Friday 25 October 2013

D’oh! The PR wisdom of Homer Simpson

It’s not easy devising a PR and marketing strategy when all your competitors are bigger and have larger budgets.

But effective PR needn’t cost the earth, and can simply rest on being able to tell the better story.

Take Homer Simpson.  His wisdom suggests that, once he retires from cartoons, a career in PR beckons.

Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel.

Having a PR strategy to underpin commercial or marketing objectives isn’t an add-on option.  In today’s inter-connected world, it’s fundamental.  However, even with the rise of social media, traditional media remains influential.  While the ink-based media is in decline, it still holds sway.  The simple fact is that if you have a good story to tell, there are media outlets willing to listen – whether through media interviews, press releases and articles, or thought leadership strategies.

If something is hard to do, then it's not worth doing.

PR is not that hard.  It’s about utilising a broad range of promotional techniques that generate both favorable publicity and, using social media channels, create a higher level of constructive two-way engagement.  But those platforms have to be integrated into one cohesive marketing and PR programme.

It takes two to lie.  One to lie and one to listen.

Actually, PR is all about transparency.  Tell your story, without embellishment.  In a buyer-led world, content is king.  You need to attract the right customers and lead them through each stage of the sales cycle.  Creating that great content and placing it where buyers are looking doesn’t happen by accident.  It takes a good content strategy, research and expertise – but no spin and flannel.

You don't win friends with salad.

It may be healthier but it doesn’t grab attention.  In PR terms, decide what makes your company or its products and services stand out – in other words, what are the benefits for customers.  What are your differentiating factors?  The new PR is no longer just about press releases and media contacts (although those are still important).  It’s about engaging with stakeholders and consumers in new ways, with an immediacy that was unthinkable even a handful of years ago.

Most individuals searching for products or suppliers first turn to the internet.  It means that companies have to have a good SEO strategy and populate Bing and Google etc with compelling content.  (Most searches start and finish on the first page of Google).  That means talking to bloggers as well as the media, and integrating pictures and links – providing target audiences with a rich mix of useful information.

The intelligent man wins his battles with pointed words. I'm sorry - I meant sticks.

Words and images are better PR tools.  But why stop at those?  Why not populate your website with videos?   Or send out a regular e-newsletter?  It’s a simple and effective way of regularly updating customers and prospects on company news.  They can carry embedded video and infographics to engage constructively.  Not only that but you can see detailed metrics of who has opened what page and how long they have visited a website – invaluable marketing data.

They have the Internet on computers, now?

In the new world of PR, everybody and every company is also a publisher – whether that’s your website, a regular blog or social media.   What’s changed is the speed in which a press release or article can be posted, found by news aggregators, and spread worldwide.  As an agency promoting clients internationally, I’m still surprised by the speed and reach that a well-crafted press release or article can achieve.

What’s important, however, is to always hyperlink back to specific pages on a website, giving readers every opportunity to engage with your brand.  Important also to use analytics to understand the search terms that are being used to find your company, and to incorporate those terms into future activity.

You may think it's easier to de-ice your windshield with a flamethrower, but there are repercussions.

A good bit of PR advice is to know when to shout from the rooftops (“new mousetrap invented”) and when to tread more carefully (“slightly better mousetrap developed.”)  One of the biggest journalist bugbears is to receive press releases loaded with hyperbole, full of bull***t words such as revolutionary, or unique or fantastic.  Use words like those, and your fine words will be heading towards the bin.  And if you use them on social media, you’ll undermine your credibility with customers, who are wise to the ways of the internet…and no longer fooled.

They didn't have any aspirin, so I got you some cigarettes.

Modern PR is about interaction.  It’s about listening to customers, and engaging with them.  It’s no longer just about selling, because the internet and social media has changed the relationship between companies and customers.  Now, it’s about being helpful, willing to respond to comment – good and bad – not forever pushing a sales message.  Remember, the marketing buzz phrase is now “pull marketing” – attract potential customers to you, rather than just push out sales-speak.  In other words, if they want aspirin, give them aspirin.

People can come up with statistics to prove anything.  14% of people know that.


Okay, then how are these.  For example, nearly £6 billion in UK sales annually is now attributed to social media.  Also, visitors to a website are some ten times more likely to make a purchase if they have come from social media.  And it’s not just the likes of Facebook.  For example, 40% of brands now use Instagram for marketing.

