Defending blogs

I carry the Blogpower logo on this site because when I started blogging, I found it an interesting way to connect with a variety of fellow “small bloggers”.  This is highlighted by a Blogpower Roundup by Ian_QT which picks out a range posts from the network in the past week.

It takes a lot of time and effort to pull together such a roundup, but this is the spirit of blogging in respect of helping others manage their time online, giving greater opportunity for bloggers to gain new readers, and connecting different topics and thoughts on a topic.

Many of these blogs will have a particular viewpoint, and you may not agree with them all, especially those with a specific political perspective.  But, with blogs you have the opportunity to leave your own thoughts and engage with the author - or use your own blog to present a counter argument.

We do need to be careful to distinguish fact from opinion - but that isn’t an exclusive criticism of blogs as it applies to mainstream media too.  Indeed, we increasingly need to challenge anyone citing a fact as to whether it is objective or has been carefully selected to make a point.  The PR survey being responsible for too many statistics that are widely cited by have questionable methodology.

Not all blogs are well written, but that doesn’t mean the authors haven’t a valid point - or indeed, those that are well written may just be enjoyed for the way words are crafted.

Whether blogs are the future of public communication or not, they do enable us to reflect on various issues, challenge or confirm our own opinions, gain new insight, possibly learn something we didn’t previously, or think about someone else’s life and times. 

Of course, they can suck up a lot of time, be polemics and often inaccurate.  If you are the PR person for a brand being criticised, you can feel bloggers have an unfair advantage - but you do have the opportunity to know what is being said and engage with the discussion as appropriate.

What bloggers are saying is often a snapshot of discussion taking place in homes, pubs, workplaces and a myriad of other real life situations.  As such, they may be important or not, influential or not, accurate or not, indicative or not.  But as with the Blogpower roundup, they give us a window on what is being said and thought, by a particular person or group at any one time.

From a PR perspective, that sounds like a useful information-gathering tool to me, if nothing else.

Talking and typing saves time

According to Microsoft, using a laptop in a meeting is “as much an element of business meetings today as any piece of equipment” - although the company does share some vital etiquette on avoiding being seen as discourteous when typing away.

Unlike in the US where it seems common for students to use laptops in class, I rarely see their use in the UK, and only know of one person who takes meeting notes on his PDA.

Away from all the discussion about whether people are really using their laptops for surfing the Internet or catching up on emails (which is unlikely in the UK where wifi access is woefully inadequate), I’ve decided it has to be more productive to type than write  (my typing speed is actually somewhat faster than 120wpm, where my shorthand was never better than 80wpm, when I trained as a secretary some decades ago). 

So a few weeks ago, I decided to use my laptop to make notes during a new media training workshop - only to be confronted by an attendee who found my typing to be distracting and asked me to stop.  This was really annoying - not least because the venue hadn’t even been able to provide online access, despite the subject matter of the day.

Whilst I took up my pen - and frankly began scribbling thoughts for a blogpost on how rude some people are - this woman’s mobile rang and she then proceeded to text, which struck me as much more distracting.

Anyway, not to be deterred, I have persevered with using my laptop in meetings - especially those where my role is to produce minutes.  In the last couple of weeks this has involved four PR meetings - and for each I have been able to produce and distribute minutes in a fraction of the time it took me previously to decipher my handwriting.  To be honest, part of the motivation was the fact that I’d been unable to get around to producing minutes from a number of meetings earlier in the year and found it nearly impossible to work out what had been discussed from my scrawled notes.

So far, no-one has complained about me typing in these meetings - although I confess that being able to touch type means I can lay the screen back and avoid hiding behind it.  And, of course, as a busy woman, I am adept in the multi-tasking required to listen, type, and contribute to the discussions (and eat biscuits of course)!!

In fact, everyone has commented favourably on the approach, recognising that it saves me considerable time and enables them to get the report of the meeting much more quickly.

Indeed, not only did I attend a MIPAA committee meeting this morning, but I’ve typed up and distributed the minutes, done my weekly shopping and found the time to write a blog post.  Can I count this as working smarter?

Can you measure PR’s contribution to society?

Last week’s World PR Festival in London took as its theme: “The public benefit of public relations”.  I wasn’t able to attend (for cost and personal reasons), but caught up with the thoughts of Paul Mylrea (in PRWeek), Toni Muzi Falconi (at PR Conversations) and Liz Lewis-Jones (at PR Voice).

Sadly the papers from the Festival aren’t readily available, but I have requested a copy as I believe they should be a useful resource for my CIPR Diploma and Advanced Certificate students.

