I’ve never really liked the police. With a few exceptions I have found most of the individual police officers I’ve encountered to be troublingly unpleasant people. I’m told that’s what happens when your job puts you in regular contact with the worst aspects of human nature. And I have a lot of sympathy for that. It is a difficult and dangerous job, and I do
You can’t teach creativity in PR
You can’t teach creativity. That’s what I hear. I’ve heard it a lot, too. Well, relatively speaking. It tends to be the reaction some people have to the idea of creativity training or workshops. To an extent, it’s hard to argue with the outlook that says you’re either born creative or you’re not. Picasso was born with an innate desire to create – to challenge
Google+ … like the internet, only with a gun to your head
I have a great many things to be thankful for. One of them is my job. Too many people have no job, or a job they find hateful and demeaning. In October of this year (which was still 2012 when I wrote this) I became the head of digital at a PR consultancy that until my arrival had taken a fairly measured approach to digital
I come from England, I grew up there
In 1992, I went to Canada and the USA. I spent three or so weeks travelling around, on my own, visiting friends and family. It was the first time I’d flown. Before we’d even taken off things started to get interesting. The plane was delayed and while we were all sat there, on the tarmac of Manchester Airport, waiting for clearance, the pilot made an
Spinach, start-ups, and bloated tech companies
Dear Tesco, what is the point of this? I’m referring to the pic of two baby spinach leaves with a speech bubble asking “what am I like?” At first glance, and maybe because I lived in Manchester for a time, when I see “what am I like” in my head I hear an annoying voice going “what am I like, eh? I’m just dead mad
Brothers in arms – my interview with Veterans Aid CEO Hugh Milroy
In the early part of summer 2012, I had the good fortune to be commissioned by the Victoria Business Improvement District’s magazine “inSW1″ to interview Hugh Milroy, Chief Executive of the charity Veteran’s Aid. The magazine is now out, and so I have taken the liberty of publishing my version of the article here. Beware… this is a lengthy article. Dr Hugh Milroy leans back
Breaking news: sorry Twitter, journalism still wins out
Two things happened in London in the space of 24 hours that, once again, had me – and plenty of others – musing on the role of Twitter as a channel for breaking news. On Thursday 26 April, there was an incident on the Bakerloo line of the London Underground (that’s the brown one). I learned about it first thanks to twitter. But here’s what
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Losing faith in the police
I’ve never really liked the police. With a few exceptions I have found most of the individual police officers I’ve encountered to be troublingly unpleasant people.
I’m told that’s what happens when your job puts you in regular contact with the worst aspects of human nature. And I have a lot of sympathy for that. It is a difficult and dangerous job, and I do have respect for the men and women that uphold law and order and keep our streets safe (try not to laugh if you live somewhere where the streets aren’t exactly safe).
But it’s hard to find that sympathy and respect as I write this.
A few days ago I was told of a friend of a friend who was physically assaulted by her husband and another male member of his family. When they arrived the police claimed insufficient evidence, no one was arrested and the victim more or less told not to make things worse for herself in the future.
Last night the police were in action outside my house. And once again they didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory.
Around midnight (Saturday night/Sunday morning), on hearing raised voices and what might have been some sort of struggle, I looked out of my window to see several police cars, and about six or so police officers.
Two of them had one of my next door neighbours, a man in his mid/late 20s, handcuffed and were dragging him away from the house toward one of the cars. He was wearing only a towel, and apart from the visible stress and upset anyone might display, he was being as cooperative as could be expected.
The main focus of his attention was his house. From where his female partner, a petite and slightly-built woman in her early 20s was emerging.
There were several police officers on her driveway all shouting instructions at her.
But the most conspicuous of all of these was the one in full body armour stood at the edge of my driveway pointing his gun directly at her face (one of those assault rifle things you may have seen UK police bearing at airports).
He was shouting “walk toward me, walk toward me.” She did. Whereupon she was handcuffed.
I don’t even want to think about what that must have felt like for her.
But I do wonder what it felt like for him. All six-feet-and-something of him. In lots of protective clothing. Pointing a loaded weapon at the face of a clearly terrified young woman wearing her pyjamas and dressing gown.
However, her focus was also mainly on the house.
