Visit speed website Speed blog home
January 26th, 2012 by Dan Howe

#CommsRewind: Reimagining public relations history


I really enjoy the alternate history genre, from Philip K. Dick right through to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Reimagined history is a compelling source for fiction. Combine it with a professional interest in public relations, and Communicate Magazine’s Rewind section makes for a great read.

Speed sponsors the monthly section that asks questions like:
If you were leading the Sunday Times’ comms team when they were hoaxed into publishing a faked Adolf Hitler diary, how would you restore the paper’s reputation?
and
What comms advice would you give the 1816 British government to repair its standing following accusations of vandalism, pillage and looting when removing the sculptures from Athens?

The next issue’s topic is again interesting:
From 14 to 28 October 1962, the world was gripped by the Cuban Missile Crisis, which threatened to thaw the Cold War and bring about nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. It ended in an uneasy, partly-secretive truce between President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev – but how could the US government convince the American population that the threat had truly subsided, and that mutual assured destruction was no longer a possibility?

Have an answer? Drop an email to Molly or summarise it in a tweet with the hashtag #commsrewind. The best responses will appear in the magazine and one will win a bottle of champagne.

December 9th, 2011 by Dan Howe

No amount of media training can hide Rick Perry’s bigotry

This week US presidential candidate Rick Perry’s homophobic advertisement hit YouTube and was met by youtubers with an amount of “dislikes” usually reserved for WBC or Rebecca Black.

As well as his hateful remark, what irked me about Rick Perry’s videos is the way he uses body language to emphasise his points. While body language is an important element in media training, the way Rick pulls is off is so uncouth, it is as if his advisor is sitting just off screen with an open textbook from Body Language & Presentation Skills 101. Does he expect to hide his bigotry behind a few subtle hand movements, or does he think Americans will be easily persuaded by his appearance so much they ignore his vile rhetoric?

I brought the videos to one of our in-house media training experts for analysis, who said “Dan, don’t you have any real work you could be doing?” So instead I took to Google and decided to make some more gifs.

Here we see Rick shaking his head while talking to remind us of negative feelings about his opponents.

Here he gives us a reassuring nod, saying “yes, what he’s talking about is a good thing, even though your gut is telling you that he’s evil ”

Below are some more examples, such as:
- When hating on openly gay soldiers, Rick is gesturing downward to show “firm disagreement.”
- When speaking about the discrimination and struggles children face when trying to celebrate Christmas, he gives us an uplifting raise of his palms, which apparently means “truthful, honesty, appealing.”
- To emphasise the word “strong,” Rick pulls his hand out from his jacket and makes a fist, apparently a sign of determination.

If anyone feels taken in by Rick Perry’s charms, or isn’t convinced that body language makes that much of a difference, I invite you to watch three minutes of Rick Perry drunk, where he looks appropriately like a sleazy politician, rather than his wayworn cowboy image. If I were on his PR team, I’d advise him to worry a little less about how he looks, and instead reconsider his hate-filled position on issues.

November 25th, 2011 by Dan Howe

Five cool tech companies in Budapest #speedbudapest

From the mess of tweets and blogs today, you’ve probably already seen that Speed is in Budapest for the day. In a cab this morning, on the way to a meeting in a spa, we drove by Prezi’s office, with their sign recognisable from the street. A few of us are big fans of Prezi’s cloud based presentation software, and it got me thinking about other cool Hungarian tech companies. Here’s five that I thought were neat.

1. Prezi! Makes doing visually captivating presentations easy.

2. Noispot! This is neat. Noispot is a background music service that allows customers in a venue to interact with and manipulate the playlists.

3. Graphisoft! Known mostly for ArchiCAD, Graphisoft make software for architects, interior designers and planners

4. 3gm! A white-label music streaming solution for businesses.

5. Kitchen Budapest! This is a new media lab for young researchers interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space.

You can follow our Budapest trip on Twitter at #speedbudapest

Image from Flickr user R.MELERO

 

November 25th, 2011 by Dan Howe

#SpeedBudapest: How to business travel without any luggage

Today Speed sent us to Budapest. When travelling for business, luggage is a bore. Airlines charge you extra, you have to wait around at carousels and it is a pain to lug about.

There is a solution. For the Speed trip, I’m bringing all the gear I need for Budapest on my back. Take that, budget airline.

How to travel without luggage - Speed Budapest

1. Budapest is famous for its baths and spas. The first layer should be swimwear and undergarments.
2. Layer on top casual wear for lounging around the fancy hotel Speed got us. Shorts and three t-shirts work for me.
3. Speed company meetings are happening in Budapest, and it is best to look sharp, so suit up.
4. Overtop of that throw on some outwear, like jeans and a jumper.
5. Top it off with a parka, toque and gloves as it is cold this time of year in Hungary.
6. Fly in style.

This blog post is a part of Speed’s Budapest digital challenge. Follow us on Twitter #SpeedBudapest and help me win by sharing and linking to this post.

Speed Budapest Speed Budapest Speed Budapest Speed Budapest Speed Budapest

Dan Howe for the Speed Budapest win

November 18th, 2011 by Dan Howe

A free lunch #feeding5k

Working in Leicester Square can sometimes be a pain. Tourists, crowds and queues are everywhere. But it also means that Central London’s festivals, events and exhibits are often no more than a stone’s throw away, giving us lots of options to pop out at lunch.


Today Feeding the 5000 is taking place in Trafalgar Square. For the next hour and a half, charities, volunteers and the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, are serving a free lunch to 5000 members of the public.

