PR Studies

Politics: personality or policy?

We've published an Election Special at Behind the Spin - with thanks to Darren Lilleker of Bournemouth University who commissioned and vetted the articles.

In overview, the articles belong in one of two camps. Those written by professionals are concerned with the process of elections: campaigning tactics and issues of electoral reform. Those written by students are primarily interested in the personalities of political leaders.

It's hard for someone of my generation (my first election as a voter brought Margaret Thatcher to power) to view politics from the perspective of the post-Cold War generation. Left-right no longer has any meaning, and there are few clear ideological lines between the main parties. What's a young voter to do? Turn off politics and turn on The X Factor.

If there's no longer meaning in left-right, here are some issues that should cause young voters to be concerned or angry:

• The previous generation have borrowed and spent to such an extent that they will most probably be poorer than their parents. (This could even be the first generation in seven centuries to be poorer, less healthy and to die younger than their parents). Money matters. The coming election will be about finances more than anything else.
• Previous generations have been taking natural resources from the planet with no thought for the future. There will be a price to pay. The environment is a major issue that sits outside conventional left-right party politics.

I'm still accepting articles for publication on politics, political communication or the other issues we cover. Please keep sending them to editor@behindthespin.com

A brief history of briefing

It's the public relations story of the past week, the rather sinister power of PR to damage and undermine through the process known as briefing. Even experienced hands are surprised by the viciousness as we saw from an interview with the Chancellor Alistair Darling and from the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley. As for less experienced people, Christine Pratt of the National Bullying Helpline must be regretting her tangle with the 'forces of hell'. She's enlisted the help of Max Clifford so she knows she's in a fight.

In an ideal world of transparency, there would be no unattributable briefings - and no 'off the record' comments. But we don't live in that perfect world. Briefings - often resulting in coy comments such as 'sources close to the Prime Minister confirmed' - are a form of institutionalised insider gossip that suits the media and PR people close to power.

In a world where everything is on the record, attributable and recorded, people would speak much less freely. The media would lose its privileged access to insight and information. PR people would become pointless intermediaries and the public would be less well informed. Is a lack of truth-telling preferable to truthfulness constrained by, say, anonymity? Few would argue that it is.

What principles can we apply to guide us through these murky waters? Remember that one guiding principle - to tell the truth - often conflicts with another principle - to respect client confidentiality.

• Assume that everything can be made public. In a world of small, ubiquitous cameras and recording devices, we shouldn't assume that our comments will stay private. A private email can easily become very public.
• Do you have good grounds for keeping something private? The most obvious example is national security (the 'lives are at risk' argument). But there are others: commercial negotiations could be scuppered if made public, so jobs could be at risk. There are also competitive reasons not to disclose future product developments. It may even be illegal to use privileged information as you could be convicted of insider dealing.
• Non-attributable: do you have a good reason for keeping your name out of the story beyond saving your job and reputation? The answer is when you believe it's in the public interest for information to be made known, but the information would be compromised if its source were made public.
• What is 'off-the-record'? The simple answer is that nothing is off the record, so don't use it. But there are occasions when there are conflicting principles. We saw this with the MMR vaccine when former Prime Minister Tony Blair refused to say whether his youngest child had received the vaccine so as not to breach the child's right to privacy. Yet this risked undermining the government's case that the vaccine was safe, so the decision was taken to brief senior journalists on an 'off the record' basis. A much better phrase is 'background briefing': is it important to explain the wider context that requires potential breaches of confidentiality or national security? Is the briefing the lesser of two evils?

It's about ideas, not events

News used to be the currency of public relations. Event-led stories were our speciality (pseudo-events if you like). But it's a dying craft and most practitioners need to move on (and advise their clients accordingly). Here's why news is limited:

• It has a short shelf-life that's becoming ever shorter in the social media age
• Neither PR people nor journalists have a monopoly on news any more
• There are fewer publications taking PR news
• The conventional press release is treated like spam

If news is no longer our currency, what should be? How about ideas, or content? Note how Edelman has appointed a senior BBC executive as 'chief content officer'.

Content, conversations, communities are what it should be about (Jim Macnamara goes further and lists 8 Cs that count in the current media landscape).

Or to put it a different way, don't be so fixated on getting your news event mentioned that you pass up the opportunity to contribute an ideas-based feature to the same publication.

It's about ideas, not events. Adapt or die!

It's not about people, it's about conversations

Here's the crucial way Twitter differs from other forms of communication (post, email, phone, face to face). With the other forms, you first find the person you want to communicate with, then direct the words at them.

