Early last week I received an email invitation that began, “I noticed your profile on Linked-In and thought you would like to attend our Guildford Link-Up networking event on 12^th October”. I read through the attendee list and was surprised to see that I didn’t recognise a single name on the list. Having attended many local networking events over the past four years, organised by #DigitalSurrey, 4N and Business Link, I’d started to see the same names cropping up on the attendee lists. So it was interesting to see that the organisers, Only Marketing, had built a completely new community. I was also impressed to see attendees from major local companies: Autodesk and BAE Systems, so I decided to go along.

Another major attraction to the #Guild-LU event was the presentation on Google+ from Thomas Power, social media expert, Chairman of eCademy and author of “Networking for Life” and “A Friend in every City”.

I was invited to join Google + by Kevin Townsend, a philosopher, security blogger and journalist. Thus far, my involvement has been limited to adding fellow high tech PR professionals and journalists to my circles and +1 ing articles and blogs that I have enjoyed reading, so I was interested in hearing Thomas Power’s views on Google’s new rival to Facebook.

Despite being billed as a Google + presentation, the point that resonated with everyone I spoke to at Guild-LU was Power’s comment that recruiters in the US are now using Klout scores to decide whether or not to interview people for marketing roles. Apparently, if a candidate’s Klout score is below 50, they won’t be interviewed because they are not using social networks sufficiently to be able to influence an audience. He pointed to the fact that Lady GaGa has a Klout score of 92 and that each of her Tweets goes out to 14 million followers, explaining that this means that she could charge $1million per Tweet.

In his YouTube channel Power talks about the key benefit of gaining a larger social network, citing that “1 in 100 people in your network will bring you business, 1 in 1000 will bring you good business and 1 in 10,000 will bring you useful information or mentoring”. He talks about networks improving the flow of information and opportunities to oneself, so the larger your network, the greater the chances of getting the right information and opportunities for your business. Power stated, that, based on social networks having a seven year cycle, both Twitter and Klout would reach critical mass in 2015.

From my own experience, this influx of information and opportunities has certainly proved to be Twitter’s biggest benefit. By following the journalists who write the most on my clients’ sectors, I can discover which news stories are breaking, trending and worth following and quickly pick up on the key issues facing our industry. But it’s not all business, Twitter also allows me to enjoy banter with friends and former colleagues as though we’re still sharing the same office. As Thomas Power states, the power of social media is about sharing knowledge and ideas.  I would add that social media also allows us to create a dream team of our favourite colleagues so that we can get the right information, be more productive and have fun in the process.

Big thanks to Jane Sherwood for my invitation to Guild-LU. I’m already looking forward to the next event.

I was excited to see that contemporary artist, Julian Opie, is exhibiting a portrait of British inventor, Sir James Dyson, at London’s National Portrait Gallery. My favourite inventor portrayed by one of my favourite artists.

The news made me think about what it is that I love about Opie’s work.

Opie is a master of reductionism, creating portraits that crystallise his subjects’ defining features.

What Opie achieves visually is analogous to good copywriting.

PR copywriters must encapsulate a story within the first paragraph of a press release. With the increasing importance of SEO, we must also incorporate keywords into attention grabbing copy. There is much to achieve with few words.

Similarly, when we are speaking to journalists we have just a few seconds to tell our client’s story and engage their interest. As a result, a honing process takes place to discover the most striking aspects of our client’s story.

What will people remember and recognise about the company? What appeals most to different audiences?

Logo designers work to the same objective: conveying a company’s mission and personality through graphics. For example, the logo for logistics company, FedEx, has a small white arrow making up the space between the letters E and X, conveying a sense of momentum.

Too often I see press releases that overstate their case, confuse their audience and lose the key message. We do well to apply an Opian discipline and decide what needs to be retained within our copywriting so that our client’s distinguishing features stand out.

 

 

A number publications have reported on the finding that poor spelling affects the behaviour of Website visitors.

The source of the report was Charles Duncombe, an online entrepreneur, who found that revenue per visitor was heavily impacted by a misspelling on one of his ecommerce sites. Revenue per visitor doubled after he inspected his site and corrected a mistake in the web copy.

The report even stated that website visitors may be deterred because they associate incorrect English with online fraud. Therefore, they are wary of sites with misspellings because they could be phishing sites.

This is not just an issue for web copy, copywriters in the offline arena also exhibit errors in their grammar and spelling. I often spot mistakes in the press releases I read on newswires.

