March 11th, 2010 by Flora Turner

Anyone you recognise…?

When discussing our jobs with non-PR folk it can feel like we are constantly justifying our ‘very busy, very important’ role as a ‘real’ job by attempting to explain in 100 words or less what it is we actually do all day. Even worse, is the assumption that we’re all vacuous champagne-swilling lushes. (- It’s amazing that Ab Fab continues to perpetuate the myth of the PR professional 6 years after the series ended!)

Times have certainly changed since Lynne Franks swapped fashion for Feng Shui, and consumer PR is now a much varied and forward thinking place, full of dynamic individuals.  However, it did come to my attention on my short-lived travels as a freelancer, that as an industry we do generally seem to fall into certain PR tribes:

Work hard, play hard – Works like a dog which earns them the right to party. Hard. Hard to the point where it all becomes a bit scary for those with them during said partying and those beside them at work the next day

Most likely to…have a heart attack

PR not ER – Constantly on the verge of tears and believes that without their manic micro managing and hysteria the whole company would go to the dogs

Most likely to…type through the tears because there’s no time to go to the loo for a proper cry (or a pee)

Posturing pervert – Can’t handle working in an industry surrounded by nubile young flesh and believes they have earned the right to ‘give it a go’ with the team assistant after a boozy lunch

Most likely to…be really inappropriate and summoned by HR

The bitter intellectual – Got a big fat academic chip on their shoulder because they are ‘too good’ for PR but have managed to work in the same agency for the last 10 years with minimum career progression

Most likely to…belittle the graduate trainee because they are secretly jealous of their youth and

Nice but dim – Exactly as the name suggests. It’s amazing they ever managed to get a job, let alone keep it but these twits seem to be recession proof. Probably because Daddy owns the company

Most likely to…look vacant while being given a simple task before asking for it to be put on an email so they can ‘get their head round it’

Lazy and deluded – The most infuriating group as you find yourself channelling a grumpy old person and saying things like ‘they wouldn’t know a day’s work if it slapped them round the face’

Most likely to…‘push back’ on work they are given because they are ‘totally maxed’ then leave the office at 5.30 on the dot

Nice as pie – So-o super nice and helpful. Never shouts, even if people deserve it, and can be a bit put upon

Most likely to…have a ‘falling down’ moment at the next inter-agency meeting and put a pic of their privates in the middle of a presentation to the company heads

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February 2nd, 2010 by Speed Briefs

New Year, new briefs

Well you have to change occasionally don’t you?

Speed Briefs has been upgraded for 2010. A literary lick of paint. More accessible, more welcoming, a more comfortable and pleasing experience all round. Not that it was bad, but we can always do better.

Why would you want to know what’s going on at a PR agency? Well you may prefer it to us pestering you with calls. And you always say you need to keep on top of things in the PR world but never have the time. So consider it a bit of public service, a moral duty if you will. You might even enjoy it.

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December 10th, 2009 by Caroline Allen

Where has Father Christmas gone?

Everywhere I look this year, it seems Father Christmas is still at home in the North Pole and an imposter has taken his place – Santa!  There are Santa sacks to hang by the chimney, the Santa Express at Selfridges, and even children’s favourite Rod Campbell has a book called ‘Dear Santa’.  What’s happened to the great British tradition – we’re not American!  Blah humbug, in my house, it will be Father Christmas who comes down the chimney and Father Christmas who eats all the mince pies.

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October 2nd, 2009 by John Brown

Future graduates: your PR career has to start now!

Your career seems like a lifetime away and anyway, surely a 1st in some form of degree will be enough for you to waltz into a PR agency of your choice and demand a lucrative salary and expense account.

Future graduates, you are wrong.

Whether you are graduating in 2010 or 2013, you will be entering one of the most competitive job markets in recent years and you need to make damn sure that you have earnt some PR stripes well before you send through your CV.

So as a relatively recent graduate who managed to avoid the doll queue, I thought I would share with you my top ten tips.  No…..Scrap that.  I will share with you the top ten minimum criteria that you need to achieve in order to stand a good chance of getting that first PR role:

1.    Read: Industry press, newspapers (regional and national), trade magazines, influential bloggers; you need to be keeping up with the media and PR industry on a daily basis.  Read, absorb and read again.

