Small businesses need PR too

Public awareness of PR as an industry has never been higher but many small businesses are unsure of what it can do for them. ‘PR is all spin and lies’ or ‘It’s not relevant to my business’ are comments I’ve heard many times over. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with the first (by the way, the latest series of ‘The thick of it’ is just amazing) but if they think the second, they’re missing a trick.

Have you got a content rich website that generates traffic, keeps visitors there long enough to read about your products and services and makes them want to get in contact? Because that’s what PR can do for you. Advice, tips, case studies, discussion, general industry news, points of view, white papers - original, non-commercial content is what you need. It makes your readers think they’re getting something for nothing. But they’re actually buying into the idea that you are an authority in the market, with the ability to satisfy their very specific requirements and solve their problems.

Of course there are many other aspects to a top website but the effectiveness of blogs costing peanuts underlines once more that content is king. And if the discipline of generating a steady stream of interesting, well-written articles doesn’t appeal to you, briefing a good writer to ‘ghost it’ needn’t take much of your time - or cost a lot. And that’s just one of the reasons why small companies need PR.

Networking … it takes all sorts

I’ve been to two networking events over the last few days and they were polar opposites in terms of both style and usefulness.

The first was sector specific (marketing) and held in a noisy, crowded city centre location at the end of the day. Most people were there for the same reason - to look for work - but apart from a couple of representatives from employment agencies there was no-one to talk to except each other.

The second was arranged by the Business for Breakfast franchise. The location was easy to reach and park at (read no £10 NCP charge) and the event had a clear format and a good mix of people from different business backgrounds exchanging advice, referrals and a bit of pre-9am banter.

If you’re a) an early bird and b) want to use your time to good effect, you’ll know which to go for.

Know thyself

Recent involvement in a psychometrics project made me reflect. Although most of us have taken part in testing at some point in our careers (usually as part of a selection process) we typically receive no feedback. The results are used by potential employers as an aid to decision making - and remain confidential. In a recent study over 80% of HR departments said they employed some sort of testing but I have to conclude that psychometrics isn’t being used to its full potential when most findings remain under lock and key.

Over the past 80 years psychologists have developed many models to describe personality and thousands of research studies have been conducted. Every one of these models has probably contributed something to the general understanding of personality, defining it in terms of: role (as an actor might play a part), the self (a permanent entity at the heart of our experience), preferences for behaving in given ways, adapting to the environment; and probability that an individual will act in certain ways.

Understanding what drives us and people around us can help us to become better communicators and ultimately raise performance and job satisfaction. I’m looking at this as much from the point of view of the employee as the business. For starters, perhaps it’s a way out of the appraisal impasse; the manager wants his or her team member to be more something or less something else, but the person in question has no practical way of achieving this. We’re not talking huge personality shifts, but subtle changes that are realistically achievable if people are given the tools.

Criteria For Qualifying Social Media Consultants

I spent a happy hour following a discussion on one of my Linkedin groups: 5 Criteria For Qualifying Social Media Consultants. “They need to have at least three years’ experience,” opined someone confidently, “although I have ten.” “Oh no you don’t!” replied another, “it hasn‘t been around that long.” “Oh yes it has.” (Well, it is the pantomime season soon.) Another just went into a sales spiel and provided a (seemingly) auto-generated response which contained the term ROI several times over while a third ventured that “Perhaps someone should offer a certification programme - It could be profitable,” he added helpfully.

The interesting stuff generally comes when you scroll down these discussions. The people who really have something to say prefer dipping a toe in the water first. Several pages down someone ‘fesses up: “Many PR companies are using junior staff to handle this work because the technology terrifies them.”

It had been left to someone else to inject some sense into the argument. “I think a SM consultant who knows "old" marketing would be high on the list. As SM is just a tool, it helps to have a good knowledge of the basics. They may know how to use Twitter, but if your audience isn't there, who cares?” Nice one, Robin Horton.

So how do you qualify Social Media Consultants? Simple. Do they understand your business and its objectives? Does the activity they propose integrate into the comms plan? Have they taken the time to understand what’s happening ‘out there’ and who’s influential in your market place? Have they explained how they will take advantage of what’s already ‘out there’ or identified a niche that they can help your business to own? That would be a start.

