Category Archives: Talking to your customers

Top tips for a career in communications (and one thing to never get wrong)

Communicating in a crisis, Content marketing, Social media, Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees, Working with the media, Writing

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.

Have that as your bedrock and you’ll go far.

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…

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.

Five broadcast interview fails

Talking to your customers, Working with the media

No one says doing a broadcast interview is easy. Sweaty and stressful come to mind. But there are some obvious fails that I hear regularly that can be easily eradicated. And in the run up to the general election we’re not short of lots of material.

Of course, the obvious one is making no attempt to answer or even acknowledge the question – the cardinal sin beloved of politicians. There are lots of techniques to handle the questions you don’t want, but none of those techniques involve simply ignoring it.

But for this post, I’m looking at some of the more irritating smaller habits I’ve seen creep in to interviews that, in my book anyway, should have no place in a good interview and are very easy to banish before they hit the airwaves.

These are my top five broadcast fails:

  1. Thanking the interviewer for inviting you onto their programme
    Why thank them? You’re doing the programme a favour by sharing your expertise (and you’re not being paid for it either) so don’t adopt a feeling that you owe them something.
  2. Asking the interviewer ‘how are you?’
    It’s a waste of time and sounds insincere. Most of the time the interviewer won’t respond anyway because they’re too busy working on their opening question.
  3. Using the interviewer’s name
    It always sounds too pally – “Well, Jonathan, it’s like this…” – and frankly insincere. The even bigger offenders are the ones who keep using the interviewer’s name throughout the interview.
  4. “That’s a great question”
    Again, sounds insincere and is almost invariably untrue. In fact, this is a bad habit in any Q&A format where some people preface every reply by praising the question.
  5. Starting a reply with “So”
    It just sounds so