don't run with scissors

fake gary glitter – the best & worst of twitter

2012-01-21T19:49:00.000Z

There was a little bit of a commotion last week when an account on twitter called @OfficialGlitter started getting a lot of attention.

I think the sum total of my involvement initially was to tweet that I thought the disgraced pop star was dead. But lots of people were talking about this account, which to all intents and purposes appeared to belong to Gary Glitter, who rose to prominence in the 1970s as a singer, and then again in the late 1990s for offences connected to child pornography.

He was then imprisoned in Vietnam in 2006. If you need more background on this stuff, JFGI.

More than 17,000 people started following the account, including a number of high profile celebrities and public figures. There were plenty of negative opinions voiced but a lot of people tweeted some very positive comments to, and about, the account – which they believed to be the real thing.

It was not.

According to the person, or people, behind the fake account the whole thing had been a “social experiment.” A Tumblr page laid out an attempt at explanation, citing the main reason to be to demonstrate just how gullible some people are online. It also made the point that there is nothing to actually prevent a convicted peodophile from setting themselves up on twitter, and no way of being able to tell real from fake.

I think the first time I wrote about the internet and child pornography was in 1997. So this issue is nothing new to me, and I sometimes think I’ve got a more highly-tuned sense of caution than most people when it comes to internet fakery and staying safe.

One extract from the blog says: "Apart from the thousands of negative and abusive comments I got whilst impersonating Glitter, it amazed me and deeply disturbed me to see a shocking amount of positive, encouraging and supportive comments that people were giving to a convicted child rapist."

And this is where the really good stuff started to happen… in the wake of the big reveal.

The too-cool-for-school brigade appeared en masse to vilify whoever was behind the fake account. The majority of them were the usual empty vessels that can generally be relied upon to be seen struggling to elevate themselves by dint of pushing others down.

But there were some more influential figures joining in, including journalists from leading UK newspapers. Their weighty contributions to this debate tended to be of the “my cat is also a social experiment” type.

For me this kind of backlash is an example of one of the worst aspects of the British psyche. Someone tried to be clever. They weren’t, perhaps, as clever as they thought they were. It matters not if the point they were making was a good point. They were trying to be clever and here, in the UK, that kind of thing will always get you shot down.

Usually by people who wouldn’t recognise an original idea if it dribbled out of their coke-damaged nostril and landed in their breakfast one morning. Or, worse, by those who are actually more than capable of solid, rounded, interesting arguments and opinions but who don’t want to be seen being intelligent, and would rather than stick to being arch, reductive and on the unpleasant side of cynical.

It’s easy to sneer and mock. I find it a hugely unappealing character trait.

I care far less whether there are holes in the explanation offered by the originators of the fake Glitter account (such as how old the account was, whether events overtook them, etc) and more that as a result of their actions someone somewhere may have started to think about the importance of not being so gullible, asking questions, being sceptical.

The issue of keeping children safe online is important.

If you disagree, you are an idiot – or you have a vested interest in children not being kept safe.

Either way, I don't wanna be in your gang.

all my 2011 blog posts in a wordcloud

2012-01-01T07:00:00.001Z

In 2011 I published almost 23,000 words on this blog.

Here they are (yes, all of them) as a wordcloud...

december 2011 word cloud

2011-12-31T12:20:00.000Z

Here's a word cloud of my posts from December 2011...

the recruitment mistake agency heads will make in 2012

2011-12-30T15:03:00.000Z

There are too many young people chasing too few job vacancies in the UK. It’s been that way for a few years, but youth unemployment is currently running at its highest rate since comparable records began almost 20 years ago, with more than one million 16 to 24 year olds out of work in the UK.

For any business with vacancies to fill this is, quite simply, a buyers’ market. And while, broadly speaking, this can be a good thing, like so many things in life it doesn’t take much to make a mess of a golden opportunity.

A few weeks ago I met with one of the UK’s more successful and respected PR practitioners (no names, after all I didn’t ask their permission to refer to them in public). Our conversation turned to the issue of attracting and retaining new people into the PR sector.

My companion expressed the belief that PR agencies should be restricting their recruitment to graduates from top universities, and only those with good degrees in solid academic subjects, and who have impressive A level results too.

Buyer’s market, you see. Why bother hiring kids who don’t have degrees, or who have degrees in flaky subjects from tier-two institutions, when there are Oxbridge graduates desperate for work too?

Why?

Well, because intelligence and ability come in all shapes and sizes for one thing.

Not to mention that we’ve probably all met someone with a first class degree from Oxford or Cambridge who also happened, bizarrely, to be catastrophically stupid and lacking in any sense of instinctive intelligence.

Why else?

PR agencies, in the main, have teams. The best teams are made up of people with different outlooks, backgrounds and skills. The points of conflict, debate and interaction in such teams don’t just keep everyone on their toes but can lead to excellent results, well-structured campaigns and a more interesting working environment.

But what about the impact on the agencies who decide to fill their ranks with as many Oxbridge graduates as they can? Surely this is a canny move on their part. Cheap excellent new hires who, a few years ago, would probably not have considered working in PR.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, if this is how your agency has generally recruited then chances are nothing will go wrong. Nothing that hasn’t already, anyway.

But if you are about to turn your back on the way you have traditionally recruited then you might want to ask yourself how you got to where you are now without such shining stars. Where will it lead you? What will your agency look like in a few years? Will you have a shiny new company culture (mono-culture even) based on the über achievers club? Is that what you always hoped for?

What of the AEs and SAEs currently in the PR sector with degrees from universities like Bournemouth, or no degree at all? In this brave new world they wouldn’t have stood a chance. But they can’t be all that bad, surely?

I have a problem (actually it's more of a chip on my shoulder) about this narcissistic outlook that says you should only hire “the best” now they are available. There are bigger forces in play, frankly.

One of them is the mess the current government is making of higher education. By stifling university funding and allowing institutions a free hand to increase their fees, the government has to all intents and purposes made going to study for a degree considerably more expensive at the stroke of a ministerial pen.

Fees of £9,000 per year at a time when (see above) youth unemployment rates are disgustingly high, is making some of the brightest and best turn their backs on university education. And who the hell can blame them? The prospect of graduating with £30,000+ debts and a dearth of job opportunities must be very dispiriting to say the least.

In fact, I’d question whether any student choosing to go to university under such circumstances is in their right mind at all. OK, of course I wouldn’t. But you get my point, I’m sure. If not, it’s something to do with the wisdom of judging books by their covers.

Going to university is a good thing. Of course it is. But it’s not right for everyone and it’s not always the right option. Even while there many students simply don’t make the most of it. It’s an experience that should broaden your mind, not just your book collection.

There are young people who could, quite easily, do fabulously well at any one of the UK’s top universities choosing not to bother at all. Should we rule them out? What do we value most – their potential or their pieces of paper?

Whichever way I look at it, I cannot help but think that the idea of only hiring Oxbridge graduates and eschewing all other candidates is a very bad idea indeed. The kind that will eventually come back to bite you in the arse. Well, here’s hoping.

an idiots guide to dinner and the euro

2011-12-20T16:24:00.002Z

Picture the scene, if you will.

You and a group of friends agree you will go out to dinner somewhere nice – let’s assume it’s to celebrate something. There are 27 of you in total.

In advance, you agree that because the bill will fairly hefty you’ll split it equally between all 27.

The big night arrives and you all meet at the restaurant, where everyone has an aperitif of the same value. Everyone has a starter course and a main course and all are roughly equal in value.

So far so good.

But then some of your group decide they want dessert and coffee, possibly dessert wine or a liqueur too. This causes concern and the group begins to fragment. There are 17 people who want the extra food and drink, 10 who don’t.

Of the 10 who don’t, some are now saying they are concerned that if the dinner doesn’t end soon they’ll miss the last train home. Others are refusing to put in an equal share of the bill – as previously agreed – because they haven’t had the extra food and drink.

So, what to do…?

Those who want to catch the last train home have two basic choices – leave now while some of their friends are finishing their dessert course and catch the train, or stay and find an alternative method of transport. They probably can’t impose their will on the others and deny them their crème brulee though. But nor should they stay and feel resentful.

The division of the bill is a tricky one too. You may well feel that by being asked to pay an equal sum but having consumed less, you are subsidising those of your friends who ate and drank more. But by reneging on the prior arrangement you risk being seen as mean. You may not get invited out again.

In the end one person refuses to pay an equal amount and leaves early in order to get the train, while everyone else stays behind.

Next time the group plans to go out together it is decided that despite the previous spat there’s no reason to exclude the grumpy and impatient friend. But no one is going to feel well disposed if that person starts out saying they won’t put in an equal amount this time, yet still wants to have an equal say in where to go and what to eat.

I think we all know how we’d feel about that one person.

And I don’t think we’d call it bulldog spirit.

why i deleted my google+ account

2011-12-17T16:33:00.001Z

I was one of the first… fact. I got my invite to join Google+ the day after it went live – a long time before the flood gates opened.

I very quickly got into the swing of it and found it useful and enjoyable. As it should be.

I also found that within a few days I was connected with a very high caliber of people from the creative industries whose opinions, observations and thoughts I was keen to share in.

It didn’t last long though.

I grew bored quickly of the goofing around some people indulged in, but that’s their choice. After all, just because I’d decided I’d use G+ more seriously than Twitter doesn’t mean everyone else should.

Then the echo chamber started.

People I knew via Twitter as well as on G+ were sharing all the same content in both places, with no objective other than to amplify their own social media echo. Unsurprisingly, their behaviour was applauded in both worlds by the same cabal of their followers.

Frankly, I just didn’t get it. If you’ve shown off about something on twitter and your subset of friends and acolytes have jumped up and down whooping, hollering and sharing, why is the very same thing happening on G+, I wondered? After all, you’re clearly just patting each other’s backs, not really reading any of the stuff each other are sharing and looking like complete plonkers in front of the rest of us.

I got a tired of the territorialism I experienced too.

Then there was the wave of people I’ve never heard of adding me to circles even though there is nothing I was ever likely to say or share that would be of value to them and vice versa.

So, I wouldn’t add these people back.

I am not and never will be a social media numbers whore. I know too many of those. I rate them all pretty much the same.

That got worse, of course, once G+ became publicly available.

I forget the actual trigger but one day a combination of all of the above led me to conclude that I wanted out. So I deleted my account.

Now I read that the first person to have more than one million circles on G+ is Britney Spears.

I don’t think I ever felt more vindicated.

why i’ve fallen out of love with google

2011-12-12T11:35:00.000Z

You and I have been together for a long time now, since 1998 in fact. I know that doesn’t quite make me a bona fide early adopter. And since I first looked to you to provide me with the answers to questions that plagued me, many others have followed in my footsteps. But even though you had only been available for about a year or so back then, compared with all the others I’d gone searching with – Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, even Alta Vista – you were…. different.

Things just seemed to click between us. You were there whenever I needed you and I soon forgot about the others. You never let me down. Things were simple. I asked, you answered. You never pretended to be something you weren’t.

Times change though. Indeed, times have changed. After a while it became clear that you wanted more, you needed more. I can’t blame you for that. It’s only natural.

I discovered that some people were using you for email. I was in no hurry to join in. But in the end I did. It was important to you, and that was enough for me to give it a go.

There were Documents, allegedly. I never paid much attention to them to be honest. It felt odd, too unusual. Out of character, even. I am not one who fears change, but it’s the little changes that allow one to read another’s motivation and behaviour and I detected a change in you that I hadn’t expected.

Maybe that’s why I ignored these Documents that so many people had begun to talk about so freely. I wanted to retain my grin of ignorant bliss for as long as possible.

There were other things too. But where it really started to go wrong for me was when you started asking everyone to Wave.

By and large, we didn’t want to. A few did – I was one of them. But it soon felt more like drowning than waving.

You then started to create a Buzz. It was starting to become embarrassing. You were becoming involved in everything. It felt like random, out of control behaviour. As though you didn’t know what you wanted anymore.

Throughout, I remained loyal, faithful and true. You were my search engine. Nothing was going to change that. Not even when someone asked me if I fancied having a Bing. Yes I was tempted. But I stayed resolute.

In my mind’s eye you were still young, fresh, challenging.

But your obsession with doing more and doing it with more and more people had by now taken such a grip on you that, if I’m honest with myself, you had changed beyond comparison with how you were when we first met.

Sharing. It was like a virus.

You called it GooglePlus and it was your desperate attempt to create your own social life, having so resolutely missed the boat when others created theirs.

You wanted people to share with you. You wanted people to share with each other. Where would it end, I wondered. Frictionless sharing, that’s where. Good lord… is this really what you have become?

Nothing and no one can take from me the memories of those early days. Back in 1998, colleagues scoffed at my boyish enthusiasm for you. But they soon succumbed to your charms. I felt vindicated. And a little smug. I was on the side of an up-and-coming challenger. It felt good. I felt good.

But times move on and people change. You are now a dominant force. No longer a plucky challenger with coquettish ways and winning performance to get you through. You don’t listen like you used to. You make assumptions about what you can get away with.

I want to tell you that it isn’t you, it’s me. Thing is… it is you.

But even so, I can’t quit you – as the line goes from Brokeback Mountain. You are everywhere I look. I am reflected in your Chrome. And even as I write, somewhere a courier is bringing me my first Android-powered smartphone.

I searched for the phone online. I.... Googled it. For all your fancy ways, underneath it all, you are still my search engine. Nothing can change that.

The meaning of Christmas, and of PR

2011-12-10T18:18:00.001Z

I went to see my youngest son’s school Christmas play recently. Twice. It was very enjoyable and he got a kick out of my being there such that I would have sat through anything he asked me to.

As I sat looking at the scenery my mind wandered inexplicably to a question both my children have asked me from time-to-time. What is it, they have asked, that I do for a living. It’s a question that I’ve often struggled to answer in terms they understand. And as I sat there, I asked myself…. what would Jesus do?

No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. But I did find myself wondering if I could take the elements of the nativity and use them to create an explanation of what I do for a living.

Let’s consider the main characters.

The inn-keeper

I’ve played the “no room at the inn” card when denying journalists access to my clients in times of crisis control and damage limitation. So he fits.

The angel Gabriel

If the angel of the Lord had come down and confronted a journalist the exchange would have gone something like this.

Angel: “I bring great news for you and all mankind!”

Journo: “If you have a press release you can email it to me and I may read it later, but please don’t call to ask me if I’ve received it.”

So the angel Gabriel fits the bill.

The shepherds

They watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground. I haven’t done a great deal of sitting on the ground during my time in PR, but I have frequently felt like I was watching my flock. Although herding cats is a description that feels more apt.

Either way, I look out for my clients’ reputations, and I look out for the best interests of the people I manage. So grab your crooks fellas… you’ve made the cut.

King Herod

Well, let’s face it…. we’ve all got a few client-from-hell stories to tell. You’re in, your majesty.

Three Wise Men

Trying to make sense of events that go on around them, they fit perfectly.

The holy family themselves is where I struggle. So I’m leaving them out – for now at least.

Were I to then take all the above elements and weave them into an explanation of what PR is, it might go a little like this.

I try to tell people important news, not my news. But news from someone else – I’m like a messenger. When I’m not doing that I’m protecting my clients from anyone who is trying to say bad things about them. And sometimes, like the inn-keeper, I have to be a bit stern and say no.

I often feel like one of the wise men, as I understand the bigger picture (Balthazar, probably, because he’s the only one of the wise men who ended up with his own animated TV show in the 1960s and 70s). And I work in an industry so full of arrogance and ego that you’d be forgiven for thinking every other person believes they’ve been cast in the role of son of God.

Or daughter. No gender bias here, folk.

As descriptions of my job go, it’s far from perfect. But it beats the one my eldest son came up with at school when he was seven. Asked what his dad’s job is, he said “he visits people in their offices and they have to give him money.”

november 2011 word cloud

2011-12-03T16:45:00.000Z

My summary, in world cloud format, of my blog posts in November 2011. There were only a couple of them!

last night i dreamt...

2011-11-16T13:43:00.001Z

Last night I had a very strange dream. It wasn’t exactly disturbing, at least not in the way people usually use that word in connection with the nocturnal wanderings of their minds. But it did disturb my sleep.

I was in a house that was a combination of several places I’ve lived in. That’s a fairly common dream motif for me. In one of the rooms my father (who died in January of this year) was sitting at a table talking about my mother – who died in 1997.

I don’t recall anything he said. But I remember wishing he would stop talking. The other thing I remember was that he had no ear lobes.

I left that room and walked into another. In this room stood a wardrobe that belonged to my mother before she was married. This is a real wardrobe, I had it collected from my parents’ house in 2002 and had it shipped to mine. Back to the dream, where the wardrobe was the only thing in this particular room – a room that resonated to the sound of a low-buzzing.

On closer inspection, the whole inside of the wardrobe was a hornets’ nest. Which was a cause for concern as I was then struck by the realisation there was something important in there that I needed to get to.

What could it all mean….?

Answers on a postcard please, to the following address:

Sean Is Clearly Bonkers

PO Box 999

Etc etc etc….

(or leave a comment)

why cameron could learn from papandreou

2011-11-05T15:10:00.008Z

Two weeks ago there was a rebellion by some Conservative MPs against David Cameron in a vote in the House of Commons.