Seventh Heaven?

Good news about Windows 7 then. The consensus is that it works with none of the sluggishness that got Vista such a bad name in such a short time. Some useful innovations but not a sea change - and none of the ‘in your face-ness’ of the previous operating system. For example it doesn’t keep floating word balloons at the user.

It’s important for businesses that MicroSoft doesn’t take inbuilt obsolescence to extremes. In many companies machines are cascaded through the ranks and retain the operating systems they were sold with. If I swap work stations with a colleague it can hamper my productivity when I encounter an unfamiliar system. They’re not as intuitive as the designers would have us believe.

One thing I like about Windows 7 is Aero Snap - comparing the contents of two windows is made much easier. If I shove a window into the left or right edge of the screen, it expands to fill half of the desktop. Then by nudging another into the opposite edge of the screen, it occupies the other half. Click here for a nice overview from engadget.

By the way, Christian Science Monitor reports that compared with Vista and XP, W7 is the quickest to shut down. I can see what they mean but it’s not a reason in itself to crack open the champagne just yet.

Life after newspapers (2)

An issue that is exercising many of the best minds at present - the future of journalism in the digital age (see also Sept 15 post). A new report into The Reconstruction of American Journalism (The Washington Post/Columbia University) places the onus on society to assist funding for start-ups.

“The ranks of news gatherers in the US now include newsroom staffers, university faculty and students, bloggers and citizens armed with smartphones. Some of the startup news organisations are trying to become profitable, while many are operating as non-profits, financed by donations from philanthropists, foundations and readers, plus some corporate sponsorship and advertising. They could provide communities with diverse sources of news reporting. But most of the startups and their budgets are relatively small, and their finances are fragile.”

As PR practitioners we all appreciate the symbiosis of journalism and PR, and the challenge and reward of gaining coverage thanks to ‘real’ journalists - as well as the importance of high quality reporting to the democratic process. But in the UK, where philanthropy is less common than the US, where is the money going to come from?

What a difference a year makes

The survey - whether genuine or contrived - has long been regarded by the PR fraternity as a good pretext for a press release, or as a way of boosting the chances of coverage for a weak story. Another is the anniversary.

We’ve recently been reminded about the outbreak of the Second World War sixty years ago and in November it will the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall - all good so far, but when IKEA issues a press release telling us that the Billy bookcase is thirty years old, things are starting to get a bit silly.

When interviewed on the subject, journalists fall into two camps - there are those happy to explain the rules of the game (it has to be a round number, eg. not 249 years since the event) while others complain that good stories get passed over by editors simply because they don’t tick the ‘relevant anniversary’ box. Broadcaster and former controller of the BBC World Service, John Tusa confirms that a “In an ideal world if you have a good idea, you do it … however we’re all poor, weak people and if someone says there’s an anniversary we all say ‘how wonderful.’ We all recognise an anniversary. We don‘t always recognise a thought and an idea.”

So here’s looking forward to celebrations of jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt’s centenary, the four hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter - both in January 2010 - and hopefully a smattering of product press releases from opportunist commercial organisations and their marketing advisors. If you can’t beat them, join them.

In the meantime, check out this website if you need some ideas: http://www.ideas4writers.co.uk/date-a-base.htm

Corn fakes and onion

Rumours of the Kellogg’s plan to laser brand Cornflakes and safeguard intellectual property rights - which probably isn’t true, but who cares - put me in mind of my own two favourite IP stories. Unfortunately they’re both stories of infringements.

One concerned a fitness company that I worked for. We sold a gym full of equipment to what we thought was a South Korean distributor who turned out to be a manufacturer. They just measured everything up and started building the kit themselves. But the funny part was, they scanned our brochure too to produce one of their own and in doing do air brushed the images of my colleagues on the computer aided design team to make them look more Asian.

