans, various bits of food packaging and yesterday's newspapers strewn across the room.

The British Rail Execs were waiting for a long time in this mess of a waiting room, with no one offering them any refreshments while they waited and no reason given as to why they were waiting so long.

As if that wasn't enough, people kept popping their head round the door and the whisking themselves away again before the British Rail Execs could ask why they were waiting so long.

After at least half an hour, a PR Exec came in.

"We're ready to see you now."

Needless to say the British Rail Execs were very frustrated and angry by now, and said (in a bitterly ironic tone): "Oh, you're ready for us now, are you?"

When asked what the matter was, the executive got quite angry: "We've been waiting here for at least half an hour now, in this complete pig sty of a waiting room, and no one has told us what is going on."

The PR guy calmly replied: "Well, now you know how your customers feel. Let us show you how we can change that."

Inventive, original - and very risky - but they won the account.

There's also a legend about a pitch for a cruise ship company's account where the meeting room was completely decked out like a cruise ship, the PROs dressed up as cruise ship staff, and the clients were served a variety of tropical cocktails - but that's another story...

Anyone else have their own anecdotes of legendary PR pitches?

And I thought I was good at football...

(Thanks Chris!)

The PR of Office Space

Is there such a thing as the PR of the office space?

I like to think so.

I've been told by a colleague about a meeting they went to at a client's offices. The client wanted to position themselves as a European company, yet their office reception suggested nothing of the sort. My colleague suggested a few simple changes that would get this message across clearly and effectively - hang clocks on the wall showing the current times in the major European cities and have copies of the main European national newspapers (Le Monde, El Pais, etc.) available for clients to browse while they are waiting.

Simple and easy changes. Clear and effective results.

There is an office that I walk past often on my way to work, and I have to say that due to its surroundings and not in any way its own fault, it suffers from bad PR just by being positioned where it is.

On one side of this office, there is a lovely little passage between two streets that offers a dichotomy of styles as you wander down it - the passage itself is constructed of steel and marble, yet small gaps along the way offer glimpses of the original London Wall. What really spoils the pleasure of walking down this passage way is the army of smokers intent on clogging the passage (and their lungs) with their smoke.

On the other side of the office in question is a Post Office, complete with its almost daily queue of 20+ miserable workers having to queue for at least 20 minutes during their lunch break to get their post sent.

Overall, it paints a pretty grim picture.

And the office in question between a rock and a hard place?

A branch of Northern Rock.

As if they don't have enough trouble already with out having to worry about their office PR.

Which companies would you refuse to work for?

Richard Millington asks over at his blog, FeverBee, if there are any companies that you would refuse to work for (and the picture of Mr. Burns was so apt i used it for this post too):

"Which companies do you consider ‘too’ evil to ever associate yourself with?

Tobacco companies perhaps? They’re pretty evil aren’t they? Your job is to help people kill themselves. Maybe oil companies too? Your job is to pollute the planet and begin wars. How about McDonalds? Run fat boy run!

So who should you work for? Well the brands everyone loves. Google? Yup! Innocent Drinks? Of course! Who wouldn’t want to work for those fruit-lovin’ (premium charging) critters? Maybe a charity too, Cancer Research UK perhaps? When you do a good job you save lives. Hell yeah!

I think to a great extent this is backwards. Working for a beloved brand is lazy, and possibly quite foolish. Your job is to keep doing a great job. What can you really accomplish at Google or Innocent Drinks? There’s only so much people can love smoothies. As for Cancer Research UK, if you don’t do an absolutely brilliant job, and give 150% every day, people might die. Can you live with that? Perhaps, it might be better to work for an evil empire?"

Personally, I think working in Charity PR would be highly rewarding and you shouldn't worry about something as extreme as people dying as a result of your work - Yes, PR changes things, but not to that extreme. You might say that you shouldn't be a doctor in case you might kill a patient, though I'm sure any doctor would tell you that this is not a good reason not to be one.

As for companies I wouldn't work for...