2.    Get a PR client: You are at university and have access to a thousand and one different societies, clubs, sports teams etc. Approach these people and offer them your PR services.  There may even be a little (and I mean tiny) bit of budget there to do a PR campaign, but most of the time it would be your time spent for free

3.    Start pitching: The biggest fear a grad starter has is speaking with journalists.  Well as one of my MDs put it in his recent blog “That’s a big part of the job, dummy”.  The sooner you overcome this fear the better.  Develop a press release for your new penniless client and start pitching it to the local press.  Try and make sure it is at least vaguely interesting, it will help

4.    Blog: A blog is a fantastic way of honing your writing skills, commenting on industry issues and getting yourself noticed.  Write what you want but bear in mind who is going to read it, a blog can be the most important bit of writing you do before your first job.

5.    Tweet: If you haven’t been then you need to get a move on.  Twitter, despite its recent increase of spam, is still a great platform for developing a network, showcasing your activity, pitching to journalists and interacting with future peers and colleagues.  Ignore it at your peril

6.    Get LinkedIn: Develop your profile and add anyone and everyone you come across in a professional capacity.  Having a bank of contacts to bring to the table at interviews will impress and may make things easier once you start

7.    Experience Junkie: It doesn’t matter what your lecturers say, you cannot learn the trade with a hangover in a lecture theatre and agency owners know this.  I promise you, if you are eager, you won’t be a coffee monkey.  Work experience is gold dust to a new grad, start yours as soon as possible.

8.    Work at a publication: Maybe blurring the lines, but I think utterly valuable.  Spending a little time in a newsroom will give you a glimpse into how busy a journalist’s life is. It will make you appreciate their time, their working day and their editorial process.  You may even like a couple of them.

9.    Don’t be an arse: PR is still full of self righteous people who treat journalists as a nuisance and clients as a means to max out the company credit card.  These people are quickly being exposed as the industry gets tougher.  Start off well, understand that you are at the beginning of a very big learning cycle and always act professionally.

10.  Get in quick: Start applying for jobs at the beginning of your final year.  Hopefully, if you have followed the above, you will have relationships with a few agencies, be able to get some journalist references and have a portfolio of work.  Now all that is left is for you to do is get in there before anyone else. It’s never too early to apply.  Worst that can happen is that they advise you to apply later, they may even remember your name!

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    August 26th, 2009 by Matthew Watson

    Is Woofer barking mad? Or a great ePR stunt?

    Following on from the success of Twitter, the micro-blogging site which lets users publish 140 character updates, a new social network has launched that allows users to post messages that are at least 1,400 characters long. The novelty macro-blogging site Woofer, now has more than 4,600 users, many of whom have already posted several wordy ‘woofs’.

    While social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, have changed the way that PROs can communicate and collaborate with colleagues, clients, journalists and industry peers, Woofer is really taking the biscuit!

    Although the macro-blogging site with its 1,400 character woofs is clearly a joke, it has attracted a lot of media attention and is currently one of the most shared web pages on social bookmarking site Digg. But rather than just being a novelty site setup to point fun at Twitter, it looks like the developers have cleverly created Woofer as a digital PR stunt to drive traffic to their website ShuffleTime.

    A PR stunt can be defined as the creation of a strange or sensational story that has the sole purpose of generating media and public interest in order to raise awareness of a product or business that is associated with it. That is exactly what Woofer does, but online. By developing a humorous site that ridicules one of this year’s most talked about topics they have created something that many people will be interested in and will choose to share with others online. This personal recommendation is key to helping the site to go viral and attracting yet more attention and traffic to the site.

    It will be interesting to see if any more companies opt to create digital PR stunts now that the silly season is in full flow.

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    May 18th, 2009 by Matthew Watson

    Can you measure PR in hits?

    The Financial Times has a terrifically-titled piece by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson today – A want to break free – which looks at how the news industry could properly monetise online content.

