All posts by Sebastian

Quote, unquote

Working with the media

The New York Times has apparently banned the practice of allowing its sources to check quotes before they’re published http://bit.ly/Q08kvR. Supporters of a free and balanced press will be delighted and, perhaps surprisingly, there’ll be quite a few PR people happy to see the back of this invidious trend.

In media training, reminding the interviewee not to request quote approval is always high on the list of ‘things not to do’. Not only can it offend the interviewing journalist but it devalues the whole process if the interviewee thinks he/she will have a second go at ‘tidying’ up their comments (it also makes for a tedious toing and froing for the PR and the journalist).

Piers Morgan recounts a cautionary tale in his diaries of some quotes arriving back from approval following an interview with erstwhile chatshow celebs Richard and Judy. So annoyed was he that he printed the original quotes together with the amends requested by the couple – making them look ridiculous.

The lesson of course is to prepare properly, get some media training and trust yourself to say it right first time.

What’s your company doing to celebrate the Olympics?

Talking to your employees

If your preparations for the Olympics have been little more than telling your employees that they need to plan their travel time more carefully to avoid being late for work, read on…

Don’t fight it
Sometimes it’s better just to go with the flow than swim upstream. Companies currently struggling against the wave of Olympic mania gradually sweeping the country might do better to think about how they can actually strike gold for employee goodwill and engagement.

So here’s five tips to celebrate the arrival of the five rings:

  • Get some big TV screens in the office – or even small ones
  • How about a daily Olympic themed raffle?
  • Every time Britain strikes Gold; every employee gets a bonus – £5? £10? Or maybe 15 minutes off the work day…
  • Early drinks on Friday to bask in the Olympic glow
  • Relax and enjoy.

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?