The truth about working for an agency

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Have you ever thought about starting a career in marketing and wondered what it’s like to work in an agency? Well, here is a short and amusing video which gives you a flavour for what it’s really like.

Enjoy.

How will the new Consumer Protection Regulations work in practice?

At the end of May I attended one of the WOM UK Espresso Briefings on the new Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. There was an excellent presentation from Stephen Clarke, head of marketing and privacy law at law firm Osborne Clarke, who went through the details of the new law. There was also a rather less illuminating presentation from Marina Palumbo, legal director of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, who simply went through some of the best known case studies that most word of mouth practitioners would already know very well. Both presentations are available on the WOM UK website.

But the big questions about the CPRs remain as to how they will be interpreted by case law and how they will be enforced?

Ian Delaney, editor of New Media Knowledge (NMK), has an interesting post on his personal blog. Reading the post it looks very much like Carphone Warehouse, or one of its agencies, is engaging in unlawful activity by blogging without revealing their identity.

It looks like some Carphone Warehouse ‘fans’ have been commenting about how wonderful it is on Ian’s post about his negative customer service experience. All of the comments have Hotmail addresses, but come from the same IP address.

But here’s the rub, Just because it appears that Carphone Warehouse is guilty doesn’t mean it is. It genuinely could be some quite nutty Carphone Warehouse fan posting all three comments. But now Ian has blogged about it then the damage to the brand is done.

This raises interesting questions for online reputation managers such as the need to monitor for situations such as this and respond to them as appropriate.

It also illustrates the need for guidelines for employees (it is directors and senior managers who will go to prison) – guidelines will help prove a due diligence defence. You do want employees to engage in conversations, but in way that benefits them and you, not one that potentially damages you both.

CBS goes inside the Barack Obama campaign

I’ve just found this fascinating video on the Total Politics site where CBS takes a camera crew inside the Barack Obama campaign to interview some of the backroom staffers.

Most telling for me was chief strategist, David Axelrod, talking about the difficulties of campaigning against friends in Primaries or internal party elections. Axelrod had worked for Hilary Clinton in her first Senate campaign and now found himself working on the other side.

I had exactly that experience when I worked as Director of Communications for Alan Johnson in the Labour deputy leadership elections. Hilary Benn, another of the six candidates, is an old friend of mine and as a Labour Party staff member I worked as his campaign manger in the Leeds Central by-election where he first won his seat.

XP: A PR Guy’s Musings

Girl Power: The top 50 most influential female bloggers

Sisters are doing it for themselves. North X East has just released a list of today’s top 50 most influential female bloggers. (And no unfortunately I didn’t make this year’s list.) In reverse order, the list names the women who are taking the blogosphere by storm in what used to seem like a boys-only playground.

The list gives readers a 30 second rundown of each blogger and why they are the cat’s pyjamas. If you want to know who the blogging world are hailing as the cream of the crop, check it out. And despite what many might think, it’s not all lipstick and handbags…

Wolfstar wants account directors, account managers and account executives

If you fancy yourself as a bit of a public relations and social media star then Wolfstar wants to hear from you. We’re recruiting at every level in order to service recent client wins and staff up for new business in the pipeline.

If you can tick at least some of these boxes we want to know, if you can tick them all then we definitely want to know more:

• Passionate interest in social media, social networking, web 2.0, word of mouth marketing and all things online
• ‘Traditional’ public relations experience – it might be just having graduated from a PR degree course or you might have spent ten years at the coal face of a PR agency or in-house communications post
• Be a great writer – PR might be moving on, but writing is still a core skill and you’ve got to be good
• Be fun – you have to want to enjoy your job, you do it because it’s your passion, your career and your future – not just a wage
• But we do serious stuff for our clients – you’ve got to be committed to helping us to deliver a real return on investment for everything we do
• Geography isn’t a deal breaker – our head office is in Leeds, but if that’s not for you then we still want to talk

If you’re interested then drop me an email. Ideally I’d like a PDF of your CV/resume, but if you don’t have an up to date one then don’t worry as you could just point me to your LinkedIn profile.