Why…? Because she has two very young children.
Five or six big burly coppers, some with guns. One small, young woman in her nightwear, terrified and fretting about her children.
If they felt like they were doing their jobs and therefore had to conduct their operations in that matter, they’re in the wrong job.
In the end, she wasn’t arrested.
The police are forever moaning that they don’t get the support of the public.
Small wonder.
When you actually encounter them up close and personal, in the line of duty, there’s not often a great deal you feel you want to support.
I don’t want to be policed by the sort of people who will turn a blind eye to a victim of domestic violence, or who can’t deploy sufficient discretion to know that they don’t need to point their guns at people just because can. They choose to.
The complaints procedure has always been laughable. I’m about to find out for myself just how laughable.
But I better make sure my tyres aren’t bald and that I always drive within the speed limit; I expect I’ll be on someone’s radar before too long.
Don’t get engaged … be engaging
The word engage has been taken hostage by the social media marketing community, and I am probably as guilty as the digital comms person of bandying that word around just a little too much.
I’ve written countless blog pieces, opinion articles and PR plans in which I extol the virtues of a three-step plan to social media nirvana .. listen, analyse and engage.
When you were a child did you ever say a word over and over and over again until it sounded like meaningless nonsense? I’m fairly sure I wasn’t the only one to do that. But if you’ve never done it, give it a try.
So it is with words that get hijacked – they can begin to lose their meaning.
I was reflecting on this in the wake of Facebook’s most recent set of changes, which are designed to give users of the service more control over what shows up in their News Feed. At the moment the News Feed is an all-in-one repository, but users will soon be able to filter different types of content into separate feeds. A little like the way you might sort your emails into folders.
There are two points of interest for businesses using Facebook as part of their marketing mix. The first is that from now on they will be able to use bigger images and video in the advertisements they place in the Facebook News Feed.
The second is that their potential audience has now been given the tools to automatically siphon advertising into a separate feed which they can ignore completely for as long as they like.
Which brings us back to the E-word.
Brands have been trying hard to engage with people via social media for years. Facebook just shifted the goalposts.
Want to be seen, listened to, remembered for your Facebook marketing? Well, you’ll have to be that much more interesting, memorable and shareable.
It’s not a revolutionary concept. But if it stems the flow of lazy thinking that lurks behind too many companies’ attitudes toward social media marketing, that’s not a bad thing.
Stop trying to have a conversation with me about the things that matter most to you but least to me. Instead, show me something that holds my attention, that reflects well on you without your products being the hero of the hour, and which makes me want to spend my money with you rather than your competitors.
Be engaging.
The war for digital hearts and minds
There’s been a bit of a turf war going on in the advertising/marketing/PR world for several years now, and it’s not really showing any signs of resolving itself.
It’s the war for digital hearts and minds and it’s being fought across all the major social media networks. From the familiar landscapes of Twitter and Facebook, through to the newer territories of Microsoft’s Socl, the revitalised MySpace and on into Pintererst, Instagram and beyond.
In business communications circles, everyone acts like they have the right to own social media: advertising agencies, marketing consultancies and PR firms. And it doesn’t stop there – there are digital creative agencies, interactive marketing houses and tech-based SEO companies. All claiming they have the secret sauce that will help a brand cover itself in digital glory.
But it’s the PR world that has the strongest claim, in my opinion.
Before you pull a muscle shouting “he would say that, wouldn’t he” let me explain why I think that.
One of the key functions of the PR industry is to intercede with the media on behalf of its clients. The media is changing, indeed has already changed, due to the impact of the internet and social media. The PR industry is changing with it.
Circulation figures for all newspapers are lower, as are advertising revenues from their print-based activities. The BBC, the Financial Times and the Guardian are just three of the UK’s major broadcast and print names that are investing heavily in their digital output. Some titles, including Newsweek, have turned their backs on print altogether.
This move to more digital-friendly output from mainstream news providers is more than a passing phase. The traditional reliance on the written word has decreased as video and graphics are increasingly sought out by readers and viewers, and this is a tide that is unlikely to turn any time soon. As a result, the PR industry has had to learn how to craft its clients’ messages and brand stories into formats that meet the needs of these changed media requirements.