It is interesting to reflect on whether PR does provide a public benefit.  Toni recently summarised a US argument regarding media criticisms of the PR “profession” - with a link to a fascinating personal reflection from Harold Burson.  Burson refutes claims that all PR practitioners are liars, but argues “we are the paid advocates of clients who have a point of view that may be questioned by affected parties”.  He presents PR as “a neutral discipline that can be used for what’s good for society and, from time to time, what’s not so good.”

One of the problems with thinking about the public benefit of PR or its role for social good is one of perspective.  Do we need another movie?  Is society happy with the role of government in citizens’ lives or the power of companies simply in exchange for them paying taxes, providing jobs and CSR programmes?  Even when employed by charities, can we always say the motives of PR are for the benefit of all publics? 

Looking at the experience of PR through the eyes of a BBC reporter on the red carpet circuit, the view of PR as supporting advocacy or dialogue is questionable.  Of course, one can argue that in the case of film promotion, PR is simply seen as press agentry where supply and demand of the product (and its human components) are used to enforce a “command and control” approach to achieving positive media coverage.

The Independent noted a Media Evaluation & PR Benchmarking Report by Metrica (full report available on request) claiming that:

In daily national newspapers, 90 per cent of articles are designated “favourable” to the organisation mentioned, rising to 97 per cent for items on local radio and local television stations. On average, a UK organisation will enjoy 492 mentions across national and regional media in a typical month, reaching an audience of 16.6 million (35 per cent of the population). Metrica judges less than 8 per cent of all coverage to be “strongly unfavourable”.

Is this a result of PR’s increasing influence - the Flat Earth News syndrome?  Metrica reports:

the proportion of “unfavourable coverage” has doubled from 4.3 per cent in 2001 to 7.8 per cent in 2007 – a trend that Metrica assigns to “the increasing competitiveness of the media in the last few years”.

It may not really matter whether your view of PR is that it involves achieving positive press coverage, advocating a partisan viewpoint, or acting as a force for public good.  Indeed, to act as a force for public good, may well involve PR professionals in the advocate role seeking favourable reporting.  But not necessarily.

Here the question is one of motive and how PR is being used.  The focus on simply counting media mentions or otherwise assessing coverage does reflect a one-sided view to communications.  Has the PR person been successful in getting a message across?  Whether or not this message is beneficial to society is another matter.

If that is the aim of PR (rather than helping society benefit simply as a consequence of “good business” - see Harold Burson’s thoughts on CSR), then it must be defined as an objective to be measured.

Apparently, the media evaluation companies are (according the Independent article cited above) “challenging the traditional PR measure of advertising value equivalent (AVE), which compared a piece of editorial to the cost of a similarly-sized advertisement”.

That may be good news itself as only this month I’ve been told several times that AVE is a good way of measuring PR (although I don’t follow the logic since you don’t measure the effectiveness of advertising by what it costs).

But then I note that Claire O’Sullivan, Metrica’s associate director, says: “The appropriate way to measure PR is to assemble a dashboard of measures relevant to an organisation’s communications objectives – for example, which key messages are reaching which audience and how many times.”

Reaching people with your message is simply one step - but what do they do with that message, does it affect their knowledge, attitudes, or behaviour even.  Do they believe the message is genuine or self-motivated (and do they feel this matters)?  Are they motivated to engage in the dialogue that some claim is the goal of PR?

Or if we are looking at PR as a force for social good - have we considered measures to reflect this?  If we take Burson’s argument that PR is simply a neutral tool, should we look at a balance sheet of effect and assess if the sum of PR activities makes a positive or negative contribution?  How well are we doing as an industry on this measure and should we take action if we fail to live up to our claim to be a force for good?

Is it enough to focus on the case studies where PR has been shown to reflect the role of a good corporate citizen?  What about those examples where PR plays a role in harming the public or wider society?  Or where its effect is of little social or public value, good or bad?

What about individual PR practitioners?  Can we truly say that our actions contribute to the benefit of society?  And, if they don’t - for example, if we work for legal concerns that may be socially unacceptable (and that may include my colleagues in the motor industry), what does that say for our role in the PR fraternity?

Back to the future

Generally we age day by day, but there are times when you take a giant leap, like yesterday when I felt I’d gone back to the future.

The occasion was a celebratory service for my dad in Great Yarmouth (where I grew up), which was attended by dozens of friends, contacts and even family members I had not seen in ten, twenty or even more years.

The odd thing was that everyone was clearly the same person, but they’d just aged.  People of my parents’ generation were now old people and my own contemporaries have spread into middle age. 

As one woman said to me: “I wouldn’t have recognised you; you used to be such a skinny little girl.”  Of course, I am no longer the seven year old schoolgirl that she pictured - but I don’t remember her as an old lady either.

Babies are now teenagers or have grown up and have babies of their own.  That’s how life is.

