Social Media | Earlin' PR abuse

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.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: 2000s, agencies, PR, public relations, skills, social media
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June 16th, 2011 by Steve

Deepwater Horizon: inside the vicious media war

Like most PRs, I watch silently from the outside when any crisis story breaks, assessing how the company at the centre of it approaches communications, how the media reacts and what specific pressures the PR team is under.

And like most PRs, I’m typically left guessing afterwards as to exactly what went on, who called the shots, what external factors existed and what it was really like. It’s rare that the story inside the story comes out, and when it does it’s normally some time afterwards. It’s even rarer for the person running the afflicted company to tell the tale rather than the communications personnel.

Earlier this week former BP chief executive Tony Hayward lifted the lid on what it was like to be at the eye of the media storm surrounding the biggest story of 2010 – the Deepwater Horizon accident, oil spillage, environmental crisis, political football, untold stock devaluation, forced asset sale and his subsequent parting company with the company.

And it was fascinating. The incident saw 11 lives tragically lost and Mr Hayward villified by the press as the “most hated man in America“. My main interest was in the rationale behind how the media was handled, the extent to which the furure on social media fuelled decisions and what it was like waking up to all that each morning. But here’s a summary of the main things he revealed to an audience at Speed’s parent firm Loewy’s monthly Mandrake networking club on Tuesday evening:

How the media handled the story

In Mr Hayward’s view, media coverage of the accident and subsequent clean-up operation was “vicious”. This point was mainly levelled at the US media, which led with the story practically round the clock in the subsequent days and weeks. The appetite for information was insatiable. You’d expect this of course. He pointed out that there were apparent inaccuraies in some of the reporting, and inflated fears about the extent of the spillage and its impact on the Gulf coast. That’s to be expected too (lots of reporting in the conditional tense), but even so it fuelled public hysteria, and hysteria fuelled more hyteric reporting. “We were at war with the media every day. There’s no other word for it,” he said.

This was the first crisis of its magnitude in which both social and conventional media were in the mix. What was that like?

In his words, the “viral media” created an immense burden on the communication team, on top of the impossible-to-meet demands for information from conventional media. At its height there were 50 people at BP working around the clock purely on countering “inaccurate” information being posted on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms. It was a social media storm the likes of which the world had never seen before and hasn’t seen since. For the team trying to manage it, the pressure was immense and the tide impossible to turn around.

How successful was the crisis communication?

Almost seems like a daft question doesn’t it? He volunteered that despite utmost efforts to communicate clearly, transparently and at breakneck pace, many mistakes were made. “What would I have done differently? I would have had more of the senior team around me to handle communication with the media.” While the person in overall charge of the business should face the media music, that music is now so loud and persistent that one man alone cannot handle it.

I also asked him, tongue in the general cheek area, about how the value of the £5 million apparently spent by BP on crisis PR with much-criticised financial agency Brunswick was assessed. The question didn’t get a direct answer, but he said that one of the main communications lessons learned for all large corporations was that plans for crises such as these must be made and tested regularly. BP wasn’t sufficiently well prepared with communications processes and resources to handle what happened, and it showed. It was an unprecedented incident, but better planning was needed. I find it difficult to disagree with that point.

Do people try to attack him in the street?

Actually the polar oppposite, apparently. He said most people in the UK shake his hand and say they believe the media coverage and US Government’s intervention was over the top, while he told of a visit to New York City late last year when Americans approached him to say much the same.

What happened at The White House?

Not an awful lot more revealed on this point, beyond a brief sense of what it was like to sit opposite the President and be told you’d better cough up $20 billion or there’d be further implications. Cash or check?

And did the UK Government help?

In his words, “Amazingly, truly helpful. They could not have done more.” The impression was that the Government had bent overbackwards to help one of the biggest UK-listed firms at its darkest hour, ever-willing to jump on a quick conference call with the chaps across the pond.

What else did BP learn?

Lots of things, obviously. But one standout point was the need to ensure expectations are managed when the entire world is watching. This referred specifically to the ongoing efforts to cap the leak on the sea bed, during which the understanding of the degree of testing and due process required to be successful wasn’t nurtered as it could have been. That led to most people assuming that BP was throwing the kitchen sink (not literally, obviously) at the hole in desperate bids to plug it, rather than had a clear and proven process for successful resolution.