Common mistakes include:

• Using “it’s” instead of “its”
• Using “their” instead of “there”
• Using “you’re” instead of “your”
• Using “to” when the writer means “too”
• Writing “till” rather than “’til” (an abbreviation of “until”)
• Writing the possessive, “radio’s”, instead of the plural, “radios”
• Writing about a company (singular) and then writing about “their” profits, instead of “its” profits (for example writing “Tightsplease have seen sales rocket” instead of correctly writing, “Tightsplease has seen sales rocket”)
• Confusing “effect” and “affect”

I am eternally grateful to my secondary school teacher who spent a whole double lesson drumming the “it’s / its” rules into us. I can still hear her pounding the blackboard as she repeated, “It’s can only be used if you meant to write ‘it is’. If you have something belonging to it it’s its”.

This issue was reinforced yesterday when I spoke to an English language teacher. She claimed that she was the only person in her department who knew how to use “affect” and “effect” correctly. If this is true, then it explains why these words are so often used incorrectly on company websites and even in copy produced by journalists and public relations professionals.

The way I explain this to colleagues is that the word “effect” is a noun. “Affect” is a verb, or a “doing word” as my primary school teacher used to say. The way I explain it to my spouse it to say, “Affect is what ‘appens to something. Effect is the end result”.

For example, poor spelling affects web visitors’ perceptions of a company, with the effect that ecommerce businesses have fewer sales from their sites.

What are your own spelling bugbears? Share them here.

 

UPDATE – Yesterday was #ApostropheDay with some howlers supplied on Twitter and Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/50294452@N03/5989953281/ It’s not just poor spelling on  websites that turns people off, misuse of apostrophes in traditional media can be just as irritating to your audience.

During the TT races on the Isle of Mann, my personal race favourite, Guy Martin, gave an extremely agitated interview at the end of the second practice race. He complained that a red flag had been waved by a marshal, causing him and the rider behind to slow down. Martin claimed that this distraction had disrupted his riding for the next three miles, costing him valuable seconds in the race.

What interested me was the precision with which he calculated the amount of time it took to regain focus, multiplied by the speed at which he was travelling (128 miles an hour). The notion of distraction to recovery time really interests me.

Yesterday I set myself numerous tasks, hardly any of which were completed. Why? Because I responded to several unanticipated email requests that swallowed up most of my day.

In his Business Computing World blog: “7 Tips for increasing personal productivity” David Lavenda, VP of social email company harmon.ierefers to the hour a day lost by US employees through office distractions.  The vast majority of these distractions come from email and social media and the rest from physical and phone interruptions. Rini van Solingen calculated that if a person is engaged in a creative task and he is interrupted by a phone call, it takes 15 to 20 minutes for him to recover his train of thought.

Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, researched the impact of email on our ability to focus on tasks in progress. He estimated that, in a worst case scenario, an employee might have just three and half minutes between each email interruption, leading to increased fatigue and reduced productivity. He found that it requires a person an average of 64 seconds to recover his or her focus after being interrupted by email. This equates to more than eight hours a week spent recovering our trains of thought and doesn’t include other communication channels such as instant messaging, texts and social media.

The harmon.ie survey estimated that these interruptions are costing businesses $10,375, per employee per annum, based on the average employee earning $30 an hour.

It’s not just businesses that are suffering. BBC Breakfast this morning interviewed a family who use their Smartphones at the breakfast table. A holiday snapshot featured them in a café looking at their own Smartphones rather than engaging with each other. Unsurprisingly, the mother commented that it was detrimental to family communications. This interview coincided with the OFCOM report that one in three UK adults now owns a smartphone, with 89 per cent of the survey sample reporting that they used mobile email. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14397101

Dr Jackson proposes that we look at emails in batches, while David Lavenda suggests that we set firm boundaries on when we are on and offline. In this way we can give different tasks and people the focus that they deserve.

As someone who’s checked into work emails from a tent at the foot of Helvellyn and subsequently drafted and emailed an article from a car travelling up the A9 to Nairn, I’m certainly not decrying mobile email. It is a fantastic technology that has liberated me from the nine to five of office life, as well as the miseries of commuting. I’m simply acknowledging that sometimes we need to ignore the red flags, step away from the machine and refocus on our priorities for the day. What are your favourite suggestions for dealing with email distractions?

It being officially summertime in the UK, I took the opportunity to hang out some washing between the rain storms. Among the various items was my favourite Endura cycling top. I smiled as I pegged it out. It cheers me up.  Why is it my favourite? Let me list the ways:

It is beautifully made from wicking material, keeping me cool and dry on long hot rides.

It fits perfectly and allows me to enter the pub after a ride, feeling that I’ve made at least a bit of an effort to meet the smart casual dress code (if you ignore the mud splatters).

It doesn’t need ironing (a big winner in my book).

It looks like a normal top, but it lights up in car headlights.

It has a pink splash on the logo to give it that, you know, feminine touch.

It has a zip pocket on the back so that I can carry something while I’m riding (even if I haven’t figured out what to put in it yet).

