6 Tips to Make Your White Paper Interesting

So many people without an original thought in their head re-hash other people's thoughts and think this is enough to create 'thought leadership'. Not surprisingly, many white papers turn out to be ineffably dull.

At least The White Paper Pundit is doing something about it.

In 5 Ways to Create a more Engaging Introduction (http://www.whitepapercompany.com/blog/?p=4638), he returns PR and marketeers to the basics of good journalism and writing: remember to engage the reader.

The tips are familiar to most journalists and editors.

They include:

1) creating compelling headlines,

2) recruiting authoritative sources to back up your position, and

3) relate the heading to that expert endorsement.

4) use graphics to underline your point - and get your key message to those that skim, rather than read. And the more visuals that do that, the merrier.

5) Plus a highlighted sign off that encapsulates your key message.

6) I'd add using sub-headings and captions to echo the key points, but that's probably implicit in the earlier points.

As ever in communications, it's a case of picking one line through a story and making everything else serve that line. Broadcasters do that all the time, even when they show two opposing sides of a question.

You will have spotted that I've just done a re-hash with a little extra content from my own editing experience. But hey - this is a blog, aiming to pass on thoughts from the coalface rather than any pretensions of 'thought leadership'.

I'll save that for the white paper...

Look out for the Giant Avatar of Portobello!

Being a creative agency, it's great having The Big Things on the Beach public arts project on our doorstep to stimulate our senses.

PHPR has been a garden gallery host in one of their previous events and we are always intrigued by their installations. Now a 6 metre high inflatable sculpture that 'captures the spirit of Portobello" is on its way. It is Grennan + Sperandio's Giant Avatar of Portobello - the second of three Imagine Porty Prom public arts commissions by Big Things on the Beach for their 2010 offering.

The giant Avatar launches on 1st May at 2pm at the Portobello Public Art House at the foot of King's Road - EH15 1DX. It will appear the following day on the beach 2pm-6pm at Pitville Street. On Monday 3rd May it will be outside the Bank of Scotland in Portobello High Street from 10am - 2pm. If the weather is poor it will be inside the Portobello Town Hall.

The first Imagine Porty Prom commission earlier this month was Michael Pinsky's Stroke - projected images on the Portobello swimming pool at night. It was an ethereal experience, made all the better for involving a host of local people.

http://www.bigthingsonthebeach.org.uk/

PHPR provides up to one week's time a year in support for the arts, education and community projects as part of its CSR policy. Our MD is a volunteer adviser for the Travelling Gallery, arranged through A&B Scotland's Board Bank.

PHPRtv now up on YouTube

A couple of posts ago, I said that I would make a "PR for technology" video. I made the promise when I found there were no PR for technology videos on YouTube when I was playing with Google's Wonder Wheel.

I've finally launched PHPR's own TV channel on YouTube with the above PR for technology video. After years of clarifying messages for technology companies, I'm using the video to urge for clarity at the top end of technology communications to communicate with end users more effectively.

Like me, it's short and sweet - well, short, anyway!

The People's Boat Brings Sponsorship to Everyone

It's not often PHPR sponsors a round-the-world race yacht, but we have - and you can too - from £25! See http://ping.fm/hQzJJ

How Google's Wonder Wheel Sparked an Edinburgh Technology PR video idea

Google's wonder wheel is not well known, yet it's useful for generating ideas.

Using the wonder wheel option returns search results on Google arranged in a wheel that resembles a mind-map. The spokes represent search terms. The natural results for your search are displayed to the right of the wheel.

The wheel format allows you to quickly see the search results. Click a spoke and another wheel pops up with more results, allowing you to drill down and chase threads of ideas. Then it's easy to refine your results by choosing to show results for "images" or "videos" - which are displayed like the results of a regular Google search.

Using this wheel/refined search combo, you may find information gaps, as I did in this example.

Technology PR agency search spots a gap:

Key a search term into Google as per normal

When the results appear, look above them - just below the Google search box - to see a blue shaded bar containing the words "show options" - click on that.

A list with 4 groups drops down to the right of your search results. The group called "standard view" contains the "wonder wheel" option . Click and your results show a neat wonder wheel.

Click a spoke of your wheel to see another wheel popping up based on a further 10 results relating to the spoke you just clicked.

Follow your thoughts and click away to spark off ideas for articles or blogs - and throw up opportunities.

Using a search on "PR"(UK pages), I clicked on a"technology PR agencies"spoke because technology PR is one of PHPR's strengths. I refined the list to see "videos" - there were no results. Excellent. That means there's a gap in the market and I'm now off to make a technology PR agency video!

How to be Interesting On-line

Seth Liss, SunSentinel.com's news community manager has some good tips for those of us who have noticed less feedback from social media activity recently. More people have piled into social media with varying levels of communications skills, muddying the waters for us all.

Time was, being on social media was novel and we all reacted to each other. Now everyone's at it, the boring get blanked out. So Seth's advice starts with the obvious: drop the minutiae of everyday living. We've all un-followed Tweeters who are obsessed by their everyday existence.

But I do agree that when you do post a newsworthy event, it's the details you bring out that make it more interesting. Every PR person and reporter knows this - and we are all occasional reporters now. As he says, 'I want to read more than: "My child took his first steps today." I want to know how it came about, where did it happen, how many steps, and how it made you feel.' Hard to do in 140 characters, I know, but whoever said good communications skills are easy?

He also reminds us to clear off to a private space if we are start engaging in a 1-2-1 conversation. I think it's a bit like talking loudly during a film in the cinema.

Seth's really nailed it when he suggests putting posts with links into context. There's no point in recommending something without giving us a clue so we can judge for ourselves whether we might agree with you. As he points out: "That approach makes it easier to agree or disagree and open the conversation up to others in your network."

Seth recruits good PR research to make a point. If you're thinking of going for the promotional jugular in your posts, you may want to consider that Edelman's Trust Barometer survey showed that "the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45 percent to 25 percent since 2008." (Edelman is the world's largest PR company and their annual Trust Barometer survey is based on nearly 5,000 25-minute interviews with informed people aged 24-60 in 20 countries)

So, if being promotional and your day-to-day wanderings are a no-no: what does work? As ever in PR, sharing good information is the key to being worth reading or listened to. He counsels us to develop expertise and share learnings if we want to be valued sources of interesting material.

His next observation is harder to do, but it makes a lot of sense: timing is key. Most people dip into their social media accounts so: "Know when to post." I'm going to start noting when people I admire are posting so we're more likely to deepen the connection. That's the whole point of social media.

Finally he repeats advice given by everyone I respect in the on-line PR game: listen first, then comment. "If people know you are interested in what they have to say, they will most likely be curious about what you have to say as well."

That's why following people you're interested in often produces a reciprocal response.

I'd say it pays to listen well before you speak, then you stand to engage with the best in your field. And that further builds your on line reputation. And boosting reputation is what PR is all about on and offline.

Is David Brent sabotaging your PR?

Jargon and abbreviations are a handy shortcut when communicating with fellow specialists, but it excludes others. That's why jargon is a serious barrier to general communications and PR.

In a world where budgets need to be signed off by a variety of specialists, including finance departments, we would argue that jargon is an expensive liability, not an asset.

Clients sometimes say they have to prove to clients that they can speak the technical lingo. That's fine. But please don't hit people with incomprehensible jargon on the main web pages. There's a place for technical language and it's in technical papers and reports.

The Internet gives us the ability to layer information, so those needing more detail can click through to increasingly denser layers.

Even when speaking to technical specialists, nowadays there are so many narrow specialisms. It's quite likely that two similarly qualified engineers could baffle each other with jargon. But would they admit that? Or gloss over the point?
Why risk it?

Jargon simply doesn't foster useful or productive business relationships.

In general business areas, jargon has crept in as a form of one-up-man-ship. People use ridiculous jargon to signal they're up with the latest management fads, as satirised so mercilessly by the David Brent character in 'The Office' TV series a few years ago.

Since that programme, many people associate 'management-speak' with idiots who may harbour a penchant for bad break-dancing!

A recent Accountemps survey of 150 top US executives listed the following top annoying jargon words:

Leverage
Reach out
It is what it is
Viral
Game changer
Disconnect
Value-add
Circle back
Socialise
Interface

Words on the list that also appeared in their earlier (2004) survey were:

At the end of the day
Synergy
Solution
Think outside the box
On the same page
Customer-centric

Sad to say, almost of all of these words have been suggested to us for inclusion in web copy.

