Rule Number One

In a week when major retailers have been accused of being slow to respond to the ongoing horse meat scandal it was a pleasant surprise to receive a personal email from the group chief executive of the Co-op.


It’s entitled An Apology from Peter Marks.

He’s been well advised.

Rule Number One: When the …. hits the fan apologise - say you’re sorry.

And I quote:

“I believe that as a result of this food scandal we have let you down….I strongly believe that all food retailers must accept ultimate accountability for the products we sell to our customers. We cannot blame the government or the regulators, or even our own suppliers. At the end of the day, the buck stops here.”

In contrast, in an interview last week, Tesco boss Philip Clarke sidestepped Rule Number One and chose instead to focus on the importance of the trust that we, the customers, place in retailers.

And he made not just one but three promises, including the development of a new ‘field to fork’ website which I have to say sounds like a ratings winner. Come children, gather round it’s time for Buttercup’s Bolognaise Journey followed by Breakfast with Babe.  Not sure I really want to watch The Silencing of the Lambs though.

Other than that Mr Tesco promised that they’ll try harder and make sure we’re not out of pocket (although they’ve already been accused of increasing the prices of meat-free meals).

Asda boss Andy Clarke has also finally spoken, vowing to leave no stone unturned in order to get to the bottom of the scandal, while Iceland boss Malcolm Walker has described the whole episode as a ‘storm in a teacup’.

Although Waitrose appears to have sidestepped the horse-meat scandal it has admitted finding traces of pork in its ‘beef’ burgers. (Meanwhile Morrison’s (we own our own farms) is reporting a 50% rise in sales of fresh burgers.)

Anyway, from what I can see only Peter Marks has actually said ‘sorry’. Rule number one boys, rule number one.

Flying with the Dinosaurs

Go on have a bet – who do you think is more likely to embrace social media, Ryanair or Delia?

Well, if you said Ryanair then you’d be wrong!

In the week that Delia has announced she’s turned her back on the BBC in favour of launching her own online cookery school, PR Week reports that Ryanair has ‘dismissed the value of social media engagement’.

The new head of comms at Ryanair is quoted as saying that while other airlines have tapped into social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, the sites ‘would not be helpful to us, as we would have so many people looking for a response.’

Referring to the social network as a ‘two way tool’ Robin Kiely said that maintaining a dedicated account would probably mean hiring two more people just to sit on Facebook all day..adding that if customers wanted to get in touch the methods were there (i.e. customer care lines).

Oh dear, oh dear.

What’s wrong with having a two way relationship with your customers Ryanair? Or is the prospect of customers being able to easily get in touch and openly share opinions simply too frightening for words?

Shame on you.

Yes, us no-frills passengers understand that low fares come at a price - remote airports, very early/late departures, extremely strict rules and not so much as a free peanut.

But it’s outrageous that is this day and age a huge company like Ryanair has adopted such a head-in-the-sand stance. And I’ll bet that getting through on Ryanair’s helpline takes longer than it does to get through security at Stansted in the peak of the hen party season.

Or is this all simply another ruse to gain publicity for Ryanair (remember those plans to charge for spending a penny mid-air)?

Sometimes you just can't win...

It’s a real pleasure to listen to a radio interview when, regardless of what is thrown at him/her, the interviewee leaves with his/her credibility intact.

It takes a huge amount of skill and experience to handle a ‘hostile’ interview or to cope with the pressure of the media when something has gone terribly wrong.

Of course having a crisis communications plan in place helps to ensure that a business can cope with dramas and disasters. But what’s particularly unpredictable is when a journalist has a bee in their bonnet about an issue and appears determined to find a scapegoat.

Suddenly the tone of the interview changes and you’re on the back foot – not only fighting to preserve your own reputation - but the morals of the entire sector, or so it feels.

And sometimes you just can’t win. When Radio Four’s James Naughtie got his teeth into Asda corporate affairs director Sian Jarvis, the poor woman had no chance.