Proven process was something that came up several times during the hour-long talk and question session. Deepwater Horizon had never happened before, and so there was no way of either predicting it or mapping out clear plans for dealing with it to a zero error margin. But better process was clearly required in the areas of the business highlighted – including communications and media handling - and could have stopped events spiralling to the extent that they did.

It was the mother of all ways to pinpoint that the people at the very top of businesses need to be not only in the media glare in the event of a crisis, but that they must make communication capabilities and process part of the organisation’s lifeblood at all times.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: chief executives, communication process, crisis communications, Deepwater Horizon, Loewy, Mandrake, PR, public relations, social media, Speed, Tony Hayward
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June 13th, 2011 by Steve

Court short: social media, contempt risks and stupidity

Today’s news about contempt of court proceedings due to take place this week against a juror who allegedly communicated with a trial defendant by Facebook highlights several things about how media restrictions on reporting of legal cases are struggling in the wake of technological progression.

Firstly, the regulations governing trial procedure and media reporting continue to be put under pressure because technology is making the world a smaller place. Secondly, the courts need to remind jurors of their obligations and the consequences of their actions. Thirdly, a lot of people seem to be utterly stupid, so given jurors are supposedly a cross-section of society then we should beware.

Let’s take those, as a prosector might in outlining a case, one point at a time. The implications of information connected to live legal proceedings coming into the hands of jurors via the conventional media are long-established and rooted in common sense. The basics are that, once the trial is in motion, the media can only report what has been said before the jury – so for example, no deliberations between barristers and the judge while the jury is excused from the room – in case jurors should become privvy to information that should not have any bearing on their verdict. I learned this lesson as a court reporter when a colleague had covered the trial the day before, added a few naughty subjudicial bits to that evening’s article and I was then asked to stand before the court for a bellowing from His Honour.

Another important piece of legal procedure here is that in the event that media coverage about an incident or an arrest has been intensive, the defence can ask for the trial to be held in another part of the country so that the jury is less likely to have been clouded by the publicity. That’s an approach that has carried less weight for years as conventional media became more immediate and the likelihood of more people across the country ‘knowing’ increased. For years, keeping what is written about a case out of the hands of jurors has been becoming more and more difficult.

In the days before internet-based media, judges would typically stress to jurors when proceedings were adjourned at the end of each day (or earlier, depending on the nature of the lunch and the day of the week, in my experience) that they were to discuss the case with no-one. Not even their friends or families, although such requests may well be wishful thinking. Often, they’d also make reference to media coverage surrounding the case and that jurors should do their utmost to avoid reading it. Again, you can avoid reading an evening paper but as media proliferated, avoidance became trickier. Nonetheless, judges today do sometimes remind jurors of these obligations and make specific reference to social media – and the risk of them personally being prosecuted for contempt of court if they did wrong. The problem is that too many judges were eupehmistic about the consequences – you’ll ‘be held in contempt’, for example – rather than being more specific and illustrating what the consequences of naive action might be. Held in contempt probably means held in a cell, for quite a long time.

Social media always had the potential to exacerbate that difficulty, but the extra ingredient that has the ability to make it a menace for legal proceedings. and potentially threaten the notion of all fair trials by jury, is simply human stupidity.

It is like this – if a juror were to discuss a case with someone in the pub, their chances of being caught doing so are fairly minimal. Broadcast something on Facebook and you may, depending on your privacy settings, be talking to the entire world about it. Despite the persistent stories about people getting tripped up by their failure to realise that the internet is a global communications network not just a thing that lives its own smiley existence inside your computer, people are still daft enough to commit their comments to the world’s view.

Yes the media reporting restrictions need a review to protect the integrity of jury trials given how media has changed. But judges also need to start from the raw assumption that every juror needs to have contempt of court explained to them as if they were a four-year-old.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: contempt of court, court reporting, Facebook, journalism, juries, jury trials, media reporting, restrictions, social media
1 Comment »

February 18th, 2011 by Steve

TV news shows ‘online within 10 years’: C4

Media is fragmenting. That much is obvious.

Figuring out how best to work with it is not easy, particularly given that social media is an ‘industry’ laden with windbags who create such confusion that brand communicators fiddle around devising discrete social media strategies, rather than realising that social media of just another kind of media.

That (evocatively) said, coming up with an all-embracing communications strategy is no mean feat these days, given the breadth and diversity of media options open to PRs, and the assortment of progress being made to better understand whether and how audiences are influenced by them.

So it was heartening to hear from Channel 4 News this morning that the inevitable convergence of media into something modern, more engaging and more measurable that Speed has been trumpeting for the past few years is finally in motion. It is real.

