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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

Press release distribution services – a survey

With my SEO PR Training hat on, we’re collating information on press release distribution services which will be published next month.

If you are from a service that would like to be included, you can complete your details here:
http://www.wavespr.com/media-and-blogger-resources/company-background-seo-pr-training/the-seo-pr-training-press-release-distribution-survey/

And if you’ve used a service and would like to offer some feedback, you can do so here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PRDrating

We haven’t surveyed the recipients of releases (aggregation sites, journalists and bloggers)  yet: there would be all kinds of flaws with any such survey, but we  are considering ways to do this without running the risk of increasing spam from the ill informed to them.

So what’s been happening at Waves PR

Cafe Bar @ Cornerstone wine evening

I realise that this is a lazy blog, just rounding things up a little, but there’s a lot been happening.

There’s an executive summary of things you can participate in at the end, but the deatil, in alphabetical order, just for the sake of having some (order, that is):

I fix the translation and distribute press releases for AIA Software. This process is OK for online stuff, but isn’t terribly engaging, so I’m hoping to deepen that relationship to something more productive for them and more rewarding for me. They’re at Plugfest in Gouda this week talking OpenDoc.

Elegant Cuisine, an Oxford caterer, has opened it’s new bar in Didcot, the Cafe Bar @ Cornerstone. They had an amazing wine evening, one which we hope will be the first of many. We’re also planning some social media training for the team at the Cafe Bar so that they can start sharing more of the good stuff that goes on whilst actually in the bar. As they had celebrities and storm troopers, hold regular science nights and Open Mic nights, there’s no reason they couldn’t have a really exciting social presence. We are also updating their website – very needed. Read more »