The vote concerned a motion that called for referendum on whether the UK should exit the European Union, renegotiate the terms of its membership, or leave things as they are. The motion was put before the House by David Nuttall, a Conservative MP. There was also an e-petition on the matter, which gathered the support of over 100,000 UK citizens.

David Cameron called upon all his MPs to vote against it, and the Tory party whips went into action - cajoling and coercing Members to do just that.

When 81 Tory MPs voted counter to the wishes of their leader (two others abstained) this was the biggest ever rebellion by Conservatives in the House of Commons over the thorny issue of the UK's relationship with the EU.

The motion was still comfortably defeated though, by 483 votes to 111. That outcome was never in any doubt. Had the unthinkable happened, and the motion had been passed, the result would not have been binding on the government anyway.

The only significant outcome there could ever reasonably have been was the one that happened - a number of Tories voted with their conscience as opposed to toeing the line. Some stated they were voting in accordance with the wishes of their constituents.

By making such a big deal out of insisting his MPs did as he told them, Cameron ended up suffering from the biggest rebellion etc etc etc.

What was he thinking? He should have publicly said that he was happy to see all MPs vote however they saw fit - safe in the knowledge nothing bad could ever happen. But instead of being big enough to relinquish control he allowed himself to appear defeated in a fight that mattered far less than the issue of whether the Prime Minister has the full backing of all of his party.

Meanwhile, this week in Greece saw Prime Minister Papandreou accept a Franco-German orchestrated bailout, only to turn round and say he wanted the Greek people to be able to vote in a referendum on whether they were happy with its terms. The French were not happy (plus ca change, mon ami). Likewise, the Germans were less than tickled.

Ultimately, Papandreou's call for a referendum has been shelved.

So what? How likely is it that he ever thought it would come off?

Maybe something else was behind this move. Perhaps, knowing he was returning home to ask the people of Greece to swallow a very bitter pill that had been designed by France and Germany, and would see years of hardship and austerity, Papandreou sought a way of deflecting the bad news.

Under the circumstances, he has managed to underline the fact that there was nothing further he could have done. Even when he wanted to use democratic means to enable the Greek people to feel they had a say, that their opinons might be heard, the dark hand of Europe's pay-masters was seen to be shutting him up.

Well played George.

Everyone suspects your domestic political career won't last much longer. But once you're looking for something new to keep yourself busy, you should consider a visit to Downing Street where a bloke called Dave could really do with someone explaining to him how politics really works.

Footnote:
David Nuttall's motion was a massive red herring anyway. The UK cannot unilaterally renegotiate the terms of its EU membership and there is absolutely no motivation for the EU to agree to any new terms the UK puts forward. Withdrawing from the EU is crazy talk - we all know that. So the only viable option from the three contained within the motion was the one where everything stays the same.

Further reading:
EU referendum: Rebels lose vote in Commons
Papandreou scraps Greek referendum as open warfare erupts in his party

october 2011 word cloud

2011-11-01T14:46:00.000Z

This is the third month that I've done a round up of what I've written in wordcloud format.

recalling a humbling evening

2011-10-30T10:28:00.001Z

On this day last year I visited a firework display in the grounds of a local hospice.

It caused me to reflect on life and death, a theme I've visited more than once on this blog. Also on the things you should be grateful for.

You'll find it here:

up in smoke

the countdown to a federal europe has begun

2011-10-27T23:47:00.005+01:00

The European single market has been a good thing. It has enabled the free flow of labour across the continent (well, most of it), which has brought about innumerable economic and social benefits.

The European single currency, aka the Euro, has of late revealed itself as a flawed project.

A great deal of attention has been focussed on some of its more obvious problems:

the collapse of the Greek economy
the size of the bailouts required by Athens
the threat of economic contagion (hello Italy, sorry... maybe I mean goodbye Italy)
the growing influence of Germany, blah, blah, blah.....

But there is one thing that has been happening behind the scenes which I cannot help but feel is being allowed to go unnoticed.

By most measures, the Euro is in a mess.

Yet one of the long-lasting consequences of this will be the increasing influence of the European Central Bank. In effect, a completely undemocratic institution will soon be making decisions that will impact very directly on the everyday lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in Europe.

How has this come about? Chiefly because of a collective failure on the part of the major European leaders. A failure to get to the heart of the Euro crisis, to take difficult/unpopular decisions and see them through to the end. Instead they have fallen into one of the old and familiar habits of the bureaucratic mind - allowing institutional influence a freer hand to deal with problems which existing instituions have already failed to deal with effectively.

I can't think of many other walks of life when failure to deliver X means you have carte blanche to press on with X + 1.

Only in high finance.

Only in European politics.

Well, I'm only a simple soul, clearly. I'm sure there are very good reasons for this.

But as someone who has always been a supporter of the European project (although not of political and fiscal union) to see the gradual shift of democratically-elected powers from Europe's capitals to the institution of Europe itself does little to bolster my sense of bon homie.

I'm not sure it's for me to say whether there ought to be a federal Europe or not. I am sure there are excellent arguments both for and against. But should that day come, I would hope that it is something that the citizens of Europe's many and varied nations get the chance to have their say on and not something that slips in unannounced while we are all distracted.

pr is dead - long live pr

2011-10-27T11:48:00.001+01:00

When I hear - as I'm sure we all have - that social media has irrevocably changed the way in which people communicate with each other, and will therefore change the way in which brands (and their intermediaries) attempt to communicate with people, I reserve the right to remain sensibly sceptical.

Back in 2002 or so, I encountered a question in almost every client meeting I had, whether with existing or prospective clients.

"Do you do online PR?" I was asked.

Frankly, this question threw me into a spin - no PR pun intended. I would return to my desk and sit there reflecting on this question, or more to the point on my complete lack of a coherent answer to it. I felt like a latter-day Rip van Winkle that had woken up after a long nap only to find there'd been an unexpected shift of paradigm. The (PR) world had moved on without me.

You see, the problem was I didn't even know what online PR was. Admittedly I wasn't, back then, the grey-haired PR aficionado I am now. But I was no newbie either. And I had been the news editor of the UK's foremost online news site. So, I felt if anyone ought to know what online PR was, and be all over it, it should be me.

But I wasn't. And that troubled me.

One of the nice(r) things about being a little older though, is you start to notice when things heralded as new are, in fact, a rehash of something that has gone before.

This brings me back to the issue of why I didn't understand what online PR was? Because it never existed. In much the same way that social media has not and will not change the way people communicate - except, of course, at a fairly mechanical level.

I don't know which was invented first - the fork or the spoon. But I wouldn't be surprised if one of those implements was heralded as changing people's relationship with food by some visionary or other. Sure, you scoop with one and, err, fork with the other. But the fundamentals remain utterly unchanged. You are eating. Transporting food into your mouth. Chopsticks will also do the job.

Back to PR. This is only my view, admittedly, but surely PR is the art of story telling - stories can be fact or fiction; if you don't agree with me, ask yourself why some documentaries are more compelling than others, why some biographies are more gripping.

Story telling only works if you have something interesting to say and someone who wants to hear it. You can sit round the campfire, you can put it on a CD, you can go on stage and use performance art, you can make a movie or a one-act play, you can write a novel or even make a documentary. It is still, at some level, a story - words and images crafted to convey information in an interesting way.

I don't doubt there are better and more sophisticated PR practitioners that will knock holes in my viewpoint with effortless ease. But I stand by the principle that if you can't get the basics right - what's my story and who do I want to tell it to - it doesn't matter which medium you select for telling it.

in praise of the front page corpse shot

2011-10-21T09:47:00.000+01:00

The Roman poet Horace said: "pale death beats equally at the poor man's gate and at the palaces of kings."

And so it goes today, as it did more than 2,000 years ago when those words were written.

I was reminded of those words yesterday, upon hearing of the death of Muammar "Colonel" Gaddafi. A man who's lowly start in life belied what was to come in later years - as he installed himself as the self-styled brother leader of Libya; autocratic king in all but name.

Like most tyrants, he got the end he probably deserved. Found cowering in a drainage tunnel, he was dragged out, beaten and shot. His corpse was dragged through the street for all to see. But not, from what I've read, hung upside down outside a petrol station, as the Italians did when they fell out of love with Mussolini in 1945.

It is said that it's not enough for justice to be done. It must be seen to be done. That's a viewpoint I have a great deal of sympathy with. But while I'm not a proponent of censorship per se, I do think that there needs to be some judgement exercised when it comes to broadcasting the image of a blood-stained corpse across the world via the mass media.

My colleague Julian Moore summed up one of the things that bothers me about the image of the dead Gaddafi, which currently adorns many of the UK national papers' front pages: "Kids need to be brought up not thinking that violence is an acceptable part of everyday life. This doesn't help do that."

a tweet before bedtime

2011-10-18T20:33:00.001+01:00

Like a lot of people I've grown to know online, and even count as friends, I have more than a passing interest in the tools available for blogging, tweeting and generally carrying on like a good netizen.

I've discussed Klout before. It's interesting. A little addictive perhaps. But pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Peerindex is much of a muchness (I love that expression, in case you were wondering).

Attempting to measure a person's online significance, influence, or (heaven forbid) capital by virtue of something as monodimensional as how many followers they have is clearly nonsense. The algorithms behind the likes of Klout, Peerindex et al are more sophisticated I grant you, but not massively.

I've become quite interested in Crowdbooster recently. I like the reports you get showing how your tweets were interacted with. It is quite simply, interesting. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm unlikely to change my behaviour in lieu of it.

I noticed just the other day that Crowdbooster also offers recommendations for the best time for me to tweet. It turns out I ought to tweet at 10am, 3pm and 5pm. To what end is not entirely clear. What to say in those perfectly-timed mini-missives... anyone's guess.

I sincerely hope no one is taking this advice too literally.

Content remains crucial. Have something to say. Know who you want to say it to. Then figure out when to say it.

10am, 3pm, bleak o'clock.... whatever. It doesn't matter what you tweet if you're saying the wrong thing.

Twas ever thus.

And it it doesn't just apply online.

if the menopause doesn’t get me, the cancer surely will

2011-10-09T10:34:00.005+01:00

This is the second of two pieces I wrote on 8 October 2011 on the subject of searching online for health-related information and coming face-to-face with the issue of trust. This was the first one: "snake oil, bone-shakers and witch-doctors 2.0"

Spurred on by my recent search for food information and the number of hokey websites I found myself looking at, I decided to go one step further and investigate some online diagnosis sites.

Once again, it is nigh on impossible to tell the voice you can trust from the ones that ought to be denied access to the internet altogether. And of the majority, which sit between those two extreme points, there is no easy way of knowing who is well-intentioned but essentially wrong on too many counts, and who is being deliberately misleading in order to promote their own beliefs.

I decided to spend a little time filling in some online forms, answering questions about my health, so I could see for myself what kind of information might be presented to someone entering into this sort of activity genuinely.

With a mind to some everyday aches and pains (the kind I imagine we all suffer from occasionally) I answered all the questions accurately and honestly. Well, mostly – I lied about my gender on one site. We’ll come on to that shortly.

It might be worth pointing out that my family doctor, a charming and thorough man, recently insisted I had a full set of blood tests and an ECG. Everything came back normal, and his assessment was that I am in very good shape for a man of my age. In fact, my lung capacity and strength is that of someone 20 years my junior, he said. Perhaps that’s from all the practice I have of blowing my own trumpet.

So what of the time I spent with Doctor Interwebz? What was the diagnosis from that?

Well, I have always believed that when it comes to any form of self-diagnosis all roads lead to cancer. These beliefs were not shattered by this weekend’s activities. In three parts of my body I am – allegedly – exhibiting symptoms that could indicate cancer.

In addition to which, I learned I need an urgent medical assessment of my cardio-vascular functions.

But my favourite diagnosis by far was the one that told me I was experiencing symptoms that indicate the onset of the menopause.

It’s hard not to laugh, which is why I did indeed laugh. But there is a serious point buried in here.

When it comes to online information, the issue of trust – it seems to me – is as valid today as it has ever been.

In some ways, I take comfort from the fact that little really changes when it comes to human nature. Some folk like to be scared, while others are happy to lead you astray.

It’s a jungle out there people – stay safe.

And for goodness sake, if you really are concerned about your health don’t go anywhere near the internet. Go and see a real doctor.

A footnote: I decided against including links to any of the sites I visited. Trust me, it's for your own good. Added to which I don't think they deserve the traffic.

snake oil, bone-shakers and witch-doctors 2.0

2011-10-08T17:34:00.000+01:00

This is the first of two pieces on the subject of using the internet to find reliable information regarding things connected with health.

Over the weekend I was searching online for information about which foods are a good source of different kinds of vitamins and minerals. Not for myself, but for one of my kids.

It was, I thought initially, a pretty straightforward thing to look for online.

But what happened next enabled me to see the internet in all its naked glory.

My first encounter with the internet was 20 years ago and these days I am rarely offline, except when I am asleep – much to the occasional chagrin of those around me.

Consequently I consider myself to be pretty savvy when it comes to using the internet. A digital native, if you will. I am well versed in finding what I want online and quickly navigating my way through the many pools of information therein, some deep and some not so.

But the food search episode was quite the revelation. Pretty much all the results returned by Google (which has been my weapon of choice for searching since 1998 and is likely to remain as such for the foreseeable) were from websites that looked at best questionable as sources of information and at worst downright misleading.

How, I asked myself, am I supposed to be able to tell in whom I should place my trust?

I trawled through page after page, site after site, and came to the conclusion that I couldn’t figure that one out. So I ignored them all, preferring to remain in blissful ignorance.

This, I realised, is what it must be like to be unfamiliar with the internet and to trust in the validity of all the search results Google delivers you.

One of the most enduring changes the internet has brought about is the democratisation of publishing. Anyone with an opinion, a computer and an internet connection can publish those opinions and, potentially, gather around them an audience of believing readers.

This is a good thing. And also a not-so-good thing.

september 2011 word cloud

2011-10-02T20:12:00.000+01:00

Last month, I published a word cloud showing the words I'd used in August.

I thought I'd do the same for September.

Simple as that.

new songs from my band the subtitles

2011-09-30T10:25:00.001+01:00

I joined The Subtitles as vocalist and rhythm guitarist late last year. A few months ago we started writing our own material.

We picked two songs that we liked, worked on them and then recorded them a few weeks ago. After some refining and mixing, they are now finished. I hope. :)

The links below should take you to them. If not, leave a comment to let me know - or email me, or @-reply me on twitter.

I would really appreciate some feedback on them. They are yet to go on the band website but soon will.

Hopefully, we'll get some gigs sorted out soon so we can try these (and others) out on a live audience.

Thanks in advance - I really appreciate you taking the time.

The songs:

Falling - click here

Walk Away - click here

Added on 1 October:

I got some great feedback from people who kindly listened to the songs and shared their thoughts. I am really grateful, as are the other guys in the band.

This is some of what was said. But I'd love to hear some more opinions.

Wow
Sounds great
Impressed
Awesome stuff
Both very good
instrumental section in Walk Away is too long - loses a bit of momentum, I thought it was the outro
Both *might* benefit from some vocal harmonies on the choruses
Seriously am now humming Walk Away
Your drummer's style is very musical rather than "technical" if that makes sense - suits your material well

telling stories, human nature and social media

2011-09-28T10:58:00.000+01:00

Since the very dawn of time itself mankind has told stories.

Ok, maybe not since the dawn of time perhaps "since the evolution of language" would have been more accurate. But that didn't sound very story-like.

Someone once told me that all the stories we are familiar with are in fact based on just a handful of original story ideas that came into being eons ago.

That could be true.

Certainly many cultures have a rich story-telling tradition. Viking sagas, the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, Greek myths, the Tales of 1,001 Nights - frankly there's loads.

Stories don't just come in that more obvious narrative format either. Cave paintings, totem poles, the adornments on boomerangs - graphical story-telling is a strong part of human history.

We've come a long way from sitting round the fire recounting our ancestors' tales of derring-do or painting on cave walls. But stories are still a fundamental part of who we are as individuals, as nations and also in relation to how brands identify themselves.

The approach taken by advertisers and marketers just a generation or two ago looks naive by our sophisticated 21st century standards. It was, with some exceptions, "here's our product - buy it."

And while that approach still exists - and of course the motivation of generating sales is still hugely valid - consumers tend now to switch off to a lot of that stuff. We're all so accustomed to being marketed to that maybe we've started to become immune.

Whether you call it PR, communications, marcomms, or whatever, those who ply their trade in the same sector as I are in the business of telling stories. Stories that will resonate with our clients' target audiences and give them a sense of affinity with a particular brand.

This can be seen being played out in the digital space even more clearly, where the time between brand execution and customer feedback grows ever shorter.

But much like the crazy preacher-man berating the passing crowds at Oxford Circus I passed this morning, there's a danger we end up trying to tell our stories to people who simply aren't interested.

Again, the online world has made this trap ever more easy to fall into.

The fundamentals of story-telling – much like the fundamentals of human nature, in my opinion – remain:

Get the story right
Know who it is that you want to tell your story to
Be sure you're talking when (and where) they will listen.
And who knows, maybe even ask them to share their stories with you too

We haven't really come such a long way at all, in this story-teller's opinion.