Commercially, nearly 80% of B2C companies and over 40% of B2B companies found customers from Facebook.  Indeed, a majority of social media users now prefer to connect with brands through Facebook, and over 50% of Twitter users recommend companies or products via Tweets.

A fool and his money are soon parted. I would pay anyone a lot of money to explain that to me.

The good news is that using a good agency to handle all or part of your PR and media strategy is usually money well spent!


Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott. We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Wednesday 23 October 2013

PR, conformity and intolerance: a Hallowe’en story

It’s that time of year when children dress up as ghouls or witches and go door-to-door innocently collecting sweets.  But the history of witchcraft is rather more complex – with a contemporary PR message.

Over the Hallowe’en period depictions of witches are everywhere.  Kate Moss, she certainly isn’t, and her very ugliness makes her evil – a PR parable that disability rights groups have been fighting for years.

Early witchcraft was a rudimentary and localised religion, bound up in fertility and survival – the two over-riding concerns for our species, then as now.  But, by degrees, the world progressed.  The concept of society developed; so too the idea of established religion.

However, in the early years of Christian imperialism, the church much preferred to assimilate by stealth.  For example, until 834, All Hallows was on 13th May – moved to 1st November by Pope Gregory to overlay the older pagan festival.  So too, of course, Christmas itself, to overlay the pagan winter solstice (also known as Yule, hence our Yule log).

Witchcraft’s journey to demonic intolerance took several centuries.  In 8th century Saxony, the death penalty existed for anyone killing a witch.  In 11th century Hungary, Charlemagne decreed that there was no legal remedy against witches “since they do not exist.”=


Bit by bit, the church flexing its muscles, tolerance was chipped away.  By 15th century Hungary, the memory of Charlemagne now dimmed, a first offender found guilty of witchcraft was made to stand in the town square wearing a Jew’s cap, a symmetrical punishment alongside Europe’s other principal scapegoat.

Indeed, in many parts of Europe, the social exclusion of the Jews was only matched by the social exclusion of witches.  It was merely a matter for individual societies to pick the scapegoat which best suited their particular circumstances.   

In the Alps and Pyrenees they burned witches, in Spain they burned Jews – for the simple crime of being either a witch or a Jew.  In 14th and 15th century Germany, it was the Jews who suffered; by the 16th century it was the witches.  In the 20th century, it was the turn of the Jew again, the cycle of persecution turning full circle in the ovens of Auschwitz.

The last person in the UK to be prosecuted for witchcraft was Scottish housewife Helen Duncan, jailed for nine months in 1944 because, a spiritualist, she seemed to know too much about the war effort. 

The real story of the witch persecutions was the church’s successful PR campaign to define as evil everything that had gone before.  It was brutally effective. 

But the cult of the scapegoat isn’t dead, and has contemporary resonance.  Take your pick from immigrants, benefits scroungers, health tourists, utility companies, investment bankers, gays, gypsies, Moslems, single mothers, young people… the list goes on and on.

And that’s the relevance for today’s news and PR professions, because by picking scapegoats we are also defining our own prejudices and intolerances, and looking for somebody to blame for society’s ills.  

That’s particularly true in a fragile economy, where many of us are worried about income or job security, and when politicians can point accusing fingers and garner cheap votes.  The rise of fascist Golden Dawn in Greece is a case in point.

Hallowe’en does therefore have a modern message – that intolerance can have unintended and unwelcome consequences.  In helping to shape public opinion, the media and PR professions should remember that.

 Charlie Laidlaw is a director of DavidGray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott. We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook.


www.davidgraypr.com

Friday 18 October 2013

Do you write cock and bull or nursery rhymes? A look at the spectrum of PR story-telling.

PR involves pitching stories to the media although, inevitably, some stories are better than others.  However, much better to make sensible use of the material you have, rather than turn it into cock and bull.

It’s what 18th and 19th century coach travellers did, so the story goes, when they stopped at a town called Stony Stratford, north of London.

Travellers would refresh themselves in one of the town’s two main coaching inns, The Cock or The Bull, where fanciful tales and so-called news would become hopelessly embellished.  The two establishments still exist.

The town’s website says that “the High Street still contains a wealth of coaching inns that thrived in this period, including The Cock and The Bull; in these inns travellers vied with each other in the telling of outrageous stories…”



The story may or may not be true, but it’s an interesting angle on how – in the wrong hands – a perfectly good story can, through spin and exaggeration, devalue both the message and the messenger.