Now all of these features could be found on the majority of other cycling tops, but this one has a chamois leather triangle, carefully sewn into the inside edge, to allow me to wipe mud splats off my riding glasses so that I can see the trail clearly. This is why it cheers me up, the thought and detail that went into making it somehow delights me every time I put it on. It’s the same thrill that drivers get when they inspect all of the “toys” in their new car.

Why am I writing about a T-shirt on a PR blog? Because most of the points I’ve listed are functional aspects that are common to most cycling tops. However, the manufacturers have added that final detail that persuaded me to buy their product and continue to enjoy using it. Importantly, this enjoyment of the product encourages me to recommend it to other cyclists.

It’s a T-shirt. Hundreds of manufacturers make T-shirts. This one stood out.

So how does this relate to PR?

When representing companies that are operating in a crowded market, it is vital to work with them to identify the differentiators that delight their customers and encourage them to become advocates of the product, service and brand.  When we speak to journalists about companies offering commodity products they will often say, “So what’s your angle?”, or simply, “So what?”

An important part of any successful PR campaign is to discover and promote the details that make a particular company, service or product stand out from the crowd. So what’s yours?

Last week I enjoyed a short break in Scotland with my husband and his friend. On the final evening, 7^th June, we sat by the fire (well it was Scotland) and the conversation turned to how much office communication had changed since we’d started our respective careers. Our friend, an IT manager, complained about the amount of server space eaten up by people (like me) who file emails away in sub folders for future reference.  My husband bemoaned the fact that, since the advent of email, people no longer pick up the phone to discuss things.

To prove his point, he referred to an incident at my former agency, involving a colleague who was making travel arrangements for an international conference. He’d emailed a journalist, apologising that he had booked him onto a very early flight and explaining that all the later flights were already fully booked. The journalist responded with an email: “Hey, don’t bite the hand that feeds”.

This email sent our manager into a mild panic and my colleague was set to work ringing around all the travel agencies to ensure that there were no other flights that would allow the journalist to get up at a more sociable hour. Eventually, after my colleague had exhausted all other travel options, I called the journalist to plead forgiveness. He responded with surprise saying: “Hey there was really no need to go to so much trouble, I’m just happy that you’ve sorted out my flight and hotel for the conference. Like I said, I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds”.

The day after our fireside conversation, I saw an interesting post by information security journalist, Davey Winder, on DaniWeb in which he pointed out that 8^th June 2011 marked the fortieth anniversary of the first email being sent by its inventor, Ray Tomlinson.

Mr Winder cited a statistic, from Sky Broadband, that 51 per cent of British workers would rather email a colleague than speak to them on the phone. In fact we should have foreseen this, since Ray Tomlinson’s first message was emailed between two adjacent computers.

So do you prefer email, or are you one of the 24 per cent of British workers who would rather pick up the phone?

This has been a landmark week for social media and privacy.

On Monday morning, 9^th May, Jemima Khan Tweeted: “I’ve woken up trapped in a bloody nightmare,” after allegations appeared on Twitter 8^th May that she had taken out a super-injunction to prevent certain pictures being published, or even alluded to. In spite of the fact that UK newspapers were prohibited from even referring to the case, the allegations were widely reTweeted and Ms Khan was quick to use Twitter to refute them.

As testament to the old William Randolph Hearst phrase, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”, with just six Tweets to his or her name, the person who made the allegation against Ms Khan had accrued 112,627 followers by 13^th May.

While the 8^th May Tweet was clearly in breach of UK law, as a US company, Twitter does not have to comply with UK super-injunctions. Legal experts have commented that Twitter would have a strong defence under US law and the right to freedom of speech. This throws up a number of legal and privacy issues, the chief one being whether country specific gagging orders can be upheld in the age of global social media and citizen journalism.

The UK Parliament is now set to debate whether to update the privacy laws enshrined in the Human Rights Act of 1998, so that social media use is covered by the same rules governing print journalism. While some commentators predict that this will lead to censorship of Twitter, its founder Biz Stone has stated that he will not remove controversial Tweets.

A number of commentators have discussed this erosion of privacy by social media, with a particularly good post by Chris Moffatt eConsultancy.

Just as the Khan/Twitter clamour died down, another social media v. privacy story broke. On Thursday 12^th May, Facebook admitted that it had hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to raise awareness of alleged privacy infringements and data scraping by Google’s Social Circles application. The admission came after a PR executive had approached online privacy expert, blogger and former Federal Trade Commission researcher, Christopher Soghoian, to interest him in writing an opinion piece on the alleged privacy infringements. Soghoian asked the PR executive which company he was representing. When the PR executive declined to name his client, Mr Soghoian published the email exchange online and the PR company was accused of running a smear campaign. The campaign was traced back to the client and the story attracted negative publicity for both client and PR.

