All posts by Sebastian

AI is not only eating a copy writer’s lunch, it’s writing about it too

Content marketing, Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees, Writing

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.

How an upmarket department store and a celebrity chef could have benefited from some heads-up PR

Talking to your customers

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.

No consultation
Next up in the dock, Jamie Oliver recently published a children’s book which included a story line featuring a First Nations girl, leading The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Commission to react that the book only serves to “erasure, trivialisation, and stereotyping of First Nations peoples and experiences”. Incredibly, Guardian Australia reported that neither Oliver or his publisher had consultations with “any Indigenous organisation, community or individual…before the book was published”.

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…

Go live blogging with your internal comms

Talking to your employees


Most decent news sites run a live blog on the biggest news stories of the day. Some will have more than one running at any one time, depending on how busy the news agenda is. Today, for example, the BBC website is running as many as four live blogs on the big stories of the day and another in the sports section focused on the Paralympics 2024 (go GB!)

Live blogs are a brilliant way of pulling together all the threads of a moving story and conveying to the reader that they’re getting the most up to date coverage of a big news event. Readers can drop in to the coverage at multiple points depending on their interest, and there is a feeling of energy and momentum around the coverage that lifts live blogs above the conventionally filed static news story.

So, if a live blog works so well for external news sites, why don’t more businesses use them as part of their internal communications?

Add some dynamism to internal communications
With the move to a hybrid working environment for many businesses, effective internal communication has taken on a critical role as the glue that holds many organisations together in the absence of more regular person-to-person contact. And live blogging can add a dynamic edge to an internal communications approach as the place an employee can go to at anytime of the day to immerse themselves in what is going on around the business.

Where is the CEO today?
Content in a live blog can range from the momentous to the minutiae: which office is the CEO visiting today? Perhaps an employee is presenting at a big industry conference. Maybe a long-termer is reaching a significant milestone and deserves a shout out. Or does a new arrival need to be announced? Perhaps it’s a big business win; an office revamp; someone attending a big industry event; a great presentation that deserves to be shared more widely…Pictures are great too and there should always be the option for people to interact and comment on content.

A compelling read
The point is a live blog can create an interesting and compelling read where people in the business feel a part of what is going on around the organisation, creating the all-important engagement that static news on the intranet does not always generate.

The hitch of course is a good live blog cannot operate by itself; it needs communications resource to curate it and contributors to send in the news and snippets that can feed the blog and keep it alive. For larger organisations, existing communications people could take turns to share the responsibility. But if a business doesn’t think it has the resources to maintain a daily live blog, why not use it as the go-to comms tool for big internal events like annual results, other earnings announcements, big structural changes?

Too often, the news feed in a company intranet feels flat and like yesterday’s news (which, most of the time, it literally is). A live blog brings more immediacy, can attract a greater readership, bring people together, and drive engagement. Oh, and it can be a lot of fun too…

Maybe it’s time for your business to start live blogging?

Keep it real: authenticity makes for great communication

Communicating in a crisis, Content marketing, Talking to your employees

What characterises someone as a good communicator? Being ‘authentic’ is usually hailed as a key attribute; someone who says it how it is, who doesn’t hide behind pre-scripted sound bites, who answers the question (and without jargon) but, most importantly, is clearly themselves. People respond well to an authentic leader, whether it’s a politician or a business leader, and feel they can have a genuine connection with that individual.

But for some reason, being the authentic version of ourselves is quite hard. Watching a debate for the UK general election last week involving six leaders and deputy leaders of the UK’s political parties, each politician had 30 seconds at the end to give their pitch to the electorate. For some inexplicable reason, most chose to read from an autocue. The result? Stilted, monotoned, expressionless statements that had me thinking more about their presentation style than the content of what they had to say.

Why would a skilled politician and speaker need an autocue to give the type of speech that they have probably already given hundreds of times? All it served to do was to strip them of their authenticity; that very thing makes them the person they are and why people like – or dislike – them.

Strip away the stuff that hides the real you
It had me thinking that the best example of an authentic communicator is probably your five-year-old self. You weren’t afraid to say what you thought of something; weren’t afraid to admit you didn’t know; and weren’t shy of saying what it is you liked and didn’t like. Of course, your five-year-old self had no filter, so I am not suggesting reverting to toddler tantrums, but I am saying that leaders whether they are politicians, CEOs, or anyone with a message to give, should strip away the communications tools that cloak and stifle authenticity.

Bin the autocue
That means binning the autocue; the over-scripted corporate videos; the company intranet piece written and polished by someone else; and the impenetrable corporate jargon that you’d never use outside the office. And maybe doing more of the things that are authentic to you. It’ll make your communications better, and your message will be more likely to land.

Green hushing

Content marketing, Sustainability, Talking to your customers, Uncategorized

I recently came across the phrase ‘green hushing’. Green washing yes, but ‘green hushing’?

For those uninitiated, like me, it is apparently the practice of businesses keeping quiet about their sustainability efforts for fear of facing a backlash from commentators – anyone from clients, to influencers, the media, politicians or even their own employees – who might disagree with the organisation’s sustainability strategy.

Or it might also be that businesses don’t want to invite increased scrutiny on other, less wholesome areas of their business and perversely, trigger allegations of green washing. It’s a bit like believing that people living in glasshouses – or greenhouses in this instance – shouldn’t throw stones for fear of what might come flying back in return.

In many respects, you can’t blame a business for actively wanting to play down its green credentials given the gaping reputational traps lurking out there. And the regulators are on the case too when it comes to green washing. For example the Financial Conduct Authority has proposed “an anti-greenwashing rule in the ESG Sourcebook to help ensure that sustainability-related claims made by all authorised firms about their products and services are fair, clear, and not misleading, and consistent with the sustainability profile of the product or service.”

A green tick for your organisation’s sustainability approach?

Be real
So, should you or shouldn’t you promote that sustainability initiative? The communications conundrum reminds me of that nice old phrase, “You can’t do right for doing wrong”. But I think the answer is easy: the best communications always come from a place of authenticity.

Businesses should not be afraid to communicate what it is they stand for and what they’re doing to meet their sustainability objectives just because they fear possible negative publicity provided of course, that the communication is an authentic representation of what the business is trying to achieve from a sustainability perspective.