With Twitter, the people are almost impossible to find first. They use aliases, they compress their real names, even the best directories are hit and miss. Besides, they're probably not paying attention. As for lists, they don't list people - they simply list fragments of conversations.

So, with Twitter, you can't find the people first. You have instead to find the conversations either through targeted searches or through a laborious process of following and listening. Once you find the conversation, you're likely to find people interested in it.

If you think this sounds familiar, it echoes the 'situational theory of publics' articulated by James Grunig a quarter of a century ago. Publics form around issues; people gather around conversations. It may not be intuitive, but it makes sense.

WAG the dog

Did you catch the interview on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live this morning with former footballer's girlfriend, Nicola Smith (available to listen again here)? Curiously, the role seemed to run in the family as she mentioned her even more celebrated sister Mandy, who notoriously dated Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones when still a very young teenager.

Nicola Smith spoke openly about the emptiness of a life that appears to have so much, and of her current work as corporate fundraiser for the Five Stars Scanner appeal. She described this as public relations work, and it's a version of public relations that appeals to many first year students.

It's public relations as personal networking; public relations as party and event organising; public relations that uses celebrity connections.

Last week in the lecture theatre I tried to distinguish two things that are often confused: the use of PR in support of major events, and the use of events to support PR campaigns. PR is not the same thing as event management (several universities follow Leeds Metropolitan in teaching both as entirely separate disciplines, in this case delivered in different faculties), though there is some overlap in the skills needed. I view event management as a left-side-of-brain activity involving painstaking attention to detail and public relations as a right-sided activity that involves creative 'ideas management'.

As student Megan Parks writes, the PR event organiser will find she's Not Quite JLo.

The connection between awareness raising and fundraising is a question for another lecture.

The trouble with Twitter

It should be about conversations (or 'two-way symmetrical' dialogue in textbook speak). But there's something asymmetrical about how Twitter is so often used.

Perhaps the problem is with the concept of 'following'. By following a celebrity, or a publication or a brand, I'm signing up for an asymmetrical relationship with little prospect of it becoming an equal conversation (symmetry).

Students and other novices often struggle to find the right balance. Are their tweets suitable for the public domain, or would they be better on a more private social network? How to develop from a personal comment on my activity towards a contribution to a public discussion?

Here are two useful posts from US academics aimed at PR students:

• Donna Talarico: 10 things to Twitter about in College
• Karen Russell: PR students: what not to tweet

Via PROpenMic

Meet Generation F

In the week Facebook turned six and announced its membership had passed 400 million, it's time to review what we know of the Facebook generation (Gen F).

This was also the week when commentators have realised that social networks and microblogging are more compelling among this group than old-fashioned blogs.

Our guide to Gen F is Stephen Davies, citing the One Young World initiative. Read his post.

My contribution to the discussion was to ask a group of first year students attending a 9am lecture about their media and communications usage so far today:

    95% had sent or received a text message
    10% had made or received a voice call
    70% had listened to the radio
    5% had watched TV
    30% had used Facebook
    0% had used Twitter
    20% had read a newspaper
    0% had bought a newspaper

He can. Can you?

'I can't find any work experience'. It's a familiar cry from PR students and my response today was unsympathetic.

If a seven year old boy can make news headlines and ludicrously overshoot his modest fundraising target, then surely PR professionals (or PR students) should feel under pressure to do better.

There's a serious point here. The other PR star of this week was Apple Computer boss Steve Jobs for the sheer attention he gained unveiling the iPad yesterday.

Boys do it. Bosses do it. Even educated interns do it. Let's do it. Let's do PR. (With apologies to Cole Porter).

Behind the Spin, March 2010

There are two themes for the next major update of Behind the Spin (in March).

• Political communications (guest edited by Darren Lilleker of Bournemouth University), timed for the imminent UK general election. Please contact the guest editor if you're interested in writing on this topic.
• PR and social media: please contact me (editor@behindthespin.com) with your angle or idea if you'd like to write on this topic.

In addition, we are always looking for news of interest to or from PR students and graduates (news@behindthespin.com), or for book reviews (particularly of recent books covering the two main topics outlined above).

Deadline for articles is end of February.

Photo: Joe Sharp

Wispa it quietly

It's been ironic reading so many positive comments about Cadbury, in a batch of essay assignments, in the week its directors recommended the proposed acquisition of the business by Kraft.

One comment in particular seems worth revisiting. The now-famous bring back Wispa campaign was cited as a good example of relationship management (in the way the company apparently did a U turn and responded to its customers' wishes). The same campaign is also named by Phillips and Young as a good example of  'groundswell' - using social media channels for campaigning purposes.