The David Brents live on...

Environmental Legislation Over-view

Thank you Business Environment Partnership (www.thebep.org.uk) and Edinburgh Council for today's workshop for smaller businesses on environmental legislation. With good input from SEPA on their advisory and monitoring roles.

Since 1990, enviro requirements on business have been mounting, thanks to European legislation. But exactly how that affects individual businesses can be tricky to work out. There's certainly no shortage of paid-for services to subscribe to, and consultants to lead you through the maze.

I'm very pleased to discover the excellent free resources at http://ping.fm/FwvKv which includes a questionnaire they created (http://ping.fm/iaVafnetregs/links/97472.aspx) where you can get a bespoke answer as to your environmental compliance requirements. It's apparently the same questionnaire that appears on the Business Link site (www.businesslink.gov.uk/), just in case you've been through that particular hoop already.

Once you have your legislation list, that's the foundation for your Environmental Management System (EMS). Then you need to to dig deeper to find out what you need to do about each individual piece of legislation by searching www.netregs.gov.uk. There's a free text box at the top right, but you can also run searches by business type, enviro topic, or go through current & future legislation. Netregs streams info according to location as the Scottish Parliament have their own variants, as do England & Wales, and Northern Ireland.

The Netregs site has been recently re-vamped so it's worth re-visiting if you haven't been there for a while.

You can sign up for their updates so you stay up-to-date.

There's enough info there to help you create your own Environmental Management System (EMS).
I'm told they are going to expand their e-learning tools for specific sectors. These currently cover agriculture plus food and drink.

Another way to get help with planning your EMS is to go in for the VIBES awards, Scotland's top environmental awards for business, which feed into the European environmental awards, with seriously good international publicity exposure and networking opportunities.

The VIBES application form covers the main building blocks you need and the feedback from the judges (free to all award applicants) will give you an expert steer. I used that to move our long-standing environment policy (first written in 1986, based on reduce, re-use and re-cycle) to a more sophisticated level encompassing carbon offsetting for necessary business energy use and travel. We got our expert feedback and followed the judges' advice. We entered again last year, to be rewarded with a place on the shortlist.

Once shortlisted, you receive an intensive visit from the judges, to prove you have demonstrated exceptional environmental performance, and of course, it's a great opportunity to get further bespoke advice. And we got serious new business enquiries at the awards ceremony itself, which was a welcome bonus.

One of the key messages I took away from today's workshop is that it's not enough to assume a waste contractor has the full range of licences they need for both transporting and disposing of different types of waste. You need to check this and be able to stream your waste for the most cost-effective disposal.

You also need to make sure that the paper trail is properly signed off when you hand over the responsibility for your waste to a contractor.

Otherwise, if your stuff is found dumped illegally, you can't prove you were not responsible and you will be held liable. That could mean a fine of several thousands of pounds.

Useful free PDF creation software

Free enterprise-level PDF & XPS creation software from Global Graphics called gDoc Creator: http://ping.fm/V1DM9

Online complaints do more damage

Convergys survey shows negative posts by-pass complaints departments, costing companies c30 customers per complaint and putting off others. Shows the need for monitoring and managing feedback and keeping tabs on what's happening to your reputation both offline and online.

Techno Babble

As we're a B2B PR specialist agency, we deal with a lot of technical clients and have had to deal with a fair amount of techno babble.

Reducing stuff down to initials is fine in a close-knit technical community, but specialisms are so narrow these days that even well qualified people can encounter terms that are meaningless. So why carry this stuff over to press releases and websites where people of real influence lose the will to live after the first sentence? Not to mention potential clients' procurement officers and finance people who have to sign off the purchase decision?

A few clients have argued they need to demonstrate they have the technical know-how and that's fine. It just doesn't need to be visible at the first glance of the home page. And surely the line up of second and third degrees on their people page does signal more than a smattering of knowledge?

This is where the Internet really scores: enabling hierarchical information to be arranged so that visitors can chose to click through to well signposted complexity as they travel through the information avenues on a website. And White Papers or Reports can underline your technical abilities without baffling those site visitors that need more general information. Not everyone needs to see all the branches, twigs, leaves and roots of the tree to know they're in a birch wood.

If you find yourself in such a wood, surrounding by numbers and letters, there's a techno-babble translation tool here: http://ping.fm/O40mZ

PHPR collect VIBES awards 2009 certificate at Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh

Being good PR people, we spun our VIBES news round our contacts and have ended up seven positive results: several of which are really promising meeting requests.

There is also another agency wanting to know how to get the VIBES, so we've pointed them to the VIBES site where it's easy to download the entry forms and all the practical notes on the different award categories: http://www.vibes.org.uk/enter.htm

Plus Margot Grantham, the Scottish director of the excellent Athena network for women sent me a flyer with useful info regarding free recession-busting workshops in Edinburgh for small businesses run by the Business Environment Partnership alongside the City of Edinburgh Council. We are more than happy to pass this info on. The leaflet says:

As part of their Economic Resilience Action Plan the City of Edinburgh Council are working with the Business Environment Partnership to run a series of free workshops at the City of Edinburgh Council Chambers. Upcoming workshops are designed to give practical ideas to cut utility bill costs and understand current & future environmental legislation that may have a financial impact on your business.

Demystifying environmental legislation. What SME’s need to know to ensure compliance – 26th January 2010

Understand your utility bills to cut costs – 25th February 2010

They point out that a 20% cut in energy costs represents the same bottom line benefit as a 5% increase in sales....

The ‘One-Stop-Shop’ provides free tailored advice to any Edinburgh-based company from a microsized start-up to a larger SME. Advice ranges from Government funded grants & loans, resource efficiency, green marketing opportunities to legislation with the aim of identifying cost saving or new sales opportunities for businesses.

Find out more about the workshops or their free advisory service at http://www.thebep.org.uk/ The lady dealing with registrations is called Amy.

Is PHPR Scotland's Greenest PR Agency?

PHPR is delighted that we received a VIBES Scotland shortlisted certificate at the awards ceremony held in the Scottish Parliament last night. VIBES are Scotland's top environmental awards for business. http://www.vibes.org.uk/

We had a serious new business enquiry just after the awards ceremony and we will be fixing up an initial meeting later on today: positive proof that VIBES awards are good for business.

The significance of getting this far in the VIBES awards was really brought home when David Sigsworth, chairman of SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) said, "The companies on the VIBES shortlist & the winners are recognised by multiple agencies and the Scottish Government for exceptional environmental performance."

PHPR was shortlisted for the best management award for small businesses (less than 50 employees). We are a very small business, and PR doesn't use lots of materials to manufacture things, so the savings we can make through environmental measures are quite small. But they do add up. We have been reducing, re-using and re-cycling since 1986. Each year we add to the eco measures we undertake and most of them benefit our bottom line. And we do help to spread the word and encourage other companies to gain the business benefits of implementing practical environmental measures.

We think we may be the first Scottish PR agency to get this far in the VIBES awards. Until we find out whether any other PR company has been recognised by VIBES for exceptional environmental performance in the last 10 years, we certainly can claim to be one of the greenest PR agencies in Scotland - and that's official!

We worked hard for that recognition. The VIBES awards are tough. Even after attending a half day course on building the business case for a VIBES award, we found the application process was very demanding. It took ages to pull together all the information and do the calculations to prove the savings we achieve. But at each stage we found out more about implementing green measures in business, and demonstrating the savings. And going through that process sparked off ideas for other measures we could try. Our first entry last year gave us really useful feedback from the expert judges - advice that we worked hard to implement before we entered VIBES this year. Yes, we did indeed put ourselves through the VIBES application process twice to get to this stage!

PHPR was one of nine Edinburgh businesses shortlisted:

• Aquamarine Power


• Balfour Beatty Rail


• Edinburgh Napier University


• Maximillion


• PHPR Ltd


• Prestonfield Hotel


• Rabbies Trail Burners


• Wilderness Scotland


• William Waugh
  

VIBES is a partnership between: Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, Environmental Protection UK, Envirowise and NetRegs.
With support from Business Environment Partnership, CBI Scotland, Energy Saving Trust, Federation of Small Businesses Scotland and Forward Scotland.

