Author: Penny

As the title of my blog suggests, I am a freelance PR working mainly in the public and voluntary sectors, on projects from small scale copywriting to big social marketing projects. In my time I've worked for government departments, the BBC and a range of other organisations of various stages of dysfunctionality. Now I'm trying to get to grips with the world of the micro-business and facing up to the recession with a fair bit of trepidation.

Futurology

What I seem to have been groping for in the last post was a view of how quickly technology is already changing  reality and how it is going to continue to change  us in the future.  Inevitably someone else was doing the same thinking as me, but doing it far more eloquently – and, unlike me,  coming up with some answers.  The Guardian has been looking at  predictions about the future made by  the Edge Foundation –  “some of the most interesting minds in the world”.

There’s some really thought provoking stuff in the article, but the  contribution I liked most was this one – mainly because alone among the chaps (and they were all chaps) quoted, this is the only one to suggest that no-one’s really got a clue about what’s going to happen:

The snowball has started to roll and there is probably no stopping it. Will the result be a utopia or a dystopia? Which of the novelties are self-limiting and which will extinguish institutions long thought to be permanent? Will universities and newspapers become obsolete? Will hospitals and churches go the way of corner grocery stores and livery stables? Will reading music soon become as arcane a talent as reading hieroglyphics? When you no longer need to eat to stay alive, or procreate to have offspring, or locomote to have an adventure-packed life, when the residual instincts for these activities might be simply turned off by genetic tweaking, there may be no constants of human nature left at all. Except, maybe, our incessant curiosity. (Daniel Dennett)

Which proves nothing much – except perhaps that  Aldous Huxley was the most accurate futurologist of all time!

Join the dots

Blogging is like going to the gym, enthusiasm is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going.  So rather than fall off the wagon over Christmas, I’ve been trying to write something that pulls together the thoughts that have been floating round my head for the past few days.   Sometimes it all seems to be about to come together to make something meaningful, but the bits always  drift apart in the end.  So,  can you join up the dots and make a profound statement about progress and technology on my behalf?  I’ll just dig out my trainers and go to the gym…

1. The Christmas  I was nine my parents bought  Pong which was then state of the art in electronic entertainment. I did most of my under-age drinking in the first pub in Lichfield to have a Space Invaders machine. This Christmas my children are 11 and 8.  My parents provided the funds to buy us  a Wii for Christmas. Is this progress? Should I be worried that geological ages can pass before they get tired of playing the racing cow game ?    One of the virtues of Pong was that it was so dull that once the novelty of playing wore off you generally stopped and got a book to read instead. Are books “better” than TV games?  What will my grandchildren be playing when they’re nine?  Isn’t it weird that I, who still think of myself as being (quite) young, have seen in my lifetime two entire industries (gaming and mobile telephony)  be born and take over the world, to the point that they are changing the way human beings behave?

2. On Start the Week , Susan Greenfield was saying that the ubiquity of computer-based entertainment was changing the way that we think, so that young people now find it hard to deal with abstract ideas or with narrative which develops slowly.   As she puts it –technology is moulding a generation of children unable to think for themselves or empathise with others. Is this  a) true? b)  inevitable? c) what middle aged people always say about the young?

3. Amazon’s biggest electronic seller this year was that electr0nic tablet which impersonates a book. I’m happy to carry all my music around with me on my iPod despite being devoted to vinyl.  Why do I hate the idea of carrying lots of books around the same away? Will I give in eventually, just as I have with blogging and owning a Blackberry?

4.  Julie’s post about work-life balance  came to mind when I was listening to a programme about the Slow Movement,  which aims to restore a gentler pace to modern life.  The programme  included a clip from Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler magazine which campaigns against the work ethic.  He blamed the Puritans for the decline in the value placed on play in modern societies and the  stress placed on work and duty.  In which case is it actually a  good thing that my children are enjoying the racing cow game?