The other concerns the well known Union brand - we’ve all got a Union product somewhere in the house, possibly on our doors and windows - that has had to contend with substandard and illegal imports bearing the logo Onion nibbling at its market share. I kid you not, and it’s hard to spot if you’re not looking for it. The packaging had the same Pantone reference and everything.

But I’m not forgetting there’s a serious side to all this. It’s not only lost revenue for the truly innovative business that‘s involved. In the construction industry specifiers and architects are liable for the equipment they choose. Counterfeit goods often don’t meet current legal standards, jeopardising people’s safety and leaving professionals open to the risk of litigation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/oct/14/kelloggs-cornflakes-laser-fake

Last chance to see

While Stephen Fry and naturalist Mark Carwardine have been wowing UK TV audiences with their series on endangered animals, the passing of another species is going unnoticed. Each week the show tells the stories of wonderful creatures, the tremendous pressures (read influence of man) that are driving so many of them to the brink of extinction and the heroic attempts that are being made in some quarters to save them. However the species chosen for the programmes are those seen by the late author Douglas Adams and Carwardine in a 1989 radio series - and the English language wasn’t among them.

Stephen Fry’s TV commentary - by turns funny, affecting and uplifting - is proof that the English language survives in some quarters, nevertheless it is gravely under threat from politicians, media presenters and so-called communications experts and we can’t say we haven’t been warned. As long ago as 1946 George Orwell criticised "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English and said that political prose was formed "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Since then corporate speak has emerged to become one of our tongue’s greatest enemies. Personally I suspect that natural selection would weed poor communicators if it weren’t for the existence of supermarkets. Having to ask a shopkeeper for a ‘holistic midday nutritional solution’ instead of a sandwich, its worst practitioners would have gone hungry and eventually died of starvation.

Wherever the terms solution, ROI and value add (to name but a few) are thoughtlessly bandied about, it is the verbal equivalent to slash and burn of the rain forests - another nail in the coffin of the poor English language. But with your help it’s not too late to save it.

Image of globe by GraphixAsset, Bristol

Coolest Christmas gift?

When I logged onto Amazon last night I learned that Kindle starts shipping in the UK on October 18. As a marginal sceptic/late adopter I wasn’t the first to proffer my £175, but let’s face it, we’re all watching with interest. It’s going to be big and with Amazon behind it, the device isn’t going to become a white elephant. Unless someone comes up with something better …

All the stuff about how it differs from the US version goes over my head but it could be the saviour of the printed media industry, giving them another opportunity to charge for content. But what a pity many people are going to use such a fantastic device to read nothing more than Dan Brown. Sorry. Unworthy thought.

Which? report here http://www.which.co.uk/news/2009/10/amazon-kindle-available-to-uk-consumers-186096.jsp#

Climb every mountain?

Why did James Dean become an icon? Why was the Rubik Cube such a big seller? And why do so many people want to attempt the National Three Peaks Challenge? Somehow they all capture(d) the imagination of many people in a way that it’s hard to put one’s finger on. The difference, of course, is that James Dean doesn’t turn up in huge numbers in Wasdale in the early hours of the morning, disturbing the residents and eroding the paths. Neither is Rubik’s cube turning the summit of Scafell Pike into an enormous open air toilet and over stretching the mountain rescue services. (I think I've even lost myself here ...)

The Three Peaks Challenge is a totally artificial construct that involves driving 450 miles in 24 hours and climbing the three highest peaks in England Scotland and Wales. I say nothing of its pointlessness - climbing mountains is a passion of mine and gloriously pointless - but rarely in this country has this pastime been so unsustainable and lacking in sense. Climbing the three highest peaks in the UK (all in Scotland) would have some logic; this has none.

I understand that the prime beneficiaries (charities) find it hard to speak out. They know there are many other ways to raise money but they would be foolish to discourage any source of revenue by taking active steps against the Three Peaks Challenge. I suppose we just have to wait for it to go out of fashion - like the cube. In the meantime it raises interesting issues about just what makes some crazy ideas catch on. Answers on a postcard, please.

