Category Public Relations practice

May 3, 2014,  Events, Guru in a Bottle, Public Relations practice  No comments

No, this isn’t a crossword conundrum or trick question but in fact the essence of the debate I chaired on Thursday 1 May at the offices of BNY Mellon ahead of the PRCA’s PR Council Meeting.

Like most things in life, there are at least two sides to every story – whether it’s the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation that threatens to obliterate the freedom of marketers to track behaviour of consumers or the ethics of sponsoring education content in the classroom.

You can be sure that whenever you get two marketers in the room, you’ll have at least three points of view.

So when it comes to ‘content marketing’… well, you can bet there’s as many views on the ...

April 9, 2014,  Public Relations practice  No comments

Ever felt you were speaking to a colleague or client and not getting very far? Felt like you could be on another planet? All too often we suffer communication breakdown. Well, the fabulous Andy Bounds, author of one of my favourite books, The Jelly Effect has identified Top Ten things to avoid a communication breakdown.

1. Back-to-back meetings. When there are no breaks in between, when exactly are people supposed to prepare or follow-up? I guess there are only two answers: ‘at home’ or ‘never’
2. Pointless communications. You know all those comms – all those reports, meetings, conference calls, emails – that achieve nothing? The ones that nobody would mind if they ...

April 4, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice, Thought Leadership  No comments

According to American anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Alfred Kroeber, culture “is a shared social blueprint for life – the constellation of values, assumptions, beliefs and behavioural norms that define a group of people.”

Well that’s the academic perspective for you, but how does this work in practice? Let’s say you have a prospective major customer in Germany and arrange to meet in Berlin over lunch.

Knowing how to read and speak German will be an obvious advantage when it comes to ordering lunch or entering into discussions but how will this serve you in being able to recognise the communication patterns of your guests that goes beyond the difference in la...

March 28, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice  No comments

Product placement has been around as long as TV itself. One of the earliest examples of product placement was in 1949 when NBC launched America’s first daily TV news programme, the ‘Camel News Caravan’, featuring a newsreader smoking a Camel cigarette and a policy that banned footage of ‘no smoking’ signs and anyone puffing on a cigars, including Sir Winston Churchill!

Today, brand and product tie-ins are less brazen but equally effective as a weapon for achieving a brand positioning advantage over the competitors’ above-the-line PR and marketing efforts.

The James Bond film franchise is credited with having started the current fashion of placing well-known brand...

March 28, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, News, Public Relations practice  No comments

The war of words continues as Russia is finding itself increasingly isolated by the NATO Alliance and is already seeking stronger ties with leaders of the BRIC nations where it may feel it gets fairer hearing over its annexation of Crimea.

Certainly monitoring the news reports here in the UK you’re left with a distinct impression that the Cold War and the imminent isolation of Russia is just around the corner. Russia may have got what it wanted but it’s losing the PR war.

A good example of what I mean is illustrated by the attack Russia faced at the UN Security Council on Wednesday 19 March when US Ambassador Samantha Powers called the Great Bear a “thief”...

March 24, 2014,  Events, Guru in a Bottle, Public Relations practice, Sponsorship News  One comment

This was the subject of my presentation at the 5^th World Communication Forum in Davos, Switzerland and my co-presenter was the dynamic Andrew Denton, Head of Media at Welcome to Yorkshire.

The topic we were asked to address was how global events can stimulate economic development. What you may not realise when you’re reading this blog post is that Yorkshire won the bid to host the first stage of the world’s most famous cycle race, the Tour de France.

The Grand Depart will begin in Leeds on Saturday 5 July 2014 and will be broadcast in 88 countries to millions of viewers around the world, many of whom may not have a clue about where Yorkshire is or indeed how stunning it is...

March 19, 2014,  Events, Guru in a Bottle, Public Relations practice  No comments

As Crimea becomes the focus of media attention here in the West, it’s easy for the facts to become obscured in the race for getting a headline grabbing news story as the public relations battle between Russia and the West picks up pace.

In the wake of the Crimea referendum on Sunday 16 March that was observed by more than a hundred bona fide international observers from 23 countries – although not affiliated with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe – it’s easy to dismiss President Putin as conducting ‘gun boat’ diplomacy when he addressed the Russian Parliament on Tuesday 18 March in what many commentators see as one of the defining moments of his presid...

March 15, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice, Thought Leadership  No comments

At the end of last year, a new book by Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington hit the shelves and caused a bit of a stir. Brand Vandals was a polemic about the dangers facing any organisation as it struggles to manage its reputation in the face of determined vandals out to destroy it on social media.

“Media has become a two-way weapon. Nobody can control it. It’s anarchy.”

Assuming you didn’t suffer nervous shock or call the emergency services after reading the first chapter, the book goes on to describe a world where luckless PR managers are fighting an ever losing battle against brand vandalism...

March 7, 2014,  Events, Guru in a Bottle, Public Relations practice  No comments

How times have changed. As PR professionals, are we in charge of how the world sees and perceives us?

Are we masters of our universe and able to manage the flow of information like we used to in order to protect and enhance the reputation of those organisations we work for and represent?

Back in 1948, US social historian Eric Goldman in his book Two-Way Street predicted that communication between an organisation and its audiences would develop in three distinct ways.

Initially, organisations and companies would have the upper hand and be able to control the amount of spin on any given subject and the unsuspecting audience wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

The secon...

February 27, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, Public Relations practice  No comments

Last week I sat in a meeting with colleagues from across the PR industry that was discussing precisely this question as part of the “Content Marketing” work stream set up by the PRCA, the largest body representing PR professionals in the UK and the largest body of its kind in Europe.

By the middle of 2014, the PRCA hope to have moved our thinking forward on the subject and attempted to clarify what is – and what is not – “Content Marketing”. For the moment, the field is wide open for interpretation and potential confusion. So why does “Content Marketing” matter and is there any merit searching for some form of clarification that will enable our thinking to be bi...