Definitely not tobacco companies, given the nature of the charity I volunteer for. I wouldn't work for oil companies either, though BP is repositioning themselves as a renewable energy provider, meaning that in the future, if they really do see renewable energy through and reduce the world's dependency on oil, they may become one of the top companies that PROs want to work for - a Google or Innocent Drinks as Richard puts it.


Discussing the issue with a colleague, he says that he would refuse to work for British Airways. He thinks it would be a permanent battle with critics, protestors and angry customers. For example, there is a lot of criticism over Heathrow Terminal 5 that would need to be dealt with, illustrated most recently by yesterday's protests by Greenpeace, where a number of people climbed aboard a British Airways aircraft with a banner that read "Climate Emergency: No 3rd runway." Not a job on my most wanted list.

But how about taking another angle:

If you work for a PR agency and one of your clients is 'evil', how comfortable are you handling that account? Is it better than working in-house because your agency has a 'good' reputation although it works with 'evil' clients?

This would appear to be slightly more of a grey area - few account executives can pick and choose which clients they work with, evil or not. and just becuase you're defended by the buffer of the evil company being a client of the company you work for, it still infringes on your own personal ethics.

Luckily, my personal ethics aren't add odds with the clients that the agency I work for works with (not to the extent that I would refuse to work here anyway), but I'm sure that mny others have had to ask themselves that question and that one day that question will come up for me.

Making the boss look good

Back in October 2007, in her Teaching PR blog, Karen Miller Russell tossed out a few blog topics for PR bloggers, all aimed at enlightening students. One of these was “What I wish my new employee knew", which I covered here.

But another that I wanted to touch was "If I knew then what I know now.”

Donna Papacosta was the name next to the entry, indicating that she had covered the subject. She had this to say:

"When I first started working full-time, I thought my job was to work as hard as possible and to do everything perfectly. It didn’t take me long to discover that my REAL job was to make my boss look good.

I’m not trying to be glib here. Yes, you must accomplish your tasks on time and with competence, but no one expects you to be perfect. You’re going to make plenty of mistakes along the way. If you can support your boss’s efforts, however, you will do well and you will be recognized for doing well."

As a relatively new PR executive, I can identify with the advice Donna gave then and the more time I spend learning about my first job the PR industry, the more I find her comments applying to my day to day work.

Donna has this advice for how to make your boss look good:

"Find out what makes him tick. Uncover her greatest needs in the organization and then try to help her meet them. Is Project A more important than Project B? Does he need assistance in a particular area to make HIS boss take notice?

If you make the move to your own business, as I have done, you need to transfer these skills to making your clients look good. (Yes, now I have 20 bosses to please)."

I think that the ways to make your boss look good that she mentions apply not only when you start your own business, but also when you get your first account - what have I done in the past to make my boss look good that I can use to make my clients look good?

Luckily, I have a extremely competent and knowledgable boss who gives me lots of support and opportunities for development. In return, I'm always sending over ideas/articles/blog posts/new opportunities for him that apply to our clients.

He often takes the credit for these when he discusses these ideas with our clients, which makes him, and the company, look great and so support our current work, improve on our company's reputation, and generate more business - what I like to think as PR for the company.

As time has gone on, my boss has become more confident in my abilities and has exposed me to clients - both in meetings and in every day phone/email contact - meaning that I am given experience and knowledge, as well as ackowledging my prowess as a PR executive. But my boss, and therefore the company, is given more recognition and an improved reputation for employing an excellent young executive (at least that's what I hope I'm regarded as anyway!).

As my boss acknowledges my efforts by giving me more exposure, experience and opportunities for development, it makes me want to offer him more ideas, work harder/smarter and make him/the company look even better. These improvements to our company have benefits that naturally carry over to our clients. It becomes a win-win situation all round.

So, yes - a big part of my job is to make the boss look good. But this is a very good thing for all involved and works when there is a mutual recognition of what the boss' needs are and how the employee/employer works.

When I (hopefully) climb up to the dizzy heights of the PR and Communciations industry and start to have people working under me, I hope they support me in the ways mentioned above. Perhaps more importantly though, I hope I'll remember my PR roots and support them in the way that I am being supported now.

