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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Can’t get online?

Claire Thompson, Freelance PR Consultant, Waves PR

John Popham is on a mission. To help the digitally disconnected, travelling around the UK offering advice. It’ll be one to watch – to see what Popham can achieve with £1k.  And compare it with, say, Government initiatives.

The future of thupr

Image via CrunchBase

Oh dear – my Audioboo interview on the future of thupr

Someone very kindly bought me a glass of red wine – but I react to some reds really badly, and you can see this on my face in the picture. And that was just a couple of sips!

There’s bits you’ll hear here first…..

PR progress report

Halima Amin, Waves PR Intern

Post by Halima Amin, Waves PR intern working on the changes to, and rebrand of, the thupr – (Tools That Help Us, PR) events

What a buzzing week at Waves! Although this is to be expected a mere week before our next meet up (Mobile apps, 16^th Sept).

Whilst this first meet up has really had me in the teething process of the PR world, it has only left me with much more confidence for meet ups to come. The dead ends and the glorious leads alongside the creative power given to me by Claire have all made up my experience so far.  Working on a new logo, name, format and means of communication is as exciting as it is challenging.

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