Does Advertising Work?

picture created with www.wordle.net

It is said that advertising is the last refuge of those who are not creative. That seems odd since advertising solutions: iconic images and catchphrase strap lines are surely the pinnacle of promotional creativity?

But small budgets can't stretch to that level of advertising. Even when you have strong design and creativity, you need heavily repeated inserts or screenings to gain attention. Even the best ads are hard to predict in terms of effects. They say most people don't even register the first three times an advert runs in most publications. Most small businesses stop at one insertion, thereby guaranteeing failure unless they are very lucky.

But there are some situations that are resistant to clever PR alternatives. For example, the need to shift a pile of beds to make way for new stock or generate a very fast cash-flow injection. Unless Mary Queen of Scots really did sleep in them all, this cries out for advertising in the local media on and offline. Plus some freebie posts on suitable online sites.

Don't forget to use those vouchers Google gives away for £30 of free AdWords. I got mine when I registered my business on Google Maps, but I've seen the offer fall out of business magazines. Every little helps as long as you have a good landing page on your website to convert interest from the ad into sales. And a well-written and optimised site that anticipates the information a buyer might need, and delivers that with a clear call to action on every page. It's always worth testing the form of words that works for your business online. By then, you'll be well beyond Google's £30 freebie, but at least they offer free analytic tools and helpful hints.

I always find that going back to the basics keeps me focussed. You'll save a lot of money and effort if you think about who you need to reach and whether you can reach them any other way before getting out the advertising chequebook.

The most powerful question you can ask yourself is: How do I.....? Then go for a walk, or have a shower - whatever activity is good for you when you need a great idea.

Would special offer leaflet drops be most effective? What about an in-store event with treats and discounts for existing customers? If they are suitable beds, what about ringing guest houses and hotels with a bulk buy deal to renew all their beds (and take away the old ones to minimise the hassle factor). A deal on matching bedside tables and wardrobes might clinch it?

This is the fourth in a series of posts re-visiting the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity by Penny Haywood. The 30 techniques are a mix of digital and offline sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines (sales, marketing and PR) to effectively boost a business. As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months. The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Clear Expression for PR

"If you think in terms of what problems you solve instead of what services you offer, your messages will be simpler."
http://ping.fm/CCcPp

That's such a good approach to marketing and PR communications. Less is always more!

Eco Car

Look out for Nissan's 'Leaf' in 2010 - an all-electric car doing 100 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 90mph.

We're currently up for a Scottish environmental award: VIBES, which may be a first for a Scottish PR agency? We have seen the business sense in "reduce, re-use, recycle" and have run our Edinburgh PR agency on that basis since 1986. Plus we do like to keep abreast of promising eco-tech developments.

Gaming brings new audience to Twitter

Xbox Live will integrate Facebook and Twitter directly into online gaming, bringing a whole new audience to Twitter.

Influential Tweeters

The Klout Twitter app measures the influencing powers of individual Tweeps to "find the people the world listens to,"


Klout now lets you see the most influential Tweeters on a topic so you can build a Twitter list of the results.


Really useful for PR as it is all about reputation and influence.

New Twitter Search by Business

Twitter's new search via third-party app will allow search by business - helping businesses promote, defend, or address problems fast.

Orange deal integrates Twitter in UK TV

Orange has made deals with U.K. TV cos to integrate Twitter into news progs, films, TV shows, and football games.

Orange SMS Tweets

UK users can tweet via SMS with Vodafone, O2, and now Orange, at 86444.

Snapshot puts Orange UK into the Twitter Picture

Orange UK users can send picture messages to Twitter thanks to Orange's picture message site called Snapshot.

UK's Global Cultural Impact

The UK has had an outsized cultural impact on the world. From music to sports to literature...and now-MMS with Twitter. http://ping.fm/AQGu9

Social Media Friends Data

The real cost of 'free' social media is our friends' data?

Schedule Priorities says Covey

"The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities." Stephen R. Covey. Brilliant!

So often we end up with so many PR ideas, that it's hard to get them all done. The window of opportunity is not long in the news agenda.

The Main Thing is to Keep an Eye on the ball

"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing" Stephen R. Covey.

So true in a creative biz like ours! That is going to sit at the top of my GoogleNotes gadget for the next few weeks to keep me focused on client's key objectives which is the key to all good PR.

30 low cost PR tips at 4networking

Looking forward to giving 30 lo-cost PR tips at 4networking.biz in Leith, Edinburgh on 24th November. £10 inc breakfast.

Jo Malone Helps Entrepreneurs

Calling all UK aspiring entrepreneurs! New BBC 1 series with Jo Malone is here to help.

Let's hope the new entrepreneurs have as much fun and fulfilment as I've had running PHPR in Edinburgh for 22 years. It still gives me a buzz when our PR gets taken up in the media, or our online PR gets clients onto Google page 1.

Good Quotes

Social Media Trends

Six Social Media Trends for 2010 David Armano: Harvard Business Review: More popular, more mobile, less social.

VIBES awards - PHPR shortlisted for top Scottish environmental awards

Just got invite to the VIBES awards ceremony (Scotland's top eco awards for biz) at the Scottish Parliament. We're short-listed! Think that may be a first for a Scottish PR agency? Fingers crossed!

Outsourcing

"Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy." Groucho Marx

I smile at this as I plough on, identifying tasks that I can parcel up and outsource. I keep on paring down to the elements of running a PR agency in Edinburgh that I love: meeting people and coming up with interesting ideas to put them onto the news agenda, both on and offline.

Bolder PR

"You must do the things you think you cannot do." Eleanor Roosevelt

I've got this sitting at the top of my to do list this month to inspire me to be bolder. After 22 years of running a PR business in Edinburgh, I do find good quotes are more than just a quick pick-me-up. Placed strategically, they help me to stay fully motivated.

Gorkana Trial Looking Good

Trialling Gorkana media data. Not cheap, but they do good networking events & advance features is free 'till the end of the month. Seems good on Edinburgh media, which is our local PR list and has excellent online PR lists.

Fuel Cells Challenge

Carbon Trust's Polymer Fuel Cells Challenge has £8m to support projects that promise to slash the cost of fuel cells.

We're currently short-listed for a Scottish environmental award, which I think is quite unusual for a PR agency, so we keep an eye on new eco-tech developments. And situated on Edinburgh's sea-front, we are particularly interested in staying cosy!

Organising PR

Task lists are too general to be much use when we get round to implementing them - we've forgotten the intended details. Much better to break the task down and add notes so we don't just give up at the thought of doing the whole thing at once.

Branding social media

Promote your brand consistently by registering an available username on the best social media sites. with http://ping.fm/RtycM

Creative Thinking in PR

"The flypaper of an unfocused mind"..."may trap new ideas and unexpected associations" better than reasoning.

That goes alongside the thought that few really good ideas come to you in the office.

That's one of the reasons our PR agency is beside the beach in Edinburgh - when we need a good idea we go for a walk. All those negative ions work wonders!

Daydreaming up better ideas?

Daydreaming activates areas of the brain that solve complex problems and may be the only time they work together.

Another good reason for our PR agency to work in a seaside location - honest!

Ideas for PR

How often do you have a great idea at your desk? No? In the shower? Or in bed? Breakthrough by not working!

We've always found the seaside location for our PR agency in Edinburgh is great for thinking up good PR campaigns and ideas.

All Work is no fun

Hard work overrated says co-founder of Flick in Fast Company. It may be bad for you!

We like hard work at PHPR, but when it extends to long hours we're so glad we're located our PR agency by the sea on the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh. Great for taking a break and coming up with fresh ideas.

Brad at 4networking in Scotland

See details for Brad Burton at 4 networking in Edinburgh 13 & 14 + Glasgow 15th.

4networking founder in Edinburgh

Looking forward to top motivator & 4networking founder, Brad Burton, speaking in Edinburgh on 13 & 14 + Glasgow on 15th

Clarity in Communications

Jon Moon's simple idea about Words in Tables has spawned many ramifications, but they all lead to one end: better communications. Ignore his ideas at your peril! Always insightful and entertaining, his free taster sessions on injecting clarity into communications are an education in themselves.

Build relationships with the media online

An inexpensive online training courses from the National Union of Journalists' Scottish office shows how editors and journalists select stories and how to connect to them. Called Interactive Media Awareness.

Subbing Copy - time to revive a lost wordsmithing art?