Today’s media is fragmented beyond all prior imagination. Just take the major broadcast news organisations operating in the UK. They have their showcase TV news programmes – lunchtime, early evening, late evening. And the breakfast news and chat shows. And the news is online. And its circulated on Twitter. And the journalists tweet. And they get interviewed by other media outlets. And they use other social media platforms too. And their content can be second-sourced by print and other online media. There are options everywhere.

This was one of the things picked up at a Gorkana Breakfast Briefing earlier today by a panel of senior people from ITN. According to Ed Fraser, online editor for Channel 4 News, broadcasters are beginning to understand far more about how people want news delivered, about how they might engage with the issues and about how news producers can be more competitive. And he pointed to a time when the televised evening news as we know it may not exist. “Five or 10 years from now, we’re probably only going to be watching Channel 4 News online. We’re definitely seeing a convergence,” he said.

In Ed’s view, the range of options currently available for the audience to consumer (please will someone come up with a better word than that?) news will have to settle down. That process is underway, and as broadcasters keep toiling to understand the audience better the media formats available in the future should be those that the audience really wants to use.

I asked the panel about this. What I heard was that lots and lots of work is going on to pinpoint who’s watching and how they might want to watch, read or listen in the future, but there is no one-size-fits-all way to gain the insight. Which is a symptom of media fragmentation and the assimilation of technology into how news is delivered.

Toby Castle, head of home news for ITV News, said ITV mainly gets to understand its audience through conventional TV network means: who’s viewing, what they’re viewing, and when. Julie Hulme, home editor for Channel 4 News, said its audience leans towards ABC1s, a proportionately high ethnic minority viewer base and 16 to 34-year-olds. Ed mentioned the work that Channel 4 Online is doing to engage with viewers, get direct feedback during news programmes being broadcast and gather insight from correspondents’ Twitter followers. Channel 4 is also soon to launch a social customer relationship management initiative to spreadhead its work to learn more about its audience. Jamie Scott, executive producer of entertainment at ITN Productions, cited use of metrics like Google Analytics in understanding viewer behaviour towards its YouTube channel.

Bit by bit, the media seems to be understanding audiences better, gearing up to reshape how news is delivered in the UK and converging all the different outlets currently on offer into a smaller number of potent outlets. And by striking at the heart of what the audience really wants and feels, surely stands a better chance of making better money out of it too. Which is good news for PRs.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: audiences, broadcast, Channel 4 News, convergence, ITN, ITV News, PR, public relations, social media
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November 5th, 2010 by Steve

“You’re wired”: Speed gets its apprentices wet

Do you work for a PR agency? Do you look around you most days, at your colleagues, and think that while some people have taken the plunge in understanding how social media works and media is modernising, others are only dipping a toe or two, while some are utterly unbathed?

This is a familiar scenario for many PRs at the moment. We know we have to modernise, we know social media is just one part of what’s happening to our industry. But while some have taken to it like ducks to water (some a bit too vigorously in my opinion, at the risk of drowning in their own excitement), others quack away about it without much more than the occasional paddle and others watch from the banks, occasionally preening their feathers.

This struck me again yesterday at the PRCA National Conference when Hill & Knowlton’s EMEA CEO Sally Costerton appealed for all PRs to “get wet” by taking the plunge into modernising media, social media in particular.

Now I know banging on about social media all the time can prompt exasperated puffing from some PRs, me included. But it’s good for SEO to keep writing about social media, so social media and search experts tell me in our conversations about social media.

And I think Speed has come up with an interesting approach to PR’s bathing challenge, so I wanted to share it (sharing is very much a social media thing, you see).

On 2 December, we’re turning off email. All email, all day. And phones. All day. It’s a company-wide training day and we’re all being forced to use modern media alone to do PR. No making calls, no sending emails, just using the web. We’ve got some outside experts in to talk about the latest interesting stuff going on in search, video content and journalism. Then we’ll be doing a pretend client exercise. After lunch is a PR exercise with the sole purpose of generating commercial returns for Speed by using social media.

Why do this? To force people to bathe in social media, in a nice way. To open all eyes to it and drive experimentation. We’ve spent two years here training the whole team so that everyone has skills in both conventional and social media, avoiding a digital ghetto. But we can go further, and this is an interesting way of doing so. The person with the best ideas and most success at the end of the day will get an iPad.

How will it go? I don’t know. I’m expecting us to learn as much about what doesn’t work as what does. But we’ll document the day and, fittingly, use social media to let anyone and everyone interested know what we’re doing.