A local’s view of the problem: http://www.mountain-adventures.co.uk/documents/EnvironmentalImpact.pdf

BBC Radio 4’s Costing the Earth: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n0tw6

Gone phishing: 90away4ack3r5

News of the latest phishing attack - this time the divulging of passwords for thousands of Hotmail accounts - is another reminder of how vulnerable we all are. But sometimes it’s difficult to know how to protect ourselves.

We might think we’re smart enough not to fall foul of phishing, but IT experts warn that email was never intended for anything other than text. It simply isn’t safe enough and if a bug goes undetected on your computer it might be capturing and transmitting confidential information putting the smooth operation of your business and, most worryingly, your bank accounts at risk.

In the same press release I also read that 40% of us use the same password for multiple sites. It’s hard to create strong, memorable for each account - especially when sites often have their own criteria and don’t allow total flexibility in choice of password i.e. limiting the number of characters - but I picked up some good tips from friends.

Alphanumeric passwords can be easily created that mean something to us, personally, but they aren’t based on our date of birth or other information that is too readily available. Hence the headline: go away hackers. You could also think about basing the string on the first letter of each word in a favourite song lyric or just Google ‘strong password’ and watch the advice come flooding in.

Good and bad science

If marketing is a science, we consultants owe it to our clients to be scientific. But pressures of time and especially the attraction of IT applications that do our jobs for us (and which we don‘t fully understand) mean that we sometimes lose sight of how we arrive at our ‘scientific’ conclusions and we leave ourselves open to criticism.

How often do we hear misleading statistics bandied around in the media, or see portions of graphs which have been cunningly selected to prove the presenter’s point? The continuing row between the UK Government and the Office for National Statistics and the propensity of even the most respected broadcasting organisations to dupe us with colourful histograms and pie charts are just two examples.

I was reminded of this by an interesting clip that has been doing the rounds over the last few days. It’s a presentation on the growth of Walmart stores in the US built in a great application called Modest Maps. Notice one thing at the end, though. It is the presenter’s intention to show how the brand ‘spreads like wildfire’ and therefore the rate of new store openings is what’s critical. The time bar seems to run in a linear way (1 second = 1 year) until it gets to 2006 which lasts a lot longer. As a result the presentation is less impressive than it might have been with a final burst of frenetic activity. Still a pretty interesting free application, though.

Ben Goldacre writes untiringly on Bad Science here http://www.badscience.net/ and in The Guardian.

Culture and language

We all have our own anecdotes about cultural stereotypes. But when I look back at my own experiences I wonder how much of them were down to the foibles of the individual rather than a representative cultural difference ... [read more]

Translators have one of the hardest jobs in the world - everyone feels free to criticise their work. For a while I freelanced for a marketing agency who paid me to take issue with translations they had commissioned ... [read more]

Frankly not impressed

I spotted a poster in the window of a high street bank today which read “30% more time for our business customers.” Am I alone in thinking this a bit of a weak message? If you have more time for your customers, surely there are better ways of expressing it. Hell, 30% isn’t even half as much time again … it’s not even a third extra!

But it’s just a thought. I’m happy to be proved wrong on this.

Quick fixes for ailing websites

Existing website not delivering but a new one is out of the question? You can start to build content within the old architecture in the short term without significant investment. And if / when you do get the budget signed off eventually - you’ll already have a better idea of what will go into it and how it should be structured.

Keep your organisation’s communications objectives in mind and make sure a) they’re all covered off from the start and b) you’re reinforcing each on a regular basis. Also aim to create specific content for each category of client - make a list of what material is relevant and ensure a balance for all your readers.

Collect pieces of news that you are qualified to hold and opinion on - and give it your own unique slant. Make all articles informative but easy to read with plenty of links to other resources on the web. Don’t lay claim to material you haven’t written - but there’s no harm in referring customers to useful information sources that are managed by third parties.

Don’t bombard your readers with promotional information - instead seek to inform and advise them. A more subtle way is to use lots of case studies structured in a problem - solution format and add background so that they can read between the lines ‘here’s a company that understands the business we’re in.’

It’s always better that your readers arrive at that conclusion themselves rather than you blowing your own trumpet.

When your photography lets you down ...

