If you are lucky enough to be en vogue, the one thing you can guarantee is that you’ll soon be out of fashion – and that’s the whole point, really: fashion is a fad. If something is highly fashionable today – be it clothing, a new way of communicating, a website, an individual, or a market research technique – it will have a short shelf life in today’s disposable and fickle society. This, I think, is a real shame.
Usually things are fashionable because they are good. One can assume that yesterday’s icons don’t stop being good people; we just get bored with them. Advances in all discourses should be embraced, but ultimately it is the suitability or quality of something which should determine its usage, not the fact that it is new and exciting.
I guess working in research we very rarely get labelled new and exciting. Frankly, I don’t think we will ever be fashionable, but that means we will also never fall out of fashion. Businesses will always need to understand why their new sales campaign is not working; why retention rates are dropping; how satisfied their customers are and how fairly they treat their customers (Ok, well you might not need to know the last one!) Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for new technological advances or ways to look at things and I’m happy to adopt them – but only if they offer tangible benefits.
I’m not having a go at fashion here but at a societyin which something has to be new, unique or underground to be fashionable. Throughout the 64 year reign of Queen Victoria taste varied but fundamentally the fashion for bright colours and corseted waists remained. Something or someone which is good or talented deserves to be highly celebrated and therefore fashionable. This phenomenon of fashions changing so rapidly is stifling. New Music can only be fashionable (and therefore very successful) for one or two albums before people want the next big thing. MySpace was superseded by Facebook; blogs are being usurped by Twitter; Katy Perry sells more records than Kate Bush.
The positive to come out of this is that quality does thankfully shine through in the long run. Katy Perry’s last CD may have sold more than Kate Bush’s but history will reveal who sold more music in total and who is remembered as the greatest talent. Classic literature will continue to be taught in schools but will the Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter?
So what is the point of this rant? I guess I’m just wishing that society would be seduced less by the shiny and new and look at all great things present and past and allow them to be fashionable. That way fashion would be a benchmark of quality, not a fad.
It came in an email at the close of yesterday afternoon: the dreadful news we’d been waiting for. No, not Jade Goody’s passing, but a chilly wind of change blowing through the hallowed halls of traditional public relations. And this is what the email said:
The Guardian’s Technology Editor, Charles Arthur, has indicated that he prefers to receive pitches from PR professionals via Twitter.
That’s right, no more ringing up Charles and pitching a story over the phone. No more lengthy emails. From now on we’re limited to communicating with him in just 140 characters using our mobiles or twitter.com.
For anyone not au fait with Twitter, it’s essentially a cross between micro-blogging and Facebook. But what’s marking it out as an issue for comms professionals is the growing number of journalists asking to receive pitches from PRs via it. Granted, most of these journalists are (a) American and (b) technology writers, but the trend is spreading. And it’s important to note that UK trade journalists and early adopters of new technology have a key demographic in common: they’re both in their 20s and 30s.
So what does this mean for PR practitioners? Should we abandon our press releases and our lengthy phone conversations in favour of condensing everything to a 140-character ‘tweet’ sent online? Absolutely not. You try pitching a reasonably complex business story in just 20 words.
Do journalists genuinely think Twitter is a better medium for a PR pitch or does it simply offer them a way of filtering out extraneous PR noise? Or is it more of a gesture – a way for a technology specialist like Charles Arthur, who is a highly intelligent and literate writer, to demonstrate that he ‘walks the talk’, technologically speaking.
Right now the jury is still out. B2B trade media are aware of the new technology and are beginning to experiment with it. So PRs, too, need to get to grips with Twitter and make a realistic assessment of its potential as a communication channel. And you can’t understand Twitter unless you use it, which is why we’re experimenting with it at FWD.
Today, for example, a picture appeared in many national tabloids of actress Demi Moore’s posterior as photographed by her husband Ashton Kutchner and uploaded to Twitter. At least that’s what the story said. Or are we actually looking at an example of a clever PR using Twitter to raise Ms Moore’s flagging profile with an allegedly candid shot?
Find me on Twitter and let me know what you think.
Genuine Twitter picture or just clever PR? Only Ashton and Demi know.
