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February 7th, 2012 by Steve

Why don’t PRs make better use of LinkedIn groups?

Most savvy PR people look at the virtues of LinkedIn as a media for communicating with B2B audiences.

So why do we use LinkedIn groups so badly for communicating with other PRs 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 laregly 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 PRs 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?

February 1st, 2012 by Steve

#speedvideo challenge: and the winner is..

Today two teams from Speed locked horns in a challenge to see what they could learn about producing strong videos to bolster PR programmes. Before lunch.

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.

February 1st, 2012 by Steve

Video thrilled the racy PR

It’s strange. There is so much talk in PR circles these days about the value of videos for developing reputation, yet only a relatively small number of PRs know how to make them well and make them part of their ongoing work for clients.

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.

January 24th, 2012 by Steve

Tomorrow’s comms teams: stand up natural narrators

We’re not just PR people, we’re communicators. No longer just ‘the press people’.

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.

December 21st, 2011 by Steve

Freddie Starr ate my headline

Headline writing is an art, they say.

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.

October 10th, 2011 by Steve

Degrees of separation: what should tomorrow’s PRs study?

I’ve said before, and my opposite number has said before, that PR is going back to the future.

By that, I mean that having buried itself up to its neck in media relations for the past 50 years or more, the digitisation of media finally seems to be forcing PR to again a more expansive view of what the infuence game is all about.

Just like PR pioneers did in the first half of the last century, today more and more of the discussion about brand reputation  and how best to impart influence is poking around topics that really amount to social psychology. Having spent decades trying to convince clients of the actual or the assumed value of a high volume and strong quality of publicity gained in an ever-expandiong conventional media, agencies are now starting to realise that influence is conducted on a broader stage, and that cause and effect can begin to be, albeit in a fairly piecemeal way, measured ‘properly’.

So the question is, where does leave all of the students of PR, who have diligently toiled to achieve PR degrees, when the very nature of PR is changing so quickly and the skills required maybe very different by the time they actually graduate? And for people running agencies who are going to need to hire graduates a couple of years from now, how can we be sure  they’ll be fit for purpose?

It’s difficult to say, because PR is changing that quickly at the moment.

But my bet is that people who understand psychology, plus sociology, and so understand  – at least in theory – how influence can or does work between people, will be in the strongest position. They’re the ones who’ll stand out, and be in the best position to apply themselves to the rigours of modern PR planning, content generation and evaluation. While I’ve never placed much weight on PR degrees – I trained as a journalist, and while great discipline it was of little practical use to me once I started as a junior hack – I can see how the types of things that people seemed to be studying on them in recent years will be pretty much obsolete from a commercial perspective in the future. I hope for their sake that they’re modernising too.

Of course, people come into PR with all sorts of degrees, most of them utterly irrelevant for their careers. To an extent, it doesn’t matter that much: what matters is that you’re really clever, love all types of media and will work your arse off.  Yet I can’t help thinking that if I had to rack up a pile of debt studying for something and wanted to go into PR in the future, I’d plump for a social science at the moment.

Because you’re better off studying people in depth than spending three years pondering media relations and how to stick together a PR plan.

August 19th, 2011 by Steve

PR Week blog: spotting PRs who give a sh*t

My first post on the new PR Week blog is up.

And so far, everyone who’s commented on it is in wholesome agreement.

So there’s another first.

June 17th, 2011 by Steve

PR in the Naughties: naughty bits?

Best laid plans and all that.

I’d intended to write this post weeks and weeks ago following the pieces on 80s and 90s PR in the UK. In fairness, not that I warrant it, I’ve had a few false starts. I’ve asked a few compatriots and competitors whether I could interview them about the 2000s, but after consideration no-one wanted to do it. I guess the last decade is a bit too fresh in the memory and there’s still competitors, so it’d only boost Speed’s search prowess and be an opening for me to misconstrue their comments cheekily. Ladies and gents, I wholly sympathise and your decisions were doubtless wise.

So I’m going to have to rely on my own memory, views and reflections to do this. And try to avoid defamation, inappropriate revelations and anything that might make peers squirm. Like I would. Here goes.

We’ve already heard that the 80s was a decade in which PR finally became more-or-less a proper job, and that the 90s was a transitional period in which 1999 PR looked very different to 1990.

So to 2000. For me, the decade began in black tie, swimming in the Caribbean with a glass of champagne aloft above the waves, worrying about whether the millennium bug had eaten through my bank account.

But rather than me just warbling on about the past, let’s try to put some structure to this as I, well, interview myself.