Ad Age 150 – is it any good?

As someone who is relatively new to the world of blogging, and who is keen to learn as much as possible about social media, I’ve been wondering how to discover the blogs that make the grade. What makes a blog worthy of attention when there are so many to choose from?

This is where the Power 150 comes in – a global ranking system of the top English language media and marketing blogs. Developed by Todd Andrlik, and now housed by Ad Age,  the Power 150 (which confusingly ranks 707 blogs) uses a multimetric algorithm to determine the best PR, advertising and marketing blogs. Sounds complex and too mathematical for my liking, but basically it considers eight sources, seven of which tally results from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati with the eighth derived from Todd’s personal input – Todd Points. These value “frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content” and the “use of audio, video and graphics.”

Todd Points is the only subjective metric. On one hand this is brilliant to have an actual human’s insight into the blogs, yet I can’t help but feel skeptical that 707 blogs can’t personally be checked regularly by one individual for their updated content. And what if a bias against the blog topics skewers the score – how impartial is the Todd Points scoring system? At least the input from the traffic rating sites has no human agenda but this does not make it completely reflective of blog popularity. Understandably, metric ranking is not perfect yet - this post by Rohit Bhargava highlights some of the issues surrounding this method – but for now, it’s all bloggers have got if they want an indication of their blog reach. 

Putting those technical complexities aside, I think the Power 150 is an excellent starting place to delve into the world of global media and marketing blogging. Alternatively, if you’re looking for UK blogs, Seventy Seven has helpfully compiled the Top UK blogs based on the Power 150. I’m pleased to see I’m in the right place at Wolfstar for my social media experience – Stuart Bruce’s A PR Guy’s Musings currently ranks 12^th and Sam Oakley’s All Things PR 49^th.

What other tools or measurements do you think should be considered when ranking a PR blog?

The newspaper that published spoof news releases

Blogging minister Tom Harris has an amusing story from his days as a student journalist on a local Scottish newspaper. The rival newspaper, in the same town, had even fewer staff and less time to re-write or check news releases submitted to it. So the enterprising hacks at Tom’s paper invented a fake local charity and wrote weekly spoof news releases, which would duly be printed in their rival paper, despite the fact that anyone reading them should have spotted the numerous clues that it was a spoof.

More Introductions… (Sam Oakley this time.)

I must have started blogging about three years ago, I think mainly as a way of passing the time during a particularly slow period at North Yorkshire County Council. The first person to comment on my blog was a guy called Stuart Bruce, and since then we’ve disagreed on almost everything – He thought Yorkshire should have a regional assembly, I thought it shouldn’t (1 -0 to me.) He thought Tom Murray should win in the local elections, I thought it should be Alan Lamb (1 – 1 dammit!) He thought Alan Johnson would make a great Labour deputy leader, I thought my dog would do better (it’s a long story but, bizarrely, 2 -1 to me.)

In fact it’s taken a while for us to find something we agree on, but the fact that I should come and work for him seems to have provided us with the common ground we were looking for, and since then we’ve actually found that we agree on a lot more than we originally thought. Namely, that good PR comes from a genuine desire to converse, that David Cameron would be a better PM than Gordon is (publicly, he still denies this but deep down… well maybe I’ll convince him one day,) and perhaps most importantly, that the web’s second coming will irrevocably shift the goal posts for traditional PR.

In all seriousness, I’m delighted to have joined Wolfstar, they’re a great group of people to be around and the business has genuinely exciting prospects. Right – I’ve got 2000 blog posts read so best get on.  You’ll be hearing more from me soon, so I hope you’ll allow me to get away with this being short.

Don’t blame the PR intern - ever

So many things I could say about this story on Gawker about a US PR firm impersonating a rabbi to post fake blog comments. But let’s keep it quick with three simple rules.

