All posts by Sebastian

2012: there are some good news stories waiting to get out

Communicating in a crisis, Working with the media

Ahead of the greatest celebration of sporting achievement this country has ever seen (Ipswich Town’s 1981 UEFA Cup win aside), the country’s media are in meltdown it seems; scrabbling desperately for absolutely anything that can fill their pages/screens with tales of London 2012 incompetence, disaster and failure. As a country we don’t just accept failure, we positively wish it up on ourselves.

Pick a pocket or two
Of course, the G4S debacle doesn’t help, but the BBC’s News at 10 I thought plumbed new depths last night with a feature on hoards of foreign pickpocketers ready to descend en masse to relieve the luckless ‘unfortunates’ attending the Games of their handbags, valuables, phones, wallets…

The media do of course love a bad story and in terms of managing that, there isn’t much you can do other than hope that Team GB starts to deliver on the gold medals. Surely then they’ll have something to celebrate.

Of course there’s the whole bun fight on legacy to come next. You just can’t keep a bad news story down.

Dare to answer back?

Communicating in a crisis, Social media, Talking to your customers

O2’s crisis management has been much debated of late, not least its management of some of the more colourful social media traffic that’s been heading their way. The question is, when the abuse really piles up, do you respond to those tweets, or let them go?

The attached blog http://bit.ly/OhMFJP from the CIPR admires O2’s response to a couple of particularly graphic tweets. My first instinct was to disagree. Surely responding will only encourage the sender to really let loose in a conversation O2 just can’t win.

But perhaps that’s not the point; they (O2), have proved they are at least listening and are working to do something about it.

Owned media: you might own it but does that mean you can say what you like?

Uncategorized

In case you didn’t know, and why should you, there are apparently three ways of defining the media channels that companies and individuals use to communicate with their audiences. PR Week’s editor gives a good definition of ‘bought, earned and owned’ so I won’t repeat it here but I did think it worth focusing on ‘owned’ media.

Owned media is where you’re communicating directly with your audience via Facebook or Twitter for example. You don’t own the medium you use, but you do own the relationship with your followers and you can say whatever you like (within the boundaries of acceptable taste and moral decency of course).

A strange contradiction
Anyway, turn over the page in the same edition of PR Week (29 June) that I mention above and you find a strange contradiction. A story appears on Wayne Rooney tweeting a Nike campaign that the Advertising Standards Authority ruled had not been ‘obviously identified as marketing comms’. Hang on. Surely he owns the relationship so why can’t he do and say whatever he likes (again within those boundaries of acceptable taste and decency)?

Why should Wayne Rooney be subject to the professional standards that the likes of journalists and publishing houses have to observe? Does he own the medium he’s using or not?

That’s the trouble/great thing with the likes of Twitter, it’s turned the traditional publishing model upside down. There are no rules, so why should celebrities or anyone who chooses to use it, listen to it, converse on it, play scrabble on it, care what the ASA, or anyone else says?

Car crash PR

Uncategorized, Working with the media

Anyone who read the Gordon Ramsay interview in the Observer last Sunday http://bit.ly/Kv2NIy would have enjoyed some spirited sparring between a spiky journalist and a prickly chef. From a communications perspective though, the role of the legion of PRs that Ramsay apparently brought with him was fascinating but ultimately did more harm than good.

Does an opinionated, forthright character like Ramsay really need a public relations team with him to guide the conversation? Of course he should have someone along to make sure the interview happens and that there is someone to listen in and make sure facts are recorded accurately, and any necessary follow-up takes place (or even post interview damage limitation, although it’s rarely effective – just look back at the Observer piece where the PR’s comments on Ramsay’s football injuries also get used in a slightly disparaging way).

Keep anonymous
In my book, if the journalist has to refer to the PR in their piece then the PR has failed. It’s a bit like the referee in a game of football. If you get to the end of a game and you don’t know the referee’s name then you know they’ve had a good match; they kept control without having to overly draw attention to themselves.

At one point in the Ramsay interview, the exasperated journalist turns to the PR and asks if they would prefer to conduct the interview. It’s not reasonable to pitch Ramsay for an interview ostensibly on his latest project and expect the conversation to stick firmly to the PR’s preferred topic – especially someone as colourful as Ramsay. To then repeatedly try and blunderingly guide the interview just makes it worse. Having said that, it does make for great reading!

When research led PR backfires…

Working with the media

There are lies, damned lies, and then there are, of course, statistics. A recent press release from an insurer has drawn a certain amount of ire from commentators for extrapolating up a statistic from research on people fiddling their expenses. See the Guardian’s comment:  http://bit.ly/JzMFZb

It’s tempting to try and draw out some big numbers from this type of research, but as ever it comes down to your gut feel and common sense: if you think it’s stretching the integrity of the research then journalists will almost certainly come to a similar conclusion and you could find the whole thing back firing.