The National Union for Journalists in Scotland have produced a bargain (imho) online course designed to teach how to produce intelligible and attractive copy, with headings that are fit for professional publication.

Forwarding Is the New Networking

Tom Davenport's The Next Big Thing blog at Harvard Business says forwarding info is a way of saying, "I know what you're interested in, and I'm thinking about you."

But he points out "you can go too far with forwarding" and advises against being "a mass forwarder". Many executives complain they got too many indiscriminate forwards.

He says, "Forwarding to a list (or retweeting to a list of followers, BTW) cheapens the networking value of the act. It's the online equivalent of finding a credit card offer from Capital One in your mailbox".

Why the Wrong People Get Laid Off

Really thought provoking piece in a Harvard Business School blog by Peter Bregman on "Why the Wrong People Get Laid Off - essentially they are "too confusing to fire" because no-one understands the consequences of getting rid of them. Means that in a downturn, better organised people who communicate more (and are much more effective employees) get the heave-ho. Another reason why smaller businesses have an edge over larger organisations? But also a warning not to let it happen in your business.

Brochures - do you need them?

This is the third in a series of posts re-visiting the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity. The 30 techniques are a mix of sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines to effectively boost a business. As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months. The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Despite the flexibility and immediacy of websites and PDF files, there comes a time when many a business owner wonders if it's about time they produced a brochure, or some other sort of impressive printed output, to make the enterprise appear more established. The thought usually hits them when they have just seen a competitors' particularly impressive publication.

There's no doubt that a beautifully printed job is an impressive object, especially if is exquisitely designed and produced on heavy duty coated paper, with a cover finished with a seductively silky surface coating, possibly highlighted with gloss spot varnish.

However, no matter how impressive, you need to think long and hard about your intended recipients. The chances are that your top potential clients are trying to run a paperless office and your work of art will go straight into the bin. Or worse: they will take one look and wonder how much of their fees are going towards fancy brochures. Or be shocked at how little care you are displaying for the environment.

There are practical issues. You often need to specify a lot of brochures before the unit cost comes down, but printed materials go out of date so quickly: sometimes before they come back from the printer.

Are brochures just expensive sops to the business owner's ego? Surely luxury brands are an exception?

I would suggest that nowdays, there are cleverer ways for luxury brands to spend their promotional budget. Especially when posh brochures risk trashing the company's environmental credentials. Maybe a bigger spend on design, branding or packaging? An interactive website? Or a really amazing and memorable business card? I don't think people see a business card as a massive waste of resources and the humble card is often the most immediate and frequently used tool.

If you really feel you must leave something decent sitting on prospective clients' desks, consider a good looking pre-printed folder to take well-designed loose-leaf inserts that you can update and run off onto good quality paper. Then you can select a range of product or service information sheets plus relevant case studies and licensed media coverage reprints to impress that particular client. Effectively, every folder becomes a bespoke brochure, with minimal waste. If you use sustainable paper and inks then the environmental impact is reduced and you can add a claim to that effect to collect a small green plus point.

To print or not to print is a good example of 'big picture' PR thinking designed to keep an eye out for all the behaviors and decisions that can impact on a company's reputation.

Ambassadors in Business Boost Brand and Referrals

This is the start of a series of posts, re-visiting the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's MD's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity by Penny Haywood (pub: Batsford 1998). They are a mix of sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines to effectively boost a business.

As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months. The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

The techniques can be used for most sizes of business and organisations.

At PHPR, we mainly work with business-to-business clients. We need to ensure that clients get the best possible PR, sales and marketing advice, so we have evolved a list of several hundred techniques to ensure we can cover most bases in most industry sectors.

These 30 techniques are more than enough to get started on. We are kicking off with one of the least used: Ambassadors.

Ambassadors - some people call them brand ambassadors - have the potential to bring great benefits to any business that thrives on recommendations: and that is most of them!

1) Ambassadors

Ambassadors are common for countries and NGOs, but companies rarely use them.

I believe ambassadors can particularly benefit small businesses and they should be a more widespread phenomenon. Why?
Being asked to be an ambassador is flattering to the most influential people in your field, which is rarely a bad thing.

Having a good ambassador aligns your business with the best people.

Ambassadors are eminently quotable and add kudos to your business

An ambassador programme leverages word of mouth recommendations from people whose opinion is respected.

Having ambassadors gets you closer to people who matter.

What's not to like about ambassadors?

If you have good contacts with prominent individuals associated with your field, could they become your ambassadors? Whether they are from business, industry, commerce, professional bodies, societies, associations or universities, local councils or governing bodies, potential ambassadors are people who are in a position to make influential recommendations. They might be customers, old colleagues, friends, fellow committee members in professional bodies or contacts from the past. Or a former mentor

Even if you can't immediately think of anyone, just remember that most people like helping others and hold the thought in the back of your mind that you are seeking an ambassador. Once you acknowledge that you are looking for one, a suitable person is much more likely to appear. That's because we tend to see what we are looking for.

Most successful people work hard, but also admit to being lucky. But you can give your luck a helping hand

If you visualise being successful and attracting a helpful ambassador, your subconscious doesn't know the difference between imagining and reality, so it will start drawing you towards things that help you achieve your goals. You won't find an ambassador just by imagining one, but visualising having an ambassador will make you feel more hopeful and energised and boost your chances of finding one.

Why not list finding ambassadors on your PR plan?

Ambassadors lend an air of credibility to your organisation. They are not colleagues or contacts on referral programmes, recommending you for some sort of reward or quid pro quo.

Referrals are more likely to be generated by equals. Ambassadors will actively promote your business because they believe in you and what you are trying to do. They like to see younger up and coming business people develop. And it's a two-way street. You will keep them fresh and up-to-date with new technology and the latest thinking in your sphere. And take them to interesting places to swap notes on the industry and your latest ideas.

I would also suggest that you periodically give your ambassador something that money can't buy easily.

Maybe you know a skilled artist whose style reflects your ambassador's own taste?

Or you have written a book you can dedicate to them?

Something special hand-crafted with their name that you have carefully judged is to their taste?

Or a bottle of their favourite and difficult to obtain single malt or wine?

Hard to obtain tickets to something they will love?

All of these things are worth more than a more expensive present and they force you to really pay attention to your ambassador's preferences: something that will make them feel special and appreciated.

Ambassadors may also be regarded by many as opinion formers and they may in fact be both. The difference is, opinion formers are useful, but are more remote than ambassadors. You may seek to influence opinion-formers, but it is unlikely that an opinion-former will actively promote your business in the way an ambassador does.

If they do make excellent comments about you or your business, your opinion-former has just re-classified him or herself as a potential ambassador.




The word-art for this post was created at www.wordle.net.

Focus to Boost Business

(picture created in http://www.wordle.com/)

How many times have you wished you had more time to promote the business? We can always find the time, provided that promotion is the top priority. But is it just a case of prioritising? Trouble is, whenever you prioritise, something else is demoted. So how can we make more time for key tasks?

One solution I've heard suggested is to tap into that "just before holiday" frenzy.

We all work like crazy before a holiday to clear the desk - all we need is to do that every day to increase our output... And when you're tired? Just imagine someone pointing a gun at your head - if that was real, all tiredness would vanish. Well yes. That's great in the short term. But how long would most people's health last, piling on the stress like that?

We can do a prodigious amount of work when we have a powerful motivating reason - saving lives, helping charities, going on hols, turning the business around, moving office or house etc. But we know it's for a finite period.

Sure, build a bit of rush time into a week, but there is another way: work smarter. And I'm not thinking about rushing out to buy the latest gadget. I had a harsh but valuable experience that taught me to focus on the important stuff only.

Recently I lost the use of my right arm for 8 weeks - a frozen shoulder. Agony. And I'm right-handed. Painkillers and a good physio sorted it out. I now use the free program called WorkRave to enforce breaks so I don't get another frozen shoulder. But boy, did I get a really good set of lessons in how to work efficiently. I didn't have any choice.

I addressed emails twice a day. I only looked at ones from clients, friends and family. And I painstakingly typed one line answers to clients. Anything else was done by phone. Guess what? I slashed my email time by half and still had time to cancel or block a load of email that was not immediately useful, saving more time in future.

