On the future of mobile

If any PR person out there is questioning why mobile is important, they need shooting. Give up and go home. Really. With more people owning mobiles than fridges, not considering the mobile aspects to anything we do is unforgiveable.

(And yes, I know I need to dogfood where this site is concerned – I’m on the case!)

So here are a few predictions from last weeks mobile meetup (at Tech Hub) in highly visual form (note that these are the concerns from a primarily developmental perspective):

Mobile predictions for 2012

It was fantastic that Mike Beardmore  managed to capture a fantastic talk from this week’s Reading Geek. It’s well worth watching for an insight into the big trends.

Given the predictions here for heavy duty, faster downloads to mobile this year, and absolutely nothing to do with Apple, (indeed lots of focus on busting away from Apple/itunes) I’m beginning to regret having upgraded my phone from Blackberry to the iphone 4S already this year. Combined with all sorts of predictions about a Nokia comeback with their rather sexy new phone, I will, as usual, be the laggard stuck with yesterday’s phone for two years.

I’ve always felt professionally that it was important for my technology to stay mainstream to help understand users’ reality, but with mobile looking this exciting, it’s going to the the year of the green eyed monster for me on the phone front, I feel.

Claire Thompson, Freelance PR/Social Media Consultant, Waves PR

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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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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Where does the line fall for PR people?

BM thrived on the 'crisis' attention

By Claire Thompson, freelance PR and social media consultant, Waves PR

PR company Bell Pottinger is again under the spotlight, along with lobbying, and will probably remain so for a while. (For anyone who hasn’t seen the story, Stuart Bruce pulled together a great Storify timeline yesterday.)

Like Burson Marsteller before it with its Facebook/Google story scandal, Bell Pottinger will be squirming uncomfortably, but, like Burson Marsteller, Bell Pottinger is already taking on difficult, often unethical clients, and this kind of publicity will encourage more of the same kinds of clients.

And like Burson Marsteller, it will probably revel in the publicity for what it’s doing, and even use it to build it’s crisis management practise as its name becomes associated with the word crisis, and all those linking to it inadvertently help push it up the search engine rankings. And it’s certainly flushed out that the company has friends in high places within the establishment, making it attractive to more of the same.

Bell Pottinger’s latest ‘sin’ has been to use Wikipedia (Article in Independent, Thursday December 8, 2011), and some of the things it’s ‘accused’ of doing online leave me uncomfortable. I’m hoping that it might spark a sensible debate here around what is, and what isn’t acceptable. Now I’ll stick my hand up and say I’ve done some cackhanded things online before now, and I’ve been called on them, and I’ve apologised. The spotlight was uncomfortable, and hand on heart I’ve always tried to remain ethical whilst serving my clients the best way I can.

But ethics are a tough subject (see the open v copyright debate), and the Independent’s Wikipedia editing article highlights just that. Bell Pottinger tried to put a comment from a client  The Prostate Centre on a cancer related page. Without seeing the comment, my initial thought was that if I had prostate cancer, I might be pleased to see that information. Adding Professor Roger Kirby as an expert? If he’s a professor and has genuine credentials in his field, I would have thought that was fair.

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