Paul Stallard is a PR professional at Berkeley PR, a technology PR agency based in Reading, where he also contributes to its technology PR blog. Please note that this blog is written in a personal capacity and does not necessarily reflect the views of Berkeley PR….although they all read it.
I saw on the Guardian yesterday that the brilliant Cadbury’s Dairy Milk commercial featuring a boy and girl with “dancing” eyebrows has been named the public’s favourite TV advert of 2009. I know this doesn’t have anything to do with PR but it is a brilliant example of how a digital advert can gerate a buzz online for a brand. According to the news piece the advert has been watched 200,000 times on its site this year – and another 5m times on YouTube. Below is the top ten according to tellyads.com:
1. Cadbury: Eyebrows
2. Comparethemarket.com: Comparethemeerkat.com
3. PG Tips: It’s The Taste
4. Churchill: Rolf Harris
5. Change4Life: Eat Well, Move More, Live Longer
6. Maltesers: Tiny Jeans
7. GoCompare.com: Only A Tenor
8. Vodafone: If I Ruled The World
9. Aviva: Green Army
10. EDF Energy: Eco20:20
As regular readers of this blog will know I am always over the moon to achieve coverage for my clients but also love it when Berkeley PR see’s its name in lights. So last week I was delighted when my post on the BerkeleyPR blog was included in this weeks best of the technology PR blogs section in PR Week. Check out my original post about radio PR and see the coverage here. Thanks to the team at PR Week for helping to kick start my weekend with that one.
There are also two other posts by heroes from the PR world. Melanie has writen a nice post about Twitter and Chris wrote about….er, Twitter also. That said, please add these two to your reading list/blog roll. I did over a year ago and have never regretted it. They both write informative and fun blogs and are always worth a visit.
The latest interview in my buying PR series is with Samantha Surry, head of communications at Affiliate Window. I was interested to read her take on social media considering the online world that Affiliate Window inhabits.
Name and title: Samantha Surry, Head of Communications Company and what it does: Affiliate Window, Affiliate Network
Paul Stallard: What role does PR have within your marketing mix and to helping you personally? Samantha Surry: Affiliate Window’s Communications and Sales & Marketing teams work very closely together as PR plays a pivotal role in our marketing mix. Unlike paid for advertising, editorial coverage allows you to get ‘under the radar’.
PS: What most annoys you about PR agencies? SS: There are some agencies who like to keep their client at a distance from the press, ensuring the direct relationship stays with them. However, this is not conducive to a strong working relationship and (in my opinion) stifles the potential/opportunities between the brand and the media.
PS: What are the basic skills a PR agency should have? SS: In no particular order….
Contacts (within the relevant press market)
Relationship Building
Copy Writing
Handling the Media
PS: Do you think that social media now part of modern PR? SS: Absolutely. Like it or not, consumers are using social media as a way of discussing products/services/brands in both a positive and negative light. Therefore, in order to make the most of your PR, you need to be interacting with these individuals, or at very least listening to what they have to say. Read the rest of this entry »
At Berkeley PR we are lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with some smart clients who are not only a pleasure to work with but also push and help us grow. I have been talking with one of my clients recently about how much they hate to pitch for free (a given in the PR world) as they see it as a way for a potential client to steal their good ideas.
Unfortunately, in these tough economic times I can’t imagine too many potential clients paying for the chance to hear you pitch for their business. In actual fact, I am finding that more are asking you to work for a reduced fee to prove yourself. If the client is interesting enough then more often than not we will take up the challenge.
Are you mad I hear you scream! The reason I am willing to do this is because I am so confident that we can do a brilliant job for our clients that I am happy for us to over service an account or work for a reduced fee if it results in a long term relationship. Projects don’t interest us - long term campaigns do, as they allow us to demonstrate the benefit of PR.
