While perusing the bookshelves for some unchallenging summer holiday reading, I cast aside my usual literary haunts – James Joyce’s Ulysses perhaps or maybe War and Peace – and picked up a paperback which looked like it might be a good yarn.
Rightly or wrongly, I’m often swayed by the reviews you see all over a book cover provided by whoever the publisher could persuade to say something nice about the book. In this case, I was swayed but, sadly for the author and the publishers, not into buying the book.
There was only one review on the cover, which read: “This is just the novel for whiling away a few pleasant evenings with a nice cup of tea”.
It seems to me that this is the equivalent of a potential house buyer looking around a house and proclaiming “nice size room” if they can’t think of anything more positive to say.
It reminds me of that old communications adage that ‘less is usually more’. In this case, it would have been better to have left the book cover to speak for itself.
Happy holiday reading everyone – maybe even enjoy with a nice cup of tea!
Somebody asked me for the best bit of career advice I could give after years of working in the communications business. I thought long and hard about it and came up with a few thoughts.…
Be curious; listen more than you speak; know your audience; tailor your messaging; keep it simple; less is more; be nice (or at least not objectionable); proof read and proof read again; don’t misspell a spokesperson’s name; be clear and concise; don’t be afraid to introduce a bit of humour; don’t be afraid to challenge those around you (and particularly those above you); the legal team might know the law but that doesn’t mean they write better than you; trust your instincts (they’re almost always right); don’t use jargon/corporate speak; if you don’t understand what’s being said, chances are most others don’t know either; and don’t let ‘busyness’ steal time needed for thinking creatively…
And then I realised, all these things are great and ‘must haves’ but ultimately it comes down to one thing:
Never – and that means absolutely never – send an email with an attachment without first opening the attachment and checking it is actually the attachment you want to send.
Listening to an interview with the Chilean/American author Isabel Allende on the radio the other day, she was asked for her best writing tip. She answered: “You can’t edit a blank page.” For the procrastinators, deliberators and postponers amongst us – and yes, I can be any of those at different times – it’s great advice for 2025 whatever the writing project. Just get writing and fill that blank space…baby.
In my household we’re all vegetarians and do like the odd bit of meat fakery. Interrupting our usual Quorn fest (and no, this post isn’t sponsored by the purveyors of the fine microprotein – Fusarium Venenatum – me neither!), we plucked from the supermarket shelf a chicken imposter: ‘THIS isn’t roast chicken and stuffing’.
What has this to do with my normal communications beat I hear you ask (or perhaps you’ve already disappeared to throw another juicy slab of microprotein on the skillet)?
Writing chick lit What tickled me was the brazen use of AI to write a description of the product on the packaging. Rather than pretend a human wrote it, the THIS marketeers were quite happy to admit that they’d handed the creative pen over to our unseen AI scribes who came up with this finger lickin’ piece of chick lit:
“You could say that THIS is like the ultimate and daring undercover secret agent in the food world – dressing up in perfect disguise as pork, chicken and beef, but without any of the actual animals involved. It has a license not to kill, but to fill – your belly.”
Poking fun at AI It’s terribly cringey as THIS themselves admit, but it made me think that a) it’s quite a good way of using AI while poking fun at it; and b) is AI literally eating the copywriter’s lunch?
To be honest, reading this poultry effort reassured me that there is still plenty of room in the coop for the human touch.
Back in the day when playing for my school football team – swift down the right wing but usually an erratic delivery – I remember a frequent howl from the coach would be ‘heads-up’, so you can see what’s happening in the game around you and where to run and pass rather than focusing on your own feet.
I know, sounds obvious but it’s usually the obvious and simple things that go awry. And two recent reputational fails have reminded me about that ‘heads-up’ instruction.
Party invites in the post First up in the court of PR gaffes, step forward the department store to the well-heeled. Trouble brewed for Fortnum & Mason when it became clear that an after party they were hosting following a Buckingham Palace reception for Team GB and Paralympics GB medallists was only open to Team GB. Even worse, the response that there would be a “separate reception for Paralympians in the works” served to ‘other’ Paralympians who have strived to be seen and treated on an equal basis with their Olympian counterparts.
It seems that both these issues could have been avoided if time had been taken to consider the wider stakeholders and interest groups involved and potentially affected. It’s understandable how this can happen given the pressures to deliver projects quickly and the tunnel vision that can result, but it’s unforgivable for any business to sacrifice that wider consultation and understanding of how a service, product or PR initiative could impact others and lead to unintended consequences, despite the best intentions.
Heads-up PR Heads-up PR and better awareness of how a project will land with those beyond the initial target audiences could save your organisation from pain and reputational firefighting. As a schoolboy footballer, I’m sure that if I’d had my head up a little more often, some of those crosses might well have landed on the right heads…