Speeches, case studies, articles and releases were handled with speech to text software (Dragon-Dictate) and took less time to write than direct keystrokes as speech is generally more concise than the written word (I'd previously trained the software to recognise my voice).

And I rigorously recycled text to ensure our online marketing remained on course by questioning everything I created - how can I use it again for maximum impact? A blog headline becomes a tweet and a Facebook posting via Tweetdeck pointing back to the blog. Or use Ping.fm to cover lots of social media and bookmarking sites with one post. And if the subject is strong enough, it could edited into a e-newsletter and pushed to your permission-based e-mailing list.

I expect you can suggest more ways to streamline your working day: let's hear them!

Homes & Interiors Scotland Exhibition

A year ago I gained my diploma from the Institute of Interior Design. Not to run away from PR, but to augment our service for clients.

After all, when we've re-vamped the website, the marketing and sales materials, raised the profile in the press and online, there's no point in customers coming into a scrappy building and reception area. Plus, with five property renovations under my belt, I wanted the technical skills to add a extra style to my own developments.

We are lucky to have a terrific award-winning magazine devoted to the best Scotland offers in interior design. I always look forward to their annual Homes & Interiors Scotland Exhibition at the SECC in Glasgow.

And this year, despite the credit crunch, they are putting on an exceptional range of exhibitors, with eight room sets created by leading designers for you to pick up loads of ideas and inspiration. Plus free talks and demonstrations from 28-30 August. They include advice from world-famous designer, Nina Campbell, plus award-winning architect, Crichton Wood's "Open Up Your Home" talk shows how to enhance a home on a budget.

I particularly enjoyed Cole & Son's MD, Anthony Evans' whizz through centuries of wallpaper and production methods, up to the latest digital designs for whole walls and ceilings. They have been making beautiful hand printed wallpapers since 1875.

The new inspiration zone is a treat, offering you the chance to browse through sample books from the world's most influential brands of fabrics and wallpapers. Designs by Casamance, Zoffany and Moon all caught my eye for traditional quality designs with a contemporary edge that won't go out of date. And compared to furniture and lighting, you don't need to splash out much for a very special fabric to add real impact to a room. A few special cushions and maybe a blind will do the trick.

At the other end of the scale, the technology showcase focused on practical advice on energy saving and grants for generating your own power. I had a long chat with an energy saving trust adviser and now have a good master plan for our own building. They also had some great suppliers exhibiting really ingenious eco products.

If you have draughty chimneys, you can stop the draughts and save money on your heating bills for a few pounds with the ingenious chimney balloon. from MGC Sempatap. The same company were offering reflective panels to place behind radiators to bounce heat back into the room instead of heating the wall. Nothing new in that, but by incorporating specially designed ridges on the panels, the heated air is forced to swirl, taking the heat further into the room, saving money by improving the thermal efficiency of your radiators. Their thermal insulation is as easy as wallpaper to work with and not only puts paid to mould, it adds serious thermal properties to walls.

Tim Stead's legacy of distinctive wooden sculptural furniture is carried forward by his widow and the craftsmen he trained. It was a pleasure to see them at the show for the first time this year.

Another first timer at the exhibition was a brilliant start-up business called Gorgeous Graffiti that had designers queueing up to offer compliments on creating a stone mason look out of hand carved wooden lettering and canvas. Bespoke logos, mottoes or poems are no problem. Bang on trend and very affordable.

CraftScotland brought some really stunning pieces, from laser cut delicacy to spectacular glass and lighting.

I also liked Jokadirect's bespoke lampshades. They can do anything in almost any size, in wood or cloth, to suit your interior. Their statement feature drum pendents are popular for commercial interiors and incorporate beautiful diffuser panels to soften the light and reduce glare. They can use your fabric too. Just the thing to match the rest of your design scheme.

Architectural Angels were offering a great deal on innovative garden design, starting at under £300.

The sinuous curves of the Ashley Ann kitchen display marry Italian design flair with German engineering. They put the appliances round the walls with the work surfaces in the middle, along with the hobs and griddle. You know it makes sense when you see it.

Pick up a copy of BoConcept's new catalogue and feast your eyes on their extensive display of customisable furniture.

Another catalogue worth picking up is Habitat's latest catalogue with a Hamburg theme. Their distinctive classic range comes with a 10% discount flyer at the show.

And after seeing the display of LEDs at their stand, I'm looking forward to seeing David Brown Lighting's revamped showroom shortly. Always an inspiring treat to visit their Edinburgh showroom as lighting is the one element that makes or breaks an interior design.

I confess I fell for a silk duvet with a substantial show discount from Mandarin Silk. Any duvet that can be cleaned by the simple act of hanging outside for a couple of hours twice a year has my vote. And silk's ability to regulate your temperature added to its natural hypoallergenic qualities are all benefits worth having.

Millers specialist floor coverings included some of the best textural rug selections I have seen for some time, including some really unusual BIC rugs.

And when it all gets too much, don't forget to collect your free tickets for the Oddbins wine tasting!

I'd wear flat shoes as there's a lot of ground to cover, and take a sturdy bag for rucksack for all the literature too!

Illustration created at www.wordle.net.

Speaking Easy

The ability to communicate effectively is a key asset in both business and personal life. Whether it's interviewing potential recruits, connecting with new people, or deciding between new business pitches, who wouldn't prefer an interesting speaker with a clear message?

So it's good to see that one of Scotland's leading communications skills training companies has put up free communications training resources on a new blog www.voicebusinesstraining.co.uk.

They include videos showing VoiceBusiness walks the talk - see http://vimeo.com/6007276 for a quick pre-speech exercise featuring their director, Dilly.

I've known Dilly over the years and have seen her in action several times: impressive and always generous with her tips. More importantly, I've seen the results of her training. Her company produces a step change in speakers' abilities.

Speaking is so important, yet we rarely think about it until shortly before we have to make a speech. We often haven't put the groundwork in to learn speaking skills, nor have not prepared or practiced enough. And deep down, we know it. It's not surprising that our speaking experiences are often laced with nerves or downright panic.

I'll never forget pitching to produce a new magazine. I'd done an OK job, but I wasn't a totally confident presenter. I got a phone call afterwards saying our proposals were much better on paper and we had a better team, but another company had done a much better presentation on the day. They got the work, despite it being a writing job with no presentation skills involved. When I pointed this out there was a total silence as the caller realised just how stupid their decision had been.

But I learned an important lesson that day. With a background in editing and writing, I needed to develop broader presentation skills. I joined the Edinburgh branch of Toastmasters International (TMI) and I achieved visible improvement in presentations within 6 months. Since then I have seen an increase in winning new business pitches.

It's certainly benefited my PR career. We have less than 30 seconds on the telephone to interest an editor in a client's story, so concise speaking is essential. And running a business, I have to be able to connect with new people effectively. I only have a few seconds to create a favourable first impression, and I need to think on my feet effectively. Toastmasters teaches you how to run your brain ahead of your mouth!

Plus the explosion of video online (UK online video viewing time is rapidly approaching TV viewing time) means that every business spokesperson needs clever presentation skills to take advantage of this most powerful medium.

It's never too late to do something about it.

We can take a leaf out of our US cousin's book for a start. We tend to think of Americans as being more outgoing communicators than us Brits. But they don't spring from the womb with fully-fledged speaking skills. They work at it. In schools - as many now do here. And they continue to practice impromptu and prepared speaking big-time at Toastmasters International (TMI) clubs.

TMI is a not-for-profit organisation with a proven track record of training more than 4 million people in public speaking and leadership skills world-wide. They offer a range of public speaking and leadership qualifications that are recognised world-wide.

Just how much more effort US citizens put into developing speaking skills is clear when you contrast the number of TMI clubs here and there.

A friend (and TMI member) moved from Edinburgh to Portland, Oregon. She reported that the population is roughly the same as Edinburgh. Yet they have 125 Toastmasters clubs in Portland. Until recently Edinburgh only had one TMI club called Capital Communicators which meets in the New Town. That grew too big and we now have two clubs with the recent launch of Waverley Communicators in the Old Town.

Why not find a Toastmasters International club to give you a speaking practice arena with constructive feedback? http://www.toastmasters.org also has a good range of free speakers' training resources.