That said, my colleague and fellow blogger at the Berkeley blog, Luke Davies showed me a post which made me laugh a great deal. This post shows an exchange of emails between someone asking a design agency for some free consultancy and the replies. I particularly liked the great use of pie charts.
It is quite long but well worth a read if you fancy a chuckle.
The last issue of PR Week featured my recent blog about Thierry Henry in its best of the Tech PR blogs. A fantastic way to finish last week. It also highlighted two other blogs which you should take five mins to check out.
Tim Dyson looked at why marketing execs love product quality for good reason and Jon Clements asked who still hates social media? PR Week’s Peter Hay highlighted the other week that too many PR bloggers who promote their blogs……wait for it……don’t actually blog. Well both these gents do and are worthy of any blog roll. If they are not on yours add them now.
Poor old “Terry Henry”, he has had his Wikipedia page defaced and been the butt of jokes all over the internet, but after his shocking handball (even Arsene Wenger saw it!) should his PR team be worrying?
Despite what some sports PR experts believe in this weeks PR Week I think the answer is yes. Football is a passionate game and the fans spend millions. The game is littered with players who have made mistakes and by not reacting in the appropriate way have suffered.
Henry is widely regarded as one of the games greats, and rightly so, but his reputation is certainly now tarnished. He was captain on the night and he could have followed players such as Fowler and Di-Canio who demonstrating the type of sportsmanship rarely seen these days. Don’t get me wrong, these guys were never saints but people remember them as great sportsmen. Fowler argued with a ref about a penalty that never was and Di-Canio stopped play when he could have scored because the opposing keeper was injured.
So what should he have done?
1. Been open and honest straight away
2. Apologised
3. Said that he thought a replay was a good idea (would never happen)
Unfortunately Thierry chose to come out with a statement a little too late. I’m sure that people would have found it more believable if he had said it closer to the actual event rather than after a campaign by the public.
Back in April of this year WIRED UK launched. The magazine has become synonymous with informed and intelligent analysis in the US so quite rightly was met with a flurry of excitement when it crossed the pond to our shores. So much so that it won the BSME Launch of the Year award on Tuesday night. Congrats to all involved.
As a result I was delighted when David Baker, managing editor for WIRED UK ,agreed to take part in one of my Meet the Media interviews. He makes a very key point about knowing the magazine and in particular the ability to refer to which section you are pitching for. If freelancers have to do this when looking for work then there simply is no excuse why PR professionals can’t.
Enjoy.
Name: David Baker Title I work for: Managing editor of WIRED
Paul Stallard: What is your pet hate of PR? David Baker: Being phoned up to see if I have received an email. If I’m interested I am going to respond. Also, not asking if I am on deadline. I often am and will happily talk at another time.
PS: What is the best way to contact you? DB: Email to our general PR address. All the editors see that.
PS: Do you think that most PR professionals read the titles you write for before contacting you? DB: Hard to say. It would be handy if they did and could name the section of the title their story would be good for. We expect that of journalists pitching stories.
PS: Have you ever done any PR work and if yes what was the experience like? DB: Yes, in the 1980s. Dispiriting. Most of it was creating stories out of nothing when the client should really be buying advertising.
PS: What is your top tip for PR professionals? DB: Be able to summarise the story in eight words or less. This is often called the “top line” in newspapers, eg. “A new app, XXX, will be the death of Apple’s iPhone”
PS: Do you run or can you recommend a PR training course? DB: No.
PS: How many emails / calls do you get a day? DB: From PRs: about 50 emails, very few calls. In total about 100 emails, 20 calls.
PS: How has the increase of social media affected traditional journalism? DB: With Twitter we can see what our readers think of a new issue as soon as it hits the street. In the past it was hard to get that feedback.
PS: Have you had to change your writing style for online copy to incorporate SEO? DB: What’s SEO?
PS: Is there a future long term for hard copy publications or will online rule? DB: Definitely a future for print. A well produced magazine is an artefact as well as a collection of information and opinion. Plus you can read it in the bath.
