Tag: PR

Picking your fights: why Jeremy Corbyn needs better PR

Whether or not Jeremy Corbyn should have sung the national anthem at yesterday’s Battle of Britain remembrance service, by keeping quiet he has handed his opponents a massive stick with which to beat him.  Today’s coverage in the papers is dominated by accusations of disloyalty – something Corbyn’s supporters on twitter have picked up somewhat self-righteously.

Well, yes, they certainly should be talking about other things:

But JC has given them the perfect opportunity not to bother with that but to make hay elsewhere.  He needs, he desperately needs, someone competent to be running his comms operation.  The slurs, the innuendo and the self-inflicted wounds will stick to him right through his leadership (which currently looks as though it will be nasty, brutish and very, very short).

There’s a difference between the soulless spin of machine politics and a principled attempt to get your message out clearly to people who need to hear it. Corbyn is now – unfairly but probably indelibly – fixed in the public’s eye as a loony lefty who hates the Queen and won’t even do his top button up to support our most iconic national heroes.   Early images stick – ask William Hague, whose leadership  never shook off the Tory-boy images of himself in a baseball cap riding the log flumes at Alton Towers; or Ed Miliband still fighting the “brother-betrayer/ back-stabber” slurs five years after his own leadership win.

JC can hold the high moral ground of unspun purity, or he can sink beneath the waves.  William Hague has written a column for today’s Telegraph about the perils Corbyn faces. It’s headed There are countless sworn assassins waiting to knife Jeremy Corbyn in the back , there certainly are.  And at the moment he’s playing right into their hands.

Who the hell’s doing the Tories’ PR?

Having spent last night watching Hackney burning on TV and listening to police sirens screaming past on the road outside, I appreciate that there are more important issues at stake than David Cameron’s PR.  But, this blog is supposed to be about communications, so what the hell:

Who on earth is in charge of Tory PR?  And why did they not have the PM on a plane back from Tuscany immediately after the first night of rioting in London?

For once I have some sympathy for the politicians –  what on earth do we expect them to do when they get back?  As Shaun Bailey put it on Newsnight :

 “This is the thing that the media have been most childish about.  Do you think that David Cameron’s going to go down there with a shield and deal with the kids in Tottenham and then run over to Hackney?  We have a mechanism.  This is a big sophisticated society.  The police are here … we have leaders.  We have a Deputy Prime Minister, a Deputy Mayor, we have all manner of people.  The point is this, they are not the people who will put this problem right.  This problem is in our communities and in our economy.  What are our young people going to do for a job?  … We have lost control of our young people and that is our responsibility not politicians’ “

But whether there’s a practical need for them to be here or not, the image projected by the absence of senior ministers is poisonous to the Tories because it suggests that either:

  • they have no idea what to do and are hiding from the cameras so that they don’t reveal this to an anxious public;   or
  • they don’t want to get into a row – about cuts to police and youth services, or about soaring youth unemployment, or about how (if?) the clean-up will be paid for;    or
  • they simply don’t care – poor communities destroying themselves in unfashionable parts of London don’t matter enough to interrupt a holiday.

I think it’s the last one that’s the one that’s most damaging.   Cameron, Boris, Osborne, privately educated, Bullingdon-clubbers and multi-millionaires to a man, they already look startingly out of touch with “real people”.  It’s all too easy to imagine that they couldn’t care less about what happens on Mare Street.

Cameron cares about his image – that’s why he was  so sensitive to criticism for not tipping a waitress that he went back to find her.  But his priorities are badly wrong.  He should have been  here, striding purposefully about in Tottenham, talking to residents with a furrowed brow, sympathising with distraught shop-keepers and homeowners and promising that help is on its way.

Of course he’s back now, but it’s too late. In PR terms the damage is done.  The mood music is clear – they don’t care, they don’t act, we’re all in this together at the mercy of the mob,  they’re enjoying holidays in expensive private villas.  They’re the nasty party again.  Little by little the brand is being re-toxified.

 

The most important thing I ever learned

As a PR the most valuable  advice I was ever given was  “never assume anything” which beats  “there’s no such thing as off the record” by virtue of applying to both professional and private life.

Both of these lessons were dinned in to me when I was a baby PR  at the BBC, and have served me well ever since.  I’ve been thinking about them recently as I’m interviewing someone on Friday for a magazine feature entitled, natch,  The most important thing I’ve ever learned,  and I’m idly wondering what I’ll say if he turns the tables on me.   I wish my examples were a bit more profound, or more practical – “funny you should ask, Dave, the most important thing I ever learned was how to turn base metals into gold… ”  But no, it’s the simple rules that support the architecture of  a PR’s career.  Turn up on time,  ALWAYS call back,  tell the truth (the biggest row I ever had was when a producer deliberately lied to me about a story, leading me to pass on a lie to a valued contact on the Observer with whom I never had quite such a good relationship again).  Of course this isn’t all there is to it – you have to passionately enthuse about what  you’re doing, be creative about the approaches you take, be constantly open to new ideas and ways of doing things.  But the nuts and bolts of it are frighteningly simple.  I’m assuming, of course, that your lessons are much more impressive…

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?

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?