Do Not Read This Post

Ok, I admit it - I read Michael Hay's post, even though he told me not to.

It got me wondering though if anyone has ever sent a release to a journo with the subject "Do not read this press release"?

I've got a feeling that rather than working really well, it would probably backfire and make it really easy for them to actually hit the delete button yet again - accompanied by a smart one liner like, er, "Ok!"*

And, just for your information (and a bit of self-respect), I didn't click on the link.

*Apologies for lack of better one liner - probably why I'm a flack rather than a hack, or maybe my brain has slowed down towards the end of the week...

How can PR practitioners use Twitter?

Since signing up to Twitter, I've tried to apply its use to the practise of PR - how it can improve my PR practises, how clients can benefit from it, how it can be used to generate coverage/awareness/clearer communciation, etc.

Before I go on any further, I'm not just selfishly mining Twitter for its use to me as a PR practitioner, but I'm also getting immersed in the community and hopefully contributing to it in a meaningful way (or as meaningful a way as 140 word texts can be...).

So how can the PR industry use Twitter?

For the personal and celebrity PR sector, Twitter can be used to alert people and create awareness of events that a client will be appearring at. For example, Stuart Bruce is using Twitter for politician Alan Johnson, who is campaigning for the position of deputy leader of the UK Labour party, to create buzz by posting a sentence or two about each event he attends. You can see how they are using Twitter on the campaign home page. (Thanks Tom!)

This can be applied to any event that needs PR to raise awareness/create buzz for. There have already been several examples of people using Twitter (Twits?) to blog about events, so the reverse could also happen - events blogging to the people.

Lee Odden followed this same trail of thought when he posted some great tips as a Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, which included discussion on Twitter's commercial uses:

"A variety of commercial applications for Twitter have begun popping up including political candidates posting updates from the road as has happened with Barack Obama & John Edwards. Other commercial and marketing use examples of Twitter include JetBlue promoting special offers, the BBC posting news items, Apple posts it’s own news (bypassing the media - hmmm) and online retailer Woot posting deals throughout the day".

For internal communications, if your organisation's internal system breaks down, Twitter could be used as a back up. Companies can use Twitter when mass communicating amongst several employees, as long as the communications are not confidential! (Thanks David!)

For Charity PR, Twitter can be used to direct people to good causes. There's plenty of posts of people doing sponsored events - charities could use their supporters who are on Twitter to communciate and get the message out about their event. Twitter allows people to use their friend lists to propagate that information faster, and try to draw more direct help down to a problem. (Thanks Drew!)

David Armano has an interesting angle that is applicable to the PR industry:

"If you are interested about marketing, conversations and the ways which we communicate with each other (and how this is changing and evolving), you should at least investigate what the hoopla is all about. My recent experiences with Twitter tell me that the service is morphing due to how users want to use it. What was once initially designed to answer the question “what are you doing?”, has turned into a free-form communications service where people are having burts of shorthand conversations, sharing links and information in rapid-fire fashion…Personally, I think Twitter is a pretty powerful tool for anything involving promotions, events and communities."

It is also worth pointing to several tools for Twitter that would be of use for PR practitioners:

TweetVolume, a frequency search tool to see how often a unique name (person, brand, etc) is mentioned on Twitter, would be really useful to see how much your client/product/brand is being discussed in the "Twittersphere" (Bare with me - still getting the hang of Twitter lingo...)

Twitter Groups allows you to tag your followers into different groups, which means you can send a message to those groups without needing to send the message to each person one at a time - great for finding people interested in a particular story/prudct/brand or to find ready made case studies before pitching to a journo, or for targeting specific groups of people when you need a response about an issue.

For a complete list of Twitter applications, take a look here.

In the end, it is worth quoting Sharon Sarmiento who argues that we should imitate the people who are using Twitter intelligently:

"If you do, you just might find a new way of connecting with your target niche, scoop a story before your competitors, meet a future business partner, or streamline your arsenal of electronic communication tools."