1. Don’t ever blame the intern. They are working on your time, on your clients. It’s up to you to supervise them and make sure it’s done right. If they screw up, then it is really your firm that has screwed up. Someone should have been mentoring them properly. They are there to learn and gain experience, not just do work for you.
2. Don’’t fake it on the internet – ever. Firstly, because it’s wrong. Secondly, because you’re likely to get caught. Thirdly, in the UK at least it is illegal thanks to the new Consumer Protection Regulations – you can go to jail.
3. If you do get it wrong then admit it, apologise, learn and don’t do it again.

Thanks to Stephen Davies for the link.

The Fakeness of Reality

Consider this – just over one hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution brought about technological advances that were considered major advancements. Yet, the technological advances of those times would make even the most restrained modernist today scream for progress.

Reflect to ten years ago – the mainstream internet and mobile phone markets were just beginning to take off. The world was on the cusp of using instantaneous communications to its advantage … well, as instant as your dial-up speed allowed you to be.

Think of now. Instantaneous communication is not expected – it is a given. Can you imagine a world where you can’t just log onto your laptop and hook up to a hotspot to look at your friend’s holiday pictures on one of their many social networking profiles? A world where you have to schedule in a face-to-face visit to ooh and aah over the actual prints? Or how about a world where you have to wait for the postman to deliver your party invite instead of being able to RSVP at the click of a button in your Facebook Events?

The internet has had the fastest penetration rate of any form of communication and has changed social interactions and how we communicate with one another, even more so since the launch of MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. Distance has become irrelevant. The internet’s promise of now has become our accepted reality; yet we once dismissed this as a ‘virtual reality’ as it didn’t take place in the flesh. But, in today’s world, the offline and online bounce back and forth between one another faster than a ball served by one of the Williams’ sisters at Wimbledon.

The great thing about the internet is, yes, you can use it to communicate about your hobbies with complete strangers across the other side of the world, but likewise, you can use it to contact your friend who lives down the street to arrange lunch. Its range and diversity is incredible, but what about the more sinister side of the ease of the internet?

Take Facebook. Facebook is described as “a social utility that enables people to understand the world around them, facilitating the spread of relevant information through social networks, allowing people to share information online the same way they do in the real world through the creation of individual profiles”. Sounds lovely in theory that Facebook is enhancing society offline, but in practice? The reality is somewhat more dubious because of the uncertainty about the value of the information we are presented with – it is often unreliable and unverifiable – even though as a communication tool, Facebook does work.

The trouble I found with my research into Facebook is that people ‘play up’ their profile information, so how can it be a reality? It’s all about self-promotion because you know other people can view your little piece of cyberspace, and worst still, they can, and will, use it to judge you. As one person said to me:

My Facebook profile is simply a virtual portrayal of a person called X, nothing else. I don’t believe an internet profile can express who I am.

It’s all a big act – the razzle dazzle of the digital age – but if your identity constructs your very source of meaning and experience, what does that say about us all when we’re carefully selecting and editing our identity online? What’s the downside to all this wonderful technological advancement?

Take a look at people’s profiles if you’re on Facebook – a good look – notice anything? Typically, there are no admissions of dodgy characteristics lurking around. Take these rather tame examples from the ‘About Me’ section:

I’m X and I’m ace. So there.

You can’t beat me, I’m a rockstar! 

And isn’t that a nice photo? Used Photoshop by any chance? Let’s have a look at some photo albums. Ah, yes. There’s a trip to the Maldives. Notice how no one seems to create albums entitled ‘Sunday trip to B&Q’? The biggest problem with Facebook is that you have to take it all with a pinch of salt, at face value – what you see is what you get – at least online anyway. It’s like the Hollywood of the digital world – all airbrushed images and carefully constructed releases – but real life isn’t like that. We are not advertisements of a version of ourselves, as much as we pretend and would like to be.

I could go on and on about the fakeness of our new reality, but I won’t. Being online is brilliant because effectively you have the whole world (wide web) available at your fingertips; you’re no longer restricted by time or spatial constraints; and it has allowed us all access to an audience – a chance to use our voice, whether we want to blog, share images or music – but on the downside … just like the dot-com bubble burst, what happens when the social networking bubble bursts and we have to face up to the reality of who we really are?

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