Victoria Sisson has joined the PR team at FWD as a director. Fresh from just under a year at QBE, during which time she project managed the giant rugby ball which appeared outside Lloyd’s in October, she’s settling in and getting to know FWD’s clients. But to start the ball rolling, we’ve asked her the questions we think you’re just dying to know!
1. How did you get into PR?
By accident! I was running the events programme for Getty Images and gradually became aware that I was working alongside their PR Director a lot of the time. I honed my understanding of what good PR could do, watching her in operation.
2. Why did you choose to work for FWD?
The chance to work use both my insurance and financial services skills working for one business.
3. Give us a brief outline of your career history
When I left university I was convinced that I was destined to become a publishing legend, so I worked as a junior editor for several publishers, including The Reader’s Digest. After realising the I was more interested in people than piles of manuscripts, I moved to the marketing team at Getty Images where, over six years, I learned the power of a picture and much about the talent of photographers.
In 2005 I spent six months on the ski slopes then switched sectors to work for Investec Asset Management, where I was responsible for PR, sponsorship, advertising and internal communications. Most recently I have spent the last year as a PR consultant at QBE, learning about insurance and how that business interacts with the rest of financial services.
4. What do you think the key PR challenges are for the financial services sector?
Explaining the product and keeping journalists engaged with it.
5. What piece of work are you most proud of?
I am equally proud of setting up the UK PR function at Investec Asset Management, which had not previously existed; and of being chosen one of the top 100 PR contacts in the City by journalists in 2008. A PR will never get a better accolade than that.
6. Where do you live?
Essex. But a nice part. Honestly.
7. Which journalist do you most respect?
Ian Cowie at The Telegraph for his ability to make personal finance both comprehensible and relevant.
8. What media do you consume regularly?
I confess to an old-school preference for printed media. I chop and change between The Times, The Telegraph and the Evening Standard (although I have to admit to a guilty flirtation with the gossip pages of the London Lite while it was running.)
9. How far have you got with your Christmas shopping?
Its online shopping all the way for me, so I don’t have to worry about it until December 18th, do I?
10. The X-Factor: TV heaven or TV hell?
Saturday night heaven. Sorry, is that shallow?
11. Is the iPhone over-rated?
It’s a beautiful thing, and I am a lifelong Mac fan. But I have to admit the Blackberry is easier to work with.
12. Have you ever unfriended anyone on Facebook?
Yes, and I am very picky about who I agree to be ‘friends’ with in the first place, having been frightened by what a bank security check at Investec managed to find out about a colleague of mine…
Victoria project managed the launch of QBE's sponsorship of the Guinness Premiership
"Take that, Gordo!" Jacqui Janes lands a direct hit on Gordon Brown's reputation
When British prime minister Gordon Brown recently got on the wrong side of housewife Jacqui Janes – note to self: must check I’ve spelled her name correctly! – he also got on the wrong end of one of the most famous slingshots in history: that belonging to a biblical David.
The problem for our loveable PM was that not only did he spell her deceased soldier son’s name incorrectly in some pretty atrocious handwriting, but he also ended up in a row with a grieving mother who could be described as a fairly average member of the British public. The moment anyone powerful gets into a ruck with someone either powerless or very ordinary, we have what PRs call a David and Goliath scenario, with Gordon cast in the role of the hapless Goliath.
David and Goliath scenarios are a magnet for media attention. They are the result of something small and impotent having a dispute – verbal, physical or legal – with something big and potent: a council, a corporation, a movie star, royalty, the Government, the prime minister…
And the problem for Goliath is that public and media sympathy is usually fairly and squarely on the side of David – even if David has broken the rules and Goliath has stuck by them. You see, these scenarios are not about rules, but emotion – particular David’s highly emotive displays of tears and gnashed teeth. This powerful wave of emotion and public sympathy can be enough to force Goliath to backtrack on an agreed policy or the rules as they are stated or even drop a court case. Remember Greenpeace and Shell Oil clashing over Brent Spar? (Greenpeace=David, Shell= Goliath.) Greenpeace’s argument proved powerful enough to force Shell to abandon its plans to dump the decommissioned rig at sea even though , after the dust had settled, Shell was shown to have been right. David won the PR battle.
The problem for businesses is that they are usually cast in the role of Goliath. In Gordon Brown’s recent scrap with Mrs Janes, he was only able to trump David’s emotional plea by making one of his own, that of the grief he too had experienced when his new-born daughter died. Even David couldn’t beat that emotional ace in the hole. But most businesses don’t have that kind of card to play and very often David – the aggrieved customer, the angry policyholder, the wronged pensioner – will triumph.
