So why do we use LinkedIn groups so badly for communicating with other PR and comms people? While Twitter has emerged as a useful information and opinion-sharing tool, with many of us making new connections and gaining new insight through content shared – with rivals, prospective clients/agencies, journalists, colleagues and industry contacts – LinkedIn by comparison seems to be a dumping ground for drudgery.

Just take stock of some of the content that has been circulated on the LinkedIn groups (PR, comms, brand reputation, social media) I’m a member of this week already:

- Two messages from agencies wanting to hire people (fair enough I guess)

- Someone looking for a PR agency (we like that sort of thing)

- Discussion: what is your personal definition of a brand?

- Discussion: strategies for staying positive (suggestion: give up using this LinkedIn group and seek alternative thrills elsewhere?)

- Discussion: what is a brand promise?

- Discussion: Google+ and its “massive growth”

- Discussion: Facebook IPO is coming (shock, hold front page)

- Discussion: defining PR

- Discussion: is reputation management just rebranded corporate communicatons (don’t start me..)

- Discussion four steps to capture competitive market share and grow sales (never seen anything like this before)

I could go on – these are just some of them, but are representative. Perhaps I just joined the wrong groups, but their titles all seem to make them relevant. The point is that while few people just use LinkedIn as an extra way of touting their wares and needs to the PR ‘community’, and so be it, many others just pollute groups with so-called discussions which are largely mute because no-one wants to talk about them. Because they’re hackneyed, dull, vacuous or have an obvious commercial bias, or all four.

It is quite an achievement to make content so uninteresting, particularly when the audience is people whose careers should be built on doing the polar opposite.

There’s little active discussion, and too few PR people have worked out how to use LinkedIn groups to build relationships, credibility and knowledge.

And while it’s hardly the best starting point, I’ll start new discussions in my groups about this post. Is that a pin I hear in collision with a flat surface?

Like many of our training initiatives, the #speedvideo challenge was speedlearning – some instructions, some theory, and then put it into practice, with a prize for the winning team. The three-minute videos were then edited, formatted and finalised by our video partner Blueprint TV (thanks again guys for giving up your time to help with this).

The judges considered communication clarity, interest level for the target audience and strength of delivery of the message that video/SEO are now core components of expansive, true public relations, as opposed to a restrictive media relations-only approach.

Without further ado, the winning team was Cakie (sorry, Katie) Swan’s, which served up a recipe for perfectly-baked SEO in PR.

A close runner-up, by a mere point, was Lisa Corbridge’s team for a video about the fundamentals of video in PR.

Well done both teams, amazing what you can achieve under a tight deadline pressure with a camera, light, microphone and large bag of Sainsbury’s plain white flour.

I’ve long been a fan of Lucy Kellaway’s column but today’s piece on whether male executives should get hair transplants to extend their careers certainly bring matters to a head.

It’s a great article and made me chuckle enormously. Anything in the FT that mentions Wayne Rooney has comic potential. And it’s fair of me to do so - no I’m not bald as a coot, but as grey as a (greying) badger and have been heading that way since my early 30s.

But while Lucy gives a cutting assessment of the value of hair in senior career aspirations, there’s a PR point to this too – would having hair replacement treatment, or trying to deny the onset of baldness, have an impact on your brand’s reputation or your own personal reputation? Does being a baldie, a hair transplantee or a wiggy work against you in media interviews?

Well looks do play a major part in determing how someone is pereceived of course. But would someone who tried to cover themselves up look like they had something to hide? Would a silver fox like me appear to be past it? Does the insistence on keeping remaining hair as-is despite the rapid emergence of chrome dome glory smack of being ill-at-ease your own abilities?

Well there’s more to reputation than immediately meets the eye, but here are some hair tips for blokes in senior roles who have to face the media and their publics as brand ambassadors:

- If you’re going bald, shave it. It’ll show self-confidence

- If you’re going grey, get used to it. You might even look more experienced. Just go easy on the light clothing (particularly shirts) for TV, videos and pictures as you might look a bit like Fred in Scooby Doo

- If you’re not going bald or grey, try not to be too smug because the rest of us are. Equally, have answers prepared on whether you use dye

Bald can be commanding, authoritative and the basis of an aura. It’s part of you, it’s part of your reputation; revel in it.

