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.

Reality Bites

A friend and fellow freelancer told me a story yesterday which made my blood run cold.  Two days before starting work on  a new contract, her client demanded that she cut her fee by 40%.

She was able to walk away from the work.  As recession snaps at our heels, I do wonder if gazundering on this scale is going to become more widespread, and if it does are we just going to have to put up with it?  Personally I haven’t found my rates being queried, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to get companies to pay within a reasonable time.  Worst so far was a very well known company who took 75 days to cough up from receipt of my invoice – this means that work I did in June/July I got paid for in October.  Fortunately I wasn’t relying on it to pay the mortgage!

Ian Monk at PR Week has been looking at the issue of late payment for small business for quite a while now and has reported on some real horror stories, including business being closed by cashflow problems, which make my experience look mild in comparison.   I appreciate that the economy is hurting everyone, self-employed or not, but if we’re doing the work surely the very least we should expect is to be paid for it on time?

In case it’s useful to anyone, here is the Better Payment Practice campaign with advice about late payment legislation for small businesses.  And here is a report on FreelanceUK about how useful the legislation is proving in practice…

Five reasons why money spent on PR is always worth it

Coming home on the tube yesterday I saw a headline in one of the freebie newspapers which said “Haringey Council blew £2m on PR”  The argument, depressingly familar to those of us who work in public sector communications, is that every penny spent on press officers means less for social workers, leading in this case directly to the death of Baby P.   Comforting myself with the thought that my source was hardly a paper of record, I googled the story this morning to see if any of the “proper” papers were running with it. I found this in the Telegraph, which repeats the argument pretty much exactly, making a direct link between the money spent on PR and the casework overload of the social worker in the Baby P case.

I am a PR consultant who works for public sector organisations (and therefore, obviously, am quite happy to grab cash and if possible food from the hands of widows and orphans), so I have a bit of a biased view of this one.  But I’m still pretty depressed at the frequency with which the PR = wasted money argument comes around.  I’ve spent most of my career in  publicly-funded bodies, and have always had at the front of my mind the fact that I am spending the public’s money on the projects I do,  so need to get value for money. (By the way, I appreciate the irony that I am now defending Haringey’s PR team, having criticised their performance over the Baby P case a couple of posts back – perhaps it means Haringey just aren’t spending enough…)

So, off the top of my head, here are five quick reasons why it’s worth public bodies spending public money on communicating with the public – and how depressing to have to trot them out yet again.

1.  There’s little point in spending very large amounts of money in providing services for the public and then failing to let them know how/where to access those services

2.  It’s good for local democracy to let people know how their elected representatives are spending their money.  Even if individuals don’t personally need to access all local services it’s good that they know that the Council does more than just emptying the bins.  If people understand how their Council Tax is being spent,  they can object if they want to, which is one way of keeping the link between local government and local people alive.  Comms budgets often pay for public consultations on contentious local issues.

3.  Media training doesn’t mean turning out hordes of automata who just parrot a party line.  It means helping people who are not professional communicators deal with the pressures of media scrutiny so that they can put their case as effectively as possible.

4. Press offices offer an invaluable resource of information and contacts for journalists – bet the Telegraph journo who sourced the quotes for this story gets lots of help from PRs!

5.  As a proportion of Haringey’s overall operational budget, £2.2m is peanuts.  I think I read that the total budget was somewhere north of £250m (I could always call their press office to check…)  So the PR budget represents just a shade under 1%.

If anyone wants to add more I’d be happy to hear them, and store them up for the next time this story comes around.

And finally, why is the PR industry so bad at doing PR for itself?

Citizen Journalists 1 – Newspapers 0?

Rupert Murdoch says that the internet won’t mean the death of newspapers.

On the Huffington Post today, Arianna H says that she is continuing with the cohort of citizen journalists who so succesfully provided content for the “Off the bus” coverage of the US election.  In fact she is expanding their numbers, believing they can make a significant contribution to the site’s editorial process.

I wouldn’t want to bet against either of them, but can they both be right?