Digital technology means that businesses now have more images for marketing purposes than they know what to do with. But how good is any of it? I’ve lost count of the number of times that my clients’ sales and marketing people have promised me ‘great shots’ only to find they’re about 50KB each. Or in PowerPoint. And they’ve junked the original files. That lack of quality will become apparent straight away.

There is a novel solution here - employ a professional photographer. There aren’t as many good specialist photographers in some areas as there once were - digital made the bottom fall out of their market - but it’s a good idea to cultivate one for important jobs. He or she will get better with each shoot, throwing in ideas that bring your marketing materials alive.

I’m convinced that good images not only have extra impact, better take-up, more mileage but they also add to your credibility. And you might have a keen amateur photographer among the staff but what’s the opportunity cost of giving them a photo assignment when they also have a ‘real’ job to do?

Digital photography might have made conventional materials obsolete, but not Adam Smith’s theories of the division of labour.

Social media not a fad (shock)

If Facebook were a country it would be the fourth largest in the world ... but China's Q Zone is even bigger.

Linkedin is used by 80% of companies to find new employees.

Wikipedia is more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica! Depends what you mean by 'accurate' surely?

By next year Gen Y will outnumber baby boomers. With all that it entails for mass communication .....

Some great and surprising stats in this presentation.Thanks to my friend Rene Power for sending me the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

Doing without the Internet

ft.com carried a podcast yesterday about a marketing exec planning to do without the internet for a week. He represents a company that "secures Web communications and accelerates business applications across the distributed enterprise," so I'm guessing it is not going to be a walk in the park for him.

Whatever next? The CEO of Nestlé goes on hunger strike? One person isn't statistically significant and this story is just nonsense. Why not look at how it has changed the lives of 'real' people? Whatever they are ...

Please take my money!

I’m into Spotify in a big way just at the moment. I’ve been using it for about a month and it intrigues and appals me in equal measure. I’m intrigued by the amount of content it gives me and appalled that I can’t listen to a song right to the end before searching for another. But I just wish I could find a reason to give them some money.

You see, since I started using it I have barely touched any of the 400 or so albums that we have in various formats: CD, LP, Minidisc, cassettes not to mention the MP3 files that lie forgotten on laptop hard drives and even a few 45s. Clearly I don’t need Spotify but it gives me something more than vast choice. It’s more convenient than hunting out the song you want, especially if you have a big collection. That said, I don’t think I’m prepared to pay for it. Maybe if it goes subscription only, I might change my mind. But at the moment I’m not bothered by the ads that come on every ten minutes or so.

No, actually I am bothered by the ads, but not in the way you might think. Instead I find myself wondering why there aren’t more of them and why they aren’t better tailored . I’ve been existing on a Spotify diet of Vaughan Williams (good for background), eighties hits (for my girlfriend) and Radiohead rarities (for me) but I still only get ads for Jay-Z and Amy Macdonald. Is that targeting ... and who is Amy Macdonald anyway?

They also run a little B2B spot that boasts how all ads are targeted on the basis of each listener’s taste. And a couple of weeks back there was an announcement that Spotify had overtaken itunes as the biggest source of income in its native Sweden - based on streamed services alone, not downloads. It’s just that nobody’s making any money out of me or any of my friends just at the moment. I suppose I should just shut up and enjoy the music.

Listen to Cape Cod Soundscapes Vol. 1. Ocean at Chatham’s Lighthouse Beach

Life after newspapers

A model is emerging in the US that shows how local journalism might work when newspapers have disappeared. Some hyperlocal bloggers - servicing audiences of around 50000 - are pulling in advertising revenues of $200K pa and with modest growth could start to employ staff.

While established (and unemployed) journalists are best placed to provide quality news content they have little experience of advertising and sales and can best exist as part of an ‘eco-system’ where diverse organisations complement each other. The size of these units will never compare to the traditional regional newspapers but would still be significant.

