Supernanny

According to Supernanny “Positive attention and praise are the most effective rewards for good behaviour”. A very popular and highly praised section on the parenting guru’s website suggests that parents can support the development of their children by creating a reward chart where you can “award stickers for good behaviour” and “when your child misbehaves, remove a sticker from the chart”. It seems like a very sensible and logical suggestion, to me, in order to educate and care for your children. Have any of you parents out there tried this and if so how successful was it?

Many, many years ago when I was a child, I knew if I was good I would get a reward and if I misbehaved (what me!) I would lose something that I wanted. Were you the same? If so, why as adults do we so often seem to ignore this mainstay of our upbringing when we communicate with people today? Courtesy seems to be a rare trait in today’s communications. I got an email last week: the person was asking me for something but their tone and manner was just so aggressive and demanding it did not encourage me to carry out the task. Don’t get me wrong, I did the task but it did not go to the top of my to-do list and they had to wait for what they wanted. I don’t think I am on my own when I say that I am much more willing to help someone who communicates with me positively rather than negatively.

I know that our appetite for quick and to the point information is greater now than ever before and such technological advances such as e-mail, text and Twitter have help meet our needs for faster and more up-to-date communication but have such new communication methods made us ruder? I personally don’t think so. I think some people just never learnt that childhood lesson, that being nice gets you further. Surely the main point of communication is to create action so why can’t some people realise that they would get more if only they were a bit nicer about asking for it. Gordon Ramsey – are you listening? Communications have moved forward but let’s not use this as an excuse to be rude.

Have you had any recent experiences of poor communication which has had a really negative affect on you? How does poor communication affect you, what do you do when someone is rude to you? Does it even bother you?

So tell me now! Sorry, what I should have said was, I would be really interested to know you experience and thoughts so please do share via the comment link below.

For Supernanny’s reward charts please visit http://www.supernanny.co.uk/Reward-Charts.aspx

Could try harder: Mike's appraisal left something to be desired

Written by Mike Harmer

So what can we say about today’s electoral shenanigans? Well, putting my more partisan instincts to one side for a moment, if there is a winner from yesterday’s vote, it’s public engagement with the political system. Turnout figures have risen after declining below the psychologically important 60% threshold at the last election; the media is full of reports of queues outside polling stations, and politics is once again a hot conversation topic in office, the pub and across the kitchen table.

Interest is going to remain high over the next few days – probably weeks – as the parties horse trade behind closed doors and we wait to see what deals and unholy alliances will emerge from the bleary confusion of the early hours.

My personal favourite time of any general election is the first hour or so after the polls have closed when TV pundits and politicians have an abyss of empty air time to fill with nothing but exit polls and carefully-worded speculation. If anything else struck me from those first moments of last night’s broadcasts, it was the indecent haste with which Labour supremos started talking about electoral reform only moments after the polls had closed. Talk about  rapid repositioning! I virtually performed a comedy double in my living room take when Lord Mandelson abruptly declared that there was something  deeply flawed about the UK’s electoral system.

What this current heightened level of public awareness means is that our politicians are firmly in the spotlight and their actions today and over the weekend are going to be scrutinized fiercely. Those who behave unethically or who ride rough shod over their electoral promises will, I have no doubt, be punished by the electorate at the next opportunity. Reputations will be made and broken in this media crucible, and those who fail to behave in what the electorate see as the national interest will pay a price.

Personally, I’m with Mervyn, my paperman. He was late this morning – uncharacteristically so. “Sorry about that,” he said, handing over my copy of The Times. “It’s all a muddle, isn’t it? Be another election within 12 months.”

Wise words, Mervyn. Wise words, indeed.

Written by Adrian Beeby

"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.

Written by Adrian Beeby

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.

The downward trend of US newspaper circulations

Written by Adrian Beeby

Gor blimey, Mary Poppins! Dancing Bugsy Malones!

When considering some of the great things England has given the world, Cockney rhyming slang must be right up here with fish ‘n’ chips and Monty Python. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, Cockney rhyming slang is form of slang in which a word is replaced with another that rhymes with it e.g. stairs = apples and pears. The Cockney bit refers to those lovely folk from East London born within the sound of Bow Bells.

Any old iron er…how, because Cockney rhyming slang is a living language that continues to evolve, we thought we’d bring it bang up to date and apply it to social media and the online world. So the FWD team put their heads together and have come up with the following. Strike a light!