Although at least we're not still writing on walls.

Ahem..!

Yes Facebook, I'm looking at you.

i don’t want you but i need you

2011-09-23T10:07:00.001+01:00

Smokey Robinson said it best when he sang I don’t want you but I need you.

As one of the most gifted song-writers in the popular music genre, this observation of what it’s like to be in love with someone you know is bad for you is beautifully crafted.

It also kinda sums up most people’s relationship status with Facebook.

I can’t think of an example of another organisation with such a vast following of people who are so quick to voice their dislike of the service.

And therein lies Facebook’s problem. Timelines and profile tweaks aside, it needs to do something about the toxic relationship it has with its users, many of whom are only sticking around because their friends are too.

It’s like a massive Mexican stand-off. If the day ever comes when enough people finally walk away from Facebook it could start a craze.

So far there hasn’t been a viable alternative to lure people away. For all the fuss, hype and expectation, GooglePlus won’t do it. And there simply isn’t anyone else with the size and reach to be a realistic threat to Facebook.

That’s not much of a business model though, is it? Our customers are stuck with us and we are stuck with the fact they don’t like us.

If I was gambling man, I’d be looking at Renren as a possible longer-term Facebook rival. But that’s probably a topic for another day.

In the meantime, Facebook has to do something to stem the tide of discontent and griping.

Will Timeline be enough to do this?

No, of course not. But if it forms part of a coherent strategy to start putting people at the heart of the Facebook experience, giving them something to like – in the real sense of the word, not a silly fake Facebook like – then maybe it could be on to something.

Now, why not treat yourself to Smokey Robinson & The Miracles singing You Really Got a Hold on Me – the video and audio quality isn’t the best, but it’s worth it. Your soul will thank you.

give us your thoughts - dan purvis set to music

2011-09-05T12:00:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago I recorded a phone interview that I did with Dan Purvis (Global Director of PR at Meltwater Group, he's also a former colleague of mine at Octopus Communications and a friend).

I cut up part of the interview and dropped extracts into a dance track I had composed a few weeks prior to that.

It's called "Give Us Your Thoughts" and Dan & I hope you enjoy it..!

august 2011 word cloud

2011-08-31T19:12:00.004+01:00

For no reason other than it piqued my curiosity, I pasted all the copy I’ve written and published on my site during August 2011 into Wordle to see what it would look like as a word cloud.

I didn’t include any of the comments readers kindly left, nor my responses to those comments.

I haven't included this piece either. That seemed like a daft idea!

Of the almost 5,000 words published, there are 250 represented below.

I wonder what this says about me or the things I write about.

August 2011 - don't run with scissors word cloud

the time has come to spam journos with video

2011-08-30T17:30:00.006+01:00

Am I missing something?

A fully-functioning synapse or two? Or the point, perhaps.

I just read a piece on TheRealPRMoment about research from press release distribution company RealWire, which states "news releases including video content achieve three times more coverage than releases without multimedia content."

It goes on.... "For those releases with editorial or blog coverage, the average number of pieces was 17.1 for the releases with video content. This was almost three times the figure for the sample without video content of 6.2 and four-and-a-half times more than the distribution industry average of 3.8 pieces."

Drawing a comparison with the last such survey, the story tells us "Adam Parker, RealWire’s chief executive, attributed the lack of adoption of video to (among other things) the barriers that existed such as the prohibitive cost of some distribution services."

Bit of a so-far-so-obvious, you may be thinking.

Here's the thing I'm struggling with.

This is the same Adam Parker and the same RealWire behind the (always struck me implausibly-named) "An Inconvenient PR Truth" campaign, which put forward a bill of rights (frankly, I've never known whether to laugh or weep at that, and I still can't make my mind up) regarding the manner in which PR people send information to journalists.

Let me break it down for you.

It's a campaign that proposes 10 so-called rights intended to make PR people treat bloggers and journalists with more respect and, at its heart, stop spamming them with unwanted press releases and other forms of contact.

For the avoidance of any doubt, I dislike the campaign. I wrote about it here.

I've never claimed to be possessed of super-human intelligence, and what I'm now struggling with is that on one hand RealWire/Adam Parker (wearing the Inconvenient Truth hat) have advised me (and the rest of the PR industry) to tread carefully. On the other hand, the one that's promoting distribution services via a news item about a piece of research, I'm now being advised to use video in press releases.

Too many people in PR can recount stories of journalists becoming quite irrationally upset just because there was a jpg or a pdf attached to an email.

Step forward if you're brave enough to start punting video at people.

I'll be the one eating popcorn and watching what happens.

brits behaving badly

2011-08-20T12:10:00.003+01:00

I'm about to make a comparison between the riots and looting of early August and the way Brits behave in cafes.

I know, I know... extreme. How long before Godwin's Law is invoked?

This is one of my pet hates, and I'm witnessing it as I write this piece.

I'm in the M&S cafe in Reading. Don't judge me! The only independent coffee house I've tried in Reading was bloody awful.

Plus, my youngest son (sat next to me scoffing an enormous cookie) likes it here.

Back to the pet hate. It was relatively quiet when we arrived. Since then, it's got busier. There's a longish queue and empty tables are fewer in number than they were.

I've watched about six groups of people walk in, bypass the queue, find a table, deposit themselves and their bags at said table, and send one person off to join the queue.

I've also watched several people leave the queue with their trays piled high, often with children in tow, struggle to find somewhere to sit.

"I'm sorry," the table-baggers say. "Someone is sitting here."

What I hear though is, "up yours you loser."

It's a bit of a leap, I admit, from here to looting. But what I'm witnessing is a lack of consideration for others.

Sadly, I think it's endemic.

I don't know what it is about this country, my home, but good manners are becoming as rare as hens' teeth. And it just fosters an attitude of looking after number one, and not giving a toss about anyone else.

It's a shame. A real shame.

We can all call for looters to be locked up for years, that's easy.

But what's much harder, is to look at ourselves and consider how we might lead by example in the little things we do every day.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

the double-dip risk of risk-avoidance

2011-08-19T20:09:00.002+01:00

It may have been three years since it hit hard, but the global financial downturn / GFC / credit crunch still casts a long shadow over Western economies.

Talk of a double-dip recession has been less prominent of late, but could it be that any cause for optimism is somewhat premature? Sadly I think it may.

An awful lot of people I know have been adversely affected financially since 2008. Belt-tightening has, for many, become the new normal. This shift in attitude goes hand-in-hand with a more cautious and risk-averse outlook. An outlook mirrored in the global finance markets.

Banks became more hesitant where lending is concerned. This sparked the oft-mentioned credit crunch.

Are we about to see recent history repeat itself?

Here's why I think we are. Or at least why it is a possibility.

The world's major stock markets have been in decline for the last few weeks - a decline which has lately gathered momentum.

As investors look around for alternatives (less risky alternatives) to the volatile stock markets, they turn to some familiar safe harbours. In particular, gold (prices are at record highs) and government bonds from the UK and USA. These too have seen trading prices hit levels not seen for decades.

This performs two functions.

First, as capital flows to governments or is exchanged for gold, there is less of it available generally.

Second, as the price of government bonds rises the yields they offer falls.

That in itself is not bad news for the governments concerned as the cost of servicing their debts levels will fall as a result.

But it is this first point that ought to set alarm bells ringing.

Banks will, simply speaking, have less money available. In fact, typical interbank borrowings have started to fall from six month to three month terms.

Less capital circulating ever faster. Something has to give.

That something is most likely going to be business lending.

Business lending is the lifeblood of all developed economies and it is still on its knees recovering from the winding it received in the post-2008 fallout.

Business confidence too is far from the healthiest it's ever been. The prospect of struggling to lend from the primary markets will cause some to pull in their horns.

Investment in people, premises, R&D, you name it, could all come under threat. As if it wasn't already in many instances.

Will there be a second wave of financial turmoil? I have no idea.

Is it likely? Yes, sadly it is.

This is one of those occasions when I really hope I will be proven wrong.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

why four years for the facebook rioters is not a good thing

2011-08-16T23:01:00.003+01:00

Two young men in north west England have been sentenced to four years in prison, each, for content posted on Facebook that was deemed to be inciting people to riot.

Some of you may be thinking this is a good thing.

But it's not good. It's far from good.

The average sentence handed down to rapists in the UK is five years.

That's the average. You don’t need to be a statistician to appreciate that means some get sentences that are far more lenient.

It has to be possible that at the same time one of those men was using Facebook to attempt to encourage people to engage in acts of criminal destruction (in one case the proposed target was a McDonald's restaurant) somewhere in the UK a woman was being raped.

Should her attacker be arrested, convicted and sent to prison in accordance with the existing typical sentencing loads, that rapist will be released back into society before someone who invited people to a riot that never took place.

This cannot, to any reasonable person, be a good thing.

I do not advocate leniency in the sentencing of people who have sought to perpetrate civil disorder, theft and destruction. Far from it.

The events that took place around 8/9 August 2011, when the rioting and looting reached its apex, were shocking and appalling. Those that broke the law must be brought to book and suffer the consequences.

However, the government has been on the back-foot from the outset and even now is seeking to position itself as in control of things by virtue of a succession of reactionary statements driven by fear. Now, it would appear, the judiciary is caught up in that fear too.

So much for the separation of powers.

Crack down on rioters and looters by all means. That can only be a good thing. Furthermore, investigating options for coping with the way in which people will choose to use social media, mobile phones and other messaging technologies is a good thing too.

Sending someone down for a failed attempt at inciting a riot – whether they do it on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, a phone call, a fax, or even a carrier pigeon – is also a good thing.

But a situation where rapists face lighter prison sentences than a couple of idiots in Cheshire whose clumsy attempts to look big on Facebook would be more at home on a site called egg-on-your-face-book is not a good thing.

It is a bad thing.

crackdowns, kneejerks, and forest fires

2011-08-15T10:21:00.003+01:00

Last week's wave of social unrest and wide-scale criminality in the UK has opened up the issue of how social media is used to a more mainstream audience than it has previously. Was it part of the problem? Was it part of the solution?

I expressed my opinion on this on twitter:

My point being that a forest fire spreads quickly via the trees. The trees aren't wooden arsonists, merely fuel being somewhat opportunistically used by the fire.

I read on Friday that the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail company had "temporarily interrupted" the service from the following mobile phone companies - Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. This was done to disrupt a protest which had been planned in the wake of a fatal shooting on 3 July of a man called Charles Hill by the BART police.

According to a report I read on Al Jazeera:

"On Thursday, BART police Lieutenant Andy Alkire told the local Bay City News agency that while it was unusual to block mobile services, it was 'a great tool to utilise for this specific purpose.'

"Linton Johnson, BART's spokesman, told the local KTVU television channel that BART 'didn't try to shut down the protest. They simply turned off the cell service so it couldn't become viral. It really is just a cost-benefit analysis of where your freedom of speech begins to threaten the public safety.'"

Fair enough. Up to a point. But I can't be the only person who thinks that a train company shouldn't be deciding on where the line is drawn. Can I?

In the early 1990s, when I was a freelance writer and editor, I interviewed a lawyer for a piece I was writing. We talked about how the legal profession was adapting to meet the needs of its clients. The lawyer told me that the fax machine had changed people's perceptions of how quickly decisions were made – a client sends you a fax that requires a detailed and careful response. But because they know it only took seconds for you to receive it, they expect that response in a similar timeframe.

Jeez. Just think what havoc email and IM must have wrought.

The law (in it's broadest sense) has always lagged behind innovation.

Cliché alert…. technology is moving so quickly that legislation cannot possibly keep pace.

But surely that's ok. To an extent.

Wherever you are reading this (I have readers on every continent bar Antarctica you know! <smiles, waves>) don't we all want to live in a society where the laws are carefully considered and brought into being following the proper consultation and evaluation of their efficacy and how they might be enforced?

Kneejerk reactions can be the downfall of many a well-intentioned action – whether in the personal or professional sphere. Some have greater consequences than others. It could be a damaged personal relationship, a badly-managed crisis, or even a calamitous piece of legislation.

While it would be foolish to completely dismiss the role of social media in bringing people together around a cause, a one-size-fits-all reaction will do more harm than good.

after the london riots, why david cameron needs to lead the clean-up

2011-08-11T00:27:00.003+01:00

David Cameron is right.

That’s not something I ever thought I’d write, let alone a viewpoint I’d ever share in public.

I have not had a right-wing epiphany though.

In the speech given on 10 August, the Prime Minister spoke with forceful authority on the causes of the appalling scenes of rioting, looting and criminal destruction visited upon the UK.

Clearly he is a man who wants us to know he is not only going to be tough on crime, but tough on the causes of crime too.

“For me, the root cause of this mindless selfishness is the same thing that I have spoken about for years,” Mr Cameron said.

And I agree with him on that point. I have often regaled people with my opinion that the UK has lost its sense of civic pride and civic duty over the last three or four decades.

He went on, as politicians often do: “It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society. People allowed to feel that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and that their actions do not have consequences.”

On this point, David Cameron and I speak with a single voice.

However, I do feel he is being somewhat selective with scope of his argument.

When I heard the Prime Minister speak these words the first thing that sprang to mind was this:

MPs' expenses: Eric Illsley claimed £150,000

And this:

How Jim Devine claimed thousands using fake receipts

And especially this:

MPs' expenses: duck house MP 'refusing to pay back £40,000'

It also brought to mind this:

Phone hacking: Hundreds of "smoking gun" emails released to detectives probing police corruption

The rioting, looting, and arson that the UK, and in particular London, has witnessed in recent days cannot be excused. The wanton destruction, criminal damage, lawlessness, and violence are all things that defy legitimisation.

Homes have been destroyed. Livelihoods ruined. Some people have lost everything they owned and worked for. Some have lost their lives.

I look around and wonder what on earth has happened to my country.

And I ask myself who the hell is actually in charge.

Is it a callous minority, hell-bent on helping themselves to whatever’s available while no one is looking, and doing their best to conceal their illegal and immoral behaviour?

Or is it a callous minority, hell-bent on helping themselves to whatever’s available while no one is looking, and doing their best to conceal their illegal and immoral behaviour?

In his speech David Cameron also said: “Well, they (referring to the ‘actions’ in the above quote) do have consequences. We need to have a clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by and stronger penalties if they cross the line. Restoring a stronger sense of responsibility across our society, in every town, in every street, in every estate is something I’m determined to do.”

Once again, Mr Cameron, you and I occupy common ground.

But – without wishing for one second to sound like an apologist for scum – this code of values and standards needs to embraced by everyone.

I do not want to live in a country where seemingly ordinary people wreak havoc because of greed, avarice, a lack of respect for their fellow human beings and a disregard for the safety and wellbeing of anyone and everyone around them.

Similarly, I do not want to live in a country where politicians steal from the public purse, where newspapers hack into the phones of dead teenagers, where corrupt police officers are being bribed by journalists to supply information and turn a blind eye.

Anyone in a position of authority and leadership will find out, if they weren’t already aware, that respect is earned – it doesn’t come with your job title, or your accent, or your grey hairs and wrinkles.

Leaders are respected most when they are leading from the front. After all, if you’re not out front you’re plainly not the one doing the leading.

social media fud and no comment 2.0

2011-08-10T15:12:00.001+01:00

It's one of the most worn-out things for someone like me to say but some clients are so gripped by the fear of what might go wrong with their social media strategy that very little can actually go right.

However, I'm fortunate enough to work with clients who, in the main, are not only excited about the potential of digital comms but they get it. I guess that may have led to a certain amount of complacency on my part – I'd started assuming that everyone was enlightened in the ways of social media.

A conversation in the office this morning with a colleague made me realise how off-the-mark this assumption of mine is. It also brought to mind challenging conversations I'd had with clients about regular-grade PR, never mind the digital flavour.

Have I, I then asked myself, stopped thinking about things from the perspective of those who live and work outside the comms and media bubble?

Is there still a job of education to be done?

Or could it be that some people (by which I mean businesses, organisations and the individuals that work in them) will never get to grips with external comms?

The most common objection I have heard from comms-deniers generally goes a little like this, and if you work in PR I reckon you’ll have heard a rendition of this one at some time:

"We don't want to talk about X because it isn’t one of the things that we sell/offer/promote."

PR person's typical response:

"I understand, but you asked us to raise your profile, and you have said you want to be a thought-leader. So you need to have opinions on a wide range of subjects, not just your own products but your industry."

Like most PR folk, I've been involved in running clients' twitter streams to varying degrees, and it is here that some of this reluctance keeps cropping up frequently.

"We should really only be tweeting about our company and products," is one comment I’ve seen recently.

Face, meet palm. Palm, meet face. I've a feeling you two will be spending a lot of time together.

I have some sympathy with the paranoia of being quoted out of context, or being asked questions you can’t answer, that leads some clients to stay entrenched in their comfort zone. There is that whole you can't unring a bell thing about once you’ve said something to a journalist it's hard to take it back.

But this outlook is very destructive when it comes to social media engagement.

There, look… I said it – engagement. That word gets over-used for a reason.