Journalists have worked themselves into a self-righteous lather this week following The Sunday Times’ shocking revelation that the Government’s City Minister, Lord Paul Myners, set up an off-shore insurance business. Cries of ‘resign’ and ‘hypocrite’ have resounded through the media. Lord Myners is, after all, leading a taskforce to stamp out corporate tax avoidance.
But hang on a sec’. Isn’t the fact that Lord Myners was formerly chairman of Bermuda-based Aspen one of the worst kept secrets in history? In fact, it isn’t a secret at all; it’s public knowledge. Most people in the London insurance market, including its journalists, are only too familar with Lord Myners’s role at Aspen until he stepped down in 2007. So why did The Sunday Times treat the story of Lord Myners and Aspen as though some dark secert had been revealed through months of in-depth investigative journalism?
The answer is that, in reality, there are an awful lot of things that national journalists don’t know but that practitioners in any given trade or industry take for granted. Most business journalists working on the nationals will be au fait with Myners’s past; the problem is that their colleagues on the political desks are not – and they are the ones pushing this story. Were one to ask a denizen of Leadenhall Street whether the Myners-Aspen story merited coverage, their answer would probably be a bemused ‘no’.
While there is some merit to the charge of hypocrisy, it is questionable whether the story deserves the prominence given to it by The Sunday Times’ exposé-style front page and accompanying leader column. What is clear is that any attempt by the media to give the impression that Myners tried to conceal his connection to Aspen is utterly unwarranted. The information was in the public domain and about as widely available as it’s possible to be. How much investigative journalism is required to pump ‘Myners Aspen’ into Google?
Surely if anything should give rise to concern, it’s the ability of the national media to feign ignorance of a Government minister’s CV, and then present information from it as a major revelation – even though its business reporters were only too familiar with the facts. To prove the point, click here for a profile of Myners in the Times from 2005 which names him as chairman of Aspen Re.
The future of traditional newspaper and magazine publishing has been the centre of much discussion in the PR world recently. The public relatons industry, which has grown up with a huge range of hard copy papers and periodicals into which to distribute its press releases, is adapting to the newer world of online media and social networking. But what’s been of concern is the question: will online news kill off old-style newspapers?
The case for the dominance of online news is easy to make: it’s free, its instantly accessible, it can be updated at any time and it incorporates video. Recently I’ve heard of newly graduated journalists who’ve barely even read a hard copy edition.
But online is not paper – and paper still has many fans. A paper can be carried onto the train and unfurled; it’s easy on the eye, and it has space for in-depth articles that websites shy away from for fear of scaring off all but the most determined reader. So even though hard copy circulations have declined, papers has survived…until now.
Until Amazon unveiled its Kindle and other technology firms followed suit. The Kindle, and devices like it, are reading screens – hand-held sheets of plastic onto which print and images can be displayed. But more significantly for the newspapers, devices like the Kindle can wirelessly download new editions or new books.
It’s not hard to imagine the next generation of these devices will also be able to handle video too. In that case, I can foresee commuters journeying to work on trains with their reading devices in their hands, downloading the latest edition of their chosen newspaper. Why consume millions of tonnes of paper and printing ink each year when the publication can be set wirelessly to each reader on a device that shares some of the characteristics of the old-style editions?
Online news may have dealt the first blow to newspapers; Google’s advertising and the recession the next; but devices like the Kindle may just be the end of the hard copy newspaper as we know it.
I want to let you into one of the most closely-guarded secrets in the creative industry: Britain’s designers run on tea. It’s true: our brains don’t function properly without the correct dose of PG Tips administered at regular intervals. But this tea addiction unfortunately makes us highly dependent on the kindness and tea-making skills of our office colleagues – and that’s where the problems start.
For a nation of tea-drinkers, most of us make a pretty poor cuppa. In nearly 20 years in design I’ve come across only a handful of reliable tea-makers. So, for those wishing to keep their designers happy, here are my top six office tea-making crimes:
The milk-first disaster: too much milk in the cup and it’s a milky mess. Bide your time; put the milk in last and judge the colour to perfection.
The dirty mug: some people have an unerring ability to deliver a cup of tea that looks like it has been stirred with an old shoe. If in doubt, clean the cup first.
The soapy mug: more pleasing on the eye than a dirty tea but that nauseating aftertaste of dishwasher fluid is ruinous.