Aren't the points that Sharon makes applicable to all PR tools, traditional or otherwise?

Essentially, Twitter is another tool for communication - like blogging, podcasts, and other social networking sites - where traditional PR practise needs to be applied and used intelligently for our PR needs.

Tweet so sweet

So less than 24 hours into my Twitter adventure and I'm learning its uses all the time.

Adam Denison (@AdamDenison) and Kai Chan Vong (@kaichanvong) gave me a warm welcome into the community, as well as some tips on how to get started.

Marina Martin (@MarinaMartin) pointed me towards her great blog, Oh, Twitter!, which proved a really useful starting point for all things Twitter and a blog I will be following as I delve deeper into the Twitter community.

And Lydia (have you joined Twitter yet?) reminded me that you shouldn't worry about being naive about a new application, especially when using it in the PR context, but just sign up, get involved, and experiment!

One of the best blog posts I've read on the uses of Twitter is by Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk), called "Twitter is paying my rent.":

• Use a platform that lives outside the Twitter web page. If I had to go to Twitter.com every time I wanted to interact with the service - I wouldn't use it very much.
• Using those tools will lead to Twitter interrupting you a lot. Pay partial attention to it when you can, Twitteriffic's large user icons allow for quick facial recognition instead of reading every message, for example.
• Add friends beyond the people you literally know.
• Accept the trivial as important. "Continuous social intelligence" is the best description I've heard of Twitter.
• Interact with people outside of Twitter too.
  

If anyone wants to 'follow' me (doesn't 'following' feel like you're stalking someone?) my username is @benrmatthews

Twitter me this, Twitter me that

I've tried to keep up with the recent boom in Social Networking sites by joining as many as seem relevant to me - MySpace (though I've now deleted my account), Facebook, JustGiving, etc.

When I heard about Twitter, I thought I'd follow the blogosphere conversations before seeing if it was worth signing up for it.

Today, I cracked. As Online Communications seems to be the future of the PR industry, I felt I'd better get involved.

But, as I signed up and searched through my email address book to see whom of the people I know used the service, I found that only one of my contacts did - and he hadn't updated his Twitter feed for 10 months.

However, I didn't left that put me off. I could follow the Twitter feeds of those blogs I subscribe to. But then I thought that most of the blogs I follow who use Twitter have Twitter feeds built into their blogs. I already am a big fan of Google Reader and find it really useful and gathering all the new blog posts in one place, so can follow all my favourite blogs there. Why have the extra account at Twitter just to follow those same blogs?

I then looked through the blogosphere to see why others used Twitter. The Addicted To New blog had some interesting thoughts on Twitter, Canuckflack pointed towards a good reason for why those in the PR industry use Twitter, and Bradley Robb found that Twitter was taking him over.

Arguably the most interesting arguemtn against using Twitter comes from Adam Denison at the For Budding Public Relations Professionals blog: "I would venture to say that the large majority of people have no idea what Twitter is, much less how to use it. Is it really the next big thing if only the PR people know about/use it?"

Ultimately, I'll give it a go, experiement, connect with a few users and see where it takes me. and if anyone wants to follow me on Twitter, and perhaps even give me some good reasons to use this service, my username is benrmatthews

Loopy for Luminous

If you watch any Premiership game these days, you'll see a torrent of players weraring orange boots. These are the Nike Mercurial Vapors, made most famous by Christiano Ronaldo, but now every star player seems to be wearing them - look at the photos below for examples.

What a great marketing idea - get every star player to wear bright orange boots so that anyone watching the games will be immediately attracted to the players wearing them and so want to buy them. This works even better if one of the players happens to be Ronaldo, one of the most in-form players at the moment.

The trend for luminous sportswear probably first came about when Barcelona released a luminous yellow away kit:

Perhaps that was why Ronaldo was so devastating for those years - the defenders where blinded by his kit, let alone his flashy skills...

Now, Chelsea uses the same colours:

Perhaps luminous colours are the colours of champions?

Apple had the same idea by changing the colour of electronics from black and grey to bright white - now any electric item made in white immediately conjours up associations of Apple and anyone seen wearing white headphones or working on a white laptop adds to Apple's brand.