There is no value to either party in simply pumping out a one-way, mono-dimensional stream of tweets.

Your followers will grow bored of you. They come to resent your lack of willingness to enter into a dialogue, or impart any wisdom. They will switch off, not just from your tweets but from your brand too.

Net result – more harm than good.

That’s not to say every corporate tweet needs to be hugely informal, or irreverent. Far from it. It's important to reflect your brand values as well as inject some personality into things.

Ultimately people will be drawn to those brands that offer them something of value. On the high street that may take the form of sale-prices, in the case of a call to register a complaint you want someone who listens and then takes ownership of your problem, and online that’s most likely going to be content that you find interesting and of value.

When I was a boy, my mother used to say to me "if you haven't got anything good to say, don't say anything." To this day I get called taciturn. But maybe, all kidding aside, this isn't such a terrible piece of advice for brands taking their first steps online.

Think about what it is you hope to achieve, what it is about the brands you admire in the digital space that you like, and try to bring some of that good stuff together in a way that will work for you and the people you want to engage with.

Find something good to say. Otherwise, maybe we need to head off down another well-trod PR path, that of the dreaded "no comment."

Almost never a good idea in the face of a direct question, I have an inkling that no comment 2.0 might start weaving its way into social media advice some brands need for their own good.

lunching with the dead, baying for the rope and the wisdom of the crowd

2011-08-08T16:00:00.004+01:00

When I was a young man death was my living.

Determined, as I was back then, to eschew a traditional career and focus instead on becoming a professional musician, I took a seemingly endless array of dead-end jobs to pay my way and fund my musical endeavours.

And so it was that I ended up in the late 1980s with one of the most dead-end of dead-end jobs… working in a funeral parlour in Manchester’s Moss Side district.

Unlike some of my colleagues there, I could never bring myself to eat my lunchtime sandwich in the mortician’s workshop, with the recently-departed in various stages of preparation for company. No, I am not exaggerating – that really is how some people spent their break, lunching with the dead.

The business of other people’s loss and grief paid for my leisure time.

Despite what may sound like a disrespectful lunchtime ritual, the people I worked with back then never showed anything other than a complete duty of care to the bereaved and the departed, and they had a highly-tuned sense of the importance of life.

Last week the BBC and many other UK news outlets reported on a website set up by the government designed to give citizens an opportunity to influence future legislation.

It’s a very laudable aim, to attempt to engage the public with politics – let them feel their views will be listened to. But as someone much wiser than me once said, be careful what you wish for.

The site isn’t especially new. But the headline writers’ interest was piqued by the prevalence of pro death penalty petitions on the site. As many as 40 different petitions in total, all worded slightly differently but all asking for the restoration of capital punishment.

I shan’t argue that a truly civilised society doesn’t have the death penalty. For me, this is a personal viewpoint.

From those that want all crimes of murder to be met with a death sentence, to those who only want it applied to child murderers and those who kill police officers. Some call for parliament to conduct a thorough investigation into the possible restoration of the death penalty (it was revoked as the punishment for murder in 1965 and for all other offences in 1998) and others simply said hanging should be brought back.

Hanging.

Small word when said in passing. But stop and think about what it actually involves.

It’s quite grotesque.

Certain acts of murder do seem to cry out at us as being particularly brutal and unforgiving, whether it’s tortured rape victims, children or scores of innocents caught up in an act of unspeakable barbarity.

It’s not easy to argue against a certain kind of logic that says someone like Anders Breivik, who murdered almost 80 people in Norway on 22 July this year, should be put to death. He is beyond doubt the perpetrator of a terrible act. His guilt or innocence cannot be open to debate, although there are – of course – arguments about his state of mind. Although, from a purely personal perspective, anyone who does what that man did is clearly not in their right mind but I’m not at all sure that ought to be much of a defence.

Whether it’s the gas chamber, a lethal injection or at the end of a rope, the job of administering the death penalty is hardly likely fall to those who clamour for its return. Which, of course, makes it so much easier to adopt a black and white view of these things.

The overwhelming majority of those of us who live in the West don’t have to deal with life and death in a very hands-on way. Thankfully violence, and murder in particular, are statistically rare – long may it stay that way.

That you are here (wherever that may be), reading these words that I wrote one Friday evening in England is a remarkable mix of fate and factors beyond the ken of this simple man. As truly awful as some people’s acts may be I do not feel I have the right to decide who lives and who dies, and frankly I don’t feel you do either.

protectionism, ponies, and the hargreaves review

2011-08-03T11:46:00.000+01:00

The industrial revolution is one of the most written-about periods in modern history, and as we are all fully aware it brought about many significant societal and economic changes.

On a micro level, mechanisation was bad news if you were an unskilled worker, or someone with very niche skills, such as a hand-weaver or some other one-trick pony. On the other hand, it was good news if you were an actual pony that was put out to pasture rather than spend its days hundreds of metres underground pulling cartfuls of coal.

There are winners and losers whenever there is a significant period of change. Recent announcements by Foxconn that increasing mechanisation in the factories where it produces the iPhone and other consumer electronic devices bear witness to this. Machine operators may find they no longer have a job. But some will have the opportunity to retrain in higher-value skills.

The urge to stop the tide of change can sometimes feel overwhelming. It is human nature to prefer the status quo – better the devil you know, and all that.

The displaced agricultural workers of the 17th and 18th Century didn’t have the luxury of hiring in lobbying groups. But in the face of seismic economic shifts in the 21st Century it is possible to see the same fears, concerns and protectionist attitudes in play.

Today’s announcement by the UK Business Secretary, Vince Cable, that the government is adopting the Hargreaves Review of Copyright and Intellectual Property is one such significant change.

One of Professor Hargreaves’ most compelling arguments (I heard him speak at the Westminster Legal Policy Forum) was that copyright and IP legal frameworks must perform two functions in harmony – protect the rights holder, and be a tool for economic development.

A rigid application of the current interpretation of UK copyright law, as laid down by the High Court in late 2010, would – in all likelihood – prevent a business like Google being created in the UK.

The case in question came about after Meltwater (a client I represent) and the PRCA were taken to the High Court by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), which seeks to collect unregulated licence fees on behalf of its owners – eight newspaper-publishing conglomerates.

Citing its belief that sending someone a URL from a newspaper (or similar) website is breaching copyright law, the NLA is effectively stifling the sharing of information and ideas online. Not only is this contrary to one of the fundamental building blocks of internet culture, it is an example of potentially dangerous protectionism.

The publishing sector has no choice but to react to and deal with the dominance of online media consumption. It is already hard to remember the time when we all got our breaking news updates from the TV news or the daily papers. That tide is unlikely to turn.

Rather than seek to use out-dated legislation to protect its interests, the newspaper industry would be better served evolving its business models and revenue streams to fit in with the way people want to consume information.

The Hargreaves Review is an excellent opportunity for the government and interested parties from industry to come together to create a copyright and IP framework in the UK that leads by example to the rest of the world. Innovation, creativity and flexibility are the cornerstones of economic growth and sustainable prosperity.

I for one hope that in years to come we will look back on this as the moment when the UK stepped up its game and became a true leader in the global digital economy.

Some further reading:

the google+ iphone app: who's the biggest loser?

2011-07-13T11:20:00.001+01:00

I read on twitter earlier today that the iPhone is the third most popular smartphone in the UK at the moment, behind BlackBerry and Android-based devices (second and first respectively).

I can’t remember the original source of that stat, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Or not – the choice is yours.

Coupled with all the brouhaha about the lack of an iPhone app for GooglePlus, this got me thinking. Who has the most to lose from the lack of such an app?

I’ve seen a lot of comments on GooglePlus (and again, this is – I’m afraid – anecdotal) saying that Google needs to pull its finger out and get an iPhone app sorted out… and fast.

I’m not sure that’s a perspective I share.

The success of the smartphone phenomenon is down to the ability to use apps and other data-dependent services on the go. If those apps and services weren’t appealing, didn’t offer any value to the user, would the smartphone be as ubiquitous as it has become? I, for one, think not.

It is still too early to say whether GooglePlus will be a long-lasting success or just another flash in the social media pan. So far though, I think all the indications are pretty positive.

The lack of an iPhone app isn’t going to impede the success of GooglePlus. Some of the most active people I know on it are also iPhone users. They’re using it because it gives them value. Not because it is associated with one device or another.

The same might not be so true in reverse.

If Apple’s loyal iPhone customer base begin to see there are other smartphones that offer a better all-round data experience they may start to consider jumping ship rather than upgrading to a new iPhone next time their contract is up for renewal.

Apple risks, therefore, experiencing some of the same disintermediation that blights the network operators. In the UK Orange, Vodafone and O2 used to enjoy significant brand loyalty among their customers. Not any more. They are the plumbing that allows the cool stuff to flow. Nothing more.

If Apple finds GooglePlus (or anything for that matter) starts to come between the iPhone brand and its customers it will be the one who loses out ultimately.

The onus therefore, in my opinion, has to be on Apple to redouble its efforts in being more open, something where it still has much to prove.

did social media bring down the news of the world?

2011-07-11T12:49:00.000+01:00

On Friday night I found myself watching BBC2’sNewsnight programme (a topical news analysis programme). Unsurprisingly, the closure of the News of the World was still dominating the news agenda.

A number of discussions took place into various anglesof this issue.

I was struck by remarks made by Justine Roberts theco-founder and CEO of Mumsnet. Essentially, one of her opening remarks was thatNews International was forced to close the News of the World because of socialmedia.

Great, I thought, now the angry mob has biggerpitchforks, more flaming torches and a megaphone.

One would have to be implausibly naïve to trulybelieve News International had bowed to Consumer Pressure 2.0 – of course thatisn’t how it happened.

Did social media amplify people’s voices? Well, if itdidn’t something would have gone terribly wrong with one of the cornerstones ofthe new social order.

Do big brands kowtow to such amplification?

No. Of course not. This industry (by which I mean allthings smedia and digital) is still very much in its infancy. Any business thatis serious about listening to its customers, understanding and delighting them,ought to be using social media.

There is a clear three-pronged strategy most businesses have adopted (or ought to adopt) where social media is concerned – listen,analyse, engage.

But the hard facts are, very few brands have got thisright.

If there’s one sector that ought to be fearful,suspicious and maybe even hostile in the face of social media it would be thenewspaper industry. They’ve seen circulation and advertising revenues go theway of all flesh in the aftermath of mass adoption of the internet.

Within a few days of some appalling revelations about phonehacking and related activities, having a light shone on them there was indeed ahuge outcry on twitter and Facebook, not to mention countless blog posts. Someadvertisers pulled out of the News of the World, but not all of them.

News International’s decision to pull the plug on theNews of the World was, of course, a damage limitation strategy (albeit one ofthe worst I can remember in its execution).

Its roots are in an organisation where journalists,editors and their managers felt they had a right to break the law and accessthe private lives of well-known and the everyday people. Its branches extendedinto police corruption. It has blossomed into a tangle of compromisedpoliticians, journalists-turned-PRs, and private investigators receivingsix-figure sums from more than one source in the newspaper world.

If I was the person ultimately responsible for sortingthis mess out, God knows I’d want to bury it all in a deep dark hole too. Andas quickly as possible.

But I might, just might, be tempted to bury those whohad created the mess at the same time. Which hasn’t happened here. Maybe it’sthe residue of my journalistic spider senses that makes me want to know whynot.

William Cobbett, the English essayist and reformer ofthe 18th and 19th Century, once said: “I defy you to agitate a fellow with afull stomach.”

When people are hungry – in a literal or figurativesense – they are more likely to rise up. Do something about that hunger and youcan pacify them. Often without giving into all their demands.

News International wants to buy the whole of BSkyB -the UK satellite TV company it already owns a chunk of.

Due to concerns of media plurality (NI owns a lot ofUK newspapers) the deal has to be given the green light by the UK regulators.The last thing Rupert Murdoch needed right now is a high profile scandalconcerning elements of his media empire breaking the law and offending commondecency.

Throwing the News of the World to the wolves is perhaps the least worstoption for him. Under these circumstances I expect it wasn't a difficult callto make.

news of the world: goodbye and thanks for all the fish

2011-07-07T17:11:00.002+01:00

Faced with a dilemma, many people (generally christians, admittedly) would pose the question: what would Jesus do?

What wouldn't Jesus do, is perhaps a better question.

But I'm not here to talk about Jesus.

I've written about the News of the World and the phone hacking scandal before. I've touched on the allegations of police collusion, which have now been linked in the public domain to the payment - by the newspaper and its owners of more than £100,000 to serving police officers. I've voiced my take on the illegal and immoral accessing of people's mobile phone voicemails and the distress it has caused.

I've posed the question do we have the press we deserve?

When, just a few days ago, it became clear that the underbelly of the News of the World's phone hacking scandal was seedier than at first imagined.

I saw someone on twitter ask what could be done to dig the paper out of its hole. What, I wondered, would Rupert Murdoch do?

Now we know. Holed below the water-line, the News of the World is to be closed down. The final edition will be published on 10 July.

But that's far from being the end of it. The image of British tabloid journalism is unlike to walk away from this episode pestilence-free.

Friends and colleagues in the US and Australia have talked to me about the News of the World in recent days and have all expressed surprise that a mainstream national newspaper could ever have behaved in this way.

But this is not an isolated incident, an aberration. This is a systemic disregard for the law, for privacy and for standards of common decency.

So what if on 17 July the News of the World is no longer available in your local newsagent. Do you think the people behind the decisions that led to the recent appalling incident will cease to exist? Of course not.

The list of innocent casualties in this sordid affair goes on and on, and now includes (potentially at least) an as-yet-unknown number of News International employees who were nowhere near this scandal but who have become collateral damage.

Unless the government and the police (preferably an arm of the police service that doesn't have grubby hands and sticky fingers) instigate a thorough and unexpurgated investigation the reputation of British tabloid journalism may never recover.

klout, klout, let it all out

2011-07-05T09:36:00.003+01:00

Influence comes in many guises. As a child you will have been influenced by those that raise you – parents, guardians, teachers and so on. When you grow a little older your friends become the biggest influence on you, and in later life influence can come from your colleagues, the people you manage, your partner. The list goes well beyond that, of course.

By and large, we all know who we are influenced by and to what extent. At least in the realm of the personal.

But identifying who wields influence has lately become a hot topic of considerable proportions in marketing, PR and comms teams the world over. As with most things in life, where there is demand there will surely be supply, and consequently there’s no shortage of people who want to appear to have influence and a growing trade in tools to tell you who has it.

The art critic and columnist Brian Sewell, when asked to comment on class and the English preoccupation with it, said: “You can acquire the trappings, but you can’t buy it.”

Can the same be said of influence? Well, yes and no.

The thing about being influential is that in the main either you are or you’re not. People will read what you write, listen to what you say and click the links you post because they trust you. This is influence.

There’s a whole chapter of a reference book that could be written on paid-for influence, but that’s not what I am concerning myself with here.

If people don’t respond in any of those ways, then – by definition – you lack influence.

However, there are plenty of things you can do to influence the way in which your own influence (can you see what I did there..?) is measured and scored by the likes of Klout, PeerIndex and TweetGrader. Most of these services will even give you tips on how to do it, with some of my favourites coming from PeerIndex who, essentially, advise you to be a person of influence if you want to have a higher rating on PeerIndex. Hard to argue with that logic.

But if you’re after shortcuts to a higher ranking there are a few quick and simple steps you can take. Here are three things you could consider.

Take a look at who you are following on Twitter, and have a bit of a clear out. Get rid of dormant accounts, bots, spammers and the like. While your follower numbers will go toward the score you achieve, the quality of those followers and your level of engagement with them is actually far more important.

If you are genuinely trying to cultivate an image as an influencer, have some focus. Decide what it is you are trying to be perceived as an expert in and cut your cloth accordingly in terms of the content you create and share as well the kinds of people you share it with. But don’t fall into the trap of creating a social media walled garden. If your tweets, and other content, are only picked up by your colleagues you will never achieve any meaningful amplification and your social media echo will be exactly that – just an echo.

Tweet often, but not too often. Sorry, you’re on your own as far as working out what on earth that might mean in terms of actual frequency. But clearly spamming the Bejebus out of everyone is more likely to cost you followers in the longer term, while letting the cobwebs settle won’t help your cause much either.

Having seen my own Klout score leap by almost 20 points since early June I feel pretty confident that some of this works. Even if I’m not entirely sure I know what I mean by “works” in this context.

I’m not advocating any kind of obsession with one’s online influence score. But the issue of who wields influence online isn’t likely to go away soon, so why not take an interest in the factors that determine the way in which others perceive how influential you are, and the part you can play in it.

democracy, disintermediation & dining out at the all-day information buffet

2011-06-30T13:10:00.000+01:00

Remember when you watched the TV news in the evening to hear about important stuff for the first time?

Remember when you read a newspaper in the morning so that you would feel informed of the weighty matters of the day?

I’ll bet neither of those things has happened to you for a while.

In pretty much every aspect of modern life, not just when it comes to the news, relationships between the public and the various providers of services and information have changed irrevocably.

You can call it disintermediation.

You can call it the democratisation of the means of publishing.

You can talk about citizen journalists if you really feel you need to.