Here are a few of the most well-known David and Goliath media stories from recent years:
The McLibel case – mighty McDonalds sued two lone campaigners. McDonalds won, but nobody cared.
Greenpeace and Shell fought over the fate of Brent Spar
The Jaffray Case - in 200o, 120 Lloyd’s Names dragged Lloyd’s of London into court
Tony Blair and the WI – boy, did he pick the wrong organisation to annoy with his poorly judged speech!
OUR RECENT BLOG looked at why B2B brands have been slow to begin using social media. Certianly one reason behind this trend is the ignorance-is-bliss attitude: brands have not wanted to enter the online space for fear of finding negative comments, lacking the resources to deal with it, making bad decisions or losing control of their brand.
The thing to remember is that there are going to be conversations about your brand with or without you, and that by participating or at least monitoring these conversations you can regain some of the control and start influencing what is being said.
The question we get asked time and again in one form or another is: isn’t social media just a load of teenagers messing about online?
A year and a half ago this would have been difficult to argue against but now social media has started to really come into its own for B2B brands.
There are soon to be over 18 million users on Twitter
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
There are more than 4,000 insurance-related posts every day
Blogs
There are over 70 million bloggers generating 1.5 million posts per day
34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
These points highlight why social media is relevant to B2B brands and indicate that they have reached a point where no sane business can afford to ignore them. Burying your head in the sand could mean you are missing out on opportunities to capitalise on gaps in the market, form ideas on consumer opinion and reduce the impact of negative press by proactively responding before a story forms.
Not every aspect of social media will be relevant for every brand, and it’s important to enter into any activity with a clear strategy. But monitoring how social media is used and what is being said about your brand will enable proactive online activity where you can start to build and influence in this online environment.
This presentation offers an introduction to the FWD Reputation Monitoring System:
AS A DIGITAL consultant at FWD I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to find case studies of B2B brands that have successfully integrated online communications into their marketing mix. This is proving to be harder than you may think, especially when looking for a UK brand.
Our first hand experience as FWD Digital has highlighted that very few financial service organisations have ventured into the online space any further than just having a website. We’ve found that the majority of them accept they should be involved in SEO and social media but, because they don’t know where to start, or due to a lack of resources, many of them keep putting activity off. Twitter and Facebook are perceived as being a teenage playground where no real business is done, and LinkedIn is just seen as a networking tool with no function in brand building or lead generation.
Our presentation explaining why social media and SEO is relevant to B2B brands has yet to fail in winning marketing directors and PR teams round. A few of our points are;
the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is the over 35s
the average age on LinkedIn is 41
49% of LinkedIn users are the business decision maker,
Twitter has 4,000 insurance-related posts a day
All of the social media sites can be great brand building, networking and lead generation tools if used correctly as there are so many industry experts, journalists and thought leaders using them everyday. With all of them, though, it is about using them strategically, familiarising yourself with how they work and then trying to fight through the noise to create your own space of relevant information where you can join or start a conversation. This video that is currently 14th in the viral video rankings with over 1 million views, clearly demonstrates that social media cannot be ignored any longer.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s a failure on my part to fully embrace the possibilities of social media, but recently I’ve begun to hit a blank when I think about what to put in my status updates. Not only do I have to maintain a family and a professional career, but now I also have to think about condensing my life into a series of 140 character tweets or updates and sending them out for the world’s consideration. That’s a lot of pressure!
And now there are so many status updates to think about. There’s my LinkedIn profile, my Facebook page, my Twitter account, not to mention my GMail status and Friends Reunited. (What? I hear you say. Are you really still messing about on Friends Reunited? Yes, I’m afraid I am.)
Frankly, I’m in danger of running out of things to say about myself. I’ve prepared plans, created media coaching courses, written strategies, fended off hostile journos…and still the blank status update field looms before me like an intellectual black hole. What can I say to fill the void? What can I write about that will make me look good, yet still seem cool and slightly aloof from this materialistic world?
As a PR consultant, one of my issues is that much of what I do is unbroadcastable. Imagine: just saved Octopus Underwriting from front page scandal involving CEO’s sexual proclivities. Not going to happen is it. Or how about: just told big porkie to journalist to save Billy the Broker from scathing media criticism? That’s a no-no – and before any journos out there ask, no, I don’t tell you big porkies anyway.
So what am I left with? Making the coffee, looking for a new Biro and spilling soup all over my keyboard. Not really the stuff of hard core professional updates.
