Watching Labour politicians working themselves into a froth this week about the Sun after it switched allegiance to the Tories has been hilarious.
Harriet Harman told conference she was speaking about something the Sun knew nothing about - women’s rights. Union leader Tony Woodley tore up a copy of the paper, saying it had never supported Labour values.
Newsflash to Harriet and Tony - this didn’t start on Wednesday morning! The Sun has never given a damn about women (unless they’ve got their tops off) or supported worker’s rights. It’s always been the shrill voice of selfish Thatcherism.
But you didn’t hear the Labour leadership dare point out this obvious truth all the time Tony Blair’s sleazy pact with Rupert Murdoch to win the tabloid’s support held firm. The Labour movement has had to hold its nose very tight indeed for the past decade or so to curry favour with Britain’s best-selling paper. Blair, Alastair Campbell and the rest of the New Labour leadership knew this was the equivalent of entering a pact with the devil and they were prepared to do it to win and maintain power.
Anyone doing deals with with tabloid newspapers - whether it’s opportunistic politicians or grubby individuals selling kiss-and-tell stories - is swimming in shark-infested waters. At some point or other, the shark is likely to turn round and devour them. So why make a fuss when it happens? As Neil Kinnock put it, finding out the Sun was backing the Tories was the equivalent of discovering the pope was a Catholic.
That’s why all the huffing and puffing from Harman and others just reeks of hypocrisy. What it says is that it’s OK for the Sun to be sexist and anti-union - just as long as it keeps telling its readers to vote Labour. At least Gordon Brown had the good sense - from a PR point of view - to try to play down the body blow, claiming feebly that it’s voters not newspapers than decide elections.
Murdoch is cold blooded, utterly ruthless, and he only backs winners who will look out for his business interests. It will be interesting to see what price he has extracted from David Cameron in return for backing the Tories.
Cast your mind back to when the Dirty Digger switched support to New Labour in 1997. There were strong calls for newspaper reform and privacy laws to curb the worst tabloid excesses. Blair rode into power with the Sun’s blessing and - hey presto! - it’s business as usual for the papers.
James Murdoch was recently laying into the BBC at the Edinburgh Television Festival, railing about the unfair advantage the state-funded broadcaster has over commerical operations. He makes some good points. The BBC is a bloated bureaucracy, spending money like a drunken sailor - who can forgot that it sent more than 400 people to cover the Glastonbury festival and more than 300 for T in the Park? Any private sector company that sloshed the cash around like that would quickly go out of business.
Has Murdoch senior pressurised Cameron to review the licence fee for the BBC as the price of his support? It will be interesting to see.
www.breenmedia.co.uk
Friday, 2 October 2009
Friday, 14 August 2009
Can Rupert Murdoch save journalism?
Rupert Murdoch has thrown a huge rock into the media pool by announcing he is planning to start charging for some online News International information.
How to make cash from internet news sites is the biggest conundrum newspapers face in the 21st century and no one has cracked it yet. Having given the shop away years ago by providing print news online for free, most commentators believe there is no way back. Why on earth would consumers used to getting their news free from any number of web sites suddenly start paying for the privilege?
I don't have a clear answer, but I do have a growing sense that as people start getting to grips with explosion of 2.0 information, there will be a marked shift towards quality. The reason for this is that amidst the diarrhoea of digital information out there, there is actually a lot of really good stuff that is worth accessing - and maybe even paying for.
Take Twitter. At first, many people simply couldn't fathom the point in receiving instant messages from thousands of complete strangers every day, much of it mind-numbing trivia. There's no doubt that none of us has the time to read all of this stuff, but used properly, Twitter can be an extraordinarily effective tool. The trick is to follow people or organisations who post information that has real value - whether it is a tech nerd keeping you up to date with the latest digital developments, someone who supports your football team who roots around the net for articles, an airport tweeting about flight delays, or your favourite restaurant alerting you if tables become available at the last minute. All of this is good stuff.
In turn, if you post useful information on Twitter, on blogs, or on social media sites, you can establish yourself as an expert, build relationships and win business.
This flight to quality that I sense is happening, could persuade some of us to pay the likes of the New York Times, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph or the FT for our news. It's a big ask, but my old boss at The Scotsman, Tim Luckhurst, who now plies his trade at the Centre for Journalism, believes that if newspapers can charge for content, then they can reinvested it in high quality journalism. He notes, quote correctly, that the legions of citizen journalists who micro-blog from the streets of Tehran about the Iranian elections are good for democracy because they defying attempts at censorship. However, amateur journalists are highly opinionated and are not trained to be critical, objective and accurate. If you want information you can trust, you need professional journalists - and charging for online content might allow struggling newspapers to continue supporting great journalism.
Love him or loathe him, Murdoch has an uncanny knack of spotting where the media market is going and jumping into that space early. If he's right, and others follow, the Dirty Digger just might turn out to be the unlikely saviour of journalism.
www.breenmedia.co.uk
How to make cash from internet news sites is the biggest conundrum newspapers face in the 21st century and no one has cracked it yet. Having given the shop away years ago by providing print news online for free, most commentators believe there is no way back. Why on earth would consumers used to getting their news free from any number of web sites suddenly start paying for the privilege?
I don't have a clear answer, but I do have a growing sense that as people start getting to grips with explosion of 2.0 information, there will be a marked shift towards quality. The reason for this is that amidst the diarrhoea of digital information out there, there is actually a lot of really good stuff that is worth accessing - and maybe even paying for.