Two-bag madness: possibly the most commonly committed crime. People mistakenly equate a colleague’s request for ‘strong’ tea with putting two bags in the mug and stirring till the tea has the consistency of gravy.
The shirkers: those team members who are happy to accept others’ tea, but never make one themselves. Usually a privilege exercised by virtue of rank, so I’d better not continue on this one.
The work-experience tea: over the years, I’ve come across two work experience teenagers who admitted they had never actually made a cup of tea and several who were totally phased by the experience of mashing for the first time.
Finally, an amusing visual accompaniment to this post comes courtesy of the unlikely figure of Hollywood superstar Sylvester Stallone. Bizarrely, a guest at my beloved Everton last season, Sly was caught on camera sampling Everton’s brown stuff. He may have licked Mr T in Rocky 3, but he looks to have met his match with Everton’s ‘T’.
Tech website mashable.com has just published a fascinating article examining the ways in which traditional newspapers in the US are tapping into social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc) to, well…save themselves.
Newspaper circulations across the board have been dropping for years – a source of much concern to their publishers. As a new generation of web-savvy Generation X-ers is swapping online news and content for hard-copy papers and magazines, the old media have been hunting frantically for new business models that will allow them to tap into the emerging culture.
You can read here how they’re trying to do it in the US.
At FWD, we spend a good deal of time reading financial services publications and one of the things we particularly enjoy is looking at journalists’ byline photos. These are the small pictures which appear next to their names at the top of stories, or which are used as the masthead of columns. I’ve decided to start a new award this week for the best byline picture and to begin, I’m going to nominate this lovely example taken from Insurance Day. It’s the masthead for the marvellous James Brewer’s new column.
Want to know what the future of personal banking looks like? Here’s Microsoft’s vision – and very nice it seems too. Lots of touch sensitive devices you don’t want to spill your coffee on. And the soul-destroyingly long queue for the bank tellers seems to have been done away with, so that’s one giant leap for mankind!
There is a secondary effect of the credit crunch acting on the public consciousness which is arguably having a more profound effect than the primary impact. The perceived depth and scale of the global downturn has, almost over night, led to a universal sense that thrift not indulgent excess is the order of the day.
Such cost consciousness en mass in the UK has led to a dramatic waning of the consumer’s appetite to spend, spend, spend. Like the adage about the stock market – that it is controlled by fear and greed – so fearful uncertainty has been the catalyst for a change in mindset from pursuing the dream to one of frugal prudence.
So when it is reported that the UK car industry, retail, catering or leisure industries have been affected by the credit crunch, what is more likely to be damaging these industries is this sense of instability and uncertainty which has killed the public’s appetite to consume non-essential products and services. The perception is therefore reality because this is causing the same behaviour in those completely unaffected as those directly affected.
A sad day today in the world of insurance journalism. The economic crisis has claimed its first insurance title: Business Insurance Europe.
Launched three years ago by Crain Communications, BIE was the sister title of the US-based Business Insurance. It’s arrival was heralded with a glitzy party at the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous and backed up by committments from Crain to run the title for years – at a loss if neccessary – to establish its new baby.
But now the party is over. The board of Crain announced yesterday they were closing down the title immediately citing the ‘worldwide economic crisis’ as the reason for the magazine’s demise.
Our best wishes go to all on the magazine’s team here in London: Stuart, Sarah and Adrian in editorial, the subs and the sales team.
It came in an email at the close of yesterday afternoon: the dreadful news we’d been waiting for. No, not Jade Goody’s passing, but a chilly wind of change blowing through the hallowed halls of traditional public relations. And this is what the email said:
The future of traditional newspaper and magazine publishing has been the centre of much discussion in the PR world recently. The public relatons industry, which has grown up with a huge range of hard copy papers and periodicals into which to distribute its press releases, is adapting to the newer world of online media and social networking. But what’s been of concern is the question: will online news kill off old-style newspapers?
I want to let you into one of the most closely-guarded secrets in the creative industry: Britain’s designers run on tea. It’s true: our brains don’t function properly without the correct dose of PG Tips administered at regular intervals. But this tea addiction unfortunately makes us highly dependent on the kindness and tea-making skills of our office colleagues – and that’s where the problems start.
