Yes, it’s finally happened. I’m now on YouTube. I was recently part of an amazing evening at Ignite Bristol – an import from the Ignite concept that first happened in Seattle in 2006. As anyone who has been through any Net.Mentor training will know, I hate PowerPoint with a passion. However, the concept of a timed 5 minutes with 20 slides in quite a buzz and some of the presentations on the first evening were stimulating, moving, funny or just completely off the wall. In the end, I went for the serious topic of handling crisis, but I hope it was light enough to be all of the above. You be the judge…
Posts Tagged ‘communication’
Crisis and the power of social media
Thursday, March 25th, 2010There have been plenty of examples recently of the power of social media and the internet in creating and overcoming corporate crisis. Most recently the Greenpeace and Nestle spat demonstrated more than just the development of the original issue itself (the environmental effects of the palm oil manufacture). The handling of the initial feedback by Nestle showed that if you are going to get involved in the debate, you need to keep your cool and stick to the issues – as highlighted by this excellent presentation from Scott Douglas.
The result of nestle’s fan page moderator getting personal went way beyond the original issue and became the story in itself. It reminds me of the classic West Wing episode where Josh Lyman decides to comment personally on the Lemonlyman website, only to wonder why he suddenly turns from hero to villain and CJ threatens personal injury with a motherboard.
The lesson? Stick to the issues; stay focused on the facts and look for the collaborative option. The best communication is two-way and changes behaviours on BOTH sides. This is a prime example of how to get the balance completely wrong and pay the corporate consequences. Ironically, KitKat was originally a Rowntree brand – the organisation that was set up by staunch Quaker, Joseph Rowntree. Interestingly, they were equally censorial back in the early ’80s when I was a Student at York University – York being Rowntrees’ home. Whiel News Editor of the student mag, Nouse, we decided to run a fairly derogatory front page about Kitkat and Rowntrees latest union activities in South Africa. Strangely, Rowntree asked us in less than polite terms to pull the publication. Clearly we were being more than provocative and now, with corporate communication experience under my belt I can appreciate the issues of brand and reputation management. However, a collaborative approach would have had a far better impact on student and company behaviour than heavy-handed corporate ‘big brother’. Joseph Rowntree must be rotating gently in his grave.
Trust and social media – Mashable stylee
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010I’ve been following Mashable for a while now, having discovered them via Twitter. As with the likes of Guy Kawasaki, the Mashables keep unearthing a wealth of stuff that makes me wonder how they have time to make any money…except by continuing to unearth a wealth…..
Anyway, like so many articles and items that I’m lead to by the Twitterati, I occasionally have time for the briefest glance before I realise that I need to be focusing on what pays the bills chez Net.Mentor. However, this particular Mashable article on trust and social media really caught my attention. It is fascinating from a psychology perspective as well as from so many other angles relating to presentation skills, response times in the social media arena, trust and brand, etc, etc. In particular, the Domino’s Pizza believability graph – although whether the graph can be believed is questionable in itself – and the relationship between body language, content and belief in the message.
Having just completed handout notes regarding feedback for a communication workshop I’m running next week, it is good to know that my recommendation of responding quickly to feedback, even if it’s just to say ‘thanks’ in the first instance, appears to be supported by a top psychologist.
Professionals still have the journalistic edge
Thursday, December 10th, 2009The role of the citizen journalist is clearly here to stay and, with the speed of delivery and monitoring of breaking/trending topics through the social media, this role is only ever likely to be strengthened.
However, this doesn’t mean the end of the line for the professional journalist – a point well made in Jeremy Porter’s recent post. Having trained and worked as a broadcast journalist, I know that the ability to point a mobile phone in the direction of a major event happening in front of you doesn’t automatically make you a journalist. It creates plenty of informed observers and that is only to be welcomed if, as in the case of Ian Tomlinson’s death during the G20 clashes in London, observational reality can become a conduit to justice.
Major incidents, such as the Paddington rail crash, have plenty of eye witnesses who were only too keen to share their experiences on what was happening – although social media was in its infancy in 1999 when that particular event happened. In that case there were BBC journalists travelling on the trains involved and it was they who called on to provide objective, descriptive and relatively balanced reports at the scene within minutes of the event and in subsequent news bulletins.
Although professional journalists may not always be immediately on hand for every incident, it is a safe assumption that during major, newsworthy events (the Hudson river plane crash being another example), the news-hungry public may turn to citizen journalism social media for their instant gratification, but will still rely on the professionals to undertake the gathering, filtering, editing, summarising and opinion-forming to deliver the ‘bigger picture’.
Long may it continue!