We know this and generally accept, or don’t even notice, how we and those around us age.  But when confronted by giant leaps back to the future, it is quite a shock.  It feels as if some conveyor belt is shuffling us along without our knowledge and we are replaced with newer, younger stock.

These new shoots see only how you look today and ask “who are you” in voices that show they don’t really care.  You can only answer “I used to be…” whilst wondering to whom they belong.

I know that once we’d told the story of my dad in memories and music, many of these young people were crying as much as us.  We had made that old man come to life.  He was the boy who used to ride a bike and get into trouble, the young man who fell in love with my mum, the proud father, the man who worked hard and helped make the lives of others better through his charity work with Lions International. 

He was the man we all loved - and they could see he was worth caring about, if only for a few moments.  In looking back, we can see our own future - in looking at the young people, we see our own past.

In life we come across so many people who may inspire us or contribute a fleeting memory.  But then we move on and don’t really find time to think about them.  Our paths cross, our family trees entwine - and sometimes we find a place where we can look forward and back to who were were, and who we yet want to become, before the conveyor belt moves us along another generation.

Do you want my opinion or not?

Like most of us, I receive a lot of emails - but do try to read and respond to most.  I am not too worried about the marketing or PR type of emails I might get either as they can be useful fodder for a blogpost. 

So I was interested to receive a customer service email from Waitrose since I am a fan and shop in my local store.  The email arrived last Friday - the day before a bank holiday weekend.  This morning, I clicked on the link to be informed the survey had closed.

Of course, one of the benefits of online surveys is that you can get “instant” feedback - but if you are genuinely interested in customer satisfaction, then closing a survey within a few working days is ridiculous.  Checking on the terms and conditions link from the email, it says “Entries for the prize draw must be received by end of May 2008″ - well there are still three whole days to the start of June.

Now I’m left with wondering if the company really does want my opinion or not.  If the survey did require immediate completion, shouldn’t it have stated so in the email?  Then I wouldn’t have wasted my time and felt rather negatively towards the brand I normally support.

In fact, I question if this was even a genuine survey or more about collecting information for marketing purposes or one of those token surveys to get data to prove how wonderful you are.

Research is all too often abused in these ways.  If you want to gain someone’s opinion - and expect this for free - then at least show the courtesy of really listening, and preferably taking action as a result.  That’s what I call feedback.

Girl power

Having the confidence to try new things and stretch yourself further than you think possible is a core aspect of the Greenbanana philosophy of continuous improvement (ie if you’re green, you’re growing).

Putting this into practice, today my mum and I are demonstrating ‘girl power’ (well middle-aged woman and old lady power!!) .  We spent this morning putting the roof cover on the gazebo in the garden here in France - which took lateral thinking, some brute force and teamwork. 

My mum is now destroying documents - her first use of the shredder.  And our job for the afternoon is to map out a heart-shaped flowerbed in the garden where my father’s ashes will be scattered.  This is a more complicated task than you might think as we are incorporating five shrubs that have been planted already in honour of departed pets (it’s okay we’re not frightened of recreating a Stephen King novel).

Of course, the shrubs weren’t placed originally with this goal in mind, so I’m flexing my mathematical abilities to map out an appropriate shape, that is geometrically sound and fits the previous planting. 

[We're leaving the digging to my brother and nephew who are coming out in a couple of weeks though, as girl power also means we're not stupid.]

Today is actually my dad’s birthday, so I suppose we’re partly demonstrating that we can do things without him.  My mum has been a star over the past two weeks - even mowing the lawn with stripes and putting up a fence.

So if as a newly-widowed, 5ft tall, 67-and-three-quarters-year old granny, she can stretch herself with new things - what’s stopping you for doing something challenging today?

Google image promotes artist themes

I’ve always thought the way Google changes its logo to connect with a particular event is a really nice touch.  It doesn’t necessarily serve a purpose, but I find you always stop to check what the graphics indicate.

Today’s image is by Jeff Koons and serves to promote the new artist themes you can use to personalise your iGoogle homepage.  The 70 themes can be viewed geographically - for example Australian artists.

A time limited cafe was set up in Japan earlier in April to promote Artist iGoogle, although not everyone thinks the brand should seek a real world presence.

Apparently:

The goal, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, is to give people a chance to connect with artists they like. Few artists turned down Google’s offer to participate, which offers an opportunity to reach a giant audience that isn’t necessarily plugged in to the gallery, rock and catwalk scenes.

Google didn’t pay the artists. It made a contribution to a charity in each of their names.

I’m not quite sure of the value of the themes, but I’ve opted for the Lance Armstrong one (I know he’s a cyclist not an artist) because the Tour de France this year is passing through Lavelanet which is near to my mum’s house.

Why should you trust me?