The Murdoch argument is that newspapers are failing not because of inroads made by online news sources, but because editors aren’t giving their readers what they want – Charles Warner (writing on HuffPo) has already described that as ” like blaming horses for the decline in the sale of buggy whips because of the invention of the automobile.” So I guess we know where he stands…

Old and new media

I’be been pondering the challenge Richard has set in his latest post – trying to decide whether or not social media means the death of PR.  The huge effort that the Obama campaign is still putting into new media (yes, I know not all of it can be defined as “social media”) seems to suggest that for PRs this is just a new channel – albeit  of a new and so-far unpredicatable type – which they can use if they know what they’re doing.  There’s a piece in today’s Observer which details the enormous returns Obama got from his very well crafted online campaigning which tends to suggest that, IF the message you are trying to spread resonates with the audience you are trying to reach AND members of that audience use social media networks to communicate with each other, then social media can be a means of spreading a PR message which is exponentially more powerful than more traditional methods.  So the answer to Richard’s question is : no,  as long as the PR is adept at finding messages which resonate – and that’s always been the trick that good PRs know how to work.  Right?

My pondering has been interrupted by my niggling doubts as to why Arianna Huffington, queen of bloggers, is advertising a proper, old-fashioned  book she has written about how to be a blogger.  Surely, if you want to be a blogger you already know that such things exist, so you’ve seen them online, so you are web savvy enough to use the internet.  So, wouldn’t you use google to find a site that tells you…  I appreciate that won’t have the Arianna Huffington seal of approval on it, and I’m quite cheered to see that books still count, even on HuffPo but I can’t stop wondering about who on earth is going to read this.  What have I missed?

Not a considered response

I worked at the DfES (now DCSF) when the Every Child Matters programme was being put in place so I know the pains that were taken to try to strengthen child protection services in the light of Victoria Climbie’s death.  It is a far from perfect system but the tools are there for local authorities to use and the emphasis on putting children’s interests first now runs through every branch of the child-related public services.  So why is the response to Baby P’s death so predictable and totally enraging?  An enquiry announced, another debate about whether or not we are demonising social workers and (at least as far as I can see) no heads rolling, no-one held accountable, no-one accepting responsibility.  How well-paid, free of bureaucracy, supported by mangement and empowered to act do you have to be in order to realise that this is wrong?  And how on earth can you not resign immediately it becomes clear that it happened on your watch?

Trying to drag this round to being a comms issue; I notice that there is no statement easily findable about this on the front page of the DCSF site – you have to dig about a bit to find this, or the children’s commissioner’s site (although you can find a statement from the Deputy Commissioner welcoming the new enquiry).  Haringey’s statement is a click thorugh from a front page headline “Statement regarding government support for Haringey”, which implies to a casual reader that everyone is rallying round this authority which is having a bit of a bad time at the moment.

So, deep breath, rant almost over, red mist starting to clear… What has to happen before we get to the point where we can say “never again” with some confidence?  Is that possible – or are there some people who are just so wicked that their actions can’t be legislated for?  I really do appreciate how difficult the work of social services is, so what do we as a country have to do to support them to allow them to deliver better services?  Is it just a matter of better funding?  And if the response to disasters is always like this, how do we get people to swallow the tax-increases that might be needed to pay?

Thinking out loud

This is more writing therapy for me than a considered blog entry – but your thoughts and  suggestions would be very welcome…

I am about to start working on  an internal comms programme for a public body which is both security conscious and has offices widely dispersed across the country.  One of the things I’ve been asked to look at is developing the intranet and making it into a more vibrant form of cross-departmental communication.  I am convinced that the words “vibrant” and “intranet” don’t generally belong in the same sentence – no organisation I’ve ever worked for has had such a thing,  and some have sunk large amounts of money into failing to develop one.  I’ve used systems where the intranet is the compulsory first screen on everyone’s pc so company messages can be shoved in front of people as they log in, but that’s always seemed to be easily ignorable – for most people the log-on process is as automatic (and memorable) as brushing their teeth.   So, examples, please of intranet systems which really work and which can be set up and maintained with a minimum of woman-power in the back office. I evidently shouldn’t have opted out of the internal comms module on the course!