    “How much would you pay to read this page? At around 2,000 of the roughly 50,000 printed words in a typical copy of the Financial Times, it should in theory be worth about 4 per cent of the newspaper’s cover price – 10 US cents, 17½ euro cents or eight pence.

    To readers particularly interested in the subject, perhaps, it may be worth more. To others, though no journalist would like to admit as much, it will be worth nothing.”

    While the debate over how to monetise online content is an interesting one, that’s not what this post is about. I’m more interested in Andrew’s comment that an article is worthless to some readers, and hence they don’t read it. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a little while; it it possible to calculate how many people have read an article online and use that as a way of measuring PR?

    The FT has more than 860,000 unique monthly visitors, according to Gorkana, but I refuse to believe that all those people read every single article on the website. While some articles will be read by thousands of people, many won’t. Simply because some topics are more niche.

    So, here’s the big idea. If the media were to share website analytics such as the number of unique hits each article gained and  how long those visitors had spent reading each page,  PR’s could provide their clients with an accurate number of views for each piece of online coverage. But what’s in it for the press? Well, they could sell this data to PR’s, via a clippings agency perhaps. The press get an extra revenue source and PR’s get a way to provide clients with more advanced measurement. Win-win? What do you think?

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    April 17th, 2009 by Claire Jones

    Speed Date: Up close and personal with…the FT’s Peter Whitehead

    Do you feel threatened by blogs and their capacity to break news stories?
    Not at all. As editor of Digital Business, I am very much features-focused, and therefore looking to explain and analyse trends that breaking news stories highlight. I think the FT as a whole has also worked out how to use third party blogs as a source and use its trusted experts to make sense of the mass – and mess – of information now available.

    How much do you use blogs to source news stories verses PRs?
    Until I started using Twitter as a filter I rarely looked at blogs. Two or three stood out as sources of ideas – which is my currency, rather than news. I see news stories as signposts showing the way to the bigger picture. Having said that, we do run what are almost news stories on the Digital Business pages of FT.com, but they tend to be slightly off-beat, because the subject we are focused on is how business and society consume IT, rather than the IT sector itself. The few that we’ve run so far have come from PRs or specialist writers.

    Have you ever sourced a news story via Twitter?
    Not directly, but I have followed many links from Twitter to websites that have provided useful information or ideas.

    Do you prefer Twitter for personal or professional communications?
    Not really. The direct message function feels outside the communication mainstream – and triggers an email anyway. And 140 characters isn’t always enough. The reply function bothers all your followers with something that is likely to be of no interest to them. And for me it makes sense to have everything in one place. It might be boring, but only e-mail does it simply and effectively enough.

    Did you have a favourite tech story in 2008?
    I loved the way Barack Obama used social networking, but the story I liked most  (because it points the way to the future for business) emerged during a family conversation over Christmas dinner. Someone running a smallish engineering business had started using the web to add a huge service element to his business – taking feedback/criticism etc from customers who were using a particular machine and turning it into a improved service for all customers. He can now offer advice on maximising the efficiency of the machinery, sell extra parts and accessories, advise on strategies, other related machines etc etc. The web community he has created is opening up new avenues of business. I’d read Andy Mulholland and Nick Earle’s book “Mesh Collaboration” in the summer – it’s about a fictional company that learns to use the web and ends up changing its business model. And there at the Christmas dinner table I was hearing a real-life example.

    What do you think will be the hottest tech issue in 2009?
    Two years ago, all seemed to be anarchy in the IT world. New and pointless innovations that didn’t add up to much. Now, a picture is emerging based around connections, broadband, networks, individual      technology and mobility which are building an amazing mesh of communities. It is vital for business to understand what’s happening here. A new generation of IT users is helping drive this change. In time, we will also see a fundamental switch to computing power as a utility. We’re seeing the start of that with Cloud/utility/Saas etc.

    What is the worst PR pitch you have ever had?
    There’s one example I’ve mentioned a few times, so I won’t quote that again – and it was largely a result of misunderstanding (it involved reluctantly agreeing to a meeting and then being told my request for the meeting was denied). If I’d known I was going to face such a question, I’d have taken more note of some of the more bizarre suggestions. But sadly they get cast aside too quickly.

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