But those of us who have regular contact with the internet no longer get our news in the old-school manner. Instead we use our RSS subscriptions, lists on twitter, messages via Facebook and other social media platforms and news websites to get our daily feed of news.

And we graze. A lot.

We take a mouthful of twitter-gossip, a bite of bloggetry, and chew on the wares of our favourite news sites. From this we get our fill of news.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a very important role for broadcast news and newspapers. But they’re rarely the first place you get to hear about something.

A growing number of people create content as well as consume it – blogs and tweets are some of the most obvious mechanisms for so doing, but there are others.

Ordinary people, for want of a less pejorative way of putting it, are now right in the centre of the flow of news and information, and are no longer reliant upon the traditional methods of staying informed. This is a trend (dare I even say phenomenon) that can be witnessed elsewhere.

How often does seeing one advertisement inspire you to go out and buy the product concerned?

Not often I imagine.

Would you buy something because a brand you like (or even “like”) is on Facebook? Again, probably not just off the back of that one thing, I expect.

Tweets, likes, reviews on blogs as well as in magazines (and their online variants), personal recommendations and so on, all go toward helping us make what we feel are informed choices about the goods and services we buy, and the ones we avoid. A lot of that information doesn’t come from what might be considered traditional sources, but is user-generated in the main.

Mobile phone companies are experiencing something similar. Do you feel much allegiance to your network provider? Despite statistics I’ve seen from research done by one of my clients (which indicates that two-thirds of us have been on the same network for at least three years) the likes of O2 and Vodafone can only dream of enjoying the kind of brand-kudos many of the handset makers revel in – Apple, BlackBerry, SonyEricsson for example.

It doesn’t stop there. The growing use of data-based services on smartphones, some of which will let you make VoIP calls (via 3G or wi-fi) effectively bypassing the carrier’s voice network completely, is another headache. People don’t get excited about the network they’re on – unless it stops working. The network has been usurped in people’s hearts by the app makers and handset manufacturers.

The common thread in all of this is that the old order is no more.

If your job involves managing customer relationships, or sales, or marketing, you ignore this at your peril.

If customers don’t see any perceived value in dealing with you they will simply ignore you and direct their attention to those people and organisations they feel an affinity for.

The challenge then is how to be valued in what is an undeniably information-rich world where there is no shortage of voices clamouring to be listened to.

You need to be present wherever your customers may be – and in every format they will be coming into contact with. You need to present a human face and treat people with the same respect that you would like to be treated with yourself.

Ultimately you want to be trusted and believable.

And it’s not rocket science, which makes it all the more noticeable when brands get it wrong.

go ugly early

2011-05-08T14:31:00.000+01:00

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is uncomfortable. The killing of Osama Bin Laden prompted this revelation from the man-of-the-cloth’s man-of-the-cloth. But more particularly, he was referring to certain inconsistencies in the story regarding that killing; at first the White House told the world Bin Laden was armed, then that he was unarmed.

Dr Williams’ reaction to this, as quoted by the BBC, was: "I think the killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn't look as if justice is seen to be done. In those circumstances I think it's also true that the different versions of events that have emerged in recent days have not done a great deal to help.”

Getting to the heart of the matter quickly and being able to determine, often amid a great deal of confusion, the right course of action, is not easy and it’s not something everyone can do. It’s a rare chance for someone in PR to tell the top brass to sit quietly and pay attention.

I can’t be the only person who has always thought the White House and the Pentagon would be stuffed to the rafters with the keenest minds in the comms world.

It’s easy to understand the difficulties in getting reliable information out of a combat zone. Life-or-death split-second decisions don’t leave much scope for a thorough assessment of a situation before events start to take over, and in the aftermath it can take time to gather information, hear the accounts of the military personnel that were involved and so on.

Which is why the later version of the story released by the White House is the one we should, probably, put more faith in.

But it begs a question – why release the story at all before verifiable information had been received?

There was a lot said in the aftermath of Bin Laden’s demise about Twitter having broken the news. A friend of mine said something to this effect… I may have read about Bin Laden’s death first on Twitter but I went to the TV news for verification.

After all, how many fake deaths have been ‘announced’ in 140 characters or less?

The title of this piece, go ugly early, is a phrase relayed to me by someone I know who was in the US Army in Afghanistan, as part of the comms team. He was alluding to a principle that applies in crisis comms generally… get the story out first – before anyone else does – and stay in control of the message.

However unreliable the millions of sources on Twitter may be, its capacity for dissemination remains. One of the consequences is that for someone in my line of work, whether in Windsor or the White House, you have to assume that someone somewhere knows something and if you don’t go ugly early they might.

loneliness and the late night vocalist

2011-05-07T11:55:00.001+01:00

I've never really written much about my band, The Subtitles, on here.

We rehearse most Tuesday evenings between 9pm and 11:30pm.

Each night driving back from rehearsing - in recent weeks anyway - I've passed a woman who always arrests my attention.

I often seem to encounter a red traffic light at a particular junction. And she is always there.

She is what, when I was a boy, would have been called a tramp. Although there's something about her that makes me think she isn't actually homeless in the classic meaning of that word.

But home is more than just bricks and mortar, a roof over your head.

Probably in her mid-to-late 60s, painfully thin, with very long straggly grey hair and bedraggled clothes, she looks to be about six feet tall. And almost not-of-this-time. Or even this world.

On each of the occasions I've seen her she has been scrutinising the houses for sale displayed in an estate agent's shop windows.

She seems as fascinated by them as I have become by her.

Agitatedly rushing from one window to the other, she looks intently at the houses advertised and seems to be comparing the details of each as she stalks the shop front.

Why is she doing this? What is her story? I am filled with an urge to leave my car, get out and talk to her. Who knows, maybe one day I will. But I haven't yet.

The most I've seen her carrying is a bag of shopping, bought at a near-by late-night convenience store. Which is the main reason I think she lives somewhere, has a roof over her head, bricks and mortar that surround her.

But is that her 'home' I wonder.

Is it a place where she is surrounded by love and warmth, a sanctuary from the obstacles life has put in her path? Does it contain family, or a loved-one? Memories of what was. Regrets over what was not. Is she lonely? Or maybe just alone.

Does she look at the houses for sale and wonder about the lives people lead when they make them their home?

Then, inevitably, the traffic lights change. And I continue my journey home.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

bonfire of the profanities

2011-05-03T11:41:00.001+01:00

Swearing. It’s not big, it’s not clever, and it’s not funny. That’s what I was always told anyway.

Plainly two out of three of those are open to debate. We’ve all heard people use uncouth language in ways that were both clever and funny. In some cases, hilariously funny.

By and large though those occasions have probably involved listening to a friend regaling a group of mates with a funny story, or maybe while watching a stand-up comedian deliver their set.

It’s rare (although it can happen) that a complete stranger swearing in public will be anything like as funny. Often it can be embarrassing. And if there are small children or seniors within earshot it can be very uncomfortable.

We all know this. It’s not news. And while you’re welcome to disagree with me I’m most likely going to dismiss you as some sort of gauche moron. But that’s as much to do with me as it is with you.

Anyway... back to swearing, everything’s different online though, isn’t it?

No, not really.

Maybe it’s because my first encounter with the internet was 20 years ago that for me the distinctions between the virtual and 3D worlds are more subtle.

Maybe not. Frankly I don’t care. Let’s face it, neither do you.

Most of the people I’ve encountered on twitter over the last couple of years are unlikely to be the kind of person to start dropping the f-bomb should they be invited around to someone’s house for dinner, let’s say.

So why is it, I sometimes wonder, so many people (and more often than not it’s blokes) think it’s ok to swear online in a manner that is not attempting to be either clever or funny? What’s their motivation?

I can only assume they are trying to look big.

They end up though looking immature, sounding offensive and losing credibility in front of people who can only form opinions of them based on what they see on screen.

So, next time you feel like telling your 450 followers that all the people in the supermarket checkout queue you're standing in are c-words, remember we’re all nodding in the kind of agreement you perhaps weren’t banking on.

let love be genuine. abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good

2011-04-30T10:28:00.002+01:00

The build-up to the royal wedding, all the hype and expectation, left me fairly cold.

I don’t have a problem with the institution of marriage, nor with the monarchy per se. But the fuss that takes place on the periphery is, for me, a massive disincentive to pay much attention.

So it was that, after weeks or even months of taking little or no notice, I found myself instinctively sitting in front of the TV on the morning of Friday 29 April to watch the proceedings.

I know I am not the only person who reminisced about the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, as she was known back then in 1981. Similarly, I’m not the only person who reflected upon their own wedding day while watching the spectacle of two young people full of love and hope becoming husband and wife.

The 1981 royal wedding was the point at which my mother decided we were through with watching the world in black and white, and we got our first colour TV. For us, it was a pretty big deal. Although I don’t recall watching very much – if anything – of that royal wedding.

I guess it’s fairer to say it was a big deal for my mum.

Roughly mid-way between that royal wedding and the one that just took place, I got married.

My mother didn’t get to see it. She had died just less than a year prior to the occasion.

So it was that, as I sat listening to the readings and homilies at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, I thought about love, and hope and expectation. I thought about life and it’s uncanny knack of paying no attention to the plans we make. The people we become as we grow older are not the people we once were. We are changed by the lives we lead, the highs and the lows, the cards we are dealt by fate.

The joys and the disappointments.

If you have never found yourself wondering, in the face of a mountainous set-back, what the point of it all is, whether you have the strength to carry on, or why you foolishly made the decisions that led to the point you’re at, well you simply haven’t lived.

When children are very young they fall over – a lot. Parents watch anxiously to see if they are hurt, or if they will start crying, and there is always lots of encouragement not to cry, not to dwell on what just happened.

As we get older we forget how easy it is to fall over.

Failure, I read very recently, is a better teacher than success.

But it’s up to us to pay attention and learn from the lessons it delivers.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

the revolution will not be televised

2011-04-27T14:46:00.003+01:00

The revolution will not be televised. That’s what Gil Scott-Heron told us in 1970. And if that’s news to you, if that’s a piece of music you are not familiar with, then take a few minutes to click on this link and listen.

Then come back.

No, the revolution will not – in all likelihood – be televised.

Not that I am someone who blindly supports insurrection or feels that “the people” (whoever they may be) are somehow owed something by someone. I don’t condone violence, nor do I believe that simply rejecting the status quo will deliver a better future.

But I can’t be the only person in the UK who feels that something somewhere has gone wrong with the country I live in and call home.

This startling/not-so-startling insight came to me recently (last week to be more precise) in the most unlikely of settings…. while watching MasterChef – the UK flavour.

In the episode I watched four contestants were making tea for Henrietta the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, her son and his wife – the current Duke and Duchess.

According to the Sunday Times, the Duke was worth almost £500 million in 2005, making him the 102nd richest man in the country.

So, there I sat watching a show on a TV channel which is – by and large – funded by the TV-watching licence-paying public along with government subsidies, where one of the most privileged families in the country in their fabulous, inherited, stately home sampled a succession of High Tea offerings.

The same episode of MasterChef featured ex-service men and women from the Royal Air Force who served in World War Two. And as I wrote this, on ANZAC Day – when the sacrifices of the failed Gallipoli campaign of April/May 1915 are remembered – my thoughts turned to those generations that gave so much. In too many cases, they gave everything they possibly could; around 22,000 British servicemen died during that campaign.

Lloyd George promised the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the First World War a country fit for heroes. The post World War Two government set about building a network of social structures designed to bring about a greater degree of equality.

Those hopes, those dreams, the sacrifices of the fallen feel to me to be horribly at odds with the increasing inequalities of UK society that I see in 2011. According to a presentation given just a few weeks ago at the University of Cambridge, the rate of social mobility in Britain is slower now than it was in the Middle Ages.

If this is true, and far be it from me to pick a fight with the University of Cambridge, where is the incentive to work hard, do well and try to progress in a country where you are less likely to improve your lot than your ancestors 600 years ago?

Whether it's law, medicine or politics, the most influential and prestigious professions in the UK remain dominated by the tiny proportion of the population that received an expensive private education. Access to the top professions is probably as good an indicator of social mobility as anything else.

I don’t want to live in a country where ne’er-do-wells get by comfortably thanks to state handouts. But nor do I want to live in a country where the descendents of a feudal elite continue to enjoy a super-rich lifestyle not because of their efforts, endeavours or enterprise, but because of a quirk of fate. Where the sons & daughters of top professionals automatically follow in their parents' footsteps, first to fee-paying prep school, then to top-flight public school (if you're reading this from outside the UK 'public' in this context actually means private and fee-paying), then to a good university and so the cycle repeats.

The current generation of young Britons, graduates entering the workplace, could be – according to some estimates – the first that will not, en masse, enjoy a higher standard of living than the generation before it.

These are the same graduates that are leaving university with debts of as much as £30,000, at a time when unemployment is as high as it’s been for 15 years and when stringent government cutbacks have seen some towns and cities slash their spending on public services by 50 per cent or more. Public libraries are closing, museum opening hours are being restricted, and the provision of social care to “at risk” families and children is more precarious now than it has been since 1945.

Meanwhile, the cost of policing and security for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on 29 April is estimated to be in the region of £20 million.

No, the revolution will not be televised.

But that’s ok, the Royal Wedding will be.

of statues, castles and spooky apparitions

2011-04-22T16:57:00.000+01:00

I took this photo on 8 April 2011. It shows the statue of Queen Victoria, with Windsor Castle in the background.

It's a popular choice for tourists taking photos of their visit to Windsor. I was on my lunchbreak and - struck by how blue the sky was, and the lack of people in the vicinity - I decided to take some pics.

It was some hours later when I looked at them again, and when I looked I saw something that quite literally made the hairs on my arms stand on end and my scalp tingle.

And not in a good way.

I was standing partly in the road to take that shot.

In the next one you can see how close I am to the statue - right next to it.

I decided to move close up to the statue, as I'd been standing in the road to take the two previous pics and a car was coming toward me. I stood next to the statue looking at it from a few different angles before taking this shot. When the car had gone I walked back across the road, pausing to take one final shot.

In the final pic you can see the figure of a woman standing next to the statue.

She is dressed in a rather unusual, striking manner. The kind of figure I think most people would agree you would notice. Especially if they were stood right in front of you.

I can't make you believe what I'm about to write. But when I looked at that pic, a few hours after I had taken it, one thought - and only one thought - ran through my mind... she wasn't there when I took that photo.

I would have noticed.

One of the reasons I took those pics is that it is rare to see the statue without people milling around it. The time that elapsed between the close-up and the final shot is literally seconds. Seconds after I had been standing next to the statue examining different angles for an interesting shot.

Surely I would have noticed if there had been someone there.

And how could I have failed to notice someone dressed like that?

Did it freak me out? Yes.

Spook me, put the wind up, give me the heebeegeebees? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Perhaps because I still feel sure she wasn't there when I took the photo. And perhaps because the figure in the photo bears more than a passing resemblance to my mother.

my mother springs to mind

2011-04-16T17:58:00.001+01:00

Spring.

The season of renewal – life, love and happiness.

What does it mean to you? Warm weather for the first time in months. Blossom on the trees. Lambs. Flowers. Easter. Mother’s Day.

A few years ago, while sorting through a box of papers and family memorabilia, I found two cards I had made for my mother when I was perhaps six or seven years old. One was a Mother’s Day card, the other an Easter card.

Both hand-drawn with bits of coloured paper stuck on them, and containing messages written in a small boy’s scrawly handwriting.

My mother died in late spring 1997 and it was a few years after that event that I found these cards – I had no idea she had kept anything from my childhood.

It was, unsurprisingly, an emotional moment for me.

This time of year has been tinged with sadness since my mother’s death.

I think about her a lot. But more so at this time of year, as the anniversary of her death approaches. Typically I get a withdrawn and introspective. Things that shouldn’t bother me do. Things that should interest me don’t.

It’s been the same every year since 1998. But it took me a while to realise what was happening. To spot the pattern.

This year will be no different. Is no different, in truth.

With one not-so-small exception. I haven’t typically acknowledged it, nor mentioned it to anyone. Instead I’ve just kind of bumbled through until the feeling has left me, snapping at and alienating people along the way.

Not this year.

If you’ve read this far you’ll know what’s eating me next time you find yourself thinking “what’s eating him?”

And I’ll know it’ll be a lot easier on everyone if I face up to it and deal with it, rather than let it dictate how I feel for a couple of difficult weeks.

Life, love and happiness might be a bit of a stretch. But a season of renewal..? I’ll give that a go.

do we have the press we deserve?

2011-04-11T11:20:00.004+01:00

Updated 5 July 2011

On 4 July it emerged that the News of the World had done far worse than hack into the voicemail inboxes of celebrities and politicians. Someone working for the paper had accessed the inbox of the then missing teenager Milly Dowler. At some point between Milly's disappearance and the discovery of her dead body, voicemails from her phone were deleted. This act, we are told, caused her parents - who had no doubt been franticly calling her but unable to leave further messages at a full inbox, to believe she was still alive.

This depraved act has, thankfully, been taken seriously by Parliament - the whole sordid affair will be debated by the House of Commons on 6 July.

There has already been a considerable public backlash against the News of the World, with calls for advertisers to pull out their commercial support for the paper. Some have already indicated they will indeed take such action.

