A bit of a Friday post this one, but I’m in the mood.

Remember in 1980 (er, I do) IBM said the PC would never take off? Well Twitter may ultimately be a star that shines brightly then fades, but for the time being public relations agencies feel they must trumpet its significance regardless of how well their staff really understand it otherwise they’ll miss the party. Or they have people who do know about it but getting a bit too sweaty in their adoration of it.

So here are 10 verbatim quotes from agencies or their staff wanting to proffer their Twisdom (Twitter wisdom, see?) this year. Some seem like a load of bollocks, others are just so plain obvious that they’re amusing when prophesised. They’re ranked in no particular order – although I had one in mind and it was tempting:

1. “The influentials, celebs and dealmakers you invite will stay only if the conversation is
entertaining, valuable and interesting.”

2. “This has profound implications for the public relations industry specifically and for marketing generally.”

3. “Twitter’s future isn’t just about the people in it, it will also be a network for objects” (actually I quite like that one)

4. “Use Twitter as your scout for cool nuggets to add value to your dialogue with your colleagues and clients.”

5. “As Twitter has yet to hit the tipping point in terms of sign ups in the UK and growth is declining, outside of the Digerati I’m not even sure Twitter is the next Twitter.”

6. “Twitter has suddenly exploded……..”

7. “Peter Hay of PR Week did a great job by running the piece in the first place.”

8. “There are also general trends that people will check their Twitter accounts when they first get to work, at lunch time, and/or near the end of their work day.”

9. “..harness the power of the Twitter ecosystem.”

10. “I’m writing this from Starbucks”

While Twitter is still at the “oof they forgot to put brown sauce in my sarnie” level for some PRs, others seem to be getting more sophisticated, using the tool to draw in media and other reader interest with the power of words. Much like baiting journalists with potential stories by phone, those 140 characters are being put to some innovative uses. Meanwhile, others trip over their own feet. Some things never change.

Look on the bright side, at least it’s improving copy skills. Kind of.

Some stereotypical editorial behaviours by PRs spotted on Twitter recently:

1. Twascal: mischief-maker who stirs it with sarcastic comments about another story, hooks in hacks who comment and then bids to tempt hacks with a dull briefing “opportunity”. Cheeky

2. Twease: makes a statement to get the conversation going, punts it about a bit to get replies and retweets, and then the ‘big reveal’. Delayed drop style

3. Tweasel: sneaky approach; infers information will add more juice to existing news item or take dramatic new twist to spark new story. Success rate mixed

4. Twhore: overblown statements in the hope of dragging in desperado hacks – “..product is so hot it is getting me all excited..”

5. Twoady: retweets journalists’ tweets in the hope that they will then notice their own tweets more, much like telling a hack by phone that you just loved that story they wrote in last week’s magazine..

6. Twumpeter: aims to tout clients’ information just by shouting louder. The digital editorial equivalent of a voiceover man on a 1980s local furniture store TV ad

7. T-wit: always first in with the wisecracks when a journalist tweets, yet has nothing of editorial interest to offer. Great at ‘journalists relationships’ though. Spends too much time on Twitter, employment days possibly numbered. Avoid

8. Twazor: as in as sharp as. Quick off the blocks and usually muscles in on the conversation and copy. Polar opposite of the above. Keep

9. Twimpleton: tries to wade into the debate, but normally laughably late, with a blindingly obvious non-statement and displaying total lack of understanding of what they’re dealing with

10. Twambassador: pops up to try to gain brownie points simply by plugging client, yet forgets this sort of content delivered by phone would make them look utterly foolish. Oh, it does by Twitter too

The Times, this is masterful.

Ah, the power of the inverted comma.

Shorthand. A bitch to learn, but invaluable once you’ve done so.

Yet it’s a skill that some think is becoming obsolete because of the increased use of recording devices.

As I’ve been telling clients for years, if a hack puts a dictaphone in front of you in an interview that’s a good thing. Because their writing may well be so bad that if there’s a dispute you probably won’t be able to read the notes back anyway. Shorthand is another dimension – few people can read everything someone else write in shorthand. When I learned it, I was shown how to leave gaps so you could doctor the notes afterwards if you ‘needed to’.

Sneaky tricks aside, shorthand has been a great asset for me since I went through the pain of getting a 100 words-per-minute Teeline certificate in 1992. It means you can take verbatim notes, unless the speaker talks unnaturally fast. It means you can listen more in client meetings because your note-taking is faster. It means journalists give you a little (just a little) mutual respect. And it intimidates people who wonder what the hell you’ve just written about them.

Yet the luminaries on the Today programme this morning told how fewer journalists and other users write shorthand these days, preferring to use recording gadgets. I can see the point, but in some situations there is simply no substitute for shorthand. The level of concentration means you listen better, and while I’d stop short of saying recording devices are lazy journalism, they’re an aide alongside shorthand in my view, rather than a replacement.

