Steve and myself are out and about speaking at the following events in the next month or so:
14 April – Social media and the media
Strategic Social Media London, Westminster
21 May – Anti-social media
Social Media in Business, Richmond/London
20 and 24 May – The great print debates
PIRA, Birmingham
Do give us a shout if you’re attending any of these events. It would be great to catch-up for a coffee or a beer.
Here’s a quick review of some of the content from across the Speed blog network this week.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7545c820-d606-4fd2-aba9-45748b2c823f)
PR Week has extended the deadline for its Top UK Consultancies League Table. Speed submitted its numbers last week.
March 2009 saw Speed created from the five PR agencies owned by Loewy. The headline number of the sum of the parts is more than 30 per cent down as a result of less than a handful of client decisions to cut budgets.
But we remain adamant that it was the right year to pursue the strategy we did to build Speed around a fragmented media proposition. The new business has scale, is strong and fit for purpose – and crucially is attracting good people and clients.
We thought long and hard about whether or not we should participate in the league table. I’d rather not reveal our underwear to the rest of the industry but that’s not sport and it would have been gutless for a business that prides itself on transparency.
Last year the Top 150 list was characterised by no-shows presumably because agency bosses felt that their results were less than impressive. Is PR Week giving us early notice that the situation will be worse for 2009 by dropping ‘150’ from the title of the league tables and extending the filing deadline? I hope not.
There has been lots of talk over the last 12-months of the industry benefiting from the downturn in 2009. Folklaw says that public sector spending, digital and a shift in budgets from other areas of marketing have all worked to benefit the industry.
At the PRCA and CorpComms Conference in October PRCA chairman and Ketchum boss David Gallagher was upbeat. “Although there is still a quarter to go, member agencies are reporting anecdotally that 2009 will either be flat or slightly up,” he said.
If you are an agency leader please submit your numbers whatever your outcome for 2009 so that PR Week is able to produce an accurate picture of the state of the industry and we can scrutinise and plan the long term future of the industry.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=1e5b4703-a984-4842-bf59-2fd0c36e6212)
Please shout, clap and cheer as we announce that Speed’s Ruth Jones has taken up a new role leading a team focused on Fast Growth Technology markets. We’re also delighted to make room at the boardroom table for her straight talking brand of Yorkshire comment.
Ruth’s five-person team will be focused on developing communication strategies for companies moving into the next hot technology cycle, including areas such as virtualisation, cloud computing and unified communications.
Congratulations Ruth. Bring it on.
Shareholder activism is forcing the senior management of public companies to become more open and better skilled at communicating with their institutional shareholders. This is the view of Co-operative Asset Management’s Abigail Herron, speaking last week at the CIPR Reputation Management conference in Manchester.
Herron, who is herself no stranger to calling the boards of public companies to account, cited the recent case whereby investors have successfully tabled questions at the forthcoming Shell Annual General Meeting in May about its approach to Canada’s tar sands.
In the past 12 months protests from vocal shareholders have resulted in the remuneration proposals for senior executives to be rejected at Provident Financial, Bellway, Shell, Punch and Royal Bank of Scotland.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ca13c7cc-0d37-4677-a7bf-cafcc3bc3f40)
Here’s an article that I’ve written for Reputation Online based on the content from the corporate blogging workshop that I ran last week at the CIPR Reputation Management conference.
Never one to shy away from straight talking my oppo Steve Earl spotlighted yesterday how you can improve your chances of a salary rise if you work for a PR agency.
“There are […] three levers in a PR agency: staff costs, overheads and profit. That is it. These aren’t complex businesses,” says Earl.
Check out Steve’s post in full. Its well worth a read and could even make you some money.
Here’s my presentation from the CIPR Reputation Management conference which took place at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester today.
I led a workshop on corporate blogging that examined why blogging was broken amongst UK corporate organisations, looked at examples of good corporate UK blogs, examined how to generate authentic content and the process required to kick start a corporate blog.
Many thanks to Ged Carroll, Stephen Davies and Rob Fenwick for their help in putting the session together. And to Speed’s Caroline Allen and Clare English.
Smooching couples were banned at Yo! Sushi in St Pauls, London, on Valentine’s Day.