Check out the full report here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/14/ecosystem-hyperlocal-bloggers

Under fire

"I would rather the BBC was abolished than we started encrypting news to stop people seeing it," says Director General, Mark Thompson. Categorical in defending the delivery of free online news, he describes it as "utterly non-negotiable". "The absolute first building block keystone of the BBC is delivering impartial, unbiased news.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/14/mark-thompson-bbc-impartiality

SMPRs - give them a go

I didn’t talk about SMPRs in Tuesday’s post, so it’s worth going over now. The Social Media Press Release is deconstructed so that blogs and other automated sites can import the content and use it more easily. Think about when you imported your CV into Linkedin - it probably used most of the information in the right context but you had to perhaps tweak a few headers. Most people agree that’s pretty neat.

Of course there’s no internationally recognised standard for SMPRs but you can see an example here. Some PR practitioners might deride it as 'dumbing down' but I see it as an extra. Once you have a fully approved conventional release for your important journalist contacts, it doesn’t take a minute to deconstruct it.

Will SMPRs become a standard part of the B2B PR toolkit? Who’s to say whether Twitter will mature as a B2B tool, come to that. We don’t know the answer - but while we wait to find out, let’s keep on top of these emerging trends.

Mini website audit

Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking at what you (an entry level audience) can do to improve your website’s performance. Each time I add new tips, I’ll overwrite the previous version. We’ll kick off with keywords, links and content.

First think of a list of three keywords that are important for your organisation and jot them down on a piece of paper - then put them into Google and see where you appear in the rankings. I’m guessing you’re not at the top, but not to worry. Make a note of three competitors that rank more highly than you and visit each of the sites in turn. For each click on the view menu in your browser and select source from the drop down menu. Most of the code won’t mean much but look for the lines with the terms keywords and description in them.

Now look at the number of inbound links that each site has. You can use a free tool like http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ to do this - all you need is a Yahoo account. While keywords and description is a quick fix, a programme of link exchange has to be ongoing so you might want to involve others in the organisation in this project and meet once a month to report on progress.

The same goes for site content. Look at what your competitors - or any site that you particularly like - are doing. The trick is to be content-rich. Give as much information as you can - without, of course, divulging any trade secrets! Show visitors that you really know what you’re talking about and they’ll be more likely to contact you directly. Again, pool your resources and ask colleagues from other departments to feed information through. Most organisations have huge untapped reserves of knowledge.

Who reads this stuff anyway?

One really important point about digital press releases is that nobody reads them. But allow me to explain - the operative word is nobody. For the purposes of page ranking, getting noticed or just having your press release 'lodge' somewhere on the net, it's mechanised search engines that trawl the internet, not people. And they just don't have the same tastes as humans.

That doesn't mean you can copy and paste 1000 words of search terms without any syntax and get away with it - you need real content but there's no requirement to keep it quite so brief. These guys are so much faster and more 'patient' that it's a good idea to keep in all of those notes and background that you would have edited out for time-poor human eyes. What might have been a one page (double spaced) release becomes possibly three or four pages.

Company and author profiles, more detailed product/service specs and a nice section of relevant links - in addition to those embedded in the text - it's all grist to the mill. And when your client (if you're an agency) or you MD (if you're in-house) says 'I think we should put out a release our our investment in a new set of step ladders' or 'a change of a pantone reference in our logo,' there's no need to argue any more. Don't send it to journalists if you think it will weaken your reputation, but do issue it on a wire service. It will get picked up somewhere and together with stronger material can possibly help you deny a competitor some space on the initial pages of a Google search.

Reinventing colour

Visited the Tate in Liverpool today. Quite taken with 'Hyena Stomp'. The title from a track by the American jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton. The artist, Frank Stella was 'thinking about syncopation while working on the painting: the alternation of colours appearing to have an irregular but rhythmic pattern.' This and other works are on show at the Liverpool Tate until September 13 in the exhibition, Colour Chart - Reinventing Colour 1950 to today.

More

Radio 4's 'In Business'

Great Radio 4 broadcast, now available on BBC i player. New media ad revenues aren't matching what traditional media are losing. Where will the money come from in the future?

By the way, I liked the rebuff of James Murdoch's on attack on the BBC at The Edinburgh TV Festival. Hands off our BBC, I say!