Regardless of what she did or didn’t say, with the best will in the world I think it’s extremely unfair to hold Asda responsible for ruining the health of our children. Their job is to sell stuff. They don’t give it away, people choose to buy it. Just like people choose to stock up on cheap booze or to indulge in fast food.

Surely, I hear you say, it’s time people started taking responsibility for their actions – and stopped blaming everyone else for their problems. Good luck explaining that to the press – ever tried to get a bone off a dog?

http://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/Food-Safety/Asda-boss-in-PR-gaffe-when-radio-interviews-turn-nasty/?c=ktLArBcbayepAzZlD3Agcg%3D%3D&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter%2BDaily

Guerilla Marketing - Olympic Style

With headline sponsors paying a mint for official Olympic association perhaps it’s understandable that the organisers didn’t want every Tom, Dick or Harry jumping on the London 2012 bandwagon.

Let’s face it the likes of McDonalds wouldn’t have been too happy to see a repeat of the guerrilla style marketing techniques used so successfully at the last World Cup. Remember how a Dutch beer company upstaged the tournament’s official beer brand with its orange clad supporters?

So with church ladies forced to rename their ‘Olympic’ Flower Festivals and bakers banned from artfully displaying doughnut rings, it was clear that brands would have to be super inventive in order to align themselves with the event, unless they were prepared to pay through the nose.

But in the end it was a piece of cake for a small Birmingham bakery, where patriotism, timing, old fashioned hospitality and great baking proved a winner.

With Birmingham playing host to the Jamaican team, Sunrise Bakery baked a batch of welcome cakes for the team and also supplied a three tier cake, which was the centrepiece of a pre-Olympic gala dinner.

And sprinter Yohan Blake reportedly took such a liking to the bakery’s products he asked for supplies to be sent to the Olympic Village.

Bakery boss Errol Drummond said: “You couldn’t pay for this level of exposure. We’ve had calls from all over the UK and around the world from people wanting to know more about our products. Think how much McDonald’s paid for its Olympic sponsorship. And we’re just a small bakery in the West Midlands.

“We’re developing a link with the Jamaican track and field team. It’s early days but we’re hoping to use this to target a premium marketplace.”

And if it was gold for Sunrise then it was a silver for Birmingham – with Usain Bolt paying tribute to the city after winning his second gold medal.

An Olympic Challenge

Want to get in the nationals? No problem.

Success for some clients is national coverage – and the challenge for those of us in PR is to manage their expectations.

The truth is we don’t have a magic wand and some PR companies actually sit down with their clients and a pile of magazines/newspapers to jointly discuss where exactly they think they would 'fit'.

You might think filling all those pages and broadcast slots every day is tough, but the reality is most press releases/pitches end up in the bin. Having said that, the good news is that there are small armies of journalists out there urging us PR folk to get in touch.

The less good news is that they’ve usually got very specific, not to say imaginative, angles in mind.

Today for instance, you’re in with a chance if you:

• Got married to a man you weren’t madly in love with, but who you’ve grown to love deeply
• Are a woman living with HIV
• Consider your girlfriend more intelligent than you
• Look great for 40
• Spend a fortune to look good on holiday
• Had a whirlwind marriage that didn’t work out
• Are a super male slimmer
• A woman who hasn’t had sex for a year

It’s probably fair to say business angles are pretty thin on the ground – unless you’re quick off the ground and able to comment on something super topical such as cash-in-hand payments or employing people over retirement age.

I suppose the morale of the story is that getting quality coverage is never easy – it’s something that takes time, patience – and teamwork. Olympic tattoo anyone?

Off the Record?

A day or so ago I came across a quote “you can be friendly with a journalist, but a journalist will never be your friend” and it reminded me of a somewhat tense session with newspaper executives and a high profile celebrity some years ago.

Amongst other things, the editor stated quite categorically “there’s no such thing as off the record”.