But my reasons go deeper than simply the ability to update story formats.
Despite the many different views on what constitutes successful social media engagement, there is perhaps one aspect that everyone agrees on, and that is that social media requires a more discursive approach to corporate communications. The audience you reach via Facebook, for example, is not receptive to one-way communications, they will expect brands to listen as much (more, even) than they talk.
Get that bit wrong, and the rest of whatever it is you’re up to won’t matter a jot.
This is why, in my opinion, if any of the marketing disciplines can claim any form of ownership of social media outreach, it has to be PR.
PR is the only branch, if I can call it that, of the marketing tree, and I realise I probably can’t call it that, where conversation is one of the fundamental building blocks of the whole discipline.
In the event of a crisis that has dragged you into the media spotlight, who is it that businesses turn to for help? It’s not the ad agency. It’s not the web designer. It’s not the marketing consultant. It’s the PR people.
Why..? PR people have no magic powers, after all. Well, it’s because the PR world knows how to listen, how and when to talk, how to avoid making things worse by lying, and how to think on its feet.
Nowhere are those traits more welcome than in the world of social media.
This piece was first published on the Nexus Communications website. You can find it here.
The King is Hacked, Long Live the King
So, the Burger King Twitter account was somehow hacked into on Monday (18 February). Did you see it? Were you aware? Do you even care?
There was certainly a great deal of brouhaha in the immediate aftermath, almost exclusively from people who work in the marketing, PR and social media sectors.
In short, someone took over the official Burger King Twitter account, changed the BK logo to a McDonalds’ logo and started tweeting nonsense. Some of it said that Burger King had been sold to McDonalds, most of it wasn’t funny and was filled with grammatical errors.
You can read more about it here.
The decision was eventually taken by Burger King – once they had regained control of it – to suspend the account. Presumably to clear out all the nefarious tweets, check they weren’t following any undesirables, and to send someone from their digital marketing team to sit on the naughty step and think about what had happened. At the time of publishing this piece, the Burger King account had reappeared.
But amid the sound and fury that gripped my Twitter stream on Monday afternoon, I couldn’t help but wonder does any of this actually matter?
“Will sales of Burger King food fall because of the hack?” asked one person I follow on Twitter.
I think it was a genuine question. The answer, quite obviously, is no. The quality of the food sold by Burger King is not affected in any way, directly or indirectly, by what happens on Twitter.
I retorted by saying in the event that sales of Burger King food don’t fall thanks to this very public social media problem, should we all conclude that social media is utterly pointless?
Well, of course the answer to that one is also no.
What this alludes to though is the question of how one assesses the value of – and ROI from – social media. And the chances are that sales of your core products is not the right metric.
Research commissioned by Nexus Communications last year into the grocery shopping habits of UK households’ primary shoppers, found that a staggeringly low two per cent cited social media as having influence over the choices they make.
Social media is not the place to promote your products and push your messages onto people. It’s where people will expect to find you listening, talking, answering their questions, and generally being a bit more human than you are elsewhere – like on your website.
People will come to your Facebook page to participate in competitions and take advantage of offers and vouchers – no one with the Facebook account needs to pay full price with the likes of Domino’s Pizza, for example.
But if you’re not measuring the pull-through from offers and competitions, if you’re not tracking the offline redemption of online vouchers, how can you know what’s working and what isn’t?
In short, if you’re measuring the wrong thing – no matter what it is – you’re measuring the wrong thing.
I’m not privy to the ins and outs of what Burger King’s social media KPIs might be, but I’d be surprised if burger sales is one of the main ones.
Right, I’m off in search of a Whopper. Who’s with me?
(This piece was first published on the Nexus Communications website. You can find it here.)
A fox on the box is worth two in the news-stand
Last night I watched Newsnight on BBC2. Well, some of it.
I saw Gavin Esler interview Susie Boniface, the artiste formerly known as Fleet Street Fox, about her 40,000 Twitter followers, her popular blog and her forthcoming book.
My initial reaction was “why do the BBC keep doing this sort of thing – who cares about the media interviewing the media?”
After we’d heard that Boniface was motivated to don the Fleet Street Fox mantle in order to give voice to her own thoughts, feelings and emotions, the discussion broadened out to include Chris Blackhust, editor of the Independent.