Here's what the BBC itself says about the broadcast: The twin pincers of global recession and technology upheaval are putting traditional newspapers and broadcasters through the ringer. Peter Day asks what the shape of the new media might be once the troubles are over.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mcw5z

Corporate blogs. Say what?!

OK, so many dyed in the wool bloggers will say their work can never be corporate - at least not as they understand the term. But organisations are increasingly eager to engage with customers and stakeholders in a more dynamic way.

Caution is ever the watchword in corporate circles and companies are much more conservative about the type of content and comment that is allowed and how their ‘blog’ is administered. Encourage employees to contribute but make the editorial policy clear from the outset. Probably one person corporate communications or marketing or the MD’s PA will have editorial control - so there’s the formal ‘sign-off’ procedure vital to any PR programme.

Do you allow comments direct onto the blog? Most organisations will shy at this but if you are moderating comments, do it regularly and promptly and engage with all submissions. If a person has something bad to say about you there are worse places they could do that than on your company blog. To prove this to myself I’ve just logged onto Dell Hell again. The .net one. Take a look if you haven’t been there.

Oh, and don’t put in any overt sales messages. Ever. It’s called blowing your credibility.

Free stuff?

“Do you have to pay to get PR in foreign language media?” someone asked me last week. And we talked about it for a bit and moved on to other subjects. But the question came back to me yesterday as I was driving.

Put simply, the smaller the pool of potential advertisers, the more the media owner will feel it necessary to tie ‘editorial’ to an advertising package. Some European countries with their own language have relatively small populations - and when we drill down to a B2B audience for a specific product or service, we’re talking a pretty select group. So yes - once you’ve played the usual cards ‘no budget till next year’ ‘prove your effectiveness first’ - some spend is going to be involved.

But here we come back to issues like ‘Aren’t the aims of PR and advertising different, if complementary?’ Surely you want to do both - so what’s more important is how you choose where to invest. A media sales friend of mine - yes, these people do have friends! - stresses how important it is to view media as potential partners.

Don’t just download the pdf rate card from their website, talk to them! There’s a great deal of sector knowledge and if you brief them properly they can add a lot of value. Media packages are increasingly varied and complex. You can get your ‘free PR’ but why not look at lists for emarketing, banners and website sponsored links, print display advertising and whatever else is on offer. There are some valuable services on offer - and like someone else says, ‘It’s good to talk.’

A place called Convergence

Everybody knows content is king, but where is that content coming from? Who can you rely on to consistently provide informative, on-message and interesting material for your website? It’s interesting that I have met a number of SEO consultants recently who have found themselves quite literally dragged into PR. It’s a service that their clients clearly need, it’s just that they aren’t that sure of being qualified to offer it.

The other side of the coin is the PR consultant who finds him or herself working more and more in the digital space. We have the writing skills and everything that goes with that - the ability to collect the right information and produce engaging copy that gets the point across. But the learning curve is a steep one when technology is constantly evolving.

There’s no shame in admitting that we all have to learn new skills and there are some great training courses on offer for people who want to fill in gaps in their knowledge. What is really striking is that PR and SEO professionals often find themselves in the same sessions … filling in the gaps in each others’ knowledge. Now that’s what I call convergence.

The language of marketing

When I came back to the UK after eleven years in Italy, everyone agreed that my language skills were going to be really useful. And so it has proved ... but not always in the way I might have thought.

I've had some pleasing successes in running PR campaigns in Italian media where the process has worked in much the same way that it would in English - you pick up the phone, sell in the idea, do the research, provide the material and hey presto! you're on the web or in print. But the process of learning a new language in depth has taught me a lot about communication. And that new found knowledge can help us whichever language we are applying ourselves to.

Is your message snappy and to the point or is it full of useless marketing buzzwords? Is it too idiomatic or will it still be easily understood by an international audience? Will your favourite translation tool make short work or a meal of it? If the Google translator widget has confused you in the last sentence then I've just proved my point!

So in the end it's not about how many languages you speak - even if it's only one. It's about being smart and using tried and tested processes. It's about knowing where to bring in language professionals and where you can trust your own experience.