PS: Bar your own, which news titles do you read? DB: Guardian, Economist.
PS: What is your favourite restaurant/coffee house for briefings? DB: None particular.
PS: Do you believe journalists are rude to PR professionals? DB: Yes and they shouldn’t be. (Though see deadlines above).
Following a story this week in The Times by Sathnam Sanghera about why businesses shouldn’t use Twitter I decided to dust the old pen off and compose a letter in response. Sathnam made some very valid points but I felt he had been slightly short sighted in his analysis of the situation. Someone else must have liked my argument at The Times, as yesterday my response appeared in the hard copy of the paper.
I’m a firm believer that you have to prove to people you can do something yourself before they will buy into you providing them a similar service. Would you pay a company that doesn’t blog to provide you advice on how to manage this communication channel? The same goes for rapid response campaigns. We have countless examples at Berkeley PR of running rapid response campaigns for our clients which work on the same principals used to secure coverage such as the above letter in The Times.
I was interested to see NMA has announced that it will be joining Rupert Murdock, the FT and Emap by experimenting with paid-for models online. In a statement on its site it announced that online access to all magazine content apart from opinion will be paid for only:
“Like all other publishers, we’re experimenting with paid-for models online,” said editor Justin Pearse. “While previously lead stories from the magazine were accessible for free, we’re confident this content, together with the analysis our site provides to the industry, is worth paying for.”
I hope Justin is right and I am sure it is not a decision that the team there have entered into lightly. My biggest concern is when I consider how I consume my information online. More often than not I won’t pay for content as it is quite likely it will also appear somewhere else for free – how will they guarantee that the information they are charging for can only be seen on their site? I also generally feel quite negative towards sites that ask me constantly to login to consume information and will avoid them if possible.
The publication has also said that it will not be charging for news until it is seven days old (who wants to read it then?) and some columns and opinion will remain free which leads me to ask….what would I be paying for?
I understand that we are in a recession and that for magazines to survive they can’t keep giving content away but I am not certain of how such a subscription system will work. Readers of magazines like to read their favourite columnists such as Will or Alex at NMA, but how many NEED to? (sorry chaps). Also, on a slightly different note, one of the key successes of Twitter is the ability to share content. As Alan Burkitt-Gray of GTB said when I interviewed him: “Twitter links that I post are the second biggest producer of visits to the Global Telecoms Business site”. Paying for content prohibits the distribution of content so will they inadvertently reduce the traffic to their website?
I think another valuable point to consider is the FT. I would argue that people pay the subscription for the FT because it publishes financial information valuable to its readers, that can’t be found elsewhere for free, and not because of the editorial. It is also interesting to note that as NMA reported just a few weeks ago, FT subscribers had risen but it still saw revenues fall by 14 per cent year on year over the first nine months of 2009.
My biggest concern for publications that are moving to a subscriber model for online content is - will the amount of traffic you will undoubtedly lose be worth the revenues you generate from charging for content? By limiting the ability for users to share your most interesting articles are you closing the door to new readers?
I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know what the answer is but I will be watching how this situation unfolds with great interest over the coming months as I am sure it will ultimately affect everyone in the media and PR industries.
While catching up on my reading after a month out of the loop playing happy families I came across a link on Brendan Cooper’s blog to a piece on Mashable about ROI with social media. An excellent read and Christina Warren the author has hit the nail on the head in my eyes. As she points out at the start according to a survey they ran 84 per cent of social media programs don’t measure ROI and companies don’t know where to start.
All too often you hear people talk about social media tools as a time waster or a client has heard Stephen Fry talk about Twitter and wants to know how they can use it. Christina’s article has been designed to outline how users of social media can determine ROI.
In the meantime, Oliver Blanchard’s Social Media ROI Presentation above which also came from the same piece is well worth flicking through. It is a little long but good use of comedy pictures help give an introduction as to why ROI with social media is essential.