Videos have had valuable since their infancy, but in the past couple of years agencies really seemed to have cottoned on to their value in explaining things, relaying stories, interesting the audience and stirring word-of-mouth.

Yet most agencies don’t really understand how to do videos well. Some agencies have restructured to develop expertise in content creation, which might help them but doesn’t always help clients looking for PR people to counsel them about more than content. That’s another discussion altogether though.

We’ve done lots of videos at Speed, but thought we can always improve skills throughout the team in applying a brand’s narrative to video, ensuring clarity of communication and apply understanding to make the content really potent. There are also lots of practical tips to consider too.

So we’re doing a Speed Video training morning today and have set two teams of all-rounder PRs a challenge: make the best video you can by lunchtime. The one that is clearest, most compelling and best tells the story of where Speed is heading as a business wins a prize. A very PR-ish prize. Being racy might help too, but let’s keep it decent.

The teams are hard at it at the moment. One video will be on the planning of editorial content for SEO, the other one best practice in using videos in PR campaigns. They’ve done their homework. Some people have brought props. Creative process PR rooted in audience nous has clearly been undertaken, rather than just one of those wafty PR brains storms that start with “what shall we do then?”

 Quite what they’re doing though, no-one is sure. Overheard in one plotting meeting:

“Sarah is going to roll, I’m going to sprinkle and then we need to work out what to do with the flour.”

And in another, awash for fluorescent sticky notes: “As cheesy as it is, it does make for a good link. I’ll just have to gaze into your eyes as I talk about rich media.”

Stay tuned for the results later.

There were other points about us not trusting the media very much, which given the obvious commercially-sensitive slants most media have put on the information - Huff Post says lack of trust in established media is a social media opening, The Guardian says trust in the media has increased - were surely a foregone conclusion anyway. When the media (new and old) spins something about apparent lack of trust in media, my eyeballs roll. 

Edelman has clearly long been onto a good thing with the Trust Barometer, but behind the headlines squats the whole issue of not just the fact (well, the fact according to a representative sample of people asked to give their opinions) that trust in business leaders and politicians is at a low ebb, but what can be done to improve it.

Of course the obvious points, mostly already made in coverage of the survey, are that transparency must reign and social media engagement to forge direct relationships with the public is something to cling to. But there are deeper issues to probe here.

Trust may be at the forefront of the story, but trust can’t begained without belief. And while the statistics have editorial appeal given the current state of the country and its economy, they do beg the question of whether Britons have ever trusted business leaders and politicians. We may need them, we may favour them over other alternatives, but we don’t necessarily trust them because we (probably) won’t ever really believe them - because they have a personal and commercial/governmental agenda to pursue. Their intentions are not typically seen as pure, so what comes out of their mouths and the way in which they behave will always be perceived with that in mind.

Sometimes I don’t completely trust my friends or those around me. That’s not a character flaw per se, but a consequence of me knowing that the thinly-veiled reason for their question, comment or behaviour may be something like giving me the ‘opportunity’ of some more work to do, or convincing me that it really is my round at the pub.

I doubt whether merchants in medieval times or past kings were trusted much by the public, and many may have been despised. We didn’t know about trust levels back then because we didn’t try to measure them scientifically, but I doubt a survey of the Holy Land about whether the local populace thought Herod was a nice chap would have given us fascinating and hitherto unknown insight. 

My point here is that while the powers that be do appear to be doing a worsening job of engendering trust in their audiences, that in itself is nothing new. Scepticism has always existed, and nowhere has it been more at home than in Britain. What communciators should be focussing on is how to make the truth believed.

A changed media landscape means the truth will out. So spinning it and trying to control media agendas won’t work anymore, and the public probably didn’t trust you any more even when you could do that.

These days your work to build trust must centre on a communications strategy that seeks to build reputation in layers over time, believably. To use Alastair Campbell’s analogy from the event Speed ran last week, it’s about landing dots on a blank page.

The difference is that – providing you tell the truth – the immediacy and transparency of digital media can be combined with the reach and calibre of conventional media to join those dots faster. No one media type will create belief, it needs to be built over time, using all appropriate media outlets in the right combination, with the right content, rooted in an intimate understanding of the audience. That’s how PR can best help to improve overall levels of trust.

It’s PR’s (public relations, not media relations) central challenge in modernising, and it will take time, trust me.