Somewhat predictably, this trio of journalistic heavyweights had a crack at the whole “why are newspapers dying and why is the internet killing them” topic.
(Thought: should anyone caught using media-bullshit jargon such as media landscape should have their fingers broken..?)
Setting aside my natural cynicism, and the general predictability of everything that had preceded this turn in the conversation, I figured this could actually be illuminating… a TV broadcast journalist, the editor of a newspaper that has attempted to do interesting things with format, and a tabloid journo with a hugely successful social media presence – if they didn’t have something interesting to say… etc etc.
I also found my mind wandering to notion of having my own soubriquet, a la Fleet Street Fox. But I work on Cromwell Road and couldn’t think of anything beginning with C that seemed to really sum up who I am.
I digress. Because, meanwhile, on my TV people were saying things like “when someone finally figures out how to make money on the internet…”
I had a strange sensation, that it was still 1999, I was a journalist at a ground-breaking online news service and the publishing industry was wondering if anyone would ever figure out how to make money off this new internet phenomenon.
(Thought: should anyone working in the media caught wondering if anyone will ever make money off the internet be forced to do a Pontifex..?)
There was lots of talk about whether or not newspapers would disappear altogether, about the difference between using social media to raise awareness and using it to generate money, mentions of the FT (and others) becoming more digitally-minded, and a fairly oblique reference to people getting their news from Twitter.
In short, the same exhausted themes, phrases and clichés that have been dragged out at different points over the last five years.
No new insights at all.
But what struck me as the biggest omission from the debate I watched was the lack of any real exploration of what readers want.
If the Esler, Boniface and Blackhurst are in any way representative of the traditional publishing sector in the UK – and why shouldn’t they be – there’s a lot of introspection going on and not a lot of thought being given to what the reader (also known as the customer in some business circles) wants.
I wonder how many failing restaurants refuse to update their menu in the face of dwindling covers. Or what the outcome would be for a mobile phone company that had steadfastly refused to offer people smartphones.
Based on what I saw, I suspect the newspaper sector, at least in the UK, is doomed.
There needs to be a significant shift in how this problem of dwindling sales, dwindling revenues and dwindling relevance is addressed. The newspaper sector needs to start putting the desires of the customer first, rather than its own.
If there is one lesson that ought be learned from social media, it is the one based around the concept of democratisation – that everyone now has a voice and means of broadcasting their opinions, everyone wants to be listened to.
And that change – in pretty much every walk of life – no longer comes solely from the top down.
Unless, that, is you work in newspapers.
Playing fair with benefits isn’t child’s play
This is a dark day (updated Monday 7 January 2013).
Child Benefit is no longer be available to households where one person earns more than £60,000 per year, and will be clawed back via increased income tax from those earning between £50,000 and £60,000.
Before you react with the “but the wealthy don’t need it” line, keep reading.
The depiction of those earning above a certain amount as not needing the additional financial support of Child Benefit is a gross over-simplification that suits no one except those wedded to a particular kind of pernicious ideology.
It’s the thin end of the wedge and the introduction of flawed logic into a complex and complicated set of issues, challenges and solutions.
All things being equal, someone earning £50,000 could indeed be considered to be doing pretty well, and it’s certainly a lot more than the official average salary currently earned in the UK. But you can’t take things out of their proper context, analyse them and still – in my opinion – hold a well-reasoned debate.
Here are just a few reasons why dumbing the issue of Child Benefit down to this kind of black and white level makes a mockery of any attempt to make the provision of benefits in this country fairer.
Direct and indirect taxes are higher now for most households than they have been in years. From the cost of gas and electricity through to the cost of petrol and diesel at the pump, from food inflation to the increased cost of train tickets, the bald facts are that there are a lot of demands on household incomes.
If you are earning close to £50,000 per year – maybe as a senior police officer – you now face a disincentive to work harder, as any earned overtime will compromise your family’s Child Benefit. Perhaps more importantly it will throw you into the circle of hell that is dealing with Her Britannic Majesty’s Revenue & Customs department, a branch of the UK government not famed for efficiency and simplified processes.