Q. What best epitomises how PR was in the UK as we entered the last decade?

It was breathless. Knackering. Literally running between meetings, burning the candle at both ends trying to find good people while taking on new clients and managing all of the difficult bits that come with growing quickly. At the same time, I think we all knew after the heady days of the 1999 dot.com and vendor-financed tech boom, that it couldn’t go on like that, and that regardless of the strength of the economy there would be some corrective action.

For me that happened early in 2000 when I was at the hotel gym, preparing for another lightless day at an off-site management meeting in Reykjavik (it was half-way between the US and UK, so it seemed to make sense). I was running on a treadmill, watching CNN. The business news came on and two of the top three stories that morning were about clients of mine that had gone bust overnight. They weren’t even flighty dot.com darlings, they were tech companies that got fidgety about their prospects of getting rich quick.  After that the management meeting became more about managing change and long-term strategy that frantic expansion. PR at that time was riding high, heading for a temporary fall but still with brightness in its future.

Q. It’s typified as a decade of progressive growth in PR, with economic pressures at either end and the birth of social media in the middle. Fair?

Typified by the question above, which I wrote, so yes. It went like this: heady excess, pop goes the dot.com weasel, a mixture of fear and pragmatism, the steady and accelerating return to growth (in technology at least), a mid-decade expansive  mini-boom, a constant flux caused by credit-fuelled growth and client consolidation due to acquisitions in their markets, then the rapid freeze of late ’08 onwards and the stark reality of recession.

There was rarely a dull moment. 

Q. How did business horizons for PR agencies change during the decade?

It was all about length of horizon I think. At the beginning of the Naughties there were numerous small but fast-growing agencies that had started in the late 90s boom, worked with lots of entrepreneurs and set their sights on building teams and agencies really quickly in order to make money quickly. There was some real arrogance around: several agencies put themselves on unrealistic pedestals and did not live to tell that tale. One dot.com knobber outfit springs to mind in particular, but I have actually forgotten it’s name – perhaps wisely! Most found their ambitions quelled (what a word that is) by the dot.com flop, and had to build their businesses around more concrete client income therafter. So the horizons were the same (expand, sell or merge, capitalise) for the smaller agencies whereas the larger ones were mostly trying to grab a piece of the action – some successfully, others in a pretty lumbering way. The mid-sized firms were either standing a bit still or holding off on offers of purchase. Some, I’m sure, soon came to wish they’d taken the money at the time. In many cases, as is always the way, egos and an overinflated sense of personal importance got in the way of a reasonable payday. 

Q. How about skills and the pressures put on PRs?

I see it like this: in the 80s PR became a proper job, in the 90s technology revolutionsed the way we did it (yes, even more than the social media stuff) and in the 00s we all had to become real, proper, effective PR people. Or at least try really hard to be. Yes there were still far too many ineffective or underwhelming PRs around, but the Naughties were a time of much wheat being sorted from chaff.

The pressures were, and still are, mostly caused by change. Technological change brought with it new techniques. Market forces meant rapid expansion and contraction. More people wanted to get into PR and so that put pressure on selection procedures and applicants. As media changed, so did client expectations. Some justifiably so, some a bit lopsidedly, others unrealistically.

The skills pressures really changed in the second half of the decade, and continue to mushroom as PR’s horizons expand, media digitises and none of us can accruately predict what PR will actually look like very far into the future. A lot of skills have stayed the same as they have for decades, whereas others have stretced PRs across new media, new content formats, markeitng consolidating meaning client counsel beyond the conventional confines of PR, and a sharper look at evaluation. 

Q. How did in-house PR teams change?

The walls started to come down. A decade ago a lot of PR managers I worked with struggled to make the editorial world understood within the rest of the marketing department, let along the business at large. They just got on with the press stuff and tried to hit qualitative targets. In recent years a more integrated approach alongside other marketing disciplines has become the norm rather than the exception. There were stated intentions to do this a decade ago, but for most it was piecemeal. In recent years there has been a far greater understanding, although sometimes it’s still a case of one step forward, one step back as PR became a  more integral part of markeitng and business consciousness one minute and then new technology blurred the lines and led to questions about what PR really was the next minute. It has come a long way, but in many cases there remains a need for further organisational change to make communication central to the business, and engender the agility and transparency now required to be wholly successful.

Q. Did PR manage to learn from any of its own mistakes?

For me it has learned lessons from some of the rollercoaster expansion and contraction of the past decade, but that may have only made those running PR firms a bit too cautious about how best to build their businesses, given the enormous changes PR is going through. It’s daunting out there.