Looking over the events of this week it would appear that in the social media age, the discipline is to balance old fashioned ethics with new media to ensure that what goes up does not bring you down.

UPDATE: Tim Jowitt has reported in eWeek that the British High Court has issued an injunction specifically prohibiting Twitter and Facebook users from publishing damaging information online that could reveal someone’s identity in a particularly sensitive case http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/facebook-and-twitter-hit-with-injunction-ruling-29234

Last week I mulled over whether the Nokia CEO memo was actually leaked, or whether it was a very carefully planned media release, given exclusively to Engadget, to generate blanket coverage in the lead up to Nokia’s Capital Markets Day on 11th February.

This morning on Twitter, the Guardian’s Technology editor, Charles Arthur, confirmed my scepticism with the following Tweets http://twitter.com/#!/charlesarthur:

“My analysis of the Nokia-Engadget love-in: Nokia wants higher visibility in US. Simple as.”

PRs have always offered exclusive stories to high profile publications that serve their target audience. It would appear that the leaked Nokia CEO memo was simply an example of  a great story being given to the publication that would reach US gadget lovers, to proclaim Nokia’s new direction to its target US market.

What are your views?

Today Nokia announced its partnership with Microsoft. The Symbian operating system will be dropped in favour of Windows 7. Now commentators are describing the smartphone market as a three horse race between Microsoft, Apple and Google (in spite of the obvious presence of RIM and HP).

The #burning platform memo, which was “leaked” to Engadget earlier this week , created the perfect runway to this momentous announcement. It will go down in history as one of the most important examples of leadership in crisis.

After reading Stephen Elop’s memo, the whole industry turned its focus on Nokia’s Capital Markets Day, with analysts worldwide predicting a tie up with Google or Microsoft.

In the information security industry a leaked memo from a CEO would be viewed as a combined failure of people, policies and technology. The appearance of Elop’s internal communication on Engadget was more akin to an expertly executed pre-pitch,  perfectly timed to gain maximum awareness of today’s revelations.

Nokia and Microsoft gained blanket coverage of its partnership announcement.

The full burning platforms memo can be read here:

8^th February 6.15pm. Chris Zeigler post on Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops-in-brutally-honest-burnin/

This month’s issue of Mountain Bike Rider, MBR, contains an inspiring article on Hope, a British manufacturer of mountain bike components. The article profiles the two founders, Ian Weatherill and Simon Sharp, who began their careers as Rolls Royce apprentices and went on to found a recession-proof business in Yorkshire that is being hailed as potential model for the future of British manufacturing.

The founders’ business model is simple: to make products that people want and sell them for a little bit more than they cost to make.  A really interesting point is that Weatherill believes that Hope could make a high end mountain bike in the UK, selling for £2,000, that would compete with mountain bikes produced in Taiwan that sell for £8,000.

Contrast this with this week’s leaked “Burning Platforms” memo, sent by Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop. The memo describes the current “crisis” faced by the handset manufacturer, which has lost market share at both ends of the market: its high end smartphones are not competing with Android and Apple devices and the cheaper handsets are rapidly losing market share in emerging markets to Asian manufacturers such as ZTE and Huawei. Andrew Orlowski commented in the Register, “Every manufacturer faces similar problems when a market becomes a commodity game: the low-cost manufacturers ultimately win. So manufacturers must seek to add value….”

Which brings me back to Hope. It certainly adds value. There is a definite buzz around this company . Customers rave about the YouTube advice videos produced by the Hope team, to guide enthusiasts  and bike builders that are fitting Hope components to their dream machines.

Talk to bike shop owners and they get genuinely excited about what Hope is producing. Over and over again I have heard people in the trade provide endorsements such as, “If you call them up they will give you great advice on your bike build”, or, “We know that we can deliver this to you on time, because we’ll put our order in to Hope this week and they’ll just make it, there’s no waiting around”… “Their wheel making machine once broke down and they pulled in everyone in the company who had any experience of making wheels and completed the orders by hand. ”

The MBR article was a superb piece of coverage for a twenty two year old business that conveyed the personality of the company and reflected the values of the founders. The impact of the printed article has been increased because people are discussing it in pubs, cafes and bike shops and are verbally endorsing what has been written about the company.

When you buy a Hope component, you’re get the feeling that you’re not just fitting a piece of precision engineered metal to your bike: you’re endorsing an ethos and you’re supporting British industry. To draw another comparison with the consumer electronics industry, Apple has successfully achieved this with its phones, MP3 players and tablets: you’re not just purchasing a product, you’re buying into a lifestyle.

Hope  genuinely engages with its customers and continues to deliver excellent, innovative products, while also adding real value to the buying experience. People speak well of the company because it treats them well and produces great products and that is the basis of good public relations.