The mobile phone network Orange also uses this idea - any time their colour of orange appears, it strengthens their brand by association.

But I guess a sportswear company wouldn't want a bad player wearing their bright orange boots or bright kit becuase of the negative connotations of being associated with a bad player, which is probably why Michael Owen isn't wearing them!

Mister Wonderful

The New York Times has the full run of Daniel Clowes' "Mister Wonderful" online in PDF format, for free.

I really enjoyed reading the whole series over coffee this morning, and what great PR - let the people sample the product and if it is good enough (which it is), they'll buy it and look to buy other similar products. It also raises Daniel Clowes' name in the graphic novel world, both in the quality of his work and his generosity in putting some of it up on t'internet for free.

I will keep an eye out to see if a wave of interviews, features, blog posts and other PR activities pop up and prove that releasing a story for free worked out well for Mr. Clowes.

Link

Facebook Fatigue - Part 2

A quick update from yesterday's post:

Facebook yields to users (again)

"After a flood of highly publicized user complaints, Facebook this week moved to make it easier for users to permanently delete their accounts and all the content associated with them by posting instructions on its user help page."

(Source: Silicon Valley Watcher)

For all its faults, at least Facebook is more than prepared to listen to their users and then act quickly upon their comments.

Perhaps I won't be deleting my account just yet...

More might not be more

Guy Kawasaki today points to research by the Tippie College of Business that buyers with less information about a product are happier than those with more information:

"They came to this conclusion after conducting a study in which people were asked their opinions of chocolate and hand lotion.with less information about a product are happier than those with more information One group was given extensive information and the other much less. For each product, the group given less information was more optimistic about the product because it was easier to engage in wishful thinking."

Guy identifies the key point of these results in a succinct way:

"When it comes to product information, more might not be more - especially when you have a crappy product."

The problem with this is that there is often the pressure of a client behind you who may want to see that you are pushing out material - even if you know it is wise not to do so.

It is a sign of a good PR practitioner who can persuade their client that more might not be more.

It is ia sign of a good client if they understand this too.

Facebook Fatigue - Part 1

More and more users are reporting that they are switching off from Facebook.

Why?

There are many reasons (I hope that plenty of people will let me know if there any that I have missed), but I think that one of the main reasons is that Facebook has lost sight of where it came from.

I count myself quite lucky that I was able to experience Facebook while at university, before it opened up to anyone and allowed applications to be made and distributed.

As universities often opetrate in a 'bubble' - where there are very few of those outside a university community who are aware of the community tastes and trends -which made Facebook the perfect social media site for these bubbles. Only those from your network (or in this case university) where able to see your profile and what you were up to. Only photos, groups, the wall and events where active, meaning it was simple, easy to manage and very useful - without the daily bombardment of junk mail and applications. Facebook was a clean and simple alternative to Myspace - and that is how it should have kept itself.

As Heather Yaxley pointed out, in September 2006, founder Mark Zuckerberg saidFacebook’s mission statement was “to help people understand their world.” (Source: Green Banana)

Once Facebook was opened up to the public, the issue of random friends added you, and the subsequent spam they sent you, became apparent. How many friends" can you possibly know or keep in contact with?

Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” makes this point:

“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

A person's cirlce of friends that once meant something on Facebook has now become so dilute as to become meaningless.

I think that the new social network sites that will undoubtedly appear in the next year or so will only be successful if they are simple and true to their target audience.

Privacy has also recently become an issue surrounding Facebook.

Indeed, some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data. (Source: The New York Times)

As if there isn't enough to worry about, it turns out attorneys are using social networking sites as evidence and, in some cases, compelling disclosure of what a person has placed on Facebook or MySpace. (Source: Online Public Relations Thoughts)

If you needed any more convincing that Facebook is at its peak, it will comes as some surprise that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has stopped using Facebook. After Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook last year, Gates spent 30 minutes a day on the social networking site, but he signed off after getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day, and spotted weird fan sites about him. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)

You may not have weird fan sites being set up about you, but I imagine that nearly everyone has (or at some point has had) some information placed on Facebook that they would rather not and it now appears impossible to remove it.