At the other end of the scale is the story so subtly told that its significance is hidden.  That’s best exemplified in our much-loved nursery rhymes, written in a bygone age when any kind of careless gossip could swiftly lead to the gallows.  Back then, subtle PR was a life-saver.

Take, for example, this innocuous rhyme:

Mary Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

It’s actually about the 16th century Queen Mary of England whose brutal persecution of Protestants earned her the nickname of “Bloody Mary.”  The garden is the cemeteries she filled with her victims; silver bells and cockleshells are slang for torture implements, and the maiden was a form of guillotine.

Queen Mary was also the inspiration for another rhyme:

Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run.  See how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a sight in your life?
As three blind mice.



This refers to three Protestant bishops who were convicted of treason and burned at the stake - but not before, reputedly, being blinded and dismembered.

Equally loved is this:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down
And broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

Jack and Jill are King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antionette.  They both lost their crowns (and their heads) in the French revolution of 1793-94.

The derivation of this rhyme is more widely known:

Ring-a-ring o’ roses
A pocket full of posies
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.

In the USA, the third line is often reproduced as Ashes!  Ashes!  It’s actually about bubonic plague in the 17th century, with one of the first symptoms being a rosy rash.  For protection, people would carry sweet-smelling herbs with them.

Other rhymes describe historical events:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.



No, it’s not about a giant egg.  It’s actually a large cannon that was sited on a tower during the English Civil War.  The tower was hit by cannon fire, and the tower and Humpty fell down.

Other rhymes are more complex:

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To give the poor dog a bone
When she came there
The cupboard was bare
And so the poor dog had none

These are the lyrics that were published in 1805, although the rhyme is much older.  One explanation is that it goes back to Henry VIII, with the King wanting a divorce from Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn.  The “dog and bone” refer to the divorce, the cupboard is the Catholic Church and Cardinal Wolsey, the highest Papal representative, is Old Mother Hubbard.

One rhyme stands out for being utterly salacious:

Georgie Porgie
Pudding and pie
Kissed the girls and made them cry
When the boys came out to play
Georgie Porgie ran away.



This is poking fun at a (reputed) gay relationship between King James I and the Duke of Buckingham, who was also an (alleged) lover of the French Queen Consort.

Goosey goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man
Who wouldn't say his prayers,
So I took him by his left leg
And threw him down the stairs.

The derivation of this is less clear, but is probably anti-Catholic propaganda.  Catholic prayers were said in Latin; Protestant prayers in English.  There again, "goose bumps" was 16th slang for the symptoms of venereal disease – and being "bitten by a Winchester goose" was slang for how you caught it.  The “Winchester geese” in question were south London prostitutes.

Lastly, this:

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home
Your house is on fire
And your children are gone.

The ladybird was regarded with affection by farmers as it ate aphids, and it’s thought that this rhyme may be about encouraging the bugs to fly off before the farmers burned stubble in their fields.  However, it may not be that simple.  Another possible derivation is that the rhyme was a warning to Catholics who wouldn’t attend Protestant services.

Nowadays, in an age of free speech, we can write what we want and make the meaning clear.  But we shouldn’t forget that the right of free speech has been hard won and that, in past times, it could get you into all sorts of trouble.

In PR terms, it was therefore better to invent a nursery rhyme than a cock and bull story.  Nowadays, neither end of the PR spectrum is much good!

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott. We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook or online.

Friday 11 October 2013

Who wants to be a trillionaire?

To celebrate its 10th birthday, a Scottish PR agency has launched an international competition with a cash prize for the winner of $100 trillion.

The once-in-a-lifetime competition is being run by David Gray PR and is open to anyone, anywhere.

All entrants need do is ‘Like’ the company on its Facebook page and complete the following paragraph:  “If I had $100 trillion, I would…” 




Entries will be judged on creativity, do-ability and social or environmental objectives, although entries which are thought-provoking or make the judges smile will score extra points.

The competition is open until the end of October.  In addition to the main prize, there are runners-up prizes of $50 trillion and $20 trillion.*

Robbie Laidlaw, head of digital at the boutique agency, said that “this is a fun way to tap into people’s priorities for society and our planet and we will compile and publish the entries received.

*Each of the three cash prizes is offered as a single banknote issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and, alas, are pretty worthless.  However, winners can still claim to be trillionaires!

David Gray PR is a specialist in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact the company at + 44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Monday 7 October 2013

And the winner is...

We all know what PR is supposed to be.