Like the #speedkids day this summer, we hope it gains a strong following. We’re calling it the Digital Apprentice. Look out for #digitalapprentice build-up, coverage and post-match analysis soon.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Digital Apprentice, modernising, PRCA, public relations, Sally Costerton, social media, Speed
1 Comment »

November 3rd, 2010 by Steve

Social media influence: dodging the tossfest

It was with a tingling spine that I read an email asking me to chair a panel debate on the future of social media influence at the PRCA National Conference.

The reason for the trepidation is that the bloated and much-mystic hype which surrounds this topic has long been a subject of irritation for me. The challenge is how to chair a session and have a pragmatic, commercial and grown-up discussion about what influence is and isn’t possible, and how that may change, rather than letting it descend into a social media tossfest of long words and fancy theories.

So having polled the panel about their views, here’s what tomorrow’s panel at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester will cover, amongst other things:

- Audience: how can PRs better understand who it is they’re trying to reach, so influence can be well planned (and outcomes measured)?

- Influence first: is the PR sector too carried away with social media this and social media that? Shouldn’t we be thinking about desired commercial outcomes and what influence is required to create them first, then the media (social, conventional, mainstream; animal, vegetable, mineral) as the next step?

- Bigger thinking when planning: campaigns intended to create influence that use social media probably shouldn’t do so in isolation. There needs to be a far longer-term and better joined-up approach that considers any and all media and techniques that may be appropriate. One of the challenges is finding room in budgets to do that smarter legwork.

Should be a good session. The panelists are Mark Hanson from Wolfstar, John Kinder from Golley Slater, Steve Downes from Juice Digital and Tim Zecchin from Media Measurement.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: audience, evaluation, influence, planning, PRCA, PRCA National Conference, segmentation, social media
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October 13th, 2010 by Steve

Chilean mine rescue, editorial policy and God

“We don’t have erections or miracles here”.

So my news editor told me when writing stories on a nasty court case and a rescue respectively. Erection was a banned word because it was considered distasteful, and ‘became aroused’ was a better alternative. Miracle was a banned word because “it implies the direct intervention of God or gods”.

At least he was clear.

My point here is that editorial policy plays a very strong role in the content produced by the conventional media, but in the world of citizen journalism – blogs, comments on the news in social media, and so on – untrained writers typically apply very few editorial controls. Newspapers, TV and radio think long and hard about whether to use the word miracle in a story, social media conversations are peppered with this and other editorially-borderline words without any forethought.

This sprang to mind this morning when hearing radio coverage of the first miners being rescued and then reading social media comments on it.

Conventional media in the UK steered well clear of the temptation of hailing events in Chile as miraculous. The Guardian ran something about which religious groups claimed credit for a miracle. which was an intriguing twist.

Only The Daily Mirror, of the British nationals, used the word directly (with the headline referencing a miner miracle, no less) while others reported the Chilean president’s use of the m word without positioning it as such themselves. Most papers presumably saw the obvious pun as a cheap shot in the circumstances, and did not want to imply any divine intervention.

Social media circles were less editorially discerning. Just look at the Twitter traffic this morning on the story and how often the word miracle is used. or how often it turns up in a search.

Lesson? Social media users should realise they are authors with a potentially global reach and should write accordingly, with real thought put into their choice of words.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Chile, editorial, editorial policy, journalism, mine rescue, miners, miracle, social media
1 Comment »

July 13th, 2010 by Steve

There are just eight types of Twitter profile picture

Journalists spend a long time choosing or pursuing the very best pictures they can to communicate a story. The pose that an individual is captured in can make a big difference to their reputation and to how readers perceive them.

Given the prominence of Twitter, you’d think that people would think a bit harder about their profile pictures. If you tweet a lot, chances are your mug (or whatever reprehensible object you have chosen to illustrate your persona) will be beaming out onto screens around the world many times each day.