I am sure I speak for most people when I say I sincerely hope the perpetrators of this criminal and morally bankrupt behaviour are subject to the full weight of the law.

I can't help but wonder, however, when similar scrutiny will fall upon the role of the Metropolitan Police and the widespread speculation concerning their collusion in the mobile phone hacking scandal.

The British press has a fearsome reputation both at home and abroad. It’s one of the reasons so many former UK journalists find high-powered jobs as corporate communications advisers to some of the biggest names worldwide.

Investigative journalism at its best has brought down tyrants, exposed fraudsters, and highlighted miscarriages of justice. It is no coincidence that in some of the most locked-down regimes there are more constraints upon what the press can effectively get away with. Indeed, the freedom of the press is one of those concepts clung to fiercely by many in this country.

Rightly so, in my opinion.

But – as anyone who has read the British press widely in the last 15 years will know – the excesses of the tabloid media have caused many a raised eyebrow.

From Fake Sheikhs to allegations of Nazi-themed sex parties there has been an unending stream of sensational stories to titillate and tantalise. Many seem to blur the lines between that which is in the public interest and those things that are deemed to be of interest to members of the newspaper-buying public.

As a former journalist, I have enjoyed the freedom to ask challenging questions and to protect my sources. I’ve had libel writs served on me, and even death threats. OK, just one death threat – but one is enough. I never felt I had to curtail my journalistic instincts in order to kowtow to the whims of publishers, advertisers, the police, the subjects of the pieces I wrote, anyone in fact.

When I hear people complain about the “rubbish that gets printed in the papers” my standard response has usually been to say we get the press we deserve and to make the point that the so-called rubbish only gets published because people flock to read it.

Shady goings on behind the scenes at some of the UK biggest newspapers have now begun to be dragged into the light in the wake of the News of the World phone hacking scandal (not a word I use lightly, but one which I think fits here).

The ins and outs of who knew what, and who sanctioned the illegal actions – namely hacking into voicemail messages on the mobile phones of a string of celebrities, politicians, civil servants and other public figures – is still the subject of debate and investigation. But some of the details to emerge are as damning of the culture of the UK media as they are downright shocking.

Top of my list of things to be concerned about is the link between News of the World reporters and the Metropolitan Police. I offer here only my opinion, but having heard that Metropolitan Police officers were paid sources for some News of the World reporters (how many news reporters wouldn’t like to be tipped off about high profile arrests, so they could be on hand to cover them) I start to feel a growing sense of unease.

You don’t need to be a genius to figure out the incredible potential for a conflict of interests when a newspaper allegedly encouraging its reporters to break the law is also regularly paying serving police officers for news leads. Throw into the mix the claim by a former senior officer in the Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, that his phone had been hacked into by the News of the World and the whole thing starts to feel very grubby indeed.

It’s unpleasantly reminiscent of the script of a movie, where the mob has paid off the police to ensure a blind eye is always turned to their criminal activity.

Now that the lid has been blown off this miserable affair, I’m left asking myself do we get the press we deserve?

I worry this is more than an isolated case of a newspaper’s ethics being trampled in the rush to boost sales in the midsts of a highly competitive media landscape.

This is, I fear, as much a wider dereliction of societal morality - an attitude of if I can get away with it, then I’m going to do it.

In October 1987, in an interview with one of the least combative publications imaginable, Woman’s Own, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said: “... who is society? There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

Clearly this is nonsense. Dangerous nonsense though, which set the tone for the next two decades and beyond.

The promotion of the individual, and their so-called rights, that took place in this country and in others (yes America I am looking at you) has spawned a generation of individuals who simply don’t care about the implications, or even the legality, of their actions.

That there were journalists working for the most widely-read British Sunday newspaper who felt breaking the law was an acceptable route to scoops and stories is, for me, an indication that the UK's moral compass may be broken.

Do we have the press we deserve?

Yes, we do.

And that is a reputation to be feared.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

coming of age: if the shoe fits

2011-04-02T18:11:00.011+01:00

For most of us there are particular points in life that seem to mark the passing of time. It could be turning 18, or 21. Or maybe 25 felt like a more significant age for you. For many, 30 is the point at which you begin to realise you’ve come a long way since school, college or university.

Beyond that there’s that old chestnut… the Big Four O, where – allegedly – life begins.

There are more subtle (and some not so subtle) ways in which the ageing process starts to hit home. Grey hairs, wrinkles, unexplained aches and pains, and so on.

However, if you haven’t got to it yet, you may find the day you start to remind yourself of your parents is actually the point at which you say to yourself, “shit, I’m getting old!”

I think it’s especially common once you become a parent yourself. That’s certainly been the case for me.

It’s rare that I do something that reminds me of my late mother. But there are occasional reactions I’ll have to situations that make me think “that’s exactly what she would have said.”

Sadly, that’s almost never happened in a way that’s made me feel warm and fuzzy.

Like most men, though, it’s the war against turning into my father that keeps me busiest.

He would have been 86 years old today, but he died in January. He left Ireland in the 1940s, volunteered for the RAF, fought in WWII, settled in Britain, raised a family, and was a manual worker all his life. He wasn’t very well-educated, but he was sharp and had a quick sense of humour. He had a very tough childhood and was one of the hardest men I’ve ever met.

In the last five or six years of his life, I didn’t see much of him. I would get reports on his health and well-being from my siblings, who often lamented that he was losing his grip a little.

It brought to mind something that happened when I was a young boy – my dad would have been in his early 50s I guess.

We lived in Birmingham and despite the fact that during the war he was a driver (among other things) my dad never bought a car – we went everywhere by bus and train.

And so it was one Saturday morning that he, my mother and I set off for Birmingham city centre on some shopping excursion or other.

We walked the 10 minutes or so to the bus stop and waited. We hadn’t been there long when, in that heavy Dublin accent that he had somehow steadfastly held onto, my dad declared, “oh Christ, would you look at that.”

We followed his gaze and looked down at the ground. He’d left home wearing one black shoe and one brown one. “I wondered why one foot was going tap and the other was going shuffle,” he said.

He made his way back home to sort himself out, while my mother and I were consumed by uproarious laughter.

So, upon hearing my brother or my sister say they thought dad was losing his marbles, my reaction (which I accept to the outside world may seem unfeeling) was to say “he’s been like that for at least 35 years – it’s nothing new.”

Sometimes when I catch sight of myself in a full-length mirror I see my father for a split second out of the corner of my eye. For some reason it happens more if I’m wearing a suit – which I do frequently in my line of work, but he only ever did for weddings, christenings and funerals.

If I stare at my reflection in the shaving mirror long enough and then slowly squint, he appears there too.

And there have been times when I’ve raised my voice in anger only to hear his words coming out of my mouth rather than my own.

The black shoe / brown shoe incident came back to me only a couple of months ago and I started joining some of the dots around all of this and attempting to make sense of the picture that was forming – my relationship with my father, his influence over the man I have grown into, the way I relate to people and the world around me, the way I conduct myself.

For some reason – and this really has been going on for several months now – I’ve had a nagging doubt every now and again that I might, just maybe, have put odd shoes on.

I find myself staring at my feet (it tends to happen mostly when I’m in the car) to see if I’ve actually got a matching pair of shoes on.

I hadn’t connected it with anything. It doesn’t feel like deep in my subconscious there sits a latent fear that I will wear odd shoes just because my dad once did. In much the same way I’ve never thought it was likely I’d wake up one day to find I’d got a job as a scaffolder.

If it’s done anything, maybe it’s made me consider that I’m more like him than I realise – or am prepared to admit. I can accept that I’m like him in many externalised ways: short-fuse, gregarious in the right company, sentimental, musical.

But I’ve never given much thought to what life must have been like inside his head.

Perhaps it was much the same for him as it is for me.

If I’m one step away from anything as a result of all this, perhaps it’s not a footwear faux pas, but an appreciation of the man I spent so many years utterly convinced I would never understand.

Although originally written in September 2010, before my dad's death, I didn't publish this post at the time.

like a virgin

2011-03-31T19:11:00.002+01:00

I recently visited Australia. I flew with Virgin Atlantic.

Yesterday I talked with a colleague who had been to Kuala Lumpur – different airline, I’m not going to name them here. Some other time maybe.

But the conversation made me consider my experience with Virgin Atlantic in a new light.

Last time I flew with Virgin I ended up writing to their customer service people to praise the way in which a member of the cabin crew had coped with a disruptive passenger.

This time, nothing happened. So, unsurprisingly, I didn’t feel the need to write to anyone.

But what I’ve come to realise in the last day or two is that nothing happening can sometimes be a very good thing indeed.

Here’s a list of things that didn’t happen.

Virgin Atlantic didn’t change the plane at the last minute to an aircraft with fewer seats, leaving many passengers stranded for 24 hours
No one from Virgin Atlantic was rude
The plane was not delayed taking off
There were no problems with the transfer at Hong Kong
My luggage did not get lost
The food was not vile

You may be thinking, “but that’s the bare minimum anyone expects.” And you’d be right.

But it’s still more than a lot of people get from much larger airlines that have been operating for longer.

And just because it’s the bare minimum doesn’t mean we shouldn’t express gratitude.

So, thank you Virgin Atlantic. My flights to and from Sydney passed off completely incident free. Every one of your staff that I dealt with was polite and helpful.

how do I get hyperlinks within blogger to open in a new window or tab?

2011-03-28T15:30:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I wrote a piece about the use of Facebook to promote my band, The Subtitles.

That post included several links including a couple to The Subtitles on Facebook.

However, as I discovered (and it’s been pointed out to me too) those links don’t work properly.

I tested them before the post went live and they worked fine. But from within the post itself, the links to Facebook bring up a blank Facebook page with another link which has to be clicked on to bring up the right page.

Anyone got any ideas…?

facebooking the music

2011-03-27T19:00:00.003+01:00

As some of you reading this will know, I am currently the lead vocalist in a band called The Subtitles.

Most people agree it’s a cool name.

And when we launched it late last year, most people agreed we have a cool website.

We have a page on Facebook. And a Twitter account. You might want to open those links in a new tab - for some reason that seems to work better.

But the website is easily our most impressive online estate. Lots of pics, some of which were sent in by people who attended our gig in February. There are also two recordings so you can get an idea of what we sound like.

Some people like how we sound, others… well not so much. But that’s ok, there’s no point trying to be all things to all people. But I have high hopes of some of the news songs we're writing.

Anyway back to Facebook. I have a confession. I’ve always felt somewhat conflicted about using it where the band is concerned.

I was an early adopter of LinkedIn. I was on MySpace before it peaked, and then well, less-than-peaked.

And I took to Twitter with a zeal that would put many a religious fundamentalist to shame.

But when it comes to using Facebook to promote The Subtitles I keep hitting a wall. If you’ll pardon the pun.

So if you’ve read this far I would like crave your indulgence.

I'd like you to visit The Subtitle’s Facebook page and well… do something. Like it, share it, critique it, leave a comment here and tell me what you think about it. Anything really - advice that I can use to improve things, that's what I'm looking for.

Thanks in advance – I hope to hear from you.

top tips for journalists wanting to make it in pr

2011-03-26T15:27:00.002Z

I’ve lost count of how many times someone has talked to me about the move I made from journalism into PR. My move to the dark side, which took place in late 2000.

I entered the heady world of journalism in the early 1990s, worked for contract publishers, several newspapers (regional and national) and magazines, tried my hand as a freelancer, went into the trade press and ended up as the managing editor on a news website which, during the two years I was there, grew its readership from 500,000 to more than six million.

The move to PR is a well-trodden path for journalists who have, for one reason or another, hit a wall and felt the need to do something different. In my case I wanted a new set of challenges, but didn’t want to have to start from scratch. Oh, and the money was a little better too – not hugely so.

There is no single reason why the move sometimes goes wrong (I don’t know what the failure rate is, but it must be pretty high). Typically fault lies both with the individual and the PR agency that has employed them.

A lot of emphasis is put on transferable skills, such as being able to write. If fact, far too often it goes no deeper than that combined with a hint of this’ll impress the client thinking.

The journo entering the PR workplace lacks a great deal of context of the mechanics of the job, the way an agency operates, the way a team works. That latter point is a good one, after all journalists are not, by nature, team players.

Customer service, appeasement and a can-do attitude also don’t necessarily come naturally to most hacks who have spent their careers marching to the beat of a very different drum.

My first ever client meeting after entering PR is something I will probably never forget. I’d been in my new role for a matter of days when I was sent to deal with a problem client.

The meeting lasted less than five minutes and concluded with a very red-faced and shouty client telling me that he was firing the agency I had just joined.

Culture shock…? You could call it that, yes.

So, here are my three top tips for anyone considering ditching their career in journalism to don a suit and join the PR party.

1. Get real
Be sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for.

You mustn’t assume that all your days will be filled with high-level strategic planning meetings, and long periods of crafting your finest prose.

How will you really feel pitching in a story to journalists? How will you cope when the features and press releases you have written are picked apart by people who will never be able to write as well as you but have the veto on what you produce?

2. Do your homework
Get the job spec, and find out what the responsibilities are. Meet the people you’ll be working with and managing – especially the ones you’ll be managing. Their careers are about to be put in the hands of someone with no PR experience. They may well be concerned about this. You need them onside.

Unlike a newsdesk, a PR account team has to work well and work together to get the best results. Be prepared to be supportive, nurturing and even nice to people.

3. Put on a happy face
Journalists earn their stripes by critiquing, by being sceptics – asking the difficult questions and highlighting problems and shortcomings.

Where they often fall down is coming up with positive solutions to the situations they have kicked holes in.
It’s easy to point out shortcomings, harder to put forward your own ideas for public scrutiny. But that’s what’s required.

It won’t be an easy ride. But nothing worth having was come by easily, was it?

If I had to include a fourth point it would be something like network – get out and talk to people.

But three’s a magic number so I shan’t bother with No 4.

Europe is dead

2011-03-25T16:13:00.003Z

Europe is dead.

Or at any rate, the notion of a unified Europe is now in serious decline politically and economically.

Sovereign debt, bail-outs, and austerity measures have featured in the news for many months now but it is only very recently that some of the less obvious implications of these events have been discussed.

Let’s take the example of Portugal, the most recent European economy to come unstuck.

Like most countries, Portugal relies on borrowing and issuing bonds to keep the wheels of its domestic economy turning.

In April, Portugal has €5 billion of repayments to honour.  There’s a similar amount due to be repaid in a few months’ time.

To meet those commitments, particularly the second tranche, Portugal will – in all likelihood – need to borrow.  But as an economy in trouble, it is penalised by having higher rates of interest applied to its bonds.  IE: the markets want a higher rate of return in exchange for what is considered a higher risk loan.

That rate of interest is in the region of 8% over a period of 10 or so years.

The Portuguese economy will not grow at anything like that rate. Meaning that meeting its repayment responsibilities in the future will become increasingly harder.  Which in turn has to increase the likelihood of Portugal defaulting on its debts.

No problem, some will say… there are bail-out options.

Yes, there are. And they are mostly funded by Germany, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent France and Finland.

There is a growing sense of dissatisfaction within these countries, especially Germany, that the domestic tax-payer is bailing out their lazy southern European neighbours. Politically-speaking, this is an unsustainable situation and unless it has been dealt with before then, it will become a major issue at the next German general election.

There is a sense among some economists that as long as this situation is confined to Ireland, Greece and Portugal (smaller nations) the rest of Europe needn’t worry.

But should Spain or Italy, for example, succumb to the financial fallout the consequences would be harder to live with for Europe as a whole and could herald the end of the Euro.

No one seems to have any answers as to how any of this could be avoided or how Europe gets out of this situation. Ignoring it, however, won’t make it go away.

Egypt, twitter and social media tools

2011-01-30T19:20:00.001Z

I have been an active user of twitter for about two years. I’m no veteran or social media maven, but I’m no newbie either.

Twitter’s helped me find work and business opportunities. I’ve used it to find people to hire, I’ve even forged friendships with people I would never have met had it not been for twitter.

Depending on how you use it, it’s an interesting and useful tool. But then a hammer can be used to help you hang a picture of your grandmother on the wall or as an offensive weapon.

Not for the first time in the last two years, I’ve recently found myself watching with a sense of mild bemusement as news of events thousands of miles away is broadcast via twitter along with a heady mix of opinion and speculation.

I am, of course, referring to Egypt. Political and societal turmoil – protests, demonstrations, and a death toll which rises daily.

As a former journalist, when something big like this happens I want to know about it: I want context and background, I want to question the sources of the information, I want to know how reliable they are.

The polarisation of the twitterati in such events as those unfolding in Egypt, is also interesting.

It doesn’t take long for people to decide there are Good Guys and Bad Guys and that somehow everyone involved, no matter how loosely, is affiliated with one side or another.

The other thing that really strikes me is the desire of many on twitter to broadcast every new, or not so new, detail in a manner that attributes equal weighting to everything, while simultaneously rushing to be the first to move the story on, so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of it has been well worth reading – such as the piece I read regarding the manner in which the lights went off across Egypt’s ISPs. But the majority of what’s appeared in my stream has tender toward being tub-thumping sloganeering.