And that's not even mentioning the problems surrounding Facebook's Beacon programme. (Sources: Techcrunch, Marketing Shift, and Boing Boing)

Financially, Facebook is failing because it has yet to make money, as these figures show:

• 2007 Revenues: $150 million
• 2008 Revenues: $300 to $350 million (projected)
• 2007 Headcount: 450
• 2008 Headcount: 1,000 (projected)
• 2008 Capital Expenditures: $200 million (i.e., servers)
• 2008 EBITDA: $50 million
• 2008 Cash Flow (EBITDA - CapEx): negative 150 million.

(Source: Techcrunch)

This may well be the reason that Facebook as taken the 'innovative' approach of translating its site into various laguages by getting the users to do all the work. While it may be of benefit to users of different languages of the site other than English, fianically speaking it is only of benefit to Facebook and its various stakeholders. (Source: Techcrunch)

As Juan Pablo Sueiro notes, "Obviously, this will help and probably a new wave of members will join, but to get the “mass network effect” they will need to work hard and not only relay to “user workforce” to adapt their strategy for this new market. Also, some other core releases and a long term commitment is needed in order to adapt the site to the idiosyncrasy of latin and spanish speaking users."

Other bloggers have also noted of their fatigue of Facebook. Tom Hodgkinson took up his issues against Facebook in The Guardian and Neil McIntosh documented his Facebook weariness earlier this year.

Because of these issues, users will start to turn away to other social networks that are simpler and cater more for their niche interests.

While I'm not writing Facebook's obituary just yet, I think it needs to change for the better if it is to continue to grow, to become profitable, and ultimately, to keep on connecting its users.

And if you do know of any niche sites that are tipped to be the next big thing, or of any more issues as to why users are growing tired of Facebook, please let me know.

My First Pitch

I went to my first pitch this week - I was nervous, of course, but it seemed to go well.

Walking out from the prospective client's offices, my boss asked me how I felt the pitch went.

I told that I thought it was a good pitch. It was a short notice meeting and I had spent most of the day before putting together the pitch docuement, under guidance, so I knew the brief and our related strengths well. The actual presentation went smoothly and we answered all of their questions well. My boss naturally did most of the talking - he knows how to pitch and can sell the company and its services better than anyone. I played my part, largely relating to online communciation and media coverage, which I probably know more about than my boss, and the prospective clients seemed impressed.

Then I asked how my boss felt it went.

He said that he wasn't sure if he wanted to work with them.

Now, this was a surprise to me. True, the guy who would decide whether to hire us or not was more interested in his blackberry than what we had to say. But as a new employee on the first rung of the ladder, I'm still in the mind set that our consultancy needs to get as many clients as it can, so that money keeps coming through the door and, most importantly for me, that my bum is still behind my desk next week and my pay cheque keeps coming at the end of the month (Ah, capitalism - don't you just love it?).

Our company has a good list of clients and a great working relationship with them all. If a potential client doesn't fit in with this, then our reputation could be damaged, especially if the PR side of things doesn't go well. Todd Deffren raises a similar point over at PR Squared.

My first pitch was important because they should be easier from now on as I get more practical experience. But even though I would like to think that we got a hire from my first pitch, I feel that I've learnt a more valuable lesson this time from not getting the client on our books.

Innovation in the charity sector

On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to be invited to a Charity Networking Reception, organised by Over The Wall, "a national Charity making it possible for the UK's most seriously ill children to experience a week of normalcy."

Taking place at the extravagant Goldmsith's Hall in the City of London, it was billed as a chance to find about the work that Over The Wall does, but more importantly as a chance to meet other charity representavives and other interested parties to swap ideas, discuss problems and challenges of wroking in the charity sector, and to generate new working relationships to benefit of all.