The same could be true for a whole host of other people who find themselves doing well as a result of working hard and encountering that awful Catch 22 where working hard, earning more and advancing yourself and your family starts to count against you.
I put it to you this approach to rationalising benefit provision actually stunts productive growth at the individual level.
Then there is the assumption which underpins the whole argument, and that is that household income is always shared equitably within the family.
I’m quite certain we all know families where one parent works and the other stays at home. I’m also fairly sure I’m not the only person who knows someone who has to rely upon handouts from their working partner, handouts which are given begrudgingly and which are frequently barely enough to cover the household essentials.
I’m not sure why I’m dressing this up in prissy language. After all, this is my blog – I can say what I like.
What I’m talking about are men who keep their residual income to themselves, only giving their wives and partners the bare minimum. And I’m talking about high earners.
This is not fair and reasonable. The addition of Child Benefit into such households can be a real life-line to those women who are living like relative paupers in their own homes.
Removing Child Benefit, then, is also not fair or reasonable, and unless you are about to advocate the State getting involved in the way people manage their personal financial affairs, I’m not sure what one does about such things.
Another piece of context it doesn’t hurt to bear in mind is that were still suffering from an economic collapse which was built, at least partially, on an excess of mortgage debt.
Lenders were eschewing the old checks and balances, and issuing mortgages based on self-certification, multiples of 5x income, and in some cases 120% of the value of the property.
Net result…. plenty of people who have well paid jobs had actually mortgaged themselves to the promise of an endlessly affluent but fictitious tomorrow. When the bubble burst, as they all do eventually, that brighter future turned into millstone around many people’s necks.
So what, you may be thinking. That’s their bad luck. If you genuinely believe that, from some sort of libertarian point of view, fair enough… you are entitled to your opinion, just as I’m entitled to disagree with it. If, however, you are thinking “so what” because of some sort of latent jealousy or general dislike of your fellow man, have a word with yourself.
I haven’t even touched upon how costly and complicated the approach taken to changing Child Benefit will be. The figures quoted by the government to explain and justify these changes are all assumptions and estimates based on mathematical models. Also, the government has failed to find enough high earners to withdraw Child Benefit from in order to make their fictitious numbers work.
The whole thing is a mess.
“But Sean something must be done,” people say to me. “There’s no money, just a huge deficit, the government has to cut back somewhere and we’re all in this together.”
This is an outlook that gets short shrift from me.
There’s money for nuclear missiles. But not for libraries and not for universal Child Benefit or benefits for the disabled, in addition unemployment rates among the young are shamefully high.
We’re not all in this together, that’s one of the most facile pieces of polit-crap that’s been pedaled in recent years.
The deficit has increased, not decreased, after almost three years of the Coalition government. Why..? Because they are hell bent on squeezing the economy until the pips squeak. They have done next-to-nothing to promote genuine sustainable growth and job creation.
I know there have been initiatives to support start-ups, especially in the tech sector, but these are not a meaningful attempt to promote wide-scale job creation. Start-ups need skilled people and don’t tend to recruit from the ranks of the unemployed.
Removing Child Benefit is just another attempt by a government under siege, and which has no intellectual capital, to find policies that play well to the Daily Mail’s headline writers.
In the wake of World War II our health and welfare systems were seen as the cornerstones of building a better society. Has it worked without exception? No of course not, after all nothing’s perfect.
But the provision of universal benefits is an indication of the kind of country we live in, and the removal of such things says just as much about the kind of society we want to build.
Or should I say dismantle?
Category: benefit, children, David Cameron, economy, employment, equality, fairness, family, NHS, politics /
1 January 2013: River Thames from Reading Bridge
1 January 2013: River Thames from Reading Bridge
Category: Uncategorized /
All my 2012 posts shown as a word cloud
Happy New Year.
2012 was, for me, actually a pretty good year on reflection. In many ways it was a healing year. I got to spend a lot more time in the company of my children, I went on my first family holiday since 2008 (and I had a jolly nice time too), I cut loose some deadwood, made some fantastic new friends, wrote some songs and even started a new job.
I know not everyone will have as much to feel thankful for as I currently do. I hope I don’t come across as smug. I don’t feel smug. I feel blessed.