One thing we still haven’t learned though is how not to make schoolboy errors about how people are managed. Too many PR firms are run like hobby shops, with people afraid to have frank conversations with people about what they’re doing well and what they’re not. I’m not backing the Jack Welch-style 20/70/10 per cent mentality, but equally we’ve got to realise we’re businesses first and foremost. We need to be fair to people, honest with them, respect them and be transparent about as much as we possible can be. We have to help people to work towards achieving their potential all the time. Equally, we can’t spend our time persistently mollycoddling, ducking difficult conversations or clinging onto people whose hearts aren’t in it. In short, commercially, as a gross generalisation, we need to grow up and toughen up a bit.

Q. Was it as raucous and pioneering a time as the previous couple of decades?

Pioneering yes, raucous no. We’ve seen from previous posts than the 80s were wilder and the 90s pretty similar in that regard. I haven’t personally been to nearly so many strange places and done so many unorthodox things in the past 10 years as previously. They still do happen, but they’re pretty few and far between. The internet has probably been the root cause of that, as it gives so much scope for immediacy and diaologue, so a new kind of influence. Then again, now we have the internet to p*ss around on a lot more eh? That was a joke, obviously.

Q. What lessons can individual PRs learn from the way the profession changed over the Naughties?

That you can’t fear change and you can’t rest on your laurels. Above all, that the PR’s best friend these days is perspective: so much is changing, yet so much remains the same. Get over-distracted by digitisation at your peril, as many of the techniques of yesteryear are just as valid today if not moreso. Resist change though and you will soon become a PR has-been.

And blogging can be extremely worthwhile if you can ever find the time to do it.

May 24th, 2011 by Steve

Trembling in their tassles: why PR is getting daunting

I wrote a piece for Reputation Online that has appeared today about the dizzying array of skills that a PR person now needs to possess and how that will only get more daunting.

So it’s not a comedy.

But it does give some reflection of the knowledge gap that exists in PR today, what skills people are likely to need as the industry modernises, and what expectations will exist around PR skills in the future. And before anyone gets too frantic about the pace of change and the higher levels of capability demanded, take some heart in the fact that in the past there have been too many ropey or in some cases utterly hopeless people in PR. So a cynic might say that in the case some individuals we’re starting from a pretty low base.

Ooops, that might have the public relations professional bodies on my back again. Not the sensible and pragmatic ones mind.

Anyway, here’s a little taste of what the article contains:

- Flimsy, airhead PRs are really going to struggle

- We cannot cover all the ground skills-wise, but specialise too deeply at your (potential) peril

- PR agencies need to do a lot more work to define what they do/will do, pinpoint their commercial value, develop people’s skills and gain an astute commercial spine (nothing too new there then)

Enough of the preview though. You can read the rest here.

April 14th, 2011 by Steve

Oh Maggie I couldn’t have tried any more: UK PR, 1980s-style

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts about how PR has changed in the UK over the past few decades, and what we might be able to learn from that.

So, the 1980s. I began my media career in the 1980s. Ish.

To be specific, and honest, I edited the school magazine, started a small business as a school project (which was forcibly closed, the business not the school), did two paper rounds and did a work experience stint on the long-since-defunct Worcester Source (geddit?) free newspaper. An inauspicious start, but it brought with it some seminal experiences, like getting bricked by fast-moving gypsies.

Even in this flimsy guise, I was exposed to 1980s PR. Press releases were piled high in the Worcester Source letterbox each morning. Most were duplicated, some were printed using some primitive word processing packages, most were hand-written. Yes, with a pen. Photoshoots were a half-day out of the office. Pages were laid out on a stone. PRs called incessantly, and those with a real nose for news were successful.

But in order to get under the skin of what working in PR was really like in the 1980s and what we could learn from those days, I put some questions to Bill Jones, one of the most straight-talking and wise PRs I’ve had the pleasure to work with, with a twinkle forever in his eyes. But enough flattery, here’s what Bill, now a non-executive director down the road from Speed at 3 Monkeys, amongst other assignments, had to say:

**************************

Q. When you first worked in PR in the 80s, what was your desk like and what equipment did you use to do the job?

A. In the mid-80s, I was an associate director of Granard, the fastest-growing agency of its day, and my desk was probably bigger than today’s modern equivalent. While open-plan, we had huge desk dividers so you couldn’t see or hear your colleagues. Instead of a computer and a mobile, I had a brain, a biro and a landline. The magic was supplied by the secretary I shared with two others, who turned my hand-written press releases into word-processed documents which could be printed and faxed to clients for approval, and then posted, faxed or biked to journalists. My secretary’s word processor would have been a Commodore something-or-other because it was a client: what I remember is green type on a black screen. I also remember banks of filing cabinets stuffed with every press release written and every photograph taken for each client. To see what had been written before, you got off your backside and hunted through folders and filing trays in much the same way you do today electronically and sedentarily.