A check on those I’m following and others whose content I have tripped across in the past few weeks leads me to believe that there are actually just eight different kinds of pictures being used, not all of them to wholly positive effect:

1. The beaming grinner. Nothing wrong with this at all. Everyone loves a cheery smile. The only drawback is when conveying extremely serious or tragic information – a bit like a newscaster faux pas when smiling through a report on a motorway pile-up

2. The face of wisdom. It it a bird, is it a plane, is it someone looking like they’re old a really bad album cover? Try too hard to look wise and you may just end up looking like a tosser

3. The body part profiler. I’ve seen elbows, lips, knees. Not big, not clever really

4. The sexy pout. Not always appropriate. Looks a bit like HM The Queen might if she took to advertising bras. Can lead to audience discomfort

5. The inanimate object. ‘I’m too clever and thought-provoking to use a picture of me, so here’s a carrot’. Knobs

6. The shadowy type. Face partially obscured in arty photo attempt. Done crudely in Microsoft Paint. Mine is in this category; it’s time to change it

7. Smug bastard. Fat face too close to the lens, trying desperately to look like a social media overlord. The smug mug that looms forth from one of Twitter’s most prolific contributors, who uses the word trending far too often and is probably very poorly endowed, is slap bang at the epicentre of this category. Naming no names. But you know who I mean

8. The passport shot. Safe but oh-so-very-dull. Smile, it may never happen

Then there are people who change their profile picture so often that they probably fall into all of these categories. Or a separate one altogether, called Skittishly Indecisively Try-Hard.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: pictures, profile pictures, social media, Twitter
3 Comments »

July 2nd, 2010 by Steve

Social media bingers ‘under the influence’ – shock

Social f&cking media eh?

If you’re a PR, it’s everywhere. All the time. Dozens of tatty bits of spam each day. Hundreds of tweets from inane PR types about the fact that they’re buying a coffee, how ‘busy’ they are, some apparently fascinating new fact (normally days after the event) or their latest Lambrini escapade. Loads of sage-like wisdom from the social media powerlords about the future, the larger social implications and the sheer exuberance that stemmed from what several dozen people had to say about a topic that’s actually very on the grey side.

If a lot of the Twitter conversations I’ve seen recently are comparable to conversations in a pub, it’s time to sup up and sod off home.

But enough of this pessimism and wholly unfair fingerpointing. The point of this post is an appeal for all PRs to get real and move on on the subject of social media influence. Of course social media has growing influence. It’s sort of obvious that if people suddenly have the ability to talk to individuals, politicians and brands all over the world, that two-way communication is becoming inevitable and that the transparency has hitherto unforeseen power, it will have influence. Yes social media has influence. Yes it is measurable in some way, because it is digitised so has an audit trail.

Yet those PRs who bleat on about how fascinating it is that influence can be measured, that ratings and supposed positivity around a brand or a person can be extracted in graph form, are spending too much time wallowing in the same wafting smells and not enough considering the bigger picture. Which is that media is changing, outcomes can be better measured but we are not there yet in making PR a fully measurable cost centre. Not by a long way.

Equally, the social media experts (they call themselves that, so clearly it must be so, given the scope of their social media influence of course) who run down other forms of media are short-sighted. Media is changing. The rules are changing. Influence is changing. We don’t know what it will look like in future, but saying something like the internet is now all-powerful and telly is less so is missing the point by a country mile.

The way I see it is this: some clever people are putting time and thought into making PR more measurable and making sense of media/technological change, and they will get their rewards I hope. Meanwhile, a lot of (by comparison) very workshy or blindly-led people are banging on about things like social media influence as if it’s the be-all and end-all of modern, better justifiable PR. My guess is they’re doing it because they’re late to the party and reckon it’ll get them sales/prevent them from looking like dinosaurs. And all they’re doing is confusing matters and making the industry look a bit fickle.

I’ve deliberately left lots of links out of this post. I could attribute much of this venting to individuals and their published content, but that’d be a cheap shot, even for me.

So instead, consider some of the emails and tweets I’ve seen in recent days from agencies and individuals offering ‘social media services’, advice and trumpeting interesting social media things:
- Five ways to get started with a social media strategy
- The power of Twitter influence
- Social media engagement and why communities work
- Building social media into your engagement framework
- Social media is good for you (because it’s so social)

FFS.

It’s the equivalent of old school PRs 20 years ago braying about why newspapers are widely read by people, why being on the front page means your story is prominent or why television can be influential given it can attract a captive audience of couch potatoes.

Social media is one of the most important developments in media ever, because it is direct to readers, is two-way and leaves an audit trail. Fact. Get over it. Get on with it. And while you’re at it, figure out how editorial influence and search marketing join up too please.

And for the love of Jesus, will someone please send me a message about how to make PR properly measurable in a very straightforward way; so that for once, finally, after years of struggle, I can clinically prove the value of what I do for a living?

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: influence, media change, PR bullshit, public relations, social media
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Steve Earl

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