That’s something which has been drilled into everyone in this line of work for years now. Yet being a communicator is a pretty broad remit isn’t it? Anyone with a mouth and a pair of ears has the potential. Which might be why the people who work in comms teams typically find themselves doing all manner of things in the course of their jobs.

On paper at least, such a broad take on what comms is might be a good thing, given fragmented and more accessible media is stretching the boundaries in so many directions.

In the future though, the role of comms teams, and in particular that of the communications director, is going to have to be clarified, focused and ‘upgraded’ if brands are to use the potential of communications to increase their value.

Live, breathe and champion

In short, brands are going to need to sustain joined-up, empathetic, collaborative and near-instantaneous communication if they’re going to defend and build their reputations through content that really influences. And this is going to mean comms teams have to live, breathe and persistently champion the cause of communications.

Communications itself needs a PR job doing, and rightly so. And who better (who else?) to do that than the communicators?

At Speed’s Control in the Age of Anarchy event last week (yes, I’ve mentioned it before, but hey that’s anarchy for you), Alastair Campbell talked about why communicators are going to have to “land dots on a blank page” through sustained communications strategies that build reputation long-term. One campaign doth not a reputation make.

What struck me is that the change that’s coming for communications teams, and has already started to take effect actually, is that communications is becoming a long-term game rather than something overly caught up with shot-term wins. Tomorrow’s comms teams are going to have to both mastermind the brand’s story and tell each of its chapters – and pages – in the most compelling way to hook readers in. They must both sustain their interest and build their belief.

It’s storytime

To succeed with this, brands will need storytellers, not just good orators, curators, conductors or stuntmasters. Those storytellers will need to know the beginning of the story, its intended end (of that instalment) and how they’ll get there. And most of all, who they’re writing for.

The 10 primary skills and traits they’ll doubtless need, given what Campbell and others said last week and the digging I did in researching for the book Brand Anarchy (due out by Bloomsbury on 29 March), are:

1. Leadership: not just of a comms team, but to lead the evolution of a communications function that is central to the organisation, with a clear remit from the person at its summit
2. Ambassadorial: the ability to speak eloquently, appropriately and convincingly on behalf of the organisation across all forms of media and with all audiences
3. Diplomacy: in ensuring that the communications function becomes sacrosanct within the business and is seen as part of its oxygen rather than something that can be cut detrimentally with little notice
4. Confidence: not just on a personal level, but true strength of conviction in what they’re doing to employ more progressive and valued  communications – they must devise delectably potent strategies and stick to them no matter what
5. Decisiveness: they must determine what to communicate, how and when, and why, in challenging circumstances and with little time to think. They cannot shirk this responsibility
6. Analytical: an intimate understanding of the audience, and how the beliefs and interests it holds dear are changing, interpreting the myriad of data now available shrewdly. And a close observer of media change too
7. Commercial: a detailed understanding of how the organisation makes money or fulfils its duties, and how those fortunes may change as market forces do
8. Educational: the ability to teach others what they know to the point where stronger communicators across the organisation fuel the development of the brand’s reputation internally and externally
9. Marketing: understanding where modern communications fits into – or leads, or usurps – other areas of marketing and accordingly utterly refusing to operate in silos
10. Narrative: per the rest of this post, they must be natural’ storytellers, and always looking to develop those inherent skills further with new techniques

Today’s better communications directors and their colleagues have probably made swift progress with amassing many of these skills. As communications techniques and media continue to change, the trick will be keeping pace with that while maintaining the skills requirements in sharp focus.

Perhaps there’s a story in that.

When we talk about results, we have tended to concentrate on the volume of publicity achieved. Yes fragmenting media is changing that and increasingly campaigns are being engineered to target commercial outcomes, but fundamentally a lot of targets that agencies work to are to get high quality and quantity of media exposure.

Chance and best guesses

So the flimsy fib upon which PR is based is that getting stuff about you in the papers, on radio and on TV will actually make a difference to you or your business. Because we have, ultimately, no way of knowing whether anyone is going to read it, see it or believe it. We don’t know whether it’ll be of influence and what they’ll think.

PR has always been a game of chance and best guesses.

But before I get my coat having completely done myself out of a job, let me qualify those brash statements a little. Of course publicity can have an enormously positive effect on brands and their reputations otherwise PR firms wouldn’t exist. And of course PR agencies can’t be taken to task when publicity campaigns don’t have the desired commercial effect because these things can’t be guaranteed.