Among the charities and organisations present were (in no particular order): CLIC Sargent, NACCPO, RNIB, Children with leukaemia, Asthma UK, Teens Unite Fighting Cancer, The Make A Wish Foundation, The Youth Cancer Trust, Association of Childrens Hospices, Children with AIDS Charity, Leukaemia Care, Action for Sick Children, and us, Camp Quality UK.

The list could go on...

I met some really great people from NACCPO who generated lots of useful ideas that I hope to share with the rest of the charity, but who also said it was good to meet me as a point of contact for families wishing to find out more about Camp Quality.

I also found, much to my surprise, that I was able to gives suggestions and ideas for other charity's and the challenges they were facing. and likewise, people came up with some great ideas for us to use.

One thing I noticed is that innovation was alive among the people gathered in the room. These were all charities that relied on funding and needed to be innovative to get that funding. Further than that, as the host of the evening reminded us, with all the people in the room and their charitiers there still wasn't enough resources, people or money to help all of those who we were trying to help. While charities are often fighting for the same funding, we are all trying to help the same people and so should work together to the benefit of all.

There were lots of useful, relevant and valuable ideas on fundraising, recruiting volunteers, providing support to young people outside of the camps we put on, ideas of places/resources to be aware of and use - perhaps too many ideas to use and certainlty too many to mention, but many that I hope Camp quality will use to great effect.

And I plan to share with the other people I met that evening which ones were successful, which ones weren't, and what could be improved upon.

The evening was a great success, and a timely reminder of why I'm involved with Camp Quality and why others should be. More than that though, why others should get involved, not just with Camp Quality, but with the charity sector in general - with whoever they feel fits most with their principles and in whatever way they can.

Find out more about Over The Wall here.
Find out more about Camp Quality UK here.
Donate to Camp Quality here, or through my fundraising widget in the sidebar.

Do some readers want a book that makes them feel sad?

According to Canongate, the UK publishers of Kate Grenville's The Secret River, they do.

The book is one suggested by a book group I go to and it is very good (if very much a work of brain-candy), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006, no less.

But the quote on the cover that comes from Geraldine Bedell, of the Observer, says:

"A sad book, beautifully written and, at times, almost unbearable with the weight of loss."

For me, this seems a very strange choice of quote to put on the front cover of what, as a book shortlisted for a high profile prize, should be riding high at the top of the fiction charts and flying off the shelves of numerous bookshops.

Surely there were more appropriate quotes to put on the front cover? Or am I, unlearned in the arts of bookselling, unaware of the fact that some people sometimes just like a good, sad read?

Are the crazy days of credit over? Libby thinks so...

Had to share a great article by Libby Purves in today's The Times, called 'That hairshirt! I must have it' (Subtitled 'After the spending boom we need the calming influence of Lent to see some sense.')

Some of the best quotes include:

"The 'high risk' that worries the online bank is the risk of itself not making any money out of these spoilsport wise virgins."

"I remember how Access scandalised the cautious with the brilliantly corrupting slogan “takes the waiting out of wanting”, a philosophy now embraced by everyone from Derek Conway's sons to the late-night lad whose knife takes the waiting out of his wanting your iPod."

"Mainly, credit has just helped to confuse the concept of money-I-have with the rival concept of stuff-I-want. It led us straight to the dreadful feature writers' insistence on applying the description “must have” to every luxury item, from flimsy shoes to £6,000 liposuction to reduce blokes' flabby chests (4,000 last year)."

Credit had always confused me, but since working in a credit card department for a high-street bank for a few weeks over the summer I learnt more about it and then finally understood how it works (for me anyway):

Don't get a credit card.

Simple as that.

Read the whole of Libby's excellent article here.

Going through a period of periodic tables

I'm definitely a visual learner.

Show me a smart diagram that demonstrates an idea in a clear, concice and engaging way, and I'll "get" it straight away.

With that in mind, here are several examples of visual aids that have really captured my imagination recently (click on a picture to go through to the appropriate page):

The Periodic Table Printmaking Project is an international collaboration where 96 artists produced 118 prints, each representing one element. They used a variety of techniques: woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or a combination. The idea is to "promote both science and the arts." Read the Etsy interview here.