Q. Did clients have a better understanding then, compared to now, of what you actually did for them?

A. Some clients had as good an understanding of the media and what was possible then as now – it is a truism that the best will always have a keen understanding of how best to operate. But the client landscape was littered with managers and marketing folk who saw PR as a cheaper form of advertising that to them was irritatingly less controllable. These kind of relationships tended to be tedious and uncreative. Sometimes in-house PR people were specialists with good knowledge and skills but they were rarer than today. We often had to deal day-to-day with people who had undoubtedly been given PR roles because of their ‘bubbly, enthusiastic’ personalities. We were teachers and protectors of these people although often they didn’t realise how much we covered their backs. I still hear stories today of clients’ backs being covered, so this hasn’t changed completely. If you do good work, it reflects well on the in-house person or team and their managers tend to think they’re capable even if they’re not.

Q. Did you see the development of the workaholic mentality which crept in across the UK workforce at large, and what was that like?

A. I’d been a journalist and crossing over to PR in 1986 was quite a shock. People in PR consultancies worked hard in the 80s and people would often still be at their desks at 7pm or later. You have to remember that we were going through the Thatcher revolution in the 80s and it’s probably down to her that I’ve eaten more sandwiches at my desk in my PR career than I’ve had good lunches. In the 80s, we were changing from a manufacturing to a service economy and that change in attitudes to work – that workaholic mentality – took root in the 80s whether you liked or loathed Margaret Thatcher. There was a kind of frenzied atmosphere in PR in the late 80s – we were working hard and growing fast, and learning to drink less on the job. That’s when the liquid lunch began its steady decline. Monthly fees and salaries were at high levels in 1987, but then it all went pear-shaped in the crash that October.

Q. What things made the job hard then?

A. The trouble with PR consultancy is that there’s always something more to do, someone to speak to, something to arrange or organise. When you were working with biros and landlines, you stayed in the office until the job was done – there wasn’t today’s mobility to the job. But by then the secretaries had gone home, so by night to get the job done you became an expert in mending photocopiers, binding documents, and making ‘flimsy’ slides for tomorrow’s presentations.

Q. Do you have any ‘legendary’ tales of moments that for you typified PR in the 80s?

A. When the Soviets started to ‘sell’ seats in space rockets to foreign governments – remember the Japanese journalist who went into space? – they approached Margaret Thatcher to see if she’d fund ‘the first Brit in space’. She would not, but she sent them to see her friend Maurice Saatchi who asked me (by then a director of Saatchi-owned Granard) to attend the initial meeting with ‘the client’ – the Moscow Narodny Bank. I ended up running the PR campaign to find our astronaut, which we launched with the Saatchi ad ‘Astronaut wanted: no experience necessary’. The ad only appeared a couple of times – it was the PR that had the effect and secured the coverage. We had something like 25,000 applications and we were off and running with the biggest story of our careers. It was like an early version of the X Factor as we eliminated candidates and created national news; the final 25 still meet I think. There was even a terrible TV programme we organised with ITV hosted by Anne Diamond on which we revealed the winning pair of astronauts, who were packed off to Star City in the Soviet Union for six months’ training. Helen Sharman, the most fearless woman I’ve ever met, went on to become the first Brit in space in 1991. The hairiest moment was trying to run a press conference in Moscow in April 1989 with a satellite link back to the UK where we had 100 news journalists and TV crews on hand. The link went down just as my client was due to speak in Moscow. But I’d organised a satellite specialist to come with us to Moscow – and he earned his fee when he hooked us up to another one within a couple of minutes. Communicating with Moscow from London was also the last time I used a Telex machine, which sat in the corner of Granard’s office and would now look good in the Science Museum.

Q. What one thing about doing PR in the 80s could the industry best learn from today?

A. The fundamentals haven’t changed despite the fact we did not have to deal with the instantaneous nature of the internet and the endlessness of internet chatter. In the 80s as now, a good angle to your story is what hooks people; a journalistic view of the story will help you see all the angles the media will exploit; and a well-managed, well-prepared client spokesperson can make the difference. How you deliver it – that’s just technology. Yellow stickies were good technology in the 80s – that’s how I knew who’d phoned when I came back from a client meeting.

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So technology may have changed how we do PR, but not necessarily what we’re doing to create influence. Which is develop good stories that will have editorial appeal, and are a means to a (normally commercial) end. Despite the office and its equipment looking very different, the fundamentals remain the same, which is something some of the digital PR jizzers and pretenders of today would do well to remember.

Equally, the 1980s were the decade when PR finally became pretty hard work, like many other industries at the time. Some might say it was when it came of age as a ‘proper’ career. It hasn’t stopped since, despite the common lingering perception of long lunches and fluff-fests.

Next post: the 1990s. It began in a recession, it gave rise to the web, it ended with millenium madness.