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January 15th, 2010 by Louise Mackintosh

Jesus in my pint

Anyone who has ever worked with me will now groan (or cheer) with recognition of my pet subject, but I personally cannot believe I have only ever made passing reference to this in previous blogs:

The faces of famous people appearing in inanimate objects.

I am quite obsessed.

Really. Ask me’colleagues – old and new – and they will tell you how I brief them to hunt examples down for my ever-growing collection of what I consider to be coverage nirvana.  This week, to give you a recent example, an old colleague of mine tweeted me about the appearance of Jesus in a naan bread in Monday’s Express. I was actually off sick that day but made damn sure I hunted the paper out in our office the following day. And low, it was well worth the effort:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/150952/Jesus-of-Naan-zareth/

Just genius.

Why such stories delight me so much I am unsure, but suffice to say that I would retire on the spot if ever a client were to let me produce one for PR purposes.  I have had a couple of very near misses. In my first job I was privy to a colleague suggesting ‘Jesus in my pint’ to the Guinness client and later I very nearly swung ‘David Beckham in my ready meal’… but both were a case of close, but no cigar.

Gutted.

Over the years I have collected all manner of examples: Osama Bin Laden in my cloud, The Madonna and Child in my water stain, Mother Teresa in my bath bun, God in my cat fur… I could go on.  And do you know what – if ever a subject was guaranteed to appear in the paper, this is it. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it is universally appealing… and fun. Maybe we could learn from this in terms of story development, particularly for the tabloids – keep it simple and make people smile. Not a bad rule to follow if you ask me.

As for my collection, I am planning to use it to create a montage for my downstairs loo… in case you were wondering.

October 14th, 2009 by John Brown

A clip too far: The problem with press clipping agencies

I have had enough of piss poor clippings agencies.  You know who I mean, those ‘organisations’ that pride themselves on providing an easy way to monitor and clip coverage a PR agency has got for its clients.

These companies are supposed to help ensure that we never miss a piece of coverage whilst simultaneously freeing up our time to get even more coverage for our wonderful clients.  Surely this a good investment for any PR agency, right?

Wrong.  I have come to the conclusion that most clippings agencies are an incompetent version of Google Alerts.  So far, according to my clippings agency, and I can assure you it is taking a superhuman amount of strength for me not to publish its name, my client has appeared a great deal of times in the national newspapers, each day for the past week.

But how utterly disappointed I was to realise that in fact I hadn’t achieved PR enlightenment and that my clippings agency has sent me (and is still sending me) totally irrelevant coverage. Not only that, my colleagues and I have to trawl through the nonsense that they send us in order to send it back to them and get a refund.  Oh yes! We pay for this privilege.  Allow me to highlight the irrelevancy.

My client (and I can confidently say this without seeking approval) do not, and I doubt ever will, deploy robotic snipers in the Gaza strip.  They are not at any point in time engaging in any form of hostilities against either Israeli or Palestinian forces.

So why does my clippings agency send me these pieces of coverage?  Well apparently my keywords are at fault.

But surely when we pay for a clippings services we are getting someone with even the slightest hint of common sense to have a quick scan of the coverage their automated system spits out and simply see if it is relevant.  Apparently not.

April 1st, 2009 by Speed Budapest (Matt)

News-jacking case study: desktop research

Initiative:

News-jack for business communications provider ntl:Telewest Business to target Twitter’s third birthday and an announcement by analyst house, Gartner

Approach:

  • Carried out research in advance to find out how many large technology companies in the UK and the US have embraced Twitter for business communications
  • Used Twitter to pre-pitch the results of the study to a few key journalists
  • Pitched the story the following day to journalists and bloggers, and tweeted about the research with a link to the press release just three times
  • Followed up with journalists who hadn’t covered the story the next day to flag a press release released by Gartner that morning highlight 4 ways that enterprises can use Twitter

Results:

  • More than 150 clicks on the link to the press release, and three retweets
  • More than 35 pieces of coverage, including two pieces in the national press
  • Dozens of tweets commenting on the research, and linking to articles about it

Coverage:

Twitter’s potential overlooked by UK technology companies, says report, The Daily Telegraph
4 out of 5 UK tech companies aren’t using Twitter. So what’s the excuse?
, Econsultancy
UK’s leading tech firms fail to grasp Twitter potential, Brand Republic
Enterprises turning to Twitter, says Gartner, IT Pro
Top UK firms slow on Twitter take-up, VNU Net