I can only offer conjecture of my own when I wonder how many (by which I really mean “how few”) of the people I follow on twitter who are avidly tweeting and RT-ing Egypt-related information really have an understanding of what is going on there.

Yes, we all know the Mubarak government has been criticised for being oppressive and not committed to a meaningful democracy.

But what do we know of the forces within Egypt that have realised current events offer them a golden opportunity to exert influence, possibly even seize power and have the country march to the beat of their drum?

The answer is as obvious as it is depressing – very little.

The history books are full of accounts of popular uprisings and revolutions that before long were exploited by those with their own, sometimes deeply oppressive, agenda.

But reading history text books affords few opportunities to show off about how ‘aware’ one is.

rip: con fleming, 2 apr 1925 - 13 jan 2011

2011-01-25T10:34:00.001Z

Life is a journey.

The detours it takes you on are many and varied, and not always within your power to control.

The death of my father two weeks ago has provided ample opportunity for me to reflect on this and - not surprisingly - where that journey ultimately ends.

His was an inauspicious start in life. Born in Dublin in the 1920s, he grew up in what by today’s standards would be regarded as poverty.

He was denied educational opportunities, faced many hardships, and never knew his father.

At the age of 17 he got on a boat to England, lied about his age and volunteered to fight in the war, joining the RAF.

Like many of the 10,000 or so Irishmen who decided their country’s neutral stance in the fight against Hitler was at odds with their own sense of right and wrong, he struggled to settle in Ireland after the war.

And so it was he settled in England and embarked on a long career as a manual worker.

At the time I was born, he was working in a car factory, liked a drink and the craic, and was still battling with hardship – from workplace racism in the era of IRA terror attacks, to working unsociable shift patterns that kept him permanently exhausted.

We had just one family holiday, when I was three or four years old. I was young enough to be blind to the stresses and tensions that accompanied that vacation. But I’ve heard about them since. For me it was an exciting car journey, a week in a little metal house, beaches, the sea, and playing.

My earliest memories are of that holiday. Yet it was a never-to-be-repeated event.

Perhaps it’s better that way.

After working hard to provide for his family, and (much as it pains me to say it) living in a marriage that didn't always make him or my late mother happy, he retired as a fit and physically robust man looking forward to a long retirement. Which is what he got – around 20 years of it.

After my mother’s death in the late 1990s, he sold the family home and eventually found the love and companionship of a woman who made him truly happy.

He had money (although not lots of it), love, and a new large extended step-family network. He took holidays, visited interesting places, rediscovered his faith, did the things that made him happy. Truly happy.

My own relationship with him had been strained – practically non-existent in fact – for years.

Thankfully, I saw him not long before he died.

After years of having nothing to do with him, of effectively denying his presence in my life and that of my sons, I felt it was time I took a detour of my own. So in late December I went to see him during one of his increasingly frequent stays in hospital.

In many ways he was not a complicated man. Seeing me turn up at his bedside made him delighted – he was overjoyed and seeing that uncomplicated sense of joy moved me.

We didn’t make our peace. We didn’t need to. It was unspoken and that was entirely appropriate.

Two weeks later, he was gone.

I didn’t get there in time to say my final goodbye.

The journey was too long. The time, too short.

up in smoke

2010-10-30T20:48:00.004+01:00

It’s the time of year when firework displays are commonplace in the UK, as part of the traditional 5th November celebration of the evisceration of a group of 17th Century Catholics.

So this evening I went to a firework display.

In the grounds of a hospice.

The smell of hotdogs, the sounds of excited children and crying babies, and the sky – alive with explosions of bejewelled gunpowder.

Cheek-by-jowl with people in the latter stages of terminal cancer.

For many of those there, it was their first ever firework display.

For others, their last.

It gave me pause for thought.

Like a lot of people I can, when so inclined, list my problems, worries and regrets until the cows come home. Things I’ve done and wished I hadn’t. Things I somehow haven’t got round to doing.

Bridges I’ve burned. Troubles I’ve caused.

It wasn't my first ever firework display and, unless fate has something in store for me, it won’t be my last.

It seems trite to say things like count your blessings. Or it’s never too late.

But there is more than a grain of authenticity in that outlook.

Staring at a burned bridge won't get you back where you came from.

The fireworks were impressive.

The evening was humbling.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/cameraslayer/

life and death

2010-10-09T12:15:00.003+01:00

Most of us are conceived in the heat of the moment. The result of an impassioned tryst between our parents. And regardless of at what point you think life actually begins, it starts – as it ends – in a heartbeat.

For most of us living in the First World, the most likely cause of death will be age-related, or an ailment brought on by lifestyle choices.

But that’s not always the way.

I found myself reflecting on this just the other day. My morning commute to work is a drive of around 45 minutes which on this particular day involved driving past the scene of a road traffic accident.

Two police cars. One fire engine. A car. A woman sitting on the crash-barrier at the side of the road with the most desolate look on her face. Pools of blood covered hastily by absorbent cloths. And a body. Hidden beneath a dark tarpaulin.

The face of the woman, presumably the driver of the car that had collided with the now lifeless individual, stayed with me all day.

As did the thought of the friends and family of the person who lost their life in that scene. Who that person was I am unlikely to ever know.

But it is likely their day started like most people’s. A rush to get ready for work. Coffee perhaps. Maybe breakfast. A quick goodbye kiss for their husband or wife, and children perhaps… “see you later,” someone no doubt said.

As I sat at my desk just a short while after passing the accident site, I thought of those left behind. Their day had started, they would be on their way to work, to school, to wherever their morning was taking them. Blissfully unaware that life had changed irrevocably.

Few of us know when the end is coming and have the bitter-sweet opportunity to say our farewells, make our peace with the world.

Take nothing for granted.

It starts in a heartbeat.

It ends that way too.

ho ho no

2010-09-26T17:40:00.003+01:00

What does Christmas mean to you?

Family? Turkey (no not the country)? Time off work? Mince pies? Mistletoe? Booze?

The list goes on.

How about… 25 September? No…? Really? Of all the things that Christmas means to you, 25 September isn’t one of them?

Me neither.

Or at least that was the case until recently – 25 September to be precise – when I was in Tesco.

There I was gamely pushing my trolley round the store, the epitome of the happy shopper, when I encountered not one but two whole aisles of Christmassy-looking stuff.

I did a double-take and inwardly corrected myself for having wrongly identified some predominantly red, green and white boxes and vaguely bauble-shaped banners as something to do with Christmas. An easy mistake to make, I told myself. But a mistake nonetheless.

However, the closer I got the more bauble-like the banner advertising seemed and there, on the seemingly generic red, green and white packaging there appeared to be a jolly-looking fat bloke with a white beard, accompanied by the occasional sprig of holly.

What the fa-la-la-la-laa, I asked myself, and went to inspect.

Yes… Christmas has come early. Three months ahead of schedule, to be exact. Making Halloween and Guy Fawkes look like the laggardly slackers of the calendar they clearly are. I mean, where are they? Nowhere to be seen, that’s where.

Now I’m sure a lot of you will instinctively reach for the “Christmas has been ruined by over-commercialisation” line. And while I’m broadly in agreement with you, I am starting to think there may be more to this than meets the eye, some of which could actually be advantageous.

The silver-lining in all of this for me, from a purely selfish perspective, is that it can only mean I’ll be getting my birthday presents around the end of October instead of waiting until the end January as I’ve always had to do in the past. Assuming, as I am, that the supermarket behemoth has finally grown tired of dominating the retail skyline and has decided to rewrite the calendar.

Easter will, I imagine, quite possibly arrive in February, meaning the Easter Bunny may be in peril of incurring a frost-bitten tail. And other annual events will have to be rearranged too, no doubt.

Mothers Day, Fathers Day – who knows where they might end up. Your wedding anniversary – anyone’s guess.

I know where I hope they stick Valentine’s Day, but I doubt they will – apart from anything else, where I’ve got in mind for it actually has nothing to do with the calendar at all.

punch drunk in london

2010-09-01T23:49:00.006+01:00

Ever punched a random stranger in the face? Unprovoked?

I have.

This happened to me while travelling on the Tube from Piccadilly Circus to Paddington a while ago.

Before you even bother asking, yes I had been drinking. But not to excess.

So, there I was on the Bakerloo Line northbound at about 7pm. It was – not surprisingly – quite full, so I was standing up. I often do. And I was not the only one – there were loads of people stood all around me, hanging on to the handrails and studiously avoiding eye-contact.

I let go of the overhead handrail at one point to check my watch.

The train lurched.

I lurched with it.

So I quickly reached for the handrail.

The thing is while many car wing mirrors state that “objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear” nowhere on the London Underground network have I seen anything point out that objects in mid-lurch may be harder to grab hold of than you might imagine.

Nor have I seen anything that says faces attached to random strangers may be easier to punch than you would ideally like them to be.

My hand shot out, fingers still curled in what might loosely be called a fist.

Picture the scene.... the dead-weight of my hand, heading toward the handrail at considerable speed, when the train lurched causing the man standing next to me to involuntarily lean in toward me putting himself in what I’ve come to think of as the line of fire.

Whereupon my hand connected with his face in an uppercut that would have made my old boxing coach shed a tear of pride.

Poor bloke. His head snapped back. And for a split second the no-eye-contact-please-we’re-British people standing all around looked up in unison to see what was going on.

I was aghast. Which is not a word I get to use very often. So here it comes again. Aghast, I tell you.

Not least because he was a bit bigger than me and I would have thoroughly disliked him returning the gesture.

Something, or someone, in my head took over. I stepped closer and slapped his face repeatedly where I’d just hit him, saying something to him like “that was a shock, you’ll be all right.”

I can’t help but think the rather obvious smell of an earlier encounter in the pub may have helped carry me through. That and the shedloads of front I was now displaying.

We pulled in at Baker Street station, the doors opened and off he got. Looking somewhat bemused.

I’ve told this story countless times since it happened and the above is a mostly faithful retelling of the event, it’s at most 10 percent fiction (I wonder, should that be a comma or a semi-colon in that sentence?).

Every time I’ve told it I’ve had the same reaction to the tale – a mix of incredulity and laughter.

I’ve often wondered if the bepunched man ever told, or even still tells, the story. How different must it sound from his perspective.

“Some drunken idiot hit me in the face.”

And I wonder did anyone laugh when he told them.

video: it's not a serious pr tool is it..?

2010-06-28T14:46:00.003+01:00

Everyone likes a good video, don’t they? I know I do.

In PR terms (check out my subtle segue from the potentially interesting topic of watching movies to the potentially duller topic of PR) there are differing opinions of the medium’s efficacy. The jury, to use an already exhausted metaphor, is still out.

Combined with the power of social media to attract an audience though, and in the right hands, video can be a useful addition to the PR practitioner’s toolkit.

One of the best examples of video and social media in action that I’ve seen in recent months comes courtesy of the Las Vegas based entrepreneur, internet marketer and force-of-nature that is Maren Kate Donovan, at http://www.escapingthe9to5.com/

Back in April (yes, it really has taken me that long to write this) Maren Kate posted a video on her site that took the form of an appeal to Herman Miller, the purveyor of fine office chairs and other related bits and pieces.

The appeal...? “I want Herman Miller to send me a several thousand dollar chair for free, in return I’ll blab about its greatness (assuming it is great) everywhere!” MK explains on her site.

The thing that caught my attention, and still has me thinking about what all this means, is that Herman Miller responded!

I contacted Maren Kate and asked for a bit more detail.

She told me: “I was hoping to get them to send me a chair and to see how long it took a major brand to get back to someone who 'reached out' to them via social media. So it was an experiment of types as well as an excuse for me to get rid of my old chair. The wider strategy: which is soon going to be a full-fledged video review site (name pending) is to get traffic by reviewing other people's stuff for free, so you will get the benefits of having a site where lots of people go (ads, etc.) and you will get a deluge of free stuff because opposed to popular opinion companies are DYING for you to try out their stuff online.”

Herman Miller have said they’d like Maren Kate to review one of their new chairs later in the year (that’s autumn if you’re in the UK and fall if you’re in the US).

It’s not a strategy that would work for just anyone. Maren Kate has built up a huge following and not insignificant personal brand equity through years of hard work.

But it does point to the extent to which major corporations are willing to incorporate social media into their communications strategies and the potential results if people like me, in PR and communications, can help them find the right channels.

a letter to the truth fairy

2010-01-28T13:05:00.010Z

A lot of rubbish has been spouted in recent weeks about so-called PR spam, ie the business of PR agencies and their ilk emailing press releases to journalists, en masse.

Most recently, a site calling itself An Inconvenient PR Truth has hopped on this rickety old bandwagon.

I can be quite an opinionated and confrontational chap at times so I thought I'd wade in with a few convenient ripostes.

Context – I've been in the PR industry for about 10 years. Before that I was a journalist blah, blah, blah... you can read that over there under the "About Me" heading over there. --->

I've done the inbox-under-siege-by-hundreds-of-press-releases-per-day thing. I'm also old enough to have had hundreds of press releases delivered every day in the mail (you know, snail mail) every day – in sacks. Actual sacks. On one occasion a room full of sacks of letters from readers. OK, they're not press releases but they were equally unsolicited.

I didn't view it as spam or anything approximating it. Was I missing something? It all came with the territory. If you've worked in a busy newsroom you ought to know that.

I have a real problem with the "Bill of Rights" on An Inconvenient PR Truth. I'll pick out a few things I particularly dislike about it.

Right 1 – Permission required
Press releases should only be sent to Recipients who have given express or implied permission. Implied permission meaning the recipient has stated publicly that they are happy to receive press releases.
The very act of becoming a journalist carries an implication that you are aware of the existence of things like PR companies and press releases. So there's your basic principle of implied permission. Everything after that is merely degrees of irritation.

Right 4 – Read publication first
Before any correspondence is entered into, the PR person will have first researched the Recipient's subject focus and read the publication or articles they write or publish to ensure that the content is relevant.
Hard to argue against. But good luck with enforcing that one.

Right 6 – Types of release
A Recipient has the right to receive press releases about 'types' of stories that they are likely to be interested in and not announcements of any kind just because of an industry categorisation.
I foresee an increase in the sale of crystal balls.

Right 7 – Telephone calling
After receiving a press release the Recipient should not expect a follow up call from the sender. Acts of such kind only waste time and have no bearing on whether a press release is used for a news story.
The first sentence implies that journalists read every email they receive. Which is not only a whopping great lie but it seems to undermine the whole "PR spam" point of view. As in... if it's spam why are you reading it?

That second sentence is also just plain wrong. I can think of too many examples to list here of journalists who, after being called, were able to put previously emailed press releases to good use. As news stories. And then called / emailed asking for follow up info for subsequent stories.

Right 8 – Succinct headlines
A Recipient has the right to receive press releases with succinctly written headlines so a decision of interest can be made quickly.
Define succinct. Something tells me this here Bill of Rights wasn't put together by someone with a keen legal mind.

This whole PR vs journo thing is a jaded, even out-dated, take on things. It would carry more weight, however, if there wasn't such an appetite among journalists for press releases and other PR-generated content with which to fill space. As a colleague pointed out earlier today, there are plenty of publications that don't feed themselves.

Standards could certainly be higher on both sides of the fence. But surely that's true of most trades and professions.

Maybe the PR industry should up the quality threshold when dealing with journos.

Don't know how to ask a probing question? Can't structure an interview? Get facts wrong even after you've been spoon-fed them? No idea how to use commas? Do you think second-sourcing might mean putting more ketchup on your chips? Have you ever agreed to come to a briefing and then didn't show up without letting someone know you've changed your mind? Then you're off the list – no interviews, briefings, press releases, photography, lunches, trips, etc etc.

How does that sound?

I agree there's plenty of room for improving some of the practices that go on around press releases and how they are issued and followed up. But it would require a lot of cooperation from the PR industry, media list/distribution companies and journalists.

I shan't be holding my breath.

signs of the times

2010-01-15T07:08:00.007Z

Nothing new here. Feel free to move along.

I got to thinking recently (and not for the first time) about the smoking ban in the UK.

This was prompted by something I’d heard on that curate’s egg of a radio station, BBC Radio 4.

The programme in question reported that in spite of what is often thought of as a European-wide, EU-derived ban on smoking in public places, it is still OK to smoke in public in Belgium. Oh the irony of being able to spark up in a bar just around the corner from the EU parliament.

The same item went on to describe how the owners of two bars in Berlin had gone to court to attempt to over-turn the smoking ban on the grounds it had damaged their business.

They won!

They now have the legal right to have a separate smoking room in their bars – with the proviso that no food may be served there.

This seems like a welcome outbreak of common sense to me. I wonder if we’ll see the same thing in the UK. Somehow I doubt it.

At various times in my life I have been a smoker and a non-smoker. I’ve never felt that I needed government intervention where that choice was concerned. Like the overwhelming majority of people who have smoked in this country, I knew the ins and outs of the health implications before I chose to start.

I think it’s a very good idea for separate spaces in pubs and bars for those who wish to smoke and those who do not. Then people can make choices. By and large, most people are capable of making choices.