• iPod = Brickie’s hod  e.g. “Oi, can you turn your brickie down!”
• iPhone = Bugsy Malone e.g. “I ‘ad me Bugsy nicked on the tube.”
• Facebook = Kelly Brook e.g. “Who were you chattin’ to on Kelly Brook last night, then?”
• MySpace = death and disgrace e.g. “Everyone else has left death and disgrace for Kelly Brook.”
• Spam = strawberry jam e.g. “Gor blimey, me inbox is full of strawberry jam this mornin’!”
• YouTube = Rubik’s Cube e.g. “I’m gonna upload that video of you falling over to Rubik’s Cube.”
• Google = apple strudel e.g. “Why don’t cha just strudel it?”
• Twitter = spam fritter e.g. “Naw, I deleted me spam fritter account last week.”
• Tweet = sweaty feet e.g. “I going to send a sweaty about that.”

To be frank, we struggled with Linkedin and email so any suggestions for those or indeed any other cockney-techno  speak most welcome. Gertcha! Now I need to get with with writing me Phileas Fogg!

Written by Adrian Beeby

I love this piece from the Daily Mail. Guerrilla grammar is a force to be reckoned with! As standards of punctuation and spelling continue to fall, it’s nice to see someone taking the laws of good grammar into their own hands. For anyone as pedantic as me, I heartily recommend Lynne Truss’s book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the bible of apostrophe usage. (And yes, according to the book Truss’s is correct.)

While technology like SMS text messaging and instant chat seem to be doing their damnedest to consign basic spelling and punctuation to the dustbin, it’s important to remember that the whole point of grammar is to aid comprehension. It’s not just rules for rules’ sake; it’s about ease of understanding.

Computer skills are vital, but if you don’t know the difference between ’specific’ and ‘Pacific’, as was the case with one student in our office recently, you’re going to look a bit of a plonker. But it’s not just young people I’m throwing the chalk at: you’d be amazed by the number of Oxbridge grads who don’t know that punctuation relating to quoted speech comes inside the quotation marks, not outside.

If you want the ultimate proof of the power of punctuaton, just remember there was a time not so very long ago when a single apostrophe was all that distinguished a mighty global insurance market from a major clearing bank: Lloyd’s and Lloyds. (You’d also be amazed at the number of people in the insurance market who still get that apostrophe wrong. When I worked at Lloyd’s, two easy ways to fail a job interview were to call it a company and to put the apostrophe in the wrong place.)

Good on yer, Stefan!  Read all about his punctuation heroics here.

Written by Adrian Beeby

One executive driven to extreme measures to get a phone signal on holiday

Just back from a week in South Devon – and yes, not bad, thanks. Rain stopped play for only one day so I count that as an above average British staycation.

We stayed in an artisan cottage – ok, former RAF house – in the South Hams near Salcombe, a locale favoured by the South West London boating brigade and former England rugby union manager Clive Woodward. (More about Clive later.) For anybody who doesn’t know the area, you bomb along the Devon Expressway until you’re in the shadow of Dartmoor and then turn south, navigating miles of the narrowest, twistiest lanes in Britain until you hit the sea. It’s a spot famous for its weird micro climate, sub-tropical fauna and a leisure dress code (washed-out pinks and nautical blues) about as strict as that of The Room at Lloyd’s.

But the South Hams is also notable for one other reason: it’s an area where the mobile signal becomes incredibly unpredictable or even non-existent – and that’s something which now poses a major problem for the British businessman on holiday.

It was during our first morning on the beach that I first saw them: lone middle-aged men wandering slowly around the sand holding Blackberries and mobiles up to the sky like modern divining rods. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, they resembled members of a Star Trek landing party scanning the atmosphere for life signs.

Slowly and deliberately, the paced in bare feet and shorts along the shoreline, oblivious to the chilly water washing over their toes. Sandcastles were trodden on, picnics disturbed, as these men, focusing solely on the signal indicator of their PDAs, tracked back and forth in a classic search pattern, gradually heading back towards the dunes and the car park.

And should they actually manage to gain a bar or two, oh joy of joys! How their faces lit up as the emails poured into their inboxes and they settled down on a sea-weedy rock to work through the unread messages, the cries of their children and spouses unheeded.

All over the beaches of the South Hams you saw them – some clambering up rocks to precarious perches; some out on boats; some hanging out of restaurant windows; others strolling up hilly tracks  to find a summit and that all-elusive signal. On the road where we were staying, I even saw one portly middle-aged fellow sitting on a roadside bench with his laptop and dongle, receiving is latest instructions from base, no doubt.

And Clive Woodward? I saw him in the Winking Prawn restaurant at North Sands, all jeans and casual checked shirt. He was marching back and forth across the wooden decking at the front of the eatery, mobile phone pressed to his ear. And you know what? Clive Woodward had no problem getting a signal at all. What a guy.

Written by Adrian Beeby

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.

Written by Adrian Beeby

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.

Written by Adrian Beeby

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.

Written by Adrian Beeby