Indeed I have successful argued that last point in court on more than one occasion.

Fantasy footfall

Yet the PR game has always been over reliant on its supposed ability to influence people. We talk about it being more effective than advertising because of the power of third party endorsement, and that is probably true. We have even dreamed up daft ‘industry standard advertising value equivalent ratios for measuring PR output. Because we had nothing better and had to do something to justify ourselves.

The lie, then, is that we’ve been planning PR activity and telling people that the topics or content we pursue will be effective ‘because that’s what will convince people’ or ‘because that’s what will inspire the audience. Guff like that. When we have no real way of knowing that, or didn’t until relatively recently, beyond a smattering of largely unrepresentative focus groups.

And yet PRs and those paying for their services were always happy (or mostly happy) to pursue the illusion, knowing that their competitors were all doing the same thing and they had to do what they could to influence the market through the established media.

Now though the lie is being undermined by the very thing that lies get brought down by: the truth. Because the transparency of two-way digital media – not just social media, but conventional media publishing online, and branded media assets too – means the audience can actually tell us what they think of the content they’re presented with.

They can answer back

When we undertake a campaign, carry out sustained communication or even answer a question posed by a customer or critic, we can actually see what that person thinks. It’s direct, visible feedback, and it’s typically provided because they really care about the topic. For better or worse, as we heard at Speed’s Control in the Age of Anarchy event last week. Providing they’re being truthful of course.

What’s more, this level of engagement enables brands to actually learn from their audiences over time – not just about what might influence them better, not just about their purchasing habits and views on issues that might impact them, but about how to better tailor products and services to what customers actually want. Over time, we can even get them to participate in the brand’s story.

So why haven’t more PRs woken up and realised that, while it may be imperfect at the moment, the possibilities for finally measuring what we do more accurately, using direct feedback from the audience we want to reach, is obvious and we should start to change the way we plan and deliver our work accordingly?

We could start to put an end to the intangible nature of PR, start to think about how we could offer consultancy that has a more clinical commercial outcome, and stop coming up with daft, unsubstantiated statements about why the results we achieved were really good. We could fill our boots with this.

Growing up time

Instead, while more progressive agencies are investing time, money but most of all energy in enhancing how they measure their work, a lot of firms seem to be burying their heads in the sand.

PR’s days of being a game of chance are numbered. It’s a really good thing for us. We can devise clever long-term communication strategies and deliver on them. We can be braver in pushing the boundaries of how brands can plan and create influence, because it’s no longer built on foundations of fudge.

Let’s man up, grow up and say goodbye to guesswork.

We launched with a bang, we’ve always aimed to set the bar higher with our campaigns, our approach to working with clients and the work environment we create for our people.

Tomorrow we’re aiming to mark the beginning of the next stage with an enviable sales event featuring former Government communications head Alastair Campbell, former Virgin PR mastermind Will Whitehorn and Speed’s Stephen Waddington, who co-wrote the new book Brand Anarchy with me.

Yes it’s a sales event, but only in the contact-making sense, with no hard sell (not even a copy of the book). In the course of compiling research for Brand Anarchy, Stephen and I undertook many interviews with experienced, expert and infamous communicators who’ve been at the sharp end of the media and its changing times over the past few decades.

Alastair is one of many people quoted in Brand Anarchy, and agreed to come and talk tomorrow about the end of the age of spin and the need for a more authentic style of communication in the future. It’s something that many brands will say they’re already doing, yet most are being challenged by the dizzying pace of media change and requirements to overhaul how they plan reputation management.

One of the reasons Brand Anarchy took 18 months to write, besides the fact that both of us lead really busy lives and did the copy in the evenings, and on trains and planes, was that some of the chapters had to be updated twice because they were out of date by the time they’d been written.

It’s symptomatic of how fast media is changing, and how fast PR is having to change too. Which is why Speed’s next stage is going to be about taking the PR programmes we run beyond audience engagement with clients’ brands, so that the audience has sustained participation in the brand story. It’s a long way from just broadcasting a message at people via conventional media outlets.

What do we mean by that? Well we’re not giving it all away yet, but suffice to say the expertise we’ve gathered and been exposed to in writing the book has given us some insight into how to push the frontiers of PR a little further.

In many ways, what we’ll be doing is getting back to some of the true principles of PR – proper public relations, not just media relations.

Stay tuned. We’d like you to participate in our story too.