It’s about connecting companies/organisations with all those who matter to them.   It’s about press releases, articles, blogs and posting onto social. 

It’s also about speaker opportunities, seminars, exhibitions, networking events…the list goes on and on.

It’s about determining a commercial and marketing strategy, setting realistic
objectives, and creating a PR programme to help make it happen.

However, there’s one silver(ish) bullet in the PR armoury that is often overlooked.
Entering awards. 

Virtually every sector of business has its own awards scheme – from lighting to
glazing, from banking to construction, from building products to bathroom supplies. 

Maybe, definitely

Whatever business sector you’re in, there’s probably an awards competition that you
could enter.  (Actually, not just maybe.  Definitely).

And it’s not just business sectors.  There are a whole raft of personal awards…in HR, accountancy, marketing… you name the job title, and there’s an award to be won. 

Nor does it matter how big you are.  There are awards for start-ups, entrepreneurial awards, innovative new products.

Or there are awards in the workplace - for best practice in flexible working, best places to work, social inclusion, recruitment policies.

More recently have come environmental or green awards, celebrating everything from recycling to carbon reduction, from waste water treatment to renewable energy.

Some award schemes are international.  Others cover the UK.  Others are regional, run by representative or public bodies.

All, however, offer PR and commercial opportunity because winning (or being short-listed for) an award gives enormous third-party endorsement.

It’s not about you saying how wonderful you are.  It’s about an independent panel of judges deciding that you really are wonderful.

What’s important is that you take the time to really understand what the judges are looking for, how to tick the right boxes and the metrics that matter.

Marketing and sales

We have won a number of international, European and UK awards for clients, and it has given them a valuable marketing and sales tool.  They’ve been able to carry the awards scheme logo on their website, and shout from the rooftops to potential customers.

Winning an award gives them that right, because the award is seen as an industry accolade – a clear indication that the product or company is head-and-shoulders above the rest.

But the fact is that relatively few companies enter awards.  Many are worried that they won’t stand a chance against the big boys.  Others haven’t thought through the marketing or PR opportunity.  Others, particularly smaller companies, just can’t find the time – and researching and writing a killer submission can be time-consuming.

But one thing we know from experience is that it doesn’t matter how small you are or if you’re from an unglamorous sector.  To win an award, size doesn’t matter.

Award schemes are designed to support companies of all sizes, providing them with a leg-up to the next level.

Upside, no downside

In the endless corporate battle that is the survival of the fittest, entering your company or its products for an award could be the best PR idea that you’ve never thought of doing.

The great thing is that there’s no downside.  If you lose, nobody will ever know.  If you’re short-listed, or win, you can make the whole world sit up and listen.  (Well, the bits of the world that matter to you).

The great upside is that (whisper it softly) winning an award isn’t the insuperable task that you might think.

The trick is to know the awards landscape, nationally and regionally, and truly understand what the judges are looking for.   (It’s also, for example, about knowing which award categories are over-subscribed with entries, and which categories are attracting the fewest entries).

In other words, entering awards should be front-of-mind for any company wanting to get itself noticed.  At a time when marketing budgets are tight, awards provide a cost-effective way to build brand value…and new business.

In our experience, every successful or ambitious company has a story to tell, about itself or its products, irrespective of size or sector.  It’s how you tell that story that matters.

Tell that story well and the commercial rewards can be considerable.

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott. We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at 01620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

Top 10 tips for modern PR

The worlds of marketing and communications have shifted on their axes in recent years – and the speed of change is hotting up.

Why?  Quite simply because the internet and social media have made us all think and behave in new ways and every day, so it seems, a new must-have service or app is launched.
It can be a bit bewildering.  So, to try and simplify things, here are 10 golden rules for the new PR.

Changed consumer behavior

It may be obvious, but every company now looking to source a new product or supplier will turn first to the internet.  If your company or product doesn't show up on Google or Bing etc, then no sale.  It’s now about populating the web with compelling content, driving SEO and getting your website up the rankings.  More importantly, it’s about giving you or your products credibility.

Credibility

I’m old enough to remember skeptical clients asking me why they needed a website.  People, they said, can simply phone or fax through what they need, and we’ll send out corporate or product information.

Now, every credible company has a website, and many are now adopting social media.  The same argument applies: shortly, companies without a social media presence will look old-fashioned or out-of-touch.  Again, no sale.