But where the UK smoking ban and I really fall out was the requirement for all buildings members of the public may occasionally enter to display the same no smoking sign. Just to remind us that the law that had banned smoking in public buildings in the UK applied to public buildings in the UK.

Never before had I wished I owned a business that printed signs, but the government spent millions of taxpayers’ money printing these ridiculous signs and one can only assume that someone somewhere with a sign making business did very well out of it.

What next though? If we need a sign on every public building to say smoking is against the law, how about one that says breaking & entering is against the law? You know, for the avoidance of any doubt – just in case potential burglars might need reminding.

Then we could all get a t-shirt printed that has something written on it like “NO MURDERING – killing people, such as the wearer of this garment, is against the law.”

Sound absurd? No more so though, surely, than the epidemic of no smoking signs.

lost and found

2009-11-24T02:16:00.002Z

I lost something recently. It doesn’t matter what. It doesn’t matter when. Not for the purposes of this post anyway.

At some point or other we all lose something that’s important to us – it’s one of those certainties of modern life... we have stuff and sometimes we lose it.

When I lost it (the thing I referred to above) my immediate reaction was one of mild shock and slight disbelief. Those feelings were quickly followed by a sense of outrage – who had taken it? Outrage is a cousin of accusation and they like to hang out together. And so it goes with me; one visits, they both show up.

Ruling out things like leaving mobile phones in taxis (which I’ve done twice and on both occasions got the phone back) most of us generally lose things in familiar settings, whether it’s around the house or in the workplace. This is a no-shit-Sherlock observation. People lose things most often in the places where they spend the most time.

Another truism is that the things we lose around the house, at work, or anywhere else we class as familiar, are frequently found again later. Fear not, I’m not about to go down the route of “why do you find things in the last place you end up looking?” OK, I can’t resist... Because 1) if you found them in the first place you looked then technically they weren’t ever lost, and 2) if you keep looking after you’ve found them (thereby making the place of discovery something other than the last place you looked) you probably need professional help.

Anyway, back to the finding bit. I hope I’m not the only person who goes through the cycle of outrage and accusatory thoughts upon finding something is lost. But if I am, this is the pattern I often follow. Thing is lost (or misplaced). I figure out it must be someone else’s fault – either some light-fingered ne’er-do-well half-inched it, or else someone moved it.

Eventually I’ll find whatever it is I’m looking for and realise that there’s no one else to blame but me. Who misplaced it/moved it? Usually me.

It’s not always as easy as it should be to accept that I’m the one guilty of a casual misplacing of something that time and circumstance will eventually make crucial.

I don’t suppose it’s something I’ll ever be able to stop doing – one is, after all, only flesh and blood.

But I’m trying to be more careful with the things I care about, the things I ought to know are crucial to my life. And I’m learning to look at myself first when I can’t find something I’m looking for.

why my kids don't need a twitter account

2009-05-18T11:00:00.003+01:00

I dislike personal attacks on people and I really hope the following doesn’t read like one. But I’ve had an “enough is enough” moment.

I recently read an interesting article on the Marketing Donut (a site/blog I have contributed a couple of articles to – just to declare my interests properly). Written by Kate Horstead and entitled “Can Twitter help your business?” it might not break any new ground but it’s a decent little exploration of the topic and appears to be based mainly on an interview with Nikki Pilkington.

I’m following both Kate & Nikki on Twitter – if you’re not already maybe you should too.

So what put the stick up my backside? Well... there was a comment from Penny Power, the founder of Ecademy, which I found so misguided and misleading that I had to blog about it just to get it out of my system.

As I already said, I dislike personal attacks, but Penny is the head of a business networking association which has been around since 1998, so I figure she can cope with someone disagreeing with her.

The thing I took issue with is the following statement from the comment Penny left: “I certainly tell everyone I meet to create their Twitter name before thier real name goes. I have registered my children for the future too.”

And in case you’re wondering the spelling mistake (thier) is copied from the original – not created by yours truly for effect or done out of sloppiness. There are other typos there too if you want to go looking for them, and maybe you should – she’s writing a book after all, so presumably wants readers.

Cutting to the chase, this advice misses the point of Twitter and everything else in the social media oeuvre. So much so, that at first I thought it had to be a joke.

Who will benefit if we all do as Penny recommends and register our children’s names as Twitter accounts? And why stop with your existing children, why not register a few spares covering all the names you might pick for the kids you haven’t had yet.

Now, here’s a thing. Any account not updated for six months is classed by Twitter as inactive (I have learned from a quick squint at the Ts&Cs).

So if I register @corneliusfleming today (in case I have a son in the future I hate so much I name him after my father) the account could be gone before Badly Named Boy can even say Twitter. Thereby making the whole exercise a complete waste of time.

Maybe I’ll have to ghost Tweet for him, to ensure that doesn’t happen. Great! Just what we all need on Twitter, an army of parents ghost Tweeting on behalf of their kids. Can’t wait!

As far as I can see, no one benefits from such behaviour. Maybe as a parent one gets a warm satisfied feeling that no one else can use the name they happen to share with your three-year old. But that’s about it.

Who loses? We all do. Twitter is a community; its value is in the networks that develop within the community – individuals and organisations interacting, sharing knowledge and insight. Twitter may one day be nothing more than a footnote in the pages of online history. But there will be connections made today on Twitter that become sustainable and mutually beneficial.

The more it is jumped on as an opportunistic bandwagon by people with little to contribute the sooner Twitter’s demise will be brought about; the cool kids will leave once the dorks arrive en masse – we’ve seen it all before, I’m sure.

I’ve got kids (two sons I’m tremendously proud of) but I don’t see much business benefit to me or anyone else in them having Twitter accounts that they may or may not use in the future. I also fail to see how my sandbagging accounts like this assists me or anyone else in terms of networking. It’s not social (if it’s anything it’s anti-social) and it’s as far from community-minded as it gets.

I’m sorry Penny, but as someone who until recently ran a small business, I expect more awareness and better advice from the head of a business networking association. I can forgive Business Link for being full of windbags, civil service dead wood and the general walking wounded that comprise the sub-genre of retired banking execs, but Ecademy has to aim higher.

There’s more I could say, and in fact did say in a response I wrote to her comment on the Marketing Donut but at the time of writing this, that response hadn’t appeared.

in case you were wondering...

2009-04-28T10:07:00.003+01:00

Case studies are an important part of many companies' marketing activities. If you’re not providing your prospects with case studies to show your past successes, chances are your competitors are. So write some!

If you’re not a competent or confident writer find someone who is. There are plenty of freelance copywriters and journalists around that you can commission to write for you.

But whether you outsource or go down the DIY route, there are a few things worth remembering.

The job of the case study is to tell the story of how you have helped your customer overcome whatever business problem they have been battling with. Whether you’ve provided a CRM system that allows them to capture leads which can be followed up, or your emarketing expertise has generated a 70% boost to their pipeline, the important thing is how their business has benefitted.

You care passionately about what you do and how you do it. And so you should. But no one else will care as much – they want to know what’s in it for them.
So show them.

If I'm writing about a client's customer I always stress to my client that their customer needs to be fully briefed about the process. Nothing is going to scupper your case study quite as effectively as the customer getting cold feet about being involved and that usually only happens if they don’t understand the process and/or what’s expected of them.

OK, that’s not strictly true – there is something that will derail it faster... an unhappy customer. Sadly I can recall several occasions when my scheduled phone interview with the customer turned into me doing a tea and sympathy routine while they ranted along the lines of “trust me, if I told you just how awful it’s been you wouldn’t want my comments to ever appear in writing.”

How long a case study needs to be is a moot point. I used to manage the UK case study programme for Microsoft's Business Solutions division. The typical case study length was 1,800 words. Sadly for some stories that was a bit of a stretch.

However, in recent months I have been writing shorter case studies for another client - around 500 words.

Keeping your word count down is a great way to make you focus on what matters in your story, whereas prescribing 1,800 words as the minimum can lead you to pad something out when the fact is some customer stories may be great but they don't always have the legs for a long write-up. If you have strict rules on word length you end up ignoring some potential stories.
By combining longer & shorter case studies with brief testimonials and customer win stories, you can end up with an impressive body of customer evidence.

You could even add video to your portfolio of customer evidence too. It can have a much bigger impact than the written word, but there’s no getting away from the marked difference in cost. One video case study could cost you the same as 100 written ones – maybe more.

can we fix it?

2009-04-07T16:27:00.002+01:00

I’m sure I’m not the only person who came down with Barack Obama fatigue last week, although it’s deeply unfashionable to admit such a thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I think he is very impressive and there is something reassuring about knowing there’s an intellectual in charge of the US. Of course, he’s got a loooong way to go before he’s as funny as the last guy. But that’s not such a bad thing, I guess.

During the G20 palaver there was a great deal of attention paid not just to what was said, but to the way in which Obama says things. For me, the fatigue began to take its toll thanks to the seemingly never-ending stream of pundits on Radio 4 talking about him. How is he different, why is he different, etc etc.

One thing’s for sure, I don’t need to hear another reprise of his famous “Yes We Can” speech. My oldest son was the right age to get into Bob The Builder a few years ago. Let me tell you, I’ve heard the phrase “yes we can” so often it just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

Mind you, part of me would like to know what things would be like if the new US administration was left in the hands of a claymation builder with a gang of talking steam rollers, cement mixers, cranes and so on. At least they could have played an active part in rebuilding those bits of the world the Bush administration had broken.

g20, fundamentalism and quizzes in manchester

2009-03-31T15:38:00.001+01:00

Most people would like to make a difference to the world they live in – hopefully for the better.

Take the G20 protestors for example; people who believe passionately that their actions are going to help build a better world.

Past anti-globalisation protestors will have had the same ambition, even if some of them have achieved little more than drumming up business for glazing companies and helping Plod earn a bit of overtime.

I have always thought of myself as “aware” in terms of the environment, global poverty, third world debt, animal welfare and so on. I’ve been fortunate enough on occasion to find myself in a position to put my money where my mouth is, like in 2005 when I turned the company I was running Carbon Neutral. But that wasn’t the end just part of the means, as it were. I’m no saint. I don’t think of myself as a role model.

Some years ago I earned my crust compiling quizzes and puzzles for the Manchester Evening News. During this time I remember meeting an earnest young man who was what we would have referred to back then as a Crusty. He was an in-yer-face animal rights and environmental campaigner. When he found out I was writing for a newspaper he spent a good 20 minutes in full flow telling me what kind of stories I ought to be writing. I let the storm blow itself out and then pointed out I was the quizzes and puzzles guy.

He looked at me blankly before saying that one week I should just hand in a piece saying how big business was ruining the lot of the common man (or something along those lines). I retorted that the readers of the double page spread I was filling were looking forward to the brain-teasers I set them every Saturday, and that if I followed his advice I’d get fired and someone else would file the copy in my place.

Unblinking he said that at least I’d have done the right thing.

What a knob. He confirmed the deep-seated mistrust I had (and still have) for fundamentalists, no matter what their calling.

A couple of years ago one of my neighbours had a bomb placed under his car by anti-vivisectionists. Literally hundreds of primary school kids walk past that house twice a day. It makes me shudder to think of what might have happened.

Going back to the story I was telling, I’m not sure how losing my job at the Manchester Evening News would have helped anyone, except maybe the person that would have replaced me. I feel much the same about the ritual vandalism and intimidation that sometimes accompany single-issue protestors.

roy castle and the art of delegation

2009-03-22T16:55:00.002Z

If you’re old enough to remember when Record Breakers was hosted by Roy Castle on the BBC, you might also remember the song he used to close the show with and its assertion that “dedication’s what you need.”

According to Roy, it was what you needed if you wanted to “be the best” and also to “beat the rest.”

Without doubt it is good advice, the kind that will see you well in life. But given a slight twist it becomes what I think is a great piece of advice for anyone wanting to run, grow and develop a successful team or business. Rather than “dedication” though in this case delegation’s what you need.

What am I on about..?

Well, this is my point – most people get promoted because they’ve done well in the job they were doing. Maybe this has happened to you. Almost without fail, someone new comes in to fill the space you vacated and it’s likely you could be managing them. At first it’s bound to be hard resisting the urge to micro-manage them; after all, until recently you were doing that job. And what’s more you were doing it bloody well.

Otherwise you wouldn’t have been promoted, would you..?

But if you are going to grow as a manager you have to focus on what your new role and responsibilities entail and, just as importantly, you have to let the newbie do their job unencumbered by your interfering, otherwise they’ll have a frustrating time feeling like they never get out of the starting blocks.

When I was a senior reporter on the IT trade newspaper Computing, I had the opportunity to interview Joe McNally – the man who brought Compaq to the UK and grew it into a £1 billion operation over the course of something like 15 years. That was in the days when Compaq was a serious player in the business IT market, not some strange left-over brand name HP sticks on some of its consumer goodies.

I asked one of the most obvious questions you could possibly ask such a man – how did he do it, what was the secret of his success. He told me that he had always tried to surround himself with the most talented people possible, and to give them the freedom to not only do their job but to exploit any new opportunities that arose.

On the surface that might sound obvious but those are brave sentiments – they must be, because in the 20-odd years I’ve been in the workforce I’ve rarely encountered them.

So hat’s off to Roy Castle, because dedication is a great thing to aspire to. But the true art of delegation, the kind I think Joe McNally was talking about, that’s not to be under-estimated either.

o2 - see what you can do...

2009-03-11T16:12:00.002Z

O2 cut me off this morning. Not me personally, my iPhone – I couldn’t make calls or send texts. After several attempts I finally got through to someone at O2 customer service who was able to explain the problem.

It transpires that for reasons best known to them, someone at O2 decided that rather than collect the payment for my bill via direct debit, they would cancel the direct debit, not ask for payment and suspend my service.

The woman at O2 I spoke to was a bit bemused by all of this. “I can see from here that we haven’t tried to take the payment,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Quick as flash, she sorted everything out – phone working fine and as a grovelling apology (sorry, I mean goodwill gesture) she credited my account with £10.

As pissed off as I was that they’d dropped the ball and I ended up not being able to use my phone, I couldn’t fault the way my problem was fixed.

I recently interviewed a WStore customer who – on the subject of customer service – said that he cares less about mistakes than he does about the way mistakes are dealt with. And don’t we all.

Well done O2!

i robot

2009-03-04T14:47:00.003Z

Branded merchandise. We’ve all had some at one time or another – crappy pens, the occasional t-shirt, the odd uninspiring laptop bag.

At WStore we’ve been thinking about getting some branded merchandise done, so one of my team – Deb – has been getting some product samples in for us to review.

There haven’t been any t-shirts, but there have been plenty of crappy pens and some utterly uninspiring bags. In fact, we were starting to lose faith in the whole thing until one day this metallic little chap arrived unceremoniously in a Jiffy bag.

He’s a USB stick in the guise of a robot.

Isn’t he great..?

power to the people

2009-03-03T15:11:00.002Z

I’m on a bit of a mission at WStore to produce some new customer evidence material. You know, case studies and the like.

So, I’ve been asking some of the sales guys for suggestions of customers to call, and I’ve been doing some interviews. Thankfully they’re going pretty well. It’s not as dumb as it might sound to say that so far everyone’s been very positive. You’d think that no one would put a customer forward to be a case study/reference if they weren’t happy – completely happy. But you’d be wrong.

A few years ago I had the good fortune to write a lot of case studies for a large and well-known software company (yes, THAT software company – I know, I know... not bad, eh..?). Anyway, a sizeable minority of the customers I called (and they were recommended to me as good case study candidates) refused to have anything to do with the process, frequently coming out with statements like: given the experiences I’ve had recently I don’t think you’d want me to put my thoughts on the record.

Fair enough.

Back to WStore, and in particular the conversation I had this morning with a very frank and very happy customer contact. Clearly, this isn’t the time or place for me to say who – but you’ve probably heard of them.

One comment he made really stuck out. “Systems can always go wrong, and they often do. It’s how the people within an organisation sort out those situations that give you the measure of a place.”

Of course, he’s dead right. It’s not new or particularly ground-breaking but it’s worth remembering plus it was a positive message that resurrected my morning – I’d spent the thick end of an hour sitting in a traffic jam on the A322 on the way into work. Still, as frustrating as the hold-up was, at least I wasn’t the poor soul the ambulance was attending to.

Again, back to this morning’s call. The chap I interviewed said a lot of very positive things about the service he’d experienced from WStore – answering queries, pre-empting problems, dealing with returns, whatever... he made it clear that the reason WStore is now his preferred supplier is because of the people he deals with.

As good as this is when you’re on the receiving end of all this positive feedback, I think there’s actually more to be learned from it if you’re at the other end of the service spectrum. If you piss people off, if you annoy them, if you fail to deliver on your promises, you will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

i came face-to-face with an actual movie star yesterday

2009-02-26T11:27:00.005Z

This is me and the little yellow chap with me is the star of Smile – an animated short, created by Chris Mais. It’s won loads of awards and if you haven’t seen it you really ought to.

It was created, in part, using technology from Oxford Metrics Group plc – a PR client of mine that I’ve been working with for the last few years.

Chris is a great guy and was one of the judges on the Vicon Film Festival which me and my colleague Hayley Roberts dreamt up and worked on in 2007.

There’s more info about Smile here.