Campaigns and comms timeline for local government in 2012
Posted: 12/01/2012 Filed under: PR community, PR practice, working life Leave a comment »Searching for a timeline of campaign weeks etc for our planning in 2012, I found that there wasn’t an easy list in one place, so I’ve compiled my own as best I can from various sources.
A couple of caveats:
- Some of the links below take you to 2011 campaigns because I couldn’t find any 2012 information.
- Not all of them will be of interest to a corporate comms team, but in our case I’ve shared them with schools, libraries etc. so they can decide if there’s something they want to do themselves.
- Not all are obvious story opportunities or hooks…but they’re worth a thought.
- While I’m 99% sure the information here is accurate, you should check it for yourself before using.
At the end of the list, I’ve also put some notes on the other content we put in our planner/grid in case that prompts helpful thoughts for those who produce such things in other organisations. Read the rest of this entry »
Whatever the future for social media gurus, I really wish some of them would wind it in
Posted: 08/12/2011 Filed under: PR practice, Social media confusion 2 Comments »
Frank Zappa didn't like gurus either, as you can hear on this fine album in 'Cosmik Debris'
I’ve read a couple of interesting (old) posts recently about the future of social media experts: Social media is still a specialism and 99.5% of social media experts are not qualified to do their role. Mike McGrail, the Social Media Penguin, has also penned a few thoughts on this issue in two posts (which I’ll call Puffin Poo 1 and Puffin Poo 2).
Away from this sensible stuff, I’ve had some supposed gurus tell me some right nonsense, or read similar online. And it is this: organisations should only do social media if they can do it perfectly.
That’s paraphrasing, but not much. While I generally try to be quite moderate and tactful, I want to vent on this a little. Frankly, I’m getting a bit fed up of self-appointed communications quacks telling me how the world should work on the basis of their flimsy organisational experience, half-decent reach statistics for some widget they were promoting or perhaps a little blogging success. Read the rest of this entry »
Some advice for jobseekers, especially the 30% who don’t proof their submissions
Posted: 20/10/2011 Filed under: PR practice, working life 1 Comment »I recently had to review 93 job applications for a couple of temporary assistant posts. It was a fairly mammoth task to do properly, something which I don’t mind, but there were some distressing sights in among them.
Worst of all was that at least a third of them had an obvious spelling or grammatical mistake. I read – but don’t proof read – applications, so if it was easy to spot the errors then it’s safe to assume there were more I failed to see.
And this wasn’t only among the ‘random’ entries that every vacancy attracts. These were basic errors that mark ignorance – or more often, carelessness – on the part of people who really ought to have known better. I wouldn’t quote application text verbatim, so to summarise some of what I observed: Read the rest of this entry »
My three perspectives on the news staff cuts at the BBC
Posted: 07/10/2011 Filed under: Media | Tags: BBC Leave a comment »A conversation with a BBC friend yesterday about some people having their shoulders tapped in anticipation of job losses prompted some musing on waste at the corporation.
I'm old enough for this to have been the BBC logo when I started working for it
For those that don’t know, I started my career in the BBC – working for Radio Shetland, mostly on local output but with the occasional network news and programme contributions thrown in. I was there for a touch over two years, so we’re not talking about a long and distinguished career on the cutting edge of journalism, but it was a great training ground and I like to think I earned my crust as a cub reporter (mostly on mundane matters, but notably with a 16hr shift reporting on a fatal air crash in the absence of the normal network reporter and breaking the equally tragic news that a helicopter winchman had been lost at sea mid-rescue.) Read the rest of this entry »
The Press Complaints Commission and the fallacy of its customer survey results
Posted: 05/08/2011 Filed under: Media, PR practice | Tags: PCC, press complaints commission Leave a comment »What do I do all day? Some bullet points on the realities of my job…
Posted: 08/07/2011 Filed under: PR practice, working life Leave a comment »I generally hate those ‘day in a life of…’ pieces (although there are some good ones on PR Moment). This is because they usually go something like this:
- 5am At the gym with Jean (personal trainer).
- 9am Finish the last of international conference calls.
- 12noon Catch up with old friend the Secretary General of the United Nations.
- 3pm Sign off a £10m multi-channel, hyper-intergrated, global campaign.
- 7pm Cocktails at an implausibly swish-sounding bar that most people outside London will never have heard about and which possibly doesn’t exist, but it’s better than confessing to a life which – outside work – is just a deparate void.
I’m not saying people claim all sorts of pretentious twaddle just to stress how busy and important they are. (Well, actually, I might be.) Read the rest of this entry »
Lies, damned lies and the abuse of statistics – do storks landing on your roof bring you kids?
Posted: 01/07/2011 Filed under: Media, PR practice Leave a comment »In previous posts I’ve covered the importance of numbers to PR and the relationship between epidemics, gossip and PR based on a book I’ve read.
I also own another book which I spotted in a charity shop – possibly because of its terrible title: “Be a wizard with numbers”. Anyway, without being too much of a nerd about it – although it’s possibly too late for that – there are a few gems in it.
One of the chapters deals with statistics and their frequent abuse. To summarise some of the examples given:
- Claims that one extra alcoholic drink per day increases a woman’s chance of getting breast cancer by 6%, once analysed, reveal that this really means an increase of 1 in every 200 women (or, 0.5%).
- The figure that 40% of sick days are taken on Mondays and Fridays might seem to confirm views that people tend to extend their weekends unofficially. However, an even spread of illness over the week (20% on each of the five ‘normal’ working days) would give you exactly the same result. Read the rest of this entry »
‘Local issues under a national spotlight’ – current media relations challenges and solutions
Posted: 23/06/2011 Filed under: Media, PR practice Leave a comment »This is the text of a presentation I gave (largely, as delivered) to a fairly broad audience at the AI Media Comms seminar in London on 9 June. I didn’t use Powerpoint so you’re not missing any slides but also please bear in mind is was written to be spoken, rather than read.
For the avoidance of doubt, it’s my personal view based on my experience at the council and previously, rather than being representative of any official council view, decision or policy. (You can never be too careful!)
It looks ridiculously long in a blog post, but the whole thing is about 2000 words – or 15 minutes speaking time.
Introduction
For my part, I’m going to share with you today some of the main media relations challenges we currently face at the council, in the context of how visible we tend to be.
I’ll be looking at the speed of communications being a double-edged sword, how our target media is often not the media at all, how we can’t even be sure what a journalist is any more, and why hyperlocal media is going national. Finally, I’ll summarise what we’re doing about those. Read the rest of this entry »
Why the great divide between PR practitioners and academics? And should anyone care?
Posted: 22/06/2011 Filed under: PR community, PR practice, PR theory | Tags: CIPR, diploma, queen margaret university 1 Comment »Yesterday I attended my first meeting of an advisory panel that the good folks at Queen Margaret University set up a few years ago to improve discussions between academic staff and people working in PR. Though it was very worthwhile, my main feeling was one of frustration at the missed opportunities between those talking/thinking about PR and those doing it (a simplistic distinction, I know, but a necessary one for the purposes of this post).
For my own part, I have had involvement through guest lectures, supporting student placements, being interviewed for dissertations and a few other exchanges. So, it is going on and there will doubtless be a fair amount of activity involving other people that I inevitably know nothing about. I also have good relationships with a number of people in universities.
However, I see very little output, questioning existing practice and pointing the way to better PR (which is what I would expect of those studying, researching and teaching it) and I find the staff at universities and colleges to be noticeably less active in the PR community than counterparts in private, public and voluntary sectors (with some exceptions of course). Read the rest of this entry »