The TMI site has a world-wide club finder. The last time I used it, disconcertingly, all UK results show a map centred on the UK TMI HQ in Norfolk, but scroll past that and you'll get a list of clubs in your area. Edinburgh's Waverly Communicators isn't on that list yet as we need a couple more members to reach official TMI chartered club status, but I'm happy to provide you with info. As a not-for-profit, TMI club membership fees are very low - related mainly to meeting costs - so they vary from club to club. The clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow are around £100 a year for fortnightly training and practice lasting 2 hours.

You can start boosting your speaking skills today by visiting www.voicebusinesstraining.co.uk and re-visiting every month or so to to tap into their free resources.

And if you need to improve your speaking skills in a hurry, or your business depends on your presentation and speaking skills, why not invest in a VoiceBusiness course to produce overnight results?

PHPR has no commercial arrangement with either VoiceBusiness or TMI.

Picture created using www.wordle.net.

40% of tweets "pointless"

A report on Twitter yesterday claimed that only 5.85% of tweets are self promotion and 3.75% spam - you could have fooled me as I'd have said self promo was the prime force behind more than that! By carefully monitoring my follows I don't get much I consider spam.

And that's the point. Everyone's personal inbox will vary according to what they, as the gatekeepers, set up. That's why Twitter works. It puts you in control. As far as I can tell, this report is an analysis of the raw Twitter stream, which I doubt anyone actually experiences.

Apparently 8.7% of posts had "pass-along" value. And 40% were "pointless babble", although I expect their close mates would find it interesting enough at the time.

It's like any media. If I set up a newsletter confined to news about my street, a handful of people on the street and their mums might be interested. At least Twitter and other online media doesn't use up good paper & ink. Find the report at: http://bit.ly/2SybV8

New-old social media

I'm indebted to Kevinghay on Twitter for pointing me towards this useful piece at the Top Rank Online Marketing blog "Let’s revisit these 16 rules for social media optimisation (SMO) and see which are still relevant" at http://short.to/m094

It's good to see that, although social media sites come and go, a lot of the best practice tips come down to attending to the basics of good communications: listening and reacting appropriately, plus good ideas, clearly presented.

Seeing the online PR light through training

PR people often ask me about how to get on top of online PR quickly.



I usually recommend David Meerman Scott's book: The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

I think that book is a great starting place, and they'll find that online PR and marketing are converging online, so the whole ballpark just got a lot bigger. But the truth is, one book, no matter how good, doesn't give you a licence to practice. I've also put in a major time investment in training.

My CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) CPD Excellence log shows I've clocked up an average of 250 hours a year, each year for the last 4 years. That's currently 1,000 hours of formal training logged, not counting at least 10 times more time refining that training through practice.

They say it takes 10,000 hours to develop an expertise in a subject, and I reckon I must be getting close to that by now if you add the "putting it into practice" element.

If you count on around 240 working days a year after subtracting weekends and holidays, I'm spending over an hour a day on logged training. Not all of it is online PR and marketing. There's useful stuff about business processes and public speaking skills in there too. But I'm always picking up online PR and marketing tips while I'm working. Twitter sends me off on all sorts of interesting links and that's not logged, nor is watching the world's top experts on TED.

So why don't I feel an expert on anything? I think the explanation lies in something my tutor in the philosophy department said over 30 years ago. Bear in mind that he was a renowned professor close to retirement: he said, "The more I know, the more I discover there is to know, so now I feel I know less than I did when I started". I can relate to that!

Sometimes you just have to get comfortable with the idea that you have put in the spadework and know a lot more than most.

But logging the time spent on training puts good statistics behind you. That's quite an important professional booster, especially for smaller company owners and freelancers that are not in large organisations with structured training and development programs run by development professionals. And it's not just PR professionals. I reckon this could apply to any knowledge-led service providers.

I never thought I would say this as I struggle each year to add up my hours and file my CPD reports, but thank you CIPR CPD Excellence program and CIPR's Debbie Liddle for ensuring that, no matter how busy I am, I plan my training year in accord with my business goals and log my hours.

PHPR short-listed for a VIBES award

Awards are great for business. Many are free to enter and you get to call your business an award-winning enterprise for evermore. Entering is time-consuming, but the best offer expert judges' feedback, so that every entrant benefits.

We have won awards in the past, but I am particularly pleased to hear that PHPR is on the shortlist for the top Scottish environmental awards for business - VIBES. Are we the first Scottish PR agency to be shortlisted?

The VIBES application form process is designed to create a robust environmental policy, so being short-listed is really encouraging as we now know that we are on the right track.

Taking care of our environment is not just a PR exercise for us. We have reduced, re-used and recycled since 1986, so we must have spared a few trees by now. But we were short on measuring and documenting our evidence, as we found out by entering VIBES last year.

Like all the best awards, VIBES (it stands for Vision in Business for the Environment of Scotland) gives expert judge's feedback to every entrant. The idea of entering last year was to use the feedback to do better this year. It has worked.

The main focus is on providing supporting evidence and we addressed some of that in the application. We will be visited at our Edinburgh base and judged in September.

Fingers and toes crossed!

Insight from knock-backs

There's a great post by Adele Revella on her Buyer Persona blog here: http://ow.ly/gY5J. The piece shows how to delve behind sales knock-backs to gain great insight.

It reinforces what David Meerman Scott says in his seminal book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, about conversations with customers being crucial to doing good business.

I think Adele's post gives some great examples of how to do just that

I'm grateful to fellow PR Boutiques International member, Wendy Marx http://www.wendymarxpr.com for pointing me towards a link posted by Stephanie Tilton http://twitter.com/stephanietilton which led me to the Buyer Persona blog piece.

Blogging or lifestreaming for business?

There’s been a bit of a stushi over the last month with a key figure in the blogosphere, Steve Rubel, announcing he was quitting blogging for lifestreaming (posting snippets on micro media like Twitter).

I’m not ready to stop blogging, but I do love http://Twitter.com. I’ve found some of the more influential (rated by numbers of followers) tweeters on PR using http://wefollow.com and its tag search facility. You can use it to find good tweeters on any subject you want.

Interestingly, the tweeter with most followers (heading for 3 million at the time of writing) http://twitter.com/aplusk is not one of the many celebrity tweeters, but an entrepreneur. Although I guess he’s become a celebrity with that following.

By following the top PR tweeters, I’ve picked up great snippets of information with little effort as the 140 character posts are so succinct. And there’s a lot less spam on the direct messaging than my emails carry. That may change, but I can always turn direct messages off, because they give me control over the information I choose to receive.

Of course, many tweeters punctuate their nuggets of gold with trivia that only their best mate, their mum and partner would be interested in, and even that might be stretching it a bit. But you can stop following them, or hang in there for the odd nugget: the choice is yours. And the best build up a following by being interesting.

Stephen Fry’s tweets are often fascinating. But few can write like that. Or have the magnetic persona to rise above the trivial.

A persona largely forged by offline media.

It’s the interaction of the on and offline that is so powerful because we can make so much more impact by using different channels. Even when PR was largely offline, I wrote the DIY PR book (pub. Batsford 1998, now out of print but second hand copies are on Amazon if you want offline PR info) outlining 30 low cost ways to communicate, encouraging people to use a mix to meet personal information preferences.

The beauty of online media is that you can link them all up (services like tweetdeck (http://tweetdeck.com/beta/) allow you to manage posts to Twitter and Face-book and you can put your twit-stream up on your Face Book for example. Posterous (http://posterous.com/) enables you to post to all your favourite media sites in one go. Their site looks ridiculously cool and I’m starting to play with that.

I’m sure there will be lots of other interesting tools coming down the line and we’ll all be off onto the next big thing. But they are all tools allowing you to connect with people that are interested in your key topics and interests. Hopefully you are working at the things you love. That makes the publicity and communicating that passion very easy. Now you can interact with those people, if they want to, but more importantly, how they want to.

Steve Rubel is probably right in the long run. More people are accessing info via phones with relatively titchy screens so the trend is for succinct comms. Twitter is good training for that.

But meanwhile, there’s plenty of people searching on Google and landing on web sites and blogs because the extended content they carry lends itself to being searched. And most business tweets carry a link to a website of blog anyway.

I think of online media like a menu. A tweet is the starter to whet the appetite, full media sites like websites, blogs and Face Book are the main courses with lots of rich content on the plate. The proof of the pudding is the interaction you stimulate and whether you can translate that into sales for your business without putting people off with hard sell tactics.