BBC Drop the ball over Griffin
Friday, October 30th, 2009The screaming headlines from the Sun to the Guardian. The hours of broadcast from Today to CNN. And the final revelation that…oh my, Nick Griffin is a fascist.
To be honest, I didn’t want to add to the millions of words already devoted to this subject and fuel the flames of his publicity. But having re-watched the BBC Question Time programme and the pre and post media frenzy, I have been left feeling numbed by the ineptitude of the UK’s public service broadcaster.
Griffin is an MEP, he is elected, we live in a democracy, the BBC were right to broadcast.
Sadly, it went downhill from there. The carefully selected panel was no surprise (although Jack Straw was surprisingly poor), neither was the make-up of the audience. What did surprise me was just how dramatically Dimbleby and the producers prostituted themselves in their desire to ensure we knew just how ignorant and bigotted Griffin is…for more than 30 minutes…without cessation. It took possibly 3 minutes for the point to be made (perhaps 5 for the less intelligent members of the audience). Job done.
What was completely missed was the fact that Griffin, and his even more disturbing side-kick Andrew Brons, are in a position to influence European legislation – the implications of which reach far beyond just British shores. If Dimbleby hadn’t allowed the red mist and the ill advice of the BBC’s editors and senior PRs to descend, he would have realised that had he conducted the remaining 55 minutes of the programme in the usual format, Griffin and, more importantly, his party would have been exposed as the political danger they truly represent.
The Nazi thugs will always vote for Griffin and his ilk because of their misguided values. It’s the so-called ‘protest voters’, who apparently have no-one else to vote for, that needed to be shown the true implications of what they have done by witnessing not the moral bankruptcy of the individual, but the political immorality and ineptitude of the party for which he was acting as a representative on the night.
There is no doubt in my mind that had he become imbroiled in the standard of political debate usually engendered by a ‘normal’ Question Time, he would have buried, beyond any hope of redemption, both his party and himself at every turn. Instead, the coffin lid was left ajar and, dracula-like, he squeezed out and into a world of PR opportunities for himself and his party.
The panel and audience may have felt a sense of smug satisfaction at the end of the evening, but the fact that fascist extremists have been allowed to walk away with even the slightest glimmer of opportunity means the BBC has very little to be satisfied about. I thought Dimbleby was the best man for the job. He blew it!
Moving content.
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009Those people who know me will not be surprised with my banging on about the importance of good content. What may surprise them is that sometimes content can move me to tears.
Yes – music, lyrics, films, a paragraph in a book…if it’s well enough written or executed, words – or a combination of words, sound an image – can really get to me. Sometimes it just creeps up on you and catches you by surprise, or just sums up professonal and personal life in a way that presses all the right/wrong buttons. Like it did this morning when I was surfing around some of my regular blogs and Writing Boots came up with this one. It’s not a new concept, but the execution is just beautifully done.
Content matters and, yes, it can even make the most cynical copywriters cry!
Push on!
Friday, May 29th, 2009Push/pull communication is a subject of regular debate amongst my CIPR students, but a blog post by Jeremy Porter in Journalistic about this subject and ‘interruption marketing’ set me thinking about a current strategy I’m using with a client which combines both push and pull.
Porter’s premise is that push and pull, when used strategically, can both work, although pull is preferable. But, most of all, that content is king – a point I made in a recent post and have been banging on about in our business for some time.
But Porter also raises the issue of interruptions and how this form of push can be offputting unless used strategically. My recent experience would also suggest that a combination of the two can work powerfully.
Experts in their field of online learning, Akamas have recently started to address social media and web 2.0 for their own marketing communication. Helped by the fact that they have in-house, recognised experts who are also excellent writers, blogging is likely to become a positive aspect of their communication.
However, as we all know, there are millions of individuals and organisations already out there and cutting through the noise to get noticed can’t just rely on Pull. A strategy of writing for their own blog or business articles, but then notifying key online media editors seems to be paying off. The push approach is interruptive, but only as far as saying – “we’ve written something that’s interesting and relevant to you, it’s posted on our blog or an in-house article, but please feel free to use it as an article or blog post yourself.”
The response, on the whole, has been very positive so far. Let’s face it, an editor isn’t going to turn away relevant, well written content that may in itself create more traffic for a site that already has pulling power.
Eventually, any well written, relevant and engaging blogs should have enough of their own pull to make it onto the RSS readers or blogrolls of their key target audiences. But in the meantime, the power of push and pull in two-way communication clearly has its benefits.
Let down by the Tweeple
Monday, April 27th, 2009Last week I delivered a Talking Heads workshop on webPR to a group of delegates eager to learn the latest techniques of digital media and PR in the 21st Century. It’s taken me a week to post this blog, because I needed time to reflect (and because Saturdays aren’t an ideal time to garner responses).