Spokespeople don’t come much bigger than Sir Richard Branson, who last night fronted the launch of Virgin Media Business, speaking to customers, media and staff at the launch event at The Collection, South Kensington, London.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4d157469-f5bd-4ae0-a47f-3c74e5bf4df5)
I love old newspapers. They provide a direct and very physical connection with the past.
Here’s a City editorial from a 1940s edition of The Evening Standard that I bought at the weekend. Its striking because the article could have been written yesterday.
Further to my blog post early today on the Right2Link campaign thanks to Andrew Smith for an update on Lord Lucas’ proposed amendment (292BA) to the Digital Economy bill seeking the “protection of the right to link to publicly available information on the internet.”
In a debate in the House of Lords last night lasting almost six hours Lord Lucas argued the case for fair usage:
“We ought to take the clear view that the breadth of knowledge on the web should be available to all, and that commercial interests on the web should be confined to relatively small corners of it and not allowed to take over vast swathes of it. In most cases, a search engine taking a small extract of copyright material-what is on a search engine is copyright material-should be regarded as fair usage and a proper part of the way in which the citizen and the copyright holder interact.”
Lord Lucas subsequently withdrew the amendment following a commitment from Lord Davies of Oldham to provide written assurances on behalf of the Government:
“The Government want-and the noble Lord did say how important it was for us to have a definition of what we wanted from the web-web users to continue to be able to use the web freely for legitimate uses, but we do not want to condone or to encourage copyright infringement. Those are the principles which underpin our approach to the web. Once again, I know that I am craving the noble Lord’s indulgence with such a sparse response to some intensive arguments, which he mercifully at this late hour kept to a few well-chosen words. We will write to him on all those amendments and I know very well that if he is less than satisfied with the responses on that very mildly-presented point, we may hear more from him. We will certainly bear that in mind in the letters that we write to him.”
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=43ac53ae-5e65-4b8b-b632-6233bf1f4b34)
Google has flexed its muscles on the advertising stage, abandoning all talk of accountability and ROI, by running a 52-second commercial during the Super Bowl yesterday.
$3million dollars for 30 seconds is all but out of reach for most advertisers but its loose change for Google.
So why is Google backing an ad campaign on a platform that its CEO Eric Schmidt famously called a “bastion of unaccountability.”
Martin McNulty, director of online agency Forward3D (disclosure: Speed client), says that this is a bid by Google to understand how marketing channels interact and that Google analysts will be closely watching how the ad impacts search traffic.
“Google is nothing if not experimental. It’s a mistake to view this latest campaign as rearguard,” said McNulty.
“Google wants to control (and integrate) every platform and every possible media and what better way to learn the true potential of the world’s most expensive slot than to buy it,” he said.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=9a4c1437-b053-451e-b816-d520c909fdd1)
Social Media Week has generated some criticism in recent days, unfairly in my view, for the saturation of events.
Undoubtedly the market is overhyped and is approaching bubble-like proportions. An element of the industry is taking on the hallmarks of a cult with self-proclaimed gurus ranking their prowess by follower numbers on Facebook and Twitter.
But a series of events that shines a spotlight on the market and its emerging potential can only be a good thing. And for the 120-odd people that attended events at 33 Digital, Porter Novelli and Speed this morning I hope it was worthwhile. I’ve never known a time when the PR industry has been so open and willing to share ideas.
We called our breakfast event this morning ‘No More Hot Air’ because social media is characterised by lots of talk and little action. We used it as an opportunity to showcase work across the agency on behalf of clients such as The Economist, Interoute and Tesco.
Social media doesn’t change the way in which human beings communicate. You can see social networks in action in a pub every day. And in this context the person with the most influence and the greatest reputation is not a Facebook geek but the landlady.
It’s not a fundamental change in how people communicate but it is a fundamental change for business.
The conventional approach of media relations no longer works alone – the media for communicating with the audience are now diverse: print media, social media, all kinds of media. And all of this is not only confusing, it’s bloody difficult.
We’ve seen the rise of specialist social media or word-of-mouth agencies to address this emerging opportunity. They have a role, but it is just one piece of the new jigsaw. For their part PR agencies have taken three distinct approaches to social media:
12-months ago we embarked on a ruthless training camp across the business covering monitoring, planning, content development, networks and measurement.
It’s a process that will be ongoing for the next 18 months at least. But it’s critical to the future of the business. My personal belief is that if you work in the PR industry and want to continue working in the industry you need to equip yourself with digital skills.
