You can have your cake in Dundee - a recipe for PR disaster

I stumbled across this gem this week: Dundee City Council has banned home baking at school fairs on the grounds of - you guessed it - health and safety. But the jobs-worths in whatever over-staffed department deals with health and safety have backed down after angry parents stated the blindingly obvious: home baking is a great way to raise money and poses very little risk. In fact, can anyone recall the last time anyone was killed or injured eating a scone at the school fair?

From a public relations point of view, what does this silly story tell us? Far too many organisations have no grasp whatsoever of commonsense. The crackpot decision from Dundee follows on the heels of other equally absurd nanny state diktats like banning kids from running in the playground in case they hurt themselves.

Health and safety is now a bloated industry whose tentacles reach into every aspect of life. The bossy types who are attracted to this kind of work feel the only way they can justify their very well-paid jobs is by dreaming up more and more annoying ways to tell us how to run our lives.

There is a very simple PR lesson in this that can be applied to all organisations. Every major decision that has an impact on the public has to be thought out in advance to assess the impact it will have on the reputation of that body. I’m not for a moment suggesting some kind of cynical PR spin is put on everything that is communicated to the public – that’s a sure-fire recipe for losing trust with the public because you are not being honest and transparent.

But it shouldn’t take a genius to work out that banning mums and dads from baking cakes for the local primary school is going to do anything other than drive them mad with frustration. The council’s mealy-mouthed statement said the climbdown was due to ‘further consideration of available risk mitigation measures’. Translated from cooncil-speak, I think that means they’ve realised what a fool they’ve made of themselves.

Watch this space for further PR disasters from council bureaucrats.

Social networking - here's how it works

If we’re honest, most of us working in PR are still feeling our way through social networking, trying to get a handle on how to get the most from it. Most people seem to be diving into this just because everyone else is and they don’t want to miss the bandwagon, but I’m always on the look-out for practical examples of how it is actually benefitting people and delivering real results to businesses.
I thought I’d share with you the experience I had this month when we launched the new Breen Media website. I’m a big fan of LinkedIn, which I think is the best social networking site for business by miles. I’ve gleaned tons of valuable information from the discussions on the groups I’ve joined and decided to tap into this vast pool of free expert knowledge.
No matter how much work you put into a website there is always room for improvement, so when our site went live earlier this month I posted an appeal on various group sites such as Network of PR Professionals, ThoseinMedia, Public Relations and Communications Professionals, Innovative Marketing, University of Strathclyde and Glasgow Entrepreneurs, asking for feedback - good and bad.
Thankfully, the response was overwhelmingly positive and most people really liked the site. However, and this was where the real value lies, there were many highly constructive comments and insights to make the site even better, which I’ve passed to our web designers, Silkstream, who also did the site for our niche insurance and reinsurance pr company rein4ce. As we speak, the site is being tweaked based on some of the terrific very thoughtful feedback I received from LinkedIn.
This simple exercise delivered so much value to Breen Media. Firstly, a large number of extremely talented professionals worldwide read the website, raising the profile of the business. Secondly, they were kind enough to offer for the free the kind of professional assessment that I would have had to pay a fortune for had I hired a consultant. Thirdly, I’ve connected with many of these people. Finally, and most importantly, I received a number of extremely promising leads from people who looked at the site.
Social networking, when used properly, can be an extremely powerful weapon for PR professionals. From a simple post, I’ve gained invaluable contacts, business leads, driven a huge surge in traffic to our website, and the website is the better for it.
That’s the beauty of social networking.

Tags: Breen Media, rein4ce, Silkstream, Linkedin

Hello from Breen Media

I hope you enjoy browsing through the redesigned Breen Media website www.breenmedia.co.uk.

The new site reflects the way our business has fundamentally changed since we set up four years ago. Then, Mairi Mallon and I we were dipping our toes in the waters of freelance journalism in Britain after decades working as staff reporters, offering public relations as a sideline. Now, due to growing demand, all our energies are focussed on using our experience of how the media works to offer PR services that get results.

With who knows how many gazillions of unread words and pixels floating across the internet, I think it’s more important now than ever for businesses to get their message clear – and seen by the right people. Or as jazz legend Charlie Mingus put it: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

We’ve re-branded the company and have a new logo and a slogan - ‘to the point’- which sums up what we think public relations should be all about.

Thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations from existing clients and people who know and have worked with us in Scotland, the UK and internationally, we’ve continued to win new business - despite the current recession.

We’ve also recently set up rein4ce, a specialist company offering PR and corporate communications to the insurance and reinsurance industries, and have picked up clients in London, Bermuda, the Middle East and Latin America.

I’ll be updating the blog regularly with news about the company, as well as offering any thoughts on media and business issues I think will interest clients - or people simply browsing through - that might help everyone struggle through the recession. And I’ll post any interesting stuff I come across that has cheered me up or made me stop and think.

In the meantime, we’re always looking for ways to improve what we do, so we’d welcome any thoughts you have – good or bad – on the website and the services we offer.