Today’s trainee journalists, interestingly, seem to agree. The number of them wanting to learn shorthand is on the rise.

On Today the debate covered Pitman versus Teeline. I’m Teeline all the way, the light and dark strokes thing makes Pitman a minefield. So no I can’t decipher John Humphrys’ shorthand test from earlier today (below):

But can you decipher my (more-or-less perfectly-formed) Teeline below?

If only you could tweet in Teeline. That’d sort the wheat from the chaff.

The emerging debate about whether libel legislation in England and Wales (the debate seems to centre on ‘UK law’, so the lobbyists are already displaying an understanding gap) is outdated and needs changing highlights the requirement for PRs to up their legal knowledge.

Which probably won’t be that difficult, given a lot of PRs have next-to-no knowledge of media law.

I say that not to be deliberately provocative, (honest, m’lud) but because in my experience accomplished PR people who are great at generating publicity and advising their clients on media strategy don’t know their defamation from their slander. Or their libel. Or their D-Notices. And a tort is a lemony dessert served by Irish waiters in a pizzeria.

Quite how they have managed to avoid legal action to date is anyone’s guess. Sure, most of us don’t spend our time advising clients to say or write something that would cause such an allegation, but the fact that there is so little basic knowledge of the parameters of the existing legislation and case law is enough to make a professional indemnity insurance broker weak at the knees.

One point of contention at the moment is that social media and other online discussions should be exempt from “libel laws”. What a stupid idea. Let’s legalise murder for certain troublesome parishes while we’re at it.

The laws associated with saying bad or incorrect things about people do need to reflect the immediacy and reach of internet communication. But there is a far bigger issue here for PRs – the power of the internet and the fact that these conversations are there forever mean that if you don’t know your legal onions know, you’d better get a grasp quickly, whatever legal changes are brought in.

It’s difficult to say why media law has not been taken more seriously by the PR industry. Perhaps clients get legal sign-off on materials so PRs have figured they’ll leave it to the lawyers. Fair point, but as the impact you can achieve for a client is now driven in no small part by the potency and relevancy of the content you produce, PRs are having to ‘produce’ more words themselves in order to do their jobs. And where there are words (about people) there are legal risks. More words, more risk.

But, question: how many agency PRs have actually been involved in any libel, defamation or slander action, and so have any experience to draw on, or have taken steps to learn about this area of the law?

Here’s an idea: rather than slobbering over the next fat pay rise they can get by jumping ship to an agency that’s in mortal fear of not having social media swagger, or worrying about their alleged Twitter influence and how ‘the community’ perceives them, perhaps a few self-professed digital PR gurus should get themselves a media law textbook and swot up. Or they could go on a course that covers this area, if there were any. The course schedules, of course, are packed with introductions to social media and the like, without more than the faintest whiff of legalese.

But I’d better not be deliberately provocative.

And I say this as a vegetarian of 22 years.

And the reason for the stupidity is not our fault. It is the fault of people who are not vegetarian (but invariably are fussy arses) muddying the waters by saying they are, in some guise. When they’re not.

This BBC article is a great precis of the situation: today, there are fish-eating (alleged) vegetarians not are not vegetarian at all, and there are vegetarians too scared or embarrassed to admit what they are.

So given I actually am a vegetarian (see below), let me attempt to segment the market once and for all:

- Vegans: nil by mouth that has come from a living creature, whether it died in the process or not
- Vegetarian: as above, but the nil by mouth applies to things that have come from a creature’s dead bits (i.e. they still drink milk, eat cheese without animal bits in it, etc)
- Carnivores: obvious
- People who are confused or clueless about what being vegetarian or vegan means, are liars or are too stupid to figure it out, so claim to be some sort of pseudo vegetarian when they’re only really kidding themselves

You can take your pollo-pesco-copout stuff and shove it.

I used to think that what vegetarianism really needed was good PR to clarify what it really meant. It still does, but it also needs the faux-vegetarians to wise up and ‘fess up.

And no, I do not bleedin’ eat fish.

With redundancies in PR at a (probably) all-time high as agencies battle their way through a tough market, I have two questions. Firstly, who’s making what redundancies? Secondly, and more importantly in the long-term, is the PR industry is danger of creating a talent chasm by failing the young people wanting to enter the profession?

I can’t answer the first one. But let me at least have the balls to state how many people at Speed (actually across its predecessors BMA Communications, Mantra and Rainier PR) have been made redundant this year. The answer is two people. We unfortunately had to make some reductions because of client budget cuts. We’ve also had some people leave through natural attrition. There you go. I wonder if any of our competitors will go public (and tell the truth) about their situations? They should do. If not, perhaps I should?

