On Tides and Tall Poppies

The Australians have an expression ‘Tall Poppies’. When poppies get too tall they get chopped down.  Mostly they use it to talk about bringing people down to size when they’ve got too big for their boots.

In the UK, we champion the underdog. We incubate little businesses until they get to the size where they have growing pains, and throw them to the Wolves. Two one-time nifty little underdogs have been getting a hard time as we come into 2012: Apple and Google.

They both came to represent something – a different set of values to the big corporate Wintel hold.

Apple

Apple has had a chequered past, and has been far from a media darling at various points of its career. It was largely thanks to the work of PR consultancy Bite that the tide began to change, but the real change happened when Job’s returned. I often wondered how Apple had managed to stay in the media good books when it was blatantly antisocial, wouldn’t do the speaker circuit and some of its products, albeit beautiful, were technologically blatantly sub-standard. We forgave them antenna-gate. We forgave them all kinds of things.

In amongst the ‘obits’ for Jobs was the missing link. Steve Jobs was Mr Attention to Detail. Or Mr Control Freak. Depends on your (dis) position. When a big story was about to break, he didn’t set the PR company on the job to try and set up a briefing. Oh no! Mr Jobs picked up the phone to the senior media himself.

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Confession of a PR girl

Claire Thompson, freelance PR consultant, January 2012

3D printer prototype at TVSMC, January 2012

So, hot on the heels of my year’s first blog, this is 2012 blog two.

In all honesty it should have been written last year, but firstly I needed to think carefully before I wrote it – it’s touched a nerve or two. And secondly, but not unrelated, I took some time off over the Christmas period to be with my family.

You see, towards the end of last year I noticed I was choking more than usual. Things came to a crunch at a client event, a wine tasting in Oxford, when I took a sip of wine and found myself attracting attention for the ensuing choking, only just managing to hold down the delicious tapas I’d just eaten.

I was convinced it wasn’t throat cancer, having seen a close friend go through that illness, and how quickly it takes hold and worsens. Whatever was wrong had been coming on over the course of months, maybe longer. But the doctor took it seriously and booked me for some tests.

It’s funny how, faced with the possibility of something that big you get a degree of clarity about what’s important in your life (and as a friend is going through something major right now, life felt a little gloomy). Funnily enough I had a lot of people I wanted to say sorry to and wanted to go back and explain some things. (I didn’t, but still might!)

But partly because of the spectre of being ill, partly because visiting doctors and hospitals ate into my work time, I had to decide where I wanted to spend time.

So immediately after December’s TVSMC (Thames Valley Social Media Café), I headed off for a barium meal at the Royal Berkshire Hospital.

It had been odd looking at the people at TVSMC and thinking “If I was seriously ill and couldn’t come back, what would I miss?” And the answer was clear: wonderful, clever, sharing people who I aspire to be like, and whose greater qualities I hope will rub off, from the uber organised Caalie (who juggles managing two great little startups and four great little (and not so little) offspring, and still manages a social life and sanity) to the uber clever Dan Benton, whose enthusiasm makes the interplay between the physical and virtual worlds fun (from flinging wet sponges at a target  – in this case me, for Twestival –  when someone tweets to delivering biscuits around the office in a tweeting train), and all the people in between that I’m not going to mention in case I forget someone, from academics to politicians! (Please don’t be cross with me for mentioning/not mentioning you here, guys, if you’re reading this.)

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Cranking up 2012

Team meeting to celebrate

So 2012 is off with a bang!

I started this working year with the Global Integration team meeting in the first week back.

Global Integration works on the people capabilities within large, complex, matrixed organizations to help them work faster and more efficiently – and make them somewhat nicer, less confusing places to work.

The team meet works for clearing the mental cobwebs.

I am always struck when we’re together at how applicable what they do is to PR companies. How many Monday mornings or team meetings do PR teams spend hearing about what everyone else is doing, gobbling up almost a full day before we even get started on any real work? How many times have we sat going through ‘to do’ lists and allocating tasks? Yet the most important meeting, the one with clients once a month, is an hour or two long. That’s some kind of madness!

The Global integration team gets together three times a year and we use the meet for some really constructive ‘moving things forward’, big picture work, and people dip in and out as appropriate.   And we usually have a team exercise – sometimes one which takes us outside of our comfort zones.

Ironically for me as a water baby, the one that had me most out of my comfort zone last year was white water rafting/raft building. Any invite from work colleagues that starts ‘bring your swimming costume’ is, in my books, a nightmare. Despite the worrying, however, it was one of the best meets I’ve been to.

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SIG pictures now up on Flickr

Rob Zerilli, UK Manager, SIG

Some of the pictures taken with client SIG (the Software Improvement Group) over the past month are now up on Flickr.

They include pictures fromReading Geek Night this week, from last month’s Public Sector ICT and from the media training that we ran in Kensington.

You can take a sneak peek here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/softwareimprovementgroup/

(Posted by Claire Thompson, Freelance PR Consultant, Waves PR)