Heather Yaxley, better know to the blogosphere for her Greenbanana blog, was my co-tutor and we spent a stimulating day discussing SEO, PR techniques and content writing for websites, social media, and creating a blog and podcast to show how easy it all is.
Naturally, throughout the day, we spent time talking about Twitter and its benefits of quick response, fast distribution, trending, citizen journalism, etc. So what better way, I thought, to demonstrate this than to put a question out there and seek a response from the Tweeple (the people who Twitter). “Anyone got any good examples of webPR best practice?” I asked in wide-eyed anticipation. I just wanted a couple of external ideas to inform our workshop debate from some other experts.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was where Twitter and its exponents showed its true colours. I #tagged, I @tagged and I sent directs. Heather re-tweeted. The response was fantastic.
NOTHING! Not a sausage, nada, zip, f*(&% all. Now, I’m not arrogant or self opinionated enough to think that Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross or Richard Branson would sit bolt upright, drop whatever celebrity-dripping activity they were doing at the time and yell “Peter Brill’s asked me a question, I really MUST respond!” I also know that I’m a very long way from hitting my million followers. But some of the people I do follow are self-proclaimed social media ‘gurus’ who spend their entire waking hours, apparently, Tweeting their latest discoveries and words of wisdom to their glorious world of followers.
So where were you when you had the opportunity to demonstrate to sceptical PR practioners who are earning a living from the daily grind of messages delivery that social media really works? What happened that you missed an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise in a truly didactic context?
Don’t bother trying to tell me that you happened to be out at that moment, because if you haven’t already worked this out for yourselves, I could see you Twittering plenty at the same time – one of you even twittered a link about how Twitter is all about listening!!
I enjoy Twitter, it’s quick, it’s mobile and it’s easy to use. But I’m also of the opinion that everyone is on ‘transmit’ and no-one has yet worked out what Twitter is really trying to achieve. Everybody is so busy demonstrating how busy they are being a busy and important part of everybody else’s business, that they’ve completely lost sight of the basic principles of dialogue.
So when an opportunity presents itself to demonstrate just how positive a role Twitter can play in communications dialogue and education, it’s biggest exponents weren’t receiving. They were too busy telling us how they’d just got out of bed, farted and brushed their teeth.
I’m sure there will be plenty of comments (one would be nice) about how I could have done this, that or the other to have changed the outcome. Too late! Apparently, the thing about Twitter is it’s incredible immediacy. The moment is past.
So our delegates left with their scepticism about Twitter intact, and I’m just carrying on transmitting tweets along with the rest of the tworld in the hope that someone, somewhere might actually explain why they hell we’re all bothering.
PR in a recession podcast
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009The Net.Mentor Podcast
Simply click the play button to hear the podcastThe Net.Mentor Podcast
Simply click the play button to hear the podcastToday was spent training a group of PR professionals on behalf of Talking Heads in the South West.
The theme is “PR in a Recession” and as the delegates learnt the art of podcasting, we also gained some insight on how the consultancy, commercial and public sectors are viewing public relations in times of credit crunch. The delegates also created blogs to match!
Everybody’s doing it…should I be scared?
Saturday, April 18th, 2009It seems like everybody’s ‘doing’ the social media and content writing thing in one way or another. Should I feel threatened or scared? Or should I just feel happy to be part of the whole process and comfortable (smug) about the fact that I’m far enough along the curve to have clients who are willing to pay me to help them write web content or advise them on social media activity?
In fact, it’s a bit of both. Chris Brogan is right when he says it’s not easy. Tom Barnes gives me a hard time for not writing enough – and I’m still trying to work out how he has time to add so many articles to his website and still manage his clients. And all of this angst is prompted by visting Brendan Cooper’s blog to find that he’s now officially writing content for a living.
But the very fact that I feel comfortable in introducing possible ‘competitors’, is a kind of celebration of the fact that the whole content element of communication is really alive and kicking – perhaps more than ever. Yes, the developing communication strategies is challenging and great fun, but my writing (whether it’s blogs or media releases) and multimedia production work takes me back to the roots of what I do best – after all I started my working life as a broadcast journalist.
So, in answer to my own question: is it scary? Yes, knowing that there are so many of us generating so much content as part of the ‘conversation’. Is it threatening? Possibly – I’ll soon find out if the three people I mentioned above are suddenly swamped with business generated by this blog post! But in reality, it’s fulfilling to be able to use my creative talents on a regular basis – enough to make a living from something I really enjoy.
Smug? Maybe, but sometimes one needs to recognise that years of graft have led to a modicum of expertise.