See?  Completely random, but somehow also linked by something.  (Polite) suggestions as to what it might all mean would be very welcome!

I Would Gladly Sell My House and All of Its Contents *

There is currently yet another campaign urging non-payment of the BBC licence fee going on with about 200,000 signed up so far.  A range of opponents of the BBC have been energised by Ross/Brand  to rage  against the broadcaster, which remains one of the  few  world class organisations the country still has.  As an ex-BBC staffer I’ve heard all the arguments against the Beeb, but it still seems to me that the arguments in favour are much, much stronger.  If you want to hear them rehearsed (with jokes), Stephen Fry does it extremely elegantly in podcast-form on his site.

The BBC itself supplied one of  the best anti-moral-majority -outrage arguments  ever.  Perhaps the fact that I saw this

  at an impressionable age is what made me the woman I am today.

Happy Christmas one and all, and let’s raise a glass to the ghost of Desiree Carthorse, who clearly still stalks the land.

* 

I’ll show you mine, if…

Google reader turned this up in my inbox this morning – a  post from American media strategist BL Ochman about the difficulty of finding out what other people charge for a job.  As she says:

“You are more likely to know what your best friend eats for breakfast or how many times a week he or she has sex, than how much money they make.

Despite all the Web 2.0 talk of transparency, openness, and honesty, you’d be hard pressed to find out what most new media consultants charge.”

Her point is that there is no  reason why consultants should be secretive about the rates they charge – so why does no-one ever say?  It would certainly be helpful to know.  One of the things I found hardest when I set myself up was knowing how much to charge for different pieces of work.  It’s really hard to know if you are pricing yourself out of a market, or seriously under-charging.  Unless you’re lucky enough to know  friendly freelancers who work in your field and are happy to discuss their rates, you have nothing to compare yourself to.   If you get it wrong,  and I really under-charged a couple of clients at the beginning,  it’s hard to get the rate back up to where you want to be for repeat business.  In my experience the conversation about fees always feels as though everyone concerned  is somehow embarrassed to be speaking about something so tawdry.  Is that a particularly British thing – or is it just me?

As a  reasonably well-established freelance myself now, I understand the fear of being undercut by some young whipper-snapper who knows my rate and sees the chance to snaffle my business.  But in my experience price is not generally the deciding factor in whether or not I get a job. That has much more to do with experience, track record and contacts.

I worked for the Government Equalities Office earlier this year, as the  Equality Bill was being prepared.  One of the things they want to do is make it harder for companies to hide what staff are paid . They also want to encourage companies to publish their  gender pay gap.  This would make it easier for new entrants to an industry to tell whether what they were being offered was fair (it suddenly seems a long time ago that there were jobs around to apply for!)   Openness seems to me to be a good thing, but if you’re a freelance there’s not much information to go on.  The best thing I’ve found is the PR Week salary survey, but that’s tied very closely to agency roles which don’t necesarily equate to other types of work.  So, should we all come clean?  And if I show you mine, will you show me yours?

Here Comes The Past

The standout sentence of the weekend’s papers for me (before I gave up reading  and took refuge in drink) was John Simpson’s assertion that we’re heading back to the 14th century – generally accepted as the worst ever century to be alive in the history of the world.   So that’s famine, the Black Death, a new 100 Years War, a Peasant’s Revolt (count me in) and religious schism in Europe to look forward to.  On the plus side it looks like a great time to be a warrior woman, or install some energy efficient central heating ; and narrative poetry is probably well overdue a comeback.  This does, of course, have absolutely nothing to do with communications or new media, other than proving yet again what a truly fantastic resource Google is for those moments when you REALLY  don’t want to start work on the accounts…

Taking Care of Business

I’ve been listening to Jerry Springer being interviewed on 5Live  this morning (ah, the joys of working from home…) I was mentally tuning in and out of the interview as my attention was caught on other things, but what came through was his apparent disdain for the output of his own show.  He’d rather be back in politics or hosting a sports show “but that’s not what I’m hired for” (sorry Jerry, I may be paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it)