So, to the second question. Having read Britain’s favourite newspaper on the topic of unemployment yesterday, my feeling is that PR agencies are setting themselves up for a fall with a short-term attitude to staff development. Rather than closing the door to new recruits and looking nervously at their payroll, they should be braver. While costs have to be watched like a hawk, they should consider how they can develop skills within their existing teams. They must improve the talent they have and create room at the bottom for young people starting out in PR, as soon as they can afford to take them on.

Things PR agencies should be doing:
1. Establish or rekindle recruitment links with universities and colleges, and the media.
2. Maintain a database of inbound CVs from people looking to start out in PR. God knows there are enough of them.
3. Ensure you are pushing forward your staff so they learn more and can move up the ladder. You may not be able to afford to pay them any more at the moment, but they can’t be left to fester. This goes for everyone in the agency.
4. Meet potential entry-level recruits so you can keep tabs on them, even if you have no vacancies at the moment.
5. In particular, appreciate the value of digital skills and understanding, and the value it could bring to your agency, even in a recession, as PR continues to modernise.

Things not to do:
1. Ignore inbound CVs and enquiries (unless they are really crap or full of errors).
2. Ignore the development needs of your existing staff.
3. Ignore the fact that as the economy recovers, you may be in a difficult place skills-wise unless you act on all of this now.
4. Ignore the digital modernisation that is going on in PR and the wealth of talent that could be coming onto the jobs market with those skills.
5. Ignore the fact that too many PR agencies are commercially childlike, and those that are need the foresight and confidence to get their priorities right.

Point of law: this post may be about ‘young’ people coming into the PR profession from academia, but for the purpose of clarity they are not necessarily young and we are open to interview and potentially employing people of all ages. Just so that’s clear.

These may be strong words, but it’s an important issue. If a newspaper hadn’t had the guts to take me on fresh from studies in the depths of the early 90s recession I wouldn’t have had the start to my career that I got and may be doing something very different now.

But then again, you’re probably still worrying about the excuses you need to keep making about redundancy levels.

As digital media makes the written word even more precious for PR and our Prime Minister shows us the full majesty of his English skills, here’s a list of the most persistent spelling errors PRs make:

1. Definately
2. Loose (when they mean lose)
3. Seperate
4. To (when they mean too)
5. Dependant
6. Privelege
7. Superseed
8. Licence (when they mean license)
9. Miniture
10. Embarass (tad ironic)

And then there are apostophe sins. But that’s another chapter.

And there is no such thing as a press invite.

After some interesting debate on Twitter this morning primarily involving the rarely-shy Charles Arthur and Paul Maher, with the sticking in of an oar (in her inimitable and admirable style) by Sally Whittle, something has been drawn into sharp focus for me.

PRs who get told to do something when they know it’s a bloody stupid thing to do should stand up for themselves.

The issue under the microscope earlier today was media audits, that hollow, hated and typically worthless process whereby a junior PR person is tasked with calling a bunch of journalists and asking their opinions on the PR operation of a certain client, their editorial focus, their views of a market sector and so on. My view on media audits is that they can work well – if you ask the right questions of the right people you can help deliver a better service for them as a result. It’s qualitative research.

Yet the majority of media audits are a pile of irritating plop. A case of shit in, shit out.

A round of calls made to hacks who don’t want to answer the questions, or give fob-off answers. Questions posed by people who don’t fully understand them, or that they’re probably not even the right questions to be asking. And all dreamed up by someone more senior at the agency whose standard new client or pitch playbook includes the media audit.

Because they somehow think that it’s a good idea to demonstrate that this is stuff you’d never thought to ask before, and that as a PR agency you never really talk much to journalists, so doing so now might be a good thing. A bit like a dating agency calling all of the blokes on its books and asking whether they like fanny, and expecting to receive a pat on the back from the ladies for doing so.

Still though, too many clients lap up the media audit. Largely because the ‘senior strategist’ on the agency or pitch team will have thought it to be a good idea. And the poor junior PRs get tasked with whipping one up.

For me the media audit underlines the contention that junior PRs in agency who know that what they’re being asked to do is a daft idea need to stand up for themselves more. And those asking them to do the deed need to apply their brains to what will really deliver value for their clients, and how they can go about really learning what journalists do and don’t want from them.

The same is true of other questionable media tasks that some account directors and managers ask for:
1. Call back to ask why the hack is not interested in the story
2. Repitch the same information as purported news days after it broke
3. Ask a freelancer when the piece will run and on which page
4. Ask if the journalist wants to go to a small village near Swindon to see a piece of software in action
5. Ask why they left a certain bit of information out of the story, or ask them to add something in as a ‘correction’

So if you work for an agency and your boss asks for something that makes you think they’re a bit of a knob for even asking it, please do question its value and whether there’s a better way to achieve the same goal. Do so politely, with the best interests of the client and media at heart, being rational and citing examples that make your experience radiate.

And if they’re still a knob, consider changing agencies.

And if you know which agency is now giving journalists £30 (a whole 30 English pounds) for suffering a media audit call, do share.