That’s why I think PR and journalism skills will be in the online media mix long-term. Because we were trained to get stories past much fiercer gatekeepers than any online registration process. We were trained to make stories interesting enough for editors select for their audience and invest in the paper, ink, or bandwidth to carry the story. Nowadays anyone can be a publisher, but the acid test is whether they build an audience.

See you at http://twitter.com/PennyHaywood

Find Tweeters worth Following on Twitter with wefollow

It's a good idea to keep an eye out on social media when you're in PR. Quite often you can spot trends or potential problems. Early reaction to a trend can catch great media coverage. And early reaction to a problem brewing can often be enough to resolve the issue.

You don't have to spend a fortune on monitoring your business reputation online. Ferret out comment mentioning your business name or key search terms on websites, forums and in the news using Google plus their news alerts service.

But finding the most influential tweeters on Twitter was a bit of a hit or miss using apps like Twollow. Not any longer. Have just discovered wefollow on Twitter and I like it.

It is a directory and you can use it to find entrepreneurs, celebs etc.

But use it on a keyword search and it will dig out the people who are tweeting in your sector. The results come back ranking Tweeters numerically according to the number of followers they have attracted, which gives a fair indication of their influence.

And helps you see where you are in the pecking order too. You do have to register to be placed, so it's not totally comprehensive, but I suspect most people wanting to be seen as a heavyweight in a subject area will be seriously tempted to sign up once their following builds.

No laws for free information

If you want all your news free of charge, can you retain quality news outlets?

Several UK media have seen their offline circulation plummet as more people access content online. But despite higher online readerships, many media are reportedly struggling to make money online as content users blank out a lot of online advertising. And that means shedding writers and relying more on standard fare from news agencies and press hand-outs from PR.


Does it matter?


Well, yes, if you want to generate high quality media coverage sitting alongside material people actually want to read. Material that packs the editorial endorsement factor that is a powerfull recommendation of your company to thousands and sometimes millions of others.

Yes, it matters if you want an editorial endorsement that you can wear like a badge of honour for the next squillion years: "as seen on BBC TV" or "as seen in the FT", with links to the coverage or a hotlink to a quote from it.

Yes it matters if you want a media recommendation your business can be proud of, because someone has to pay editorial staff to create the content that you are proud to be seen in, and edit the publication to maintain its reputation for credibility.

A media recommendation where anyone can get a look in is no recommendation at all, regardless of whether the news source is on or offline.

So it matters when an influential author like Chris Anderson writes a new book, called “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” arguing that there is a law dictating that anything made of ideas, like information, gravitates inexorably to being free - that it 'wants' to be free. And he doesn't mean unfettered free speech. He is talking about free of charge.

Now free of charge, when it comes to information usually translates into a vastly reduced budget to invest in good writers. You would think that PR people would welcome that as it might open doors for news releases to be used almost wholesale. But I know I am not alone in being more concerned with the bigger picture. Sure, getting news releases taken up is one thing, but a swing towards accepting unrestricted content reduces the impact of coverage on the site to the point that it would be worthless from a PR point of view.

Anderson is editor of the popular Wired magazine and author of the best-selling book, The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. In that book he argued the Internet offers everything to everyone, and trailing in the wake of success, a tail of endless near misses can now have a market. That never convinced me entirely. I can see that there is more of a long tail than before the Internet, when physical shop space limited the choice on offer. But I've always thought that assuming an upward graph line will continue forever is just that: an assumption. So I couldn't see how the tail of unlimited demand would continue indefinitely. Surely the near misses would start drifting further off the mark and become irrelevant?

In today's issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews Anderson's latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price and finds similar holes in the idea that a tendency towards free information is the only force affecting pricing online. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all

Gladwell is no stranger to big ideas. He was named one of the top 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2005 and his books: The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers have all been international best-sellers.


Gladwell takes Anderson's examples of how we all rush to free services, so they cost a bomb to handle the demand, like YouTube, forcing owners to retreat from the abundance thinking model that propels free information. Universal free information is often of such questionable quality that even YouTube pays for professional content provide from TV stations and film production companies for quality content to keep users happy and deliver audiences for advertisers.

Gladwell says there are plenty of models where information is running in just the opposite direction from free - in drug companies, for example where the high costs of trialling to meet regulations need to be recouped. Or where both models are used: the New York Times puts its content up free on the Web site, but the Wall Street Journal has over a million subscribers paying for online access to its content.

Gladwell predicts Apple could make more from selling iPhone downloads than from the iPhone itself and may one day offer the phone free to boost download sales (yes, please!). Or give away downloads to boost the phone sales. Or carry on charging for both.

He concludes that the only law is that "the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws".

And that's good news for those who want quality journalism to continue, because quality comes from an editing process to sort the wheat from the chaff. Plus sources to provide information and run around getting pictures set up and arranging interviews (PR people). Plus someone to write it up and place the information in context - and that understanding of context comes with in-depth experience in a sector.

All that means skilled intelligent human intervention - and with humans come minor factors like a liking for food, a need for clothes and a roof over their heads, plus obligations to care for family members and spending money.

In short: great media needs to be paid for somewhere down the line.

And great media is an inspiration and a challenge to PR people to come up with issues-led ideas and spokespeople that can stretch to fit the news agenda, add to the debate and showcase their company's talent. And when they do, they get all the conferred credit that editorial endorsement can bring.

Used well (and I've seen an astonishing number of businesses fail to capitalise on good quality coverage of their businesses) good editorial endorsement is like a prestigious award and can be referred to almost indefinitely thereafter.

Business Ethics & PR

Inspired by an article in last year's Harvard Business Review that said: "True professions have codes of conduct," written by Harvard Business School professors Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, the students researched and created their own code.

Around half of the 886 graduating Harvard Business School students signed up, pledging to "manage the companies they work for in a way that safeguards not just the interests of stakeholders, but of fellow employees, customers, and the larger society in which they function".

Part of me wonders what the other half will do with their business lives.

But if you are looking to add inspiring moral vision to your enterprise, you could do worse than to base your business ethics on a version of their code of conduct here: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2009/06.11/hbsoath.html.

But if you do establish a code, you need to ensure you adhere to it, from top to bottom within the company with regular examples of walking the talk. If you don't it will backfire badly as an obvious load of claptrap, damaging your reputation.

There's only so much that PR can sort out, even with the best PR team on the case.

There's no getting round the fact that it takes time to heal a damaged reputation.

The best PR practice of all is to walk whatever talk you choose, and to operate fairly.

Google's forthcoming Wave

Google's forthcoming Wave looks like email meets instant messaging, only better (imo). I think it will be rather handy for working on collaborative projects - and in PR, what project isn't collaborative these days? Good for fine-tuning press releases, articles, online PR materials, web copy and other marcoms text.

Wave is due to be launched later this year.

As MicroSoft tries to move into Google territory with Bing and Google is attempting to venture into MicroSoft territory with Wave, the first video below provides an overview of both Bing and Wave. It also demonstrates the added value that good media analysis brings to a subject, if you compare it to the second video below, but that was a preview for developers, and it does contain a useful demo of Wave.









(you can skip the long preamble - the actual Wave demo starts c6 mins 30 secs into the video).


I've already blogged on Bing. With Wave I like the almost instant transmission of characters as people type in replies, so you can be formulating your response and not staring at a "X is typing" message. I don't think speaking through a keyboard can ever be truly like a conversation, as Google claims, but I think it does look more conversational than instant messaging.

There's a very neat trick where you can take some bits of the online conversation to selected recipients and the ones missed out don't know. And easily add others in later - there's a neat playback facility the newcomers can use to replay the wave construction sequence to make sense of it unfolding.

Nice one Google.

Using WordTracker to boost your online sales

It's great when you get your hands on something that is genuinely useful, so I'm grateful to Ian Burgess at http://www.linked-it.co.uk/ for pointing me towards http://www.WordTracker.com.

He explained keyword research in Google Analytics is based on past performance, whereas WordTracker is predictive and they are an excellent way to find extra profit avenues from your search terms.

A new version of WordTracker is coming down the line that looks very useful if this beta video is anything to go by:

Wordtracker New Tool Tutorial from Wordtracker on Vimeo.

If most of your online business comes from searches involving just 20 keywords, finding another 20 good keywords would give you a decent hike in new business. WordTracker provides initial free tools and tutorials to turbo-charge your keywords research, with enhanced paid-for offerings.