So it was with some disbelief that I read an article in this morning’s Eastern Daily Press involving an email sent to BBC Radio Norfolk.

Not only did the email contain ‘off the record’ information, crucially it was also in writing – including the full name and contact details of the sender, who signed off with the request ‘please treat this as an anonymous tip off’.

Fat chance!

Needless to say the email found its way into various other inboxes…which led to the sender being suspended from his job…and the email being published in full in today’s Eastern Daily Press.

So, to repeat – never, ever assume you’re speaking ‘off the record’ when talking to the media. And if you want to whisper anonymously in someone’s ear then best avoid email…

http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/conservative_political_assistant_at_norfolk_county_council_suspended_as_email_probe_launched_1_1385921

One Size Seldom Fits All...

Here's a very interesting article about how the world's largest technology companies approach PR:

The Guardian's technology editor Charles Arthur gives his opinion on the different PR strategies employed by the world's largest technology firms.


I've been writing about technology for a couple of decades now. Both technology writers and PR professionals face a problem in trying to produce coverage that will interest the average person: most people have only heard of a few companies, and actually care about even fewer.

These days, those few companies tend to be in the US. So both journalists and PROs have a challenge getting to the people and the stories. Time zones and travel schedules fight you. I often envy colleagues in politics, or media, or sports such as football, whose interviewees are (comparatively) right on their doorsteps.

Things are changing. For example, the explosion of Tech City in London in the past few years is making a big difference. But the big money is still in the US (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), creating the continual problem of getting a quote out of someone who actually knows.

In writing my book Digital Wars, about Apple, Google and Microsoft and their many business battles over the past 15 years, I had plenty of time to reflect on the different companies' PR strategies. One of the first things I did was to seek formal interviews. They mostly turned me down. But that wasn't an obstacle: if you're on LinkedIn and have Skype, you can track down pretty much anyone who used to work anywhere. And I still had my contacts inside the companies.

In contrast to the 'big three', the typical technology company - and someone doing their PR - has the opposite problem: getting people interested. With dozens of topics jostling for attention all the time, you need either a 'fancy that!' story ('my website is actually powered by cats' - no, I made that up) or to grab the coattails of a topical subject. From the number of phone calls and emails I get, my impression is the struggle for coverage can be desperate. Especially if you've over-promised how much national print coverage the client will get.

The three big tech companies - Apple, Google and Microsoft - however, have rather different PR strategies. Here's my take on them, as someone on what you could call the receiving end.

APPLE - SECRETIVE

Apple's PR approach is, generally, 'we'll say what we want, when we want, to whom we carefully choose'. People think it's a silent monolith, which it often is. But it was like that back in the days when the iPod was new and Apple was comparatively tiny. Its approach has pretty much always been to let the products speak for themselves. In addition, secrecy is a big part of its success: Apple gets a giant publicity boost from letting expectation build up ahead of a new iPhone or product. Just look at the fascination about the possibility of an Apple TV. There's no 'background briefing' ahead of time. Apple is completely silent about it.

Despite the fact that people - well, journalists - love to focus on the cult of personality around (previously) Steve Jobs and (still) Jonathan Ive, partly because people give better interviews than gadgets, the company itself doesn't play ball.

Its PR team is also very small compared with the level of interest in the company, and with the company itself; Apple has the biggest market value in the world and, last Christmas quarter, the biggest quarterly revenue. But the media team isn't singled out for low recruitment; Apple has incredibly small teams proportional to its size and sales everywhere except its stores. Also, requests often get bounced back up to the mothership in Cupertino, California. Even when a subject is important, Apple may choose not to respond.

For example, despite my having sought a response in plenty of time about the iPhone storing a 'map' of phone masts users had linked to - effectively a map of where they had been - the company decided simply not to comment. The story, when it came out, led to questions in the US Congress and, soon, changes to the iPhone software.