I know that I often argue for robust research, but I’ve also presented an argument many times that online ain’t that different to “the real world”.  That’s my reaction to all the fuss on the topic of who people trust. [Link via Judy Gombita]

I’m surprised that bloggers seem surprised by recent studies indicating most people trust people they know and friends and family are key influencers on attitudes and decisions. 

Source credibility theory has long proposed a number of dimensions of influence:

1. trustworthiness
2. competence
3. objectivity
4. dynamism
5. expertise
6. physical attractiveness
7. similarity

Trust is a key factor.  But it has been publicly seen to have been abused in recent years by traditional “expert” influencers, such as journalists, corporations, scientists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, banks, celebrities, etc etc. 

We are less and less impressed by those claiming expertise or status in society.  We’ve few real role models in public figures to look up to.  We question objectivity knowing that corporate cheque books often buy endorsement.

Trust is something that has to be earned, and this involves a consistent believability that is established over time.  So no wonder we look to those we have built genuine relationships with when making important decisions.

Whether bloggers and virtual social media friends are influential will similarly depend on the relationships and trust that is established. 

The rules that public relations practitioners need to reflect when counselling organisations in the area of credibility, trust and influence are pretty basic.  I’ve written about it before - do as you would be done by.

That means that big businesses, such as oil companies, are unlikely to be trusted when they report record profits, while motorists struggle to afford petrol at £5 a gallon.  Banks are bailed out and pay big bonuses, yet many ordinary people face the threat of losing their homes. 

Politicians lie, scientists twist figures to suit their cause, celebrities are vacuous and self-interested.  Hardly the characteristics of people who should be trusted.  So why all the surprise?

Another year older

Yesterday was my birthday, so technically, I am a year older today.  Of course, like most changes in life, the process is not a discrete change, but more continuous - we age second by second, rather than year by year.

So older, yes.  But am I any wiser?  The process of gaining wisdom does require discrete change in many aspects as we gain new knowledge or change our understanding.  Although at the same time, skills can be gradually improved - in the spirit of kaizen, continually improving.

Unfortunately as you get older, everything isn’t about improvement and there’s a huge PR and marketing effort focusing on “anti-aging” or as the Dove campaign puts it more positively, Pro-age - who they define as “women in their best years”.

Although encouraged to embrace wrinkles, curves and other demonstration of the aging process, this is within the context of cosmetics and products to make us feel better, even if we can’t turn back the hands of time.

Or there’s the likes of Nintendo eager to keep my little grey brain cells active with their pointless “brain training” games. 

Whilst the government is promising health tests in the over 40s to detect “killer diseases“, apparently, there is a baby-boom among such “older” women.  Does this coincide with the higher incidence of binge-drinking in the age group too?

Are we now just another market segmentation?  Must we accept the marketing pressure, grab our fat pants and fight the signs of aging?  Can we really have it all in being older, and wiser?

Are PR graduates ready to be their own boss?

On his PR Placements site Richard Bailey kindly features a communications job that I’d been asked to promote by Honda Motorcycles. 

What interested me about this opportunity is that it is a full-time job, but available in a freelance capacity.  It is increasingly common in my experience of the motor industry PR world for in-house headcount restrictions to result in the use of “embedded” consultancy staff.  Indeed, I used to manage a team of 19 of “contractors” undertaking PR roles within Ford when I worked at a PR agency some ten years ago.

Here though, the contract is open to a graduate recruit as it could “potentially be a great role for early professional development”.

Are graduates open to the idea of freelance work - or do they feel they need the security of being employed either in-house or within a consultancy? 

I’ve been self-employed for nearly eight years, having made a millennium decision to stop being a wage slave.  But working for yourself wasn’t unfamiliar to me, as my parents ran a small hotel in Great Yarmouth (as did my mother’s parents before her) and my dad’s parents worked as independent upholsterers.  I was prepared for the downsides as well as looking forward to the upside - which for me is primarily the flexibility to control what I do in life.

Many PR practitioners seem to come to freelance employment as a lifestage decision, particularly those who need to combine work with caring for a family.  For example, via Strive PR I read Sally Whittle’s post on WorkLife balance - where some of the difficulties are evident.

I’m not sure if graduates are being prepared for the option of self-employment by careers services.  One of the things we focus on in the final teaching session of the CIPR Advanced Certificate course is the idea of managing your personal reputation - brand me. 

Regardless of whether you are working for someone else or are your own boss, it is vital that you maximise your “brand value”.  In PR, we are often the commodity being sold - our skills and contacts are the true assets being sought by clients. 

Having an excellent reputation also offers security whether in employment or with clients as a freelancer.  I would recommend the opportunity offered by Honda as a good career move - not only for the experience and its excellent brand name. 

I believe future career strategies, particularly in professions such as public relations, will require greater independence - so starting your career in the driving seat has to be a good move.