I’d love to find a way to make it a properly participatory network, but the spectre of the Virgin Facebook debacle keeps floating in front of my eyes.   With this in mind, I was intrigued to see reports of a Demos pamphlet about the impact of social media in improving collaboration within organisations.  The public sector seems to come out as mistrusting the use of social media networking tools by staff.  Admittedly the stuff I’ve seen about this is from New Zealand rather than the UK, but I find it hard to believe that the UK is more adventurous! So, is anyone aware of any innovative use of this stuff in the public sector – which preferably won’t land me on the front page of every newspaper in the country as a threat to the nation’s security?

Sledgehammer, meet nut

The BBC is currently giving us a  master class in how not to handle a PR crisis, marks should be awarded for (lack of) style, grace or  basic competence.  I can’t help feeling though that, yes Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s comments were crass and stupid.  And no, it’s not big or clever to leave offensive nuisance calls on someone’s answerphone.  And yes, indeed, they are both over-paid, overgrown school boys who aren’t as funny as they think they are and should think about the responsibility that goes with taking public money.  BUT do we really need questions in the House, a Prime Ministerial statement and some spluttering from David Cameron to highlight how terribly serious it all is?  The media response seems to me to be completely out of all proportion and is feeding the outrage – the number of complaints was pretty insignificant until the papers and the politicians jumped onto the bandwagon.  I was researching some stuff for a presentation I’m doing later in the week and came across this, which made me laugh out loud in recognition of today’s papers.  “I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous.  He or she is like a person who has just put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae”.

So that’s how you do it…

I was wondering how I was going to keep up my conversion to social media without having to give up my day job and leave the children to fend for themselves.  Then I found this on PROpenMic , five easy steps to managing a tidal wave of information whilst still leaving you time to wash, sleep and eat.   Shared in a spirit of community – I hope it helps someone!

Megaphone or conversation?

I was  interested to read Sarah’s post about CEO blogging, and agree with her about the lack of thought behind the call “I must have a blog”.   For many senior people in organisations I’ve worked for, blogging is seen as either a vanity publishing opportunity for sharing their unique vision with a grateful world; or just another comms channel – a pipe to squeeze some corporate messaging through.

This seems to be a pretty basic misunderstanding of how things work.  I remember reading an article Emily Bell wrote for Broadcast (I think and I can’t find a link) saying that you can’t target people with messages online –  the process only works when people feel they can contribute and participate.  I can’t imagine there are many CEOs (or senior civil servants) who would be genuinely happy to set out their thinking on a blog to let customers – and competitors – pick over it and join in.  And even if they were they wouldn’t have time to really engage with what came back to them.  And if they weren’t, what’s the point?

The collaborative nature of  blogging ought to work for business, though.  A small, personal example.  My husband runs a trade association which offers its members expert support in solving technical manufacturing problems.   He is setting up a series of members’ blogs in the hope that they can share best practice, good ideas and wizard wheezes across the industry for the benefit of everyone.  It’s not exactly “the CEO addresses the nation” and it won’t be of any possible use to anyone outside the industry, but it absolutely meets the needs of that community, and isn’t that the point?

A late entry at the blogging ball

Typically, on the day I decided to take the plunge and set up a blog, the Today programme  gleefully told me that blogging is so completely over that anyone who has a blog should close it down and hop off to Twitter  instead.    Apparently the blogosphere is sinking under a “tsunami of paid bilge” and most people have an attention span which is too short to deal with more information than they can get in a typical txt msg or tweet.

If even John Humphrys is telling me that I’m behind the times I evidently have some catching up to do.  But having been prompted by blogging enthusiast Richard Bailey to set up my own space, I’m now really excited at the thought of having somewhere to organise my thoughts about the best way to manage a PR business through what promises to be a pretty grim recession.

PR Week ran one of their “thought leader” supplements about the future of the PR agency, recently which came up with some interesting ideas about how agencies can rise to the challenge of the credit crunch.  The tone was pretty upbeat – there may be trouble ahead but the PR industry is well placed to weather the storm and our communications skills are always going to be needed.  Cheerily, for me at least, there was some suggestion that more business will be outsourced from inhouse staff to freelancers.  This allows companies to cut their overheads and not have to pay for all those expensive fripperies like heating, lighting and pension contributions for their staff.  This means that I may be able to keep paying the mortgage, but may never be able to retire.  Suggestions as to whether this is good or bad news will be very welcome!