But here’s one to pay attention to – because it concerns not an intern, but a superintern. And you, the PR industry at large, have just 48 hours to save him from returning to a life of whippets and gravy.

James Roche has been doing a two-month internship at Speed but it comes to an end this Friday, 6 January. Which is a shame, because has proven himself to be excellent at everything we’ve thrown at him.

As well as getting involved with client work, he has taken the lead on the social media side of a pro-bono campaign we’re doing to publicise the inspirational fundraising efforts of Phil Packer MBE, the former solider seriously wounded in Iraq who later became the slowest man to complete the London Marathon.

So James hasn’t just been dipping in here and there, but running a big project from the off, involving high-profile people, complex deadlines, dynamic content and a need to target a nationwide audience segmented into several specific groups. He took to it all like a duck to water.

Which is no doubt down to his no-nonsense Yorkshire attitude. When James called me and asked about vacancies several months ago, he struck me as the sort of confident, pragmatic bloke who really wants to build a career in PR and can take most things in his stride. Parted from his beloved northern gravy and doubtless dozens of whippets for these two months, he fitted into the Speed team like he was one of us, able to turn his hand to anything and never seeming phased by the tasks he was set, no matter how strange. And yes, we have been paying him. And yes, abandoning real northern gravy for so long and having to contend with inferior southern gravy instead shoes his sheer commitment to the PR cause.

Now James is looking for another internship with a PR agency in London, and is able to start next Monday. He’s not looking for any old internship though a superintern needs a superinternship.

Are there any agencies out there listening who could be his superhero and offer him some time with them? Leave a comment below or email james.roche@speedcommunications.com.

But it’s partly a science too. And as headline writing becomes a more important part of PR, it’s a skill that we could do with brushing up on. If we’re honest, many of us are a bit cack at it (I speak, of course, not of myself) and when we’re put on the spot and asked what a good headline for a story would be, we trundle through a lengthy, flaccid sentence that would make a sub-editor’s eyes roll.

Headlines are meant to entice the reader to read or view the rest of the content. They’re one of the main reasons why people click on links to stories, to blog posts or to content touted using social media. The problem most PRs have with them is that they try to make the headline a single-sentence summary of the story. Which it isn’t.

So what makes a good headline? Well some, particularly those dripping with puns, are simply brilliant because they’re so brilliantly simple. Others draw in readers with ambiguity or the promise of dirt. Some make brash claims, some go large on intrigue, some on smut. Some are just wierd.

Some I remember from my days in journalism are just a bit bonkers and speak for themselves.

Pub that used to be a funeral home may be haunted? ‘Bier, whines and spirits’.

WPC who used to be a PC pursues an unfair dismissal claim? ‘No-nobby bobby loses jobby’

And a favourite from the Currant Bun some years ago, for a story that HM The Queen and her husband had apparently taken to speaking in Liverpudlian accents to each other over the breakfast table: ‘Scouse of Windsor’.

Headline writing cannot be taught as such, it’s a skill that must be learned on the job from others who’re good at it. Here are some top tips for PRs wanting to perk theirs up:

1. ‘Keep it tight, bright and right’ (courtesy of a picture editor I used to work with, applied to pics too
2. Always use it to flirt with the reader so they’re left wanting more (i.e. the main body of the story)
3. Use short words
4. Headlines do not have to be written in good English nor, necessarily, make sense. That is not their purpose
5. More than 10 words is always too long.
6. Do not be subtle or obscure. And if you have a pun, use it, providing it’s not so overused that it will be a turn-off. Flaunt thy copy, baby
7. Use the present tense: you’re touting news, as in an actuality, not a history lesson or some fanciful future-gazing
8. Avoid ‘bad breaks’ between the first and second line, so for example is the last word of the first line and first word of the second line as the crux of the headline/story. It must not just read well, it must look good too
9. Use at least one emotive word, providing you back up that fact or contention in the main copy
10. The inverted comma is an ally: use it to bolster the editorial value of the main copy – it is window dressing, it is the equivalent of showing a little too much leg, but go for it

And finally, a question I get asked a lot: is there any difference between headlines for newspapers, magazines, online stories, blog posts and other forms of editorial copy?

No. Apart from too many online news headlines are crap, driven by search desires rather than editorial potency ones.

Actually, one more question: are British headline writers the very best in the entire world bar none?

Yes.