A Periodic Table for Branding Elements - Groups include: Advertising, Direct, Branding, Marketing Communications, M&A, Misc. (Java rollover goodness included).

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - An excellent compilation of visualization methods, which in turn leads to more delightful eye candy.

Web Trend Map 2008 - Information Architects Japan created this 2008 Web Trend Map that positions "300 of the most influential and successful websites" on a Tokyo train map.

And perhaps the best of all...

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post - From the post:

"You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers."

Genius.

(If anyone else knows of any great visual aids, let me know!)

Wilby's "version of the truth" of the PR industry

Continuing the debate on the influence of PR over journalism, Peter Wilby in today's Media Guardian argues that Campbell's media critique is only half the story, the other half being Wilby's own critique of the PR industry:

"Most journalists at least aspire to some version of the truth. Public relations, at best, aspires to a partial truth and, at worst, to outright fabrication. Over the past three decades, it has become infinitely more powerful, and not only in government."

As a PR practitioner, I have to disagree with this statement. While many PR practitioners give the PR industry a bad name through laziness and poor practise (which is wherre Campbell, and the rest of the public, get their negativenperception of the PR industry from), PR's aspirations lie far above "a partial truth". The height of PR is "an organisations ability to strategically listen to, appreciate, respond to, and (ultimately) communciate with those persons whose mutually beneficial relationships with the organisation are necessary if it is to achieve its missions and values." (Robert L. Heath, Encyclopedia of Public Relations). That entails communciating the truth, but in a way that audiences undertstand and thus generate an understanding of the organisation in question.

As to the PR industry's hold over modern journalism, Wilby has this to say:

"The main reason why you read so little decent journalism, he argues, is simple: hacks don't have time to do it. In 20 years, the amount of space they have to fill on national papers has trebled. But staffing levels are, if anything, slightly lower. The position is worse on local papers, where journalists sometimes write 10 stories a day. A swollen public relations industry has filled the gap, issuing press releases, organising conferences and offering briefings that set the agenda. At least half the news in papers is generated not by journalists, but by PRs or spin doctors, and very little is subject to serious critical scrutiny."

I agree with this position, but just as hacks don't have time to write decent journalism, PR practitioners contribute this by sending through bad press releases. Whilst I think that the argument that PR practitioners don't have time to practise decent PR doesn't have a leg to stand on, there are many reasons why they practise poor PR - pressure from clients, pressure to pay the bills, etc. But often it is due to laziness. Journalists with not be criticised like this if PR officers subjected their own press releases to "serious critical scrutiny."

Wilby questions whether there is a solution to this rpoblem:

"Can anything be done about this state of affairs? Alas, both Campbell and Davies are stronger on diagnosis than cure. "I fear the illness is terminal," Davies concludes. "I don't care if this speech gets any media coverage or not," Campbell told his audience.

But let me make one tentative suggestion. The Northern Rock debacle has led to proposals for "narrow banking", whereby some banks would just look after your money for modest rates of interest without doing anything fancy or risky with it. Perhaps somebody could start a paper that carries only "narrow news". Every statement would be rigorously checked and attributed to named sources. Its journalists would never speak to PRs and use press releases only if they could corroborate the contents from other sources. Editors would apply some kind of test to distinguish the important from the trivial."

A new paper shouldn't have to be released for this to happen. PR officers should be checking and attributing named sources themselves so that journalists can be safe in the knowledge that what is sent to them is correct and credible. Good PR officers also should develop relationships with the key journalists in their sectors, meaning that when they speak to a journalist about a PR piece, the journalists knows that what the PR practitioner is sending through is credible. Otherwise, if a PR practitioner sends through a dud story or an incorrect source, the journalist thinks twice before using them, ad so the PR practitioner (and their client) loses out.

The PR industry shouldn't be attacked as a way of deflecting criticism from journalism. PR practitioners should not be journalist's scapegoat, but we have to help ourselves by upholding high industry standards if we don't want to see this kind of critique happen more often.

(Richard Bailey also talks about Wilby's commentary here)