As if to taunt me, I’m compelled to marvel at the richness and variety of the status updates produced by David Worsfold, Group Editorial Director at Incisive Media. The man is a status update dynamo. One minute he’s sorting out the All Party Group, the next he’s leading a social media course, then reading War and Peace, then linking his Twitter account to his LinkedIn profile, then updating his blog…The list is endless. I cannot keep up with him. How does he do it?
I, in contrast, stare at the blank What-are-you-doing-now? field and my brain crashes like an aging PC.
"Quickly...I must set the time machine's controls for the heart of EastEnders!"
A friend of mine who lives in the US recently told me that his children no longer watch television in what might be described as the traditional manner – the traditional manner being to tune into a channel when a scheduled programme is due to air. Instead, my friend’s teenage offspring either watch programmes on Hulu and YouTube, two video sharing websites, or they record them using Tivo, a hard driver recorder like Sky+ and watch them later. Their other way of consuming television programmes is to watch them on a DVD.
What these children in Florida are doing is time shifting – using technology to consume media content at a time of their own choosing rather than at the time the medium dictates. The ability to time shift has been brought about by new technology: the video recorder in the late 70s, CDs, DVDs, recordable hard drives, and now broadband internet and mobile communications, and innovations like the BBC’s iPlayer and podcasting.
While initially a feature of TV viewing, time shifting has also now begun to affect radio and print media – why wait for the hard copy edition when I can read it online now? It’s also begun to create what could be called content aggregation. In the same way that Google’s news page draws content from a huge range of sources to create Google’s own front page, the web allows me to identify what interests me and create, in effect, my own newspaper or magazine to be browsed at a time of my choosing.
The effect of time shifting and content aggregation is to turn TV channels into content providers and brands. It’s no longer about viewer loyalty to a channel; it’s about loyalty to specific shows which can be consumed in many different ways – most entirely unrelated to the original channel. For example, BBC News has morphed into a trusted news brand rather than the scheduled news output of the BBC. I can watch BBC news – or at least snippets of it – in any range of places and at any time. I trust that news because it’s the BBC, in much the same way as I trust a Mexican ready meal from M&S.
Print news is also being systematically deconstructed by technology. Once the Daily Telegraph was a newspaper to be delivered in the morning and read over breakfast or on the train: now the Telegraph is a provider of hundreds, if not thousands, of packets of news content to be distributed all over the media, backed by the Daily Telegraph brand. One can easily foresee how the content from different B2B trade magazines could be branded and used in a range of other places.
For communicators, these trends mean the loss of reassuringly familiar advertising spaces and the inability to know when a customer will actually receive a message. They mean that reaching a broad based audience is becoming harder, but reaching a niche audience is becoming easier. Control is being eroded in some ways but added in others – for example, if I place a video on YouTube I can tell precisely how many viewings it has had.
What we’re seeing is the democratisation of news and entertainment content on a massive scale. The old control and command style of communication is holed below the waterline and what’s replacing it is something altogether more diffuse and with a longer tail. If I may speak metaphorically, once upon a time communicators believed they could send a message in much the same way as someone shoots a bullet from a rifle at a target; today, it’s more a case of crafting your message like a product in a supermarket and waiting to see if the shoppers bite. It may fly off the shelves, or it may be consigned to the bargain basement bin!
The B2B space is just beginning to feel the impact of these changes, but the effects are real. The key is that it will be the businesses who adapt best to the new style of messaging who reap the rewards of the newly-opened media content supermarket.
We’ve heard a lot about how newspaper circulations have been declining over the last 30 years, but seeing that decline graphically makes it all the more gripping. Below is a newly published graph showing the circulations of a range of US newspapers over the last 20-ish years. It makes for some grim viewing. The tracks are based on data supplied by the US Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The key question it raises is where are these former readers going for their news – if, indeed, they actually consume news at all? Is the newspaper looking increasingly like a relic of the Victorian age whose days are numbered? Or, as Robert Putman pointed out in his seminal study of US society Bowling Alone, were the very high newspaper circulation figures post-World War II an anomaly and the later downward trend a correction?
The graph was created by a US blog calleed The Awl. If you’d like to see it in its original home, click here.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s a failure on my part to fully embrace the possibilities of social media, but recently I’ve begun to hit a blank when I think about what to put in my status updates. Not only do I have to maintain a family and a professional career, but now I also have to think about condensing my life into a series of 140 character tweets or updates and sending them out for the world’s consideration. That’s a lot of pressure!