I think Apple often prefers to see how big a story becomes and then react. It's the classic problem for big companies stretched over continents.

Social media: There are no official Apple blogs. It doesn't have an active presence on Facebook or Twitter (apart from some auto-tweets from the iTunes Store). Marketing chief Phil Schiller is on Twitter (@pschiller) but doesn't interact much. Many other Apple staff are, but keep very quiet; no beans are ever spilt.

GOOGLE - OFF THE RECORD

The modern Google hates to leave fingerprints. I've been dealing with it since it was a comparatively small company back in 2003/04. Google started out not being interested in PR - co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to chat to journalists in the very early days, but they didn't really see the point in marketing. Like Apple, they thought the products should speak for themselves.

That's changed as it has got bigger and come into more direct rivalry with Microsoft and, more recently, Facebook.

Page and Brin give the occasional high-profile interview (Brin recently with The Guardian, Page to Businessweek). But it's not the plucky little start-up any more; it's the big beast - so big the EC is deliberating over whether to launch an antitrust action, as it previously did with giant names like Microsoft and Intel.

It has also had to work hard reassuring people over privacy, given the rows in the past couple of years over YouTube and copyright, Google Maps and Google StreetView (with satellite pics of people's homes), Google StreetView's Wi-Fi data capture (a horrendous privacy gaffe that hasn't gone away), and most recently the changes to its privacy policies, rolling them into one.

There are few public faces in the company. And even in briefings, it prefers not to stick its head over the parapet. Read stories about Google in any country, and in time you'll find the magic phrase 'sources close to', which actually means 'the company, but unofficially'. The company itself offers few quotes. Instead there's plenty of 'guidance' on offer for journalists, which of course can't really be challenged in any formal way. No fingerprints, no traceability. Intriguing, for a company whose mission is 'to organise the world's information and make it accessible'.

Social media: Google has many blogs, while Page and Brin have their own Google+ pages. It eschews Facebook, but loads of the staff have blogs, are on Twitter and use Facebook.

MICROSOFT - BLOG SPIN

Of the three, Microsoft has the most businesses that can simply tick over. Windows and Office (which makes 105 per cent of its profits; five per cent then gets lost by various other divisions) don't really need much day-to-day PR. Most of its visible PR effort is around Xbox and Xbox Live and, to a lesser extent, its Windows Phone mobile software.

But once more, it's hamstrung by the sheer size of the business. A UK query relating to something about its general business - say, to pin down a rumour about the Xbox, or the Zune software, or Windows Phone - has to ping over to Seattle, and will often vanish into the vast maw of operations there. That's why so many journalists now rely on the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) blogs that Microsoft's engineers write, because they feel authentic. Of course, they're actually carefully vetted and checked before publication. The clever thing is that the MSDN blogs are the spin; the press office is the formal voice.

The company also sponsors some lobbying groups, without much success. It's too easy these days to follow the money and wonder if there isn't an obvious bias. Google could always neutralise them by applying to join, but it simply ignores them.

Social media: Loads of blogs and plenty of Twitter presence (PR chief Frank Shaw @fxshaw is often biting).

WHICH WORKS BEST?

Which approach works best? One can't be categorical - their different business models mean they need different approaches. Apple's secretive approach is ideal for its 'unveiling' strategy. Microsoft's more open form approach works to drip information out to its enterprise customers, who have long lead times and have to plan. Google wants to be a bit mysterious about its inner workings; it would hate people to see that there are just loads of folk typing code into computers, rather than a magic search bar in the middle of the internet.

I don't envy the modern PR professional trying to boost the profile of a technology company; nor those who look after the 'big three'. Interest is exploding, the number of outlets ditto, and trying to prioritise who to deal with must be mind-numbing. You have my sympathies - honestly.

Arthur's new book Digital Wars: Apple, Microsoft, Google and the Battle for the Internet is published by Kogan Page, and available through bookshops and online.