All of which is by-the-by, as this is really just preamble. The main event can be found below… a word cloud produced by putting all the blog posts I wrote in 2012 into Wordle.
Sean Fleming: 2012 blog post word cloud
You can’t teach creativity in PR
You can’t teach creativity. That’s what I hear. I’ve heard it a lot, too. Well, relatively speaking. It tends to be the reaction some people have to the idea of creativity training or workshops.
To an extent, it’s hard to argue with the outlook that says you’re either born creative or you’re not. Picasso was born with an innate desire to create – to challenge the accepted ways of doing things and to push the creative boundaries.
He didn’t learn that in a workshop held in a medium-sized conference room in a hotel adjacent to an urban ring-road.
So, there you have it. Creativity… it’s either in your genes or it’s not. And if not, tough… you can’t learn it.
That outlook’s nonsense though, isn’t it?
I came to that stunning realisation after a conversation I had recently with a friend about the importance of collaborating with like-minded people. Some of her comments brought to mind a remark made in an interview I read with the guitarist Johnny Marr, who said something like “if you really want to open up your creative side you need to surround yourself with creative people.”
It may be true that we are all born with different talents and abilities, and that there is no substitute for natural ability. But it’s also true that it’s important to create an environment in which creativity flourishes.
It’s also remarkably easy to create an environment – particularly a working environment – in which creativity has no chance of flourishing.
So, while it might be true that you can’t teach the people in your agency to become creative geniuses from scratch, you can certainly achieve a great deal in terms of challenging existing working practices and fostering a culture where it’s ok to be creative, and to have ideas… even really bad ones.
I’d take a really bad idea over no idea at all any day. You can improve on a bad idea and make it a great one.
But those people who put hierarchy before ability, who put their own cosy self-interests before that of the client, the agency or the team… there’s not a lot you can do with them unless you challenge them.
Just how challenging you need to be in such cases depends on how entrenched their attitudes are and how willing – or otherwise – they are to accept that change can be a good thing.
The data-day challenges facing many PR firms
Data.
Data, data, data.
In PR circles data has become the new black.
Or the new designer drug, depending on which kind of overt cynicism you want to go with.
There has never been a better time to use data as part of a comms strategy, this much is self-evident. After all, who in PR doesn’t get approached from the purveyors of fine analytics tools on a regular basis?
From Radian6 to Brandwatch, from SDL SM2 to Meltwater, and well beyond… there are literally hundreds – possibly thousands – of monitoring tools out there that will track and report back on mentions of you, your clients, their competitors, market trends, hot topics, etc.
I read a post by Danny Whatmough at EML Wildfire in which he talks about this very topic. It’s a good piece that stresses the importance of evidence-based strategies for PR and marketing.
It made me think about some of the challenges I’ve witnessed and experienced in my PR career when it came to PR people using data.
The single biggest problem, or so it has always seemed to me, is the preponderance of data-intolerant people working in PR. I’m not talking about the stereotypical fluffy bunny syndrome. But simply that a lot of smart people in PR are not comfortable around raw numerical data.
There is little to be gained from having an agency-wide desire to do more data-based stuff if the people entrusted with bringing that to life couldn’t be trusted to count time in a marching band (yes, I know that’s a rubbish analogy but I couldn’t think of another one).
For decades now, the education system in the UK (well, England & Wales) has encouraged pupils to choose between arts and sciences at the age of 14/15. We can hope this divisiveness will be less prominent in the future, but that’s not going to affect the make up of our account teams any time soon.
So, here is my advice – given as someone who has run their own PR agency and as someone who has lectured in PR at a university in London.
Start firing those people in your agency who are rubbish at maths.
No, wait… I don’t mean that.
But audit their data-related skills and abilities. Do it methodically and without emotion – this isn’t pass or fail, this is about working out how you can help your people perform better.
Nurture those who have an aptitude for data, help them become better at it.
As for those who find numbers utterly baffling, provide them with coping mechanisms… ways to break it all down and make sense of it. Perhaps you’d never let them loose on a major piece of research. But you’d certainly want them to feel able to understand it, critique it and explain it. Wouldn’t you?
So… go forth and multiply your data-aware account teams.