The meals are made from fruit and vegetables that are cosmetically imperfect and would otherwise be destined for waste. The event sets out to show how easy it is to reduce the levels of food waste in the UK and internationally, and how governments, businesses and individuals can help.

The line-up for grub went around the square. But it was okay, I just stopped by to take a look at the food waste eating pigs.

November 11th, 2011 by Dan Howe

Spammers impersonating and targeting PR

It has been a while since I’ve written anything on information security, but noticing these two Twitter spammers quickly got me back in the game. While this is in no way indicative of any large scale threat, I thought it was neat how it is targeting our industry specifically.

Complete with racy photos, spam Twitter accounts with bios claiming to be PR people are targeting real PR people.

The accounts launched this week, with a series of news headline tweets, which would be easy to automate from RSS and wouldn’t look too out of place in a real PR person’s Twitter feed. Along with the headlines, the occasional spam pharmacy link is thrown in.

While this kind of Twitter spam is not uncommon, by glancing at who they are following, they appear to be using some sort of follow/unfollow algorithm based on PR-related words. This, combined with their bio, shows that some thought has been put behind the spam campaign to deliberately target PR people.

By blending in and targeting a very specific sector, they are likely to be trying to generate higher quality click-throughs. The question is, why PR people? Are we particularly gullible? Perhaps we have a weakness for Twitter pics of the Iranian lingerie model the spammers used?  Or maybe we’ve been recognised as having Twitter habits that make us easily phished? Judging from the recent spate of dodgy DMs, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case.

October 7th, 2011 by Dan Howe

The Public Relations Advice Animals

Working in public relations can be emotional. PR professional is one of the most stressful jobs out there. Where can we turn to put things into perspective and find guidance when things get rough?

In the tradition of taking internet memes and repurposing them for PR, here are The PR Advice Animals. For advanced interneters, you will already be familiar, but for those who don’t know advice animals, here is a quick guide.

Tech Impaired PR Duck
Tech Impaired PR Duck - Public Relations Advice Animal
Foul Bachelor PR Frog
Foul Bachelor PR Frog - Public Relations Advice Animal
Paranoid PR Parrot
Paranoid PR Parrot - Public Relations Advice Animal
Depression PR Dog
Depression PR Dog - Public Relations Advice Animal
Rich PR Raven
Rich PR Raven - Public Relations Advice Animal
Creeper PR Canine

September 12th, 2011 by Dan Howe

QR Code as Street Art

I’ve got a thing for QR codes and like spotting creative examples being used effectively in marketing, for good or bad. In Soho this afternoon, this combination of QR code and street art caught my eye.

Made up of over 700 images and pasted to the wall, the poster was a pain to scan. When I finally got it, the link was to a Youtube channel for a band Clean Bandit. Seeing how difficult it was to scan, I can’t imagine that it would generate many click-throughs, but the piece itself is a great bit of street art. Even if it isn’t effective for driving traffic, it still more interesting than traditional band poster flyposting.

September 3rd, 2011 by Dan Howe

Facebook girlfriends for sale

I have a fascination with mechanical turks and “freelance” online labour. Whether it is for skilling up MMO characters to sell for cash or joking about outsourcing my time sheets, I am happy to have strangers on the internet helping me out with menial electronic tasks. And I’m really interested in the economies and labour force behind the jobs too. This emerging workforce is varied, from a bored student in Saskatchewan to a computer sweatshop in India, there is always someone somewhere on the web willing to spend a few hours clicking away for a little cash.

My fascination recently led me to Fiverr, a site that is great for quirky art kids to draw MSPaint portraits or pose for funny pictures at $5 a pop. Fiverr keeps 20%, and workers can make some nice pocket money. There’s other sites like this out there, TechnoBuffolo reports that Fiverr has “spawned several clone sites, like Fourerr.comGoferr.comTenbux.comTaskArmy.com,Gigsbucks.com, and Uphype.com.” The market is huge.

One thing that grabbed my attention on Fiverr is the abundance of offerings on the front page for Facebook relationship status stand-ins. “I will be your Facebook girlfriend for $5.” Exploring these posts and it seems that some are genuine young ladies renting out their relationship status, but most appear to be fake accounts, part of networks of other fake accounts, boasting thousands of friends and photo albums of beach vacations. Complete with reviews from former customers (surely most of these are fake too?), and filed under Social Marketing, there clearly is a market for impressing your old high school friends with a fake fb hottie.

Along with menial Excel tasks, online influence is being bought and sold, from large scale social marketing scams and now apparently your Facebook friends. Is there any task that you can’t pay someone to do online?

August 12th, 2011 by Dan Howe

How PR people see each other

A few hours ago I tweeted an image that I made: “How PR people see each other http://i.imgur.com/jXyr6.jpg

The plan

  1. Steal an existing meme and edit for the public relations industry
  2. Distribute on Twitter
  3. ????????????????????
  4. Profit

After 15 minutes several people I consider influencers in my circles has retweeted it. Success!

Under an hour and it went past my network. I was getting new followers and strangers were asking me questions about the meaning behind certain squares.

After about an hour, Twitter etiquette be dammed, it was gone and away, being tweeted without the usual credit, getting hosted and shared on other image services and blogs. It also apparently trended.

Two hours later and the image is circulating around offices as an email attachment, a bit of Friday fun. This includes Speed’s office, my colleague unaware of where it originated.

I think it is a hilarious example of how quickly content can spread and how there is an appetite for humour amongst the usual industry news.

Yeah, it was only for a laugh on a Friday, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the stats over the weekend. Hopefully I’ll learn something and make my next press release as much of a viral success. Watch the blog for an update on Monday!