As WordTracker's free tutorial says: "you can't get enough good keywords", and they open up avenues to unexplored profits, and provide useful information. The words I've looked at to date have shown unexpected differences in popularity. I'll be reviewing my content. Can I encourage you to take a look if you're not using WordTracker already?

And there's good marketing and management advice to be had at http://www.linked-it.co.uk.

Touches that sell online

The PR, sales and marketing touches that nudge a prospective customer into making a buy decision go something like this, although at any stage, a particularly strong recommendation from a trusted person or a respected media source (on or offline) can accelerate the process dramatically. As can 'clicking' with someone who has already got a well-developed need for your product or services and has already done a fair amount of research.

A potential customer stumbles across your website in an unrelated search (touch 1) and think 'that's interesting'. They may even save your URL in their favourites. Then forget all about it until a blog they're following recommends you (touch 2), but the phone rings and they get side-tracked.

Then they notice a piece about you in a trade or consumer publication (on or offline). Or on Face-book, Twitter etc (touch 3). Since this is the third time your name has come up, they start to remember you (the memory likes to work in groups of three, which is why triads are so popular and memorable in prose and speeches).

So they note down the name and look up your website (touch 4).

If the page they land on takes them to something interesting (instead of a wait for flash content to download) and the interesting content contains a clear and easy call to action on the page, you may well accelerate them on to the next touch.

Activating the call to action does what it says on the tin. A call to action is an exhortation to take action accompanied by an easy way to initiate the next step in the sales dialogue: click on an email address for further info, or a Skype call button etc) (touch 5). If they respond to a call to action, they have seriously entered your sales pipeline and are now a qualified or 'hot' sales prospect and should be tagged as such in your database or CRM program (such as www.salesforce.com).

You respond to their enquiry with further marketing information (touch 6). Plus an invitation to another call to action (touch 7) - maybe a special offer, a white paper to download, a newsletter to subscribe to (collecting their info into a permission-based database if you didn't capture it at touch 6).

Now you have their permission (always with an easy unsubscribe route and backed by a good data privacy management system following good data protection practices - see http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk) you can embark on a relationship-building series of exchanges (touches 8 onwards).

Depending on the nature of your product or service and your communications strategy and company ethos, your company's marketing and sales materials will flow alongside these relationship building exchanges, via automated responses, information provision and further calls to action and website interactions into negotiated sales. Larger sales and service contracts may have to be reeled in via a tendering system or individual sales exchanges on the telephone, presentations at meetings, or via mail or email.

Looking backwards through this process, are there any points where your PR, sales and marketing could be strengthened? Are there any points where the sales process ceases to flow? Points where you lose them?

See the next post to make the most of your sales enquiries.

Touches for Sales

Sales people talk about the number of 'touches' it takes to make a sale: 'touches' being the number of nudges towards a sale that a prospective customer needs before they finally choose to buy from you. Obviously there are less touches on the way to picking up a chocolate bar with the milk, although branding and advertising touches may well influence the 'impulse' decision.

Even with seemingly simple online purchases, it can take 9 or more touches to make a successful sale. The Internet makes it much easier to deliver touches at the point the customer is making the buying decision.

But the multiplicity of touches can be very confusing if you are seeking to nail just one magic sales bullet that lands customers. Especially if you have been diligently asking new clients how they heard about you, as recommended in most business marketing guides. At best, a new customer will remember the last touch towards their purchase decision. That last touch is often just the tip of the whole publicity chain.

So what touches work? It will vary from business to business (and individual buyers) across the mix of sales, marketing and PR touches that collectively topple the decision over the sales edge into a purchase. Usually personal recommendations, enough media coverage to create buzz on and offline, good information on and offline, high visibility and plenty of new things happening, plus good connections will boost a business. The business will also need to offer an effective and available product or service at a reasonable price.

To find out more about why people buy from you, you will need to develop a relationship with customers to discover more of the marketing mix that actually drove them to you. And even then, they won't remember some of the process!

It makes sense therefore to cover plenty of ways to 'touch' your potential customers in your marketing strategy. Track what seems to be making a difference by asking new clients and by looking at the sales figures. There are hundreds of marketing, PR and sales tactics that can be deployed. Generally a mix of PR, sales and marketing tactics together deliver up to 50% more sales than concentrating individually on just PR, or on sales, or marketing on its own.

The choice of individual publicity tactics is usually a trade-off: budget v time, proven tactics v new opportunities (but if your competitors are not using a tactic, there's often a good reason for that).

Most powerful for most businesses is trusted word of mouth recommendations (on or offline) and you can enhance that with referrals incentives. But you usually need to add good marketing materials (including a good website that performs well in searches) plus social media interaction and good sales processes to reel new customers in.

Media recommendation is also very powerful as it carries the editorial endorsement factor ('as seen on TV', or 'marvellous' says The Times) and the media reach many thousands of people. Referring to that media coverage on your on and offline sales and marketing materials is important to monetise that editorial endorsement and ensure it carries on working for you.

We advise clients to run 10 on and offline sales, marketing and PR techniques at any one time, testing every 3-6 months the effects of dropping one and trying another.

See how it all works together in my next blog.

Barriers to online sales

No point in creating hurdles customers have to leap before they can buy from you online.

I stumbled across a surprising hurdle when I was writing case studies for an online payment processor. One interviewee mentioned they had a 24% hike in sales on the day they switched from one payment service provider to another, due to the decrease in 'failed carts': in this case, abandoned transactions during the payment part of the sale.

I asked the other 3 interviewees if they had seen a similar difference. None of them had been tracking failed carts during the change over, but they took a look. Sure enough, they all reported over 20% growth in sales on the day they switched online payment service provider, but had attributed the growth to other factors. The increase in sales persisted thereafter.

I was writing these case studies a while ago, so individual payment services providers may have changed the way they work now. My interviewees reckoned the uplift was due to the new payment service provider making it much easier for the customer to pay online. They didn't have to go through a cumbersome registration process. One less barrier to the sale. And a 20% hike in sales without any additional sales, marketing or PR? Now that's a potential added bonus that's well worth checking out!

Looks like the cost of services is not necessarily the only factor when choosing an online payment service provider. In this case, it was one of the most expensive providers that created the biggest barrier to sales, making it an even less attractive proposition.

But it's not just the payment process on your site, it's the site as a whole. Are there any online barriers you could remove for your customers to make your website more sales effective?

It's very hard to see your website the way a first-time user sees it. Can you test your site using people with no familiarity with your website? Friends and family? Or run a short test as part of a recruitment selection process? Record testers talking through their actions and feelings as they work their way through a series of tasks on your website to collect information and make a purchase. That could produce very useful information on both the potential recruits and your website.

Some usability experts reckon they get over 100% uplift in sales by streamlining pages and placing clear and appropriate calls to action on key landing web pages. They test variants again and again against the free Google analytics service. Are there any tweaks you can make to test, refine and fine-tune the sales results from your site?

As my favourite NLP master and trainer (Erick Rainey) says: "There is no failure, only feedback!"

Here's to your ecommerce success.

The Twitterati

Twitter is like Marmite. Clients and colleagues either love or loathe it. Those that hate it inevitably say something like: who cares what you had for breakfast?

And they’re right. Validating your lonely existence is not what Twitter is about. There’s plenty of rubbish on the internet, but we don’t dismiss it out of hand just because of that.

We are seeing more enquiries about how to use Twitter effectively. And no wonder clients are interested. ComScore shows Twitter has gone from under 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site world-wide in February, to 32 million in April, up from 19 million in March 2009. Even more impressively, that score only includes website visitors, not the millions who access it via phones.

But if it’s the early adopters of funky new social media you are after, or if you think Twitter is the cool place to be, think again! It’s months since I read in the ad magazine, Revolution that the super cool had already abandoned Twitter when the corporate suits moved in for a clutch of other social media platforms.

It keeps happening. Remember all the fuss about Friends Reunited and MySpace? A lot of money piled in and they’re not exactly flavour of the month now.

There are loads of new social media platforms all hoping to be the next big thing.
That doesn’t stop companies engaging with the Twitterati, as long as they do engage and don’t just sell: that goes down like a lead balloon in any social media format.
But it’s wise to stay flexible and avoid putting all the eggs in one social media basket.

There are plenty of next big things brewing.