Social value

Still not convinced by social media?  Well, nearly £6 billion in UK sales annually is now attributed to social media, with that figure vastly rising every year.  Also, visitors to a website are some ten times more likely to make a purchase if they've come from social media.  And it’s not just the likes of Facebook.  For example, 40% of brands now use Instagram for marketing.

Commercially, nearly 80% of businesses such as yours have found customers from Facebook.  Indeed, a majority of social media users now prefer to connect with brands through Facebook, and over 50% of Twitter users recommend companies or products via Tweets.

Many companies make the mistake of assuming that only young people connect with Facebook, Twitter etc, and that their customers have no idea what a Tweet looks like.  Well, maybe.  But the rise of social media makes that assumption unwise and, don’t forget, those tech-savvy youngsters will be tomorrow’s customers.

Integration

However, social media (like the rest of PR) has a downside, if not handled well.  There’s no use getting messages out, if they’re the wrong messages – and, remember, social media gaffes can linger online for a very long time, particularly if your gaffes attract unwelcome comment.  The lesson is to choose your social media platforms wisely, make sure you understand how they work, and post information to them that is consistent across all the platforms you use and therefore…

Getting attention

…grabbing attention for all the right reasons.  In a 24/7 media landscape, always also wise to keep an eye on the media in your sector – whether by logging onto trusted news sites or following the rolling news agenda on Twitter.  Maybe the government is making a statement about the widget industry.  As a widget manufacturer, you may have something to say.  Become a commentator, not a bystander.  You may even become an industry thought leader, to whom the media automatically turns.  That’s when you know you've cracked the new media rules!

Content management

But before all that, there’s no use developing traditional and online PR strategies without first deciding on message and content strategy.  Writing good and compelling content for press releases, articles, blogs or social media remains – and will always remain – the most important part of PR.  Not only does it have to be well-written, it has to resonate with potential customers, and be optimised for SEO.  Now, more than ever, content management is all-important.

Targeting messages

When I was a journalist, dodging dinosaurs on the way to work, press releases arrived by post.  Then came the fax, followed by the internet and email.  Then (shudder!) came media companies who did (and still do) everything for you.  Their great advantage is that, with no effort, you can send out a press release to vast thousands of journalists and websites, and many of the latter will publish your information verbatim.  Mostly, however, they’ll be sites of no importance, with real journalists simply ignoring your story.  So why not draw up a list of key media (and the bloggers and journalists who work on them) and get to know those people on a one-to-one basis?  In the new media age, with more and more press releases being distributed, journalists are looking for the human touch.  More than anything, they’re looking for good information, and why they should be interested in your story.

Push and pull

It all used to be so easy.  You adopted a “push” strategy of buying advertising or marketing lists, sent out information or a press release, and waited for the phone to ring.  Now the rules have changed.  It’s about publishing good information and drawing customers into your community: a “pull” strategy in which potential customers find you.  Inbound marketing focuses on excellent content that attracts people towards your company.  By aligning your published content with your potential customers’ needs, you will naturally generate inbound traffic that you can convert. 

Monitor

Before the internet, it was hard to know what worked and what didn't.  Often, for example, I would advise clients to ask everyone phoning for information how they had heard of them.  Mostly, it was a secretary (remember them?) who wouldn't know the answer.  Now, with the likes of Google analytics you can easily see how people have found your website – what publications they first saw you in, what pages on your site they looked at, or the keywords they used to search for you (or your competitors).  Monitoring will help you refine your strategies and messages.

Engage and converse

Monitoring also allows for two-way communication.  It’s no use having a Twitter or Facebook account if nobody in your company actually posts material to them or, just as bad, nobody keeps an eye on them to see what comments or Tweets have been received.  Social media is all about PR immediacy and everybody communicating with you expects the same kind of immediacy in return.  

Nor does it matter if the person is making a complaint; by reacting positively to it, you are making an important statement: we care about customers and, if something appears to have gone wrong, we’re on the case.  Everybody knows that mistakes happen, so a bad Facebook post need not be bad news – respond quickly and positively, and it can actually be turned into good news.

Taking all the above together (rather than have a point 11, which would be silly), it’s about managing reputation, using all media platforms to communicate messages and, by investing a bit of time and effort, building your brand.   At DavidGray PR, we've been there, done it, and have lots of T-shirts.  We understand the power of brand, and how generating a joined-up strategy that uses social media and targets individual media outlets can generate brand value and corporate reputation.


Charlie Laidlaw  is a director of  DavidGray PR.  He can be contacted Charlie@davidgraypr.com or 01620 844736.