Now, my opinion of the Jerry Springer show and its  counterpart, Jeremy Kyle, can wait for another day when I feel  in need of  something to vent some rage on (there’s a clue in the link…).  What snagged my attention today was the idea that doing something you seem to despise is OK  if  it’s how you earn a living.  This whole issue has been bubbling round in my head for a while  and has cropped up in some unexpected places recently – the mighty Seth touched on it in his blog just a few days ago.   I’m particularly exercised by it now because I’m currently working for an organisation which has done some things I’ve disagreed with pretty vehemently in the past (I’m OK with the project I’m on at the moment, though).

I can’t be alone in wondering about the ethics of communicating on behalf of organisations I disagree with.  When I was temping years ago I told the agency I was working for that I didn’t want to be considered for a job they had with BAT;  and there are other organisations you can think of that you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole – anybody fancy being press officer for the BNP?      So how bad do organisations have to be before we feel the obligation to walk away?  And in these recessionary times, with alternative jobs pretty thin on the ground,  would the building society accept my righteous glow as part-payment on the mortgage?

Matters of life and death

It’s the  60th annivesary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights this month (December 10th, to be precise).  Looking round the planet it seems that we still have a way to go to make a reality of the idea that  “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”  Still, as the founders of Amnesty pointed out, it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. So here is a short list of no-effort-required ways to use the power of your internet connection to fight the good fight.  Now,  flex those social networks and pass it on:

Read the Declaration to see what it’s  all about;   join Amnesty – and support their greetings card campaign;  support Reprieve which fights against the death penalty; pick an issue which really makes your blood boil and find out more about it (personally, mine are Burma and Zimbabwe, so there are a couple of links for starters), and keep an eye on what’s happening at home too

Thanks.  Normal PR-based services will be resumed in the next post…

Living Life in Black and White

Increasingly it feels as though I’m living a secret life online, dipping in and out of all of the truly inspirational (well, OK, quite interesting) things that are happening in a world of PR somewhere else.  Google reader turned up this blog post today highlighting a range of great ideas for things I’d love to do myself and none sounding so close to the cutting edge of technology as to be impossible.    Then I turn my attention to the office I’m actually working in at the moment.  From here the online world feels like a technicolour Oz with me still stuck in sepia-toned Kansas.  Forget Facebook groups,  Twitter and webinars.  At the moment not only is there no digital strategy, I can’t even get security clearance to get through the internet firewall to update our website.   The notion that “Web 2.0 technologies have made participation more fun, accessible, instantaneous, trackable” is great, except it doesn’t feel that it has much to do with me at the moment; a month into this contract and wondering where’s the best place to start just to get the basics right.

The etiquette of blogging?

Thanks to Richard for his very rapid comment on my last post.  I answered him back in a comment of my own, but was then reminded of something I read on Richard’s own blog about leaving the comments space to everyone else (I’ve already had my say in the original post, after all).  I find it almost impossible not to respond if someone comments on something I’ve written (or as my husband would put it, I am constitutionally incapable of letting someone else have the last word).  Are there rules about this kind of thing? And should I look on bestadviceforum to find them?

By the way, for anyone who’s not sure what the term means (I wasn’t myself) this is what Google Juice is…

Expert schmexpert

I have now achieved internet recognition and can stop blogging.  My last post has surfaced on the bestadviceforum website – as I accidentally discovered, much to my astonishment this afternoon while looking for something completely different.  So there I am, an online expert (at least an advice-giver of note) – proudly next to “how to buy a designer diaper bag” and “abusing the UK tax system from the Isle of Man” (haven’t read that one, but assume it’s not a “how to” guide).    I am now linking back to myself in an act of rampant egomania, in the hope that I can create a circular reference loop which will create a virtual black hole which swallows the internet (in my head the Dr Who theme is playing now…)

Has it?  Is there anybody there?