What if it's neither of these? What if the bring back Wispa campaign was an example of an old-fashioned PR stunt out of Barnum & Bailey, or from Grunig and Hunt's bad old press agentry/publicity model.

You see, our transparent age of social media is meant to make the old-style PR stunt ineffective (unacceptable too). So it's awkward to find an example of it working so well - and the source of the campaign being able to cover their tracks.

So, based on a nudge and a wink more than hard evidence, I name Borkowski as the PR brains behind the Wispa campaign. (He continues to deny it publicly but he's probably made the commitment to do so to the client). Let's please stop using it as an example of the crowd versus business. It's an example of PR orchestration simulating (and stimulating) public opinion. We think we're so sophisticated, but it seems we're still suckers for the old gags.

Freddie Starr ate my wispa.

Are your friends making you fat?

Malcolm Gladwell dissected the power of social contagion in The Tipping Point. Other researchers and writers have subsequently explored the power of connectedness (such as Mark Earls with Herd).

Now there's buzz around the latest contribution to this field: Connected, soon to be published in the UK.

In the Observer magazine, Simon Garfield profiles the book's author, Harvard professor Dr Nicholas Christakis: Are your friends making you fat? It's a beguilingly simple idea: that we can 'catch' obesity from our friends. 

Advice for Behind the Spin contributors

I welcome approaches to write for Behind the Spin, but frequently find myself having similar email exchanges with would-be contributors. So this post should make the process clearer for all (and save me some time).

We are a magazine for public relations students and graduates. If you have news of interest to our readers, then please contact news@behindthespin.com. If you would like to write a feature, then contact editor@behindthespin.com.

What is news?

We're very keen to hear news about PR students or PR degree courses. 

News typically describes an event, frequently in the recent past. News tends to be written in the past tense, is usually objective (it or they, not I or we), and news articles should be as short as possible. The best way to write news is to answer this question: what happened? 

What is a feature?

A feature article should be about a theme or idea. It can be longer than a news article (our features are typically 1000 words) and can be personal. But your feature does not have to express your opinion: you can contact others and include a range of opinions in the form of quotations. Or you can write a profile on one person.

What can I write about?

We give some indication of the type of features we're looking for on the About page. But you're also welcome to contact us with your own ideas. You could:

• Write a profile of a senior practitioner
• Spend a day with a junior PR practitioner and write about their working day
• Focus on careers: how to get a graduate job in a top consultancy; how to earn big money
• Focus on issues: why are there so few men in PR?
• Focus on sectors: how to find work in fashion PR?; what's it like working in NHS comms?
• Focus on change: how is social media changing PR?
• Focus on courses: is a PR degree worth it?
• Answer a question: is media relations declining in importance?
• Turn your dissertation or essay into an article
• Write a review of a recent book about (or of relevance to) public relations

The rise of the community manager

I've been monitoring the emergence of the community manager role for some time, but it's good to be able to put names and career trajectories to it.

New Media Age reports that ASOS social media manager Ilana Fox is leaving next month. She was previously community editor at The Sun and before that she had a similar role at The Daily Mail. At ASOS, she led the launch of the ASOS Life community. (Via Vikki Chowney)

My review of 2010

Let me look back on the present year (since it's too uncertain looking forward). Here's what I see:

Work: I have a better balance of university teaching, professional qualifications, training and consultancy. (I've already precipitated this change by reducing my university commitments). The freelance life isn't for everyone, but it suits me. There was more time for reading and writing too.

Politics: We needed an election, though a five month election campaign was unprecedented. Unfortunately, my vote counts for little as for the first time in my life I live in a safe seat (Skipton and Ripon). Living in Bristol North West and both Oxford constituencies made elections so much more interesting.

Sport: The World Cup galvanised the nation. To add to the excitement, I was teaching American graduate students in Italy when England played USA.

Profession: I had time to resolve some unfinished business. Time to help establish a specialist group for those in public relations academic and training roles (as distinct from the remit of the Education and Skills sectoral group).

The International History of Public Relations Conference was a highlight of the academic calendar.

Search and reputation optimisation

One day on from my rant about Domain Renewal Group, and Google has ranked my post higher than the company's own website (for the admittedly rather odd search string 'pop domain renewal group'). I know this because someone found my blog having typed this search in Belgium.

Other recent visitors to PR Studies came here having entered 'meaning PR', 'dissertation public relations', 'why want to work in PR', 'emergence social media public relations'.

This is a fair overview of this blog's content over several years - and a hint of what I should write more about if I'm to attract more visitors through search.