Take Twitter. At first, many people simply couldn't fathom the point in receiving instant messages from thousands of complete strangers every day, much of it mind-numbing trivia. There's no doubt that none of us has the time to read all of this stuff, but used properly, Twitter can be an extraordinarily effective tool. The trick is to follow people or organisations who post information that has real value - whether it is a tech nerd keeping you up to date with the latest digital developments, someone who supports your football team who roots around the net for articles, an airport tweeting about flight delays, or your favourite restaurant alerting you if tables become available at the last minute. All of this is good stuff.
In turn, if you post useful information on Twitter, on blogs, or on social media sites, you can establish yourself as an expert, build relationships and win business.
This flight to quality that I sense is happening, could persuade some of us to pay the likes of the New York Times, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph or the FT for our news. It's a big ask, but my old boss at The Scotsman, Tim Luckhurst, who now plies his trade at the Centre for Journalism, believes that if newspapers can charge for content, then they can reinvested it in high quality journalism. He notes, quote correctly, that the legions of citizen journalists who micro-blog from the streets of Tehran about the Iranian elections are good for democracy because they defying attempts at censorship. However, amateur journalists are highly opinionated and are not trained to be critical, objective and accurate. If you want information you can trust, you need professional journalists - and charging for online content might allow struggling newspapers to continue supporting great journalism.
Love him or loathe him, Murdoch has an uncanny knack of spotting where the media market is going and jumping into that space early. If he's right, and others follow, the Dirty Digger just might turn out to be the unlikely saviour of journalism.
www.breenmedia.co.uk
Monday, 10 August 2009
Social Media is all grown up
If anyone working in public relations still has any doubts that social media is going to be a massive part of their job then the latest report from Marta Kagan on Digital Buzz should put them right.
It’s packed full of extraordinary figures about the remarkable growth of social networking sites on the web.
For example:
* three out of four Americans use social technology
* two thirds of the global internet population use social networks
* social sites are the fourth most popular area of online activity - ahead of personal email
* time spent on social networks is growing three times faster than overall internet growth, accounting for 10% of all internet time
* 100 million YouTube videos are viewed each day
* Twitter grew by 1382% between January and February this year
It’s bursting with compelling reasons why every PR practitioner has to include social media as part of their arsenal of communication tools. The swear words might not be to everyone’s taste, but the message is clear.
But enough from me. Why not view the slideshow here yourself.
It’s packed full of extraordinary figures about the remarkable growth of social networking sites on the web.
For example:
* three out of four Americans use social technology
* two thirds of the global internet population use social networks
* social sites are the fourth most popular area of online activity - ahead of personal email
* time spent on social networks is growing three times faster than overall internet growth, accounting for 10% of all internet time
* 100 million YouTube videos are viewed each day
* Twitter grew by 1382% between January and February this year
It’s bursting with compelling reasons why every PR practitioner has to include social media as part of their arsenal of communication tools. The swear words might not be to everyone’s taste, but the message is clear.
But enough from me. Why not view the slideshow here yourself.
Friday, 31 July 2009
Why content is still king in good PR - part 2
Thanks to social media, I often get that quesy feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in my inbox.
2.0 allows anyone to post whatever they like on blogs, Twitter and discussion boards with no quality control whatsoever. Twitter is the classic example. The advice from Twitter pioneers to the uninitiated who couldn’t understand why they would want to be bombarded with hundreds of messages every day from random strangers they had decided to follow, was essentially that you have to jump and experience it before you will get any value from it.
No one can possibly read all of these messages so why would you want to receive them? The answer, ultimately, is content. Amid the avalanche of dross from the morons who will follow anyone on Twitter and post meaningless trivia about their lives and their pets, there are real nuggets of extremely valuable information. The reason it is valuable is because the sender has put some thought into and decided it would be of interest to like-minded people.
Some examples. Mashable, the Social Media Guide, tweets like crazy all day. The last time I checked this afternoon they had posted 17,243 tweets and they have 1,187,803 followers –it will no doubt be more by the time you read this. The reason so many people follow them is because they are delivering a really valuable service sharing with the world everything they are finding out that might interest those of us into social media.
Andrew Ballenthin is another social networking guru who is worth reading. He has more than 500 LinkedIn connections and his blog attracts between 4,000 and 7,000 pages views every week because what he writes is worth reading.
Dublin Airport has started Tweeting as well. What a fantastic idea to send instant messages to those who are interested about flight delays. I follow BBC Scotland because it gives me regular news updates all day. A restaurant in New York tweets table cancellations. That way, regular customers might get a last minute reservation, and chances are the place is full every night. That’s a sensible business use of Twitter and those who follow that eatery value the information they receive.
Bit of a conflict of interest here, but my partner in Breen Media’s specialist insurance and reinsurance public relations firm rein4ce, Mairi Mallon, tweets as reinsurance girl. In just over two and half months of tweeting, she has attracted 99 followers (and it would be many more if she didn’t delete many of the nutters who follow her at random). It’s not an astronomical amount, but she is very successful. Why, because in her tweets she regularly shares information that is of genuine value to those in the industry and rein4ce is communicating regularly with influential people in our market.
That, at the end of the day, is what separates those public relations practitioners who are using social media innovatively from the pests. Those who perform a real service to their online community by trying to help out by posting high quality content are worth reading and following. Their reputation as experts among their peers grows, traffic to their websites increases, and the long-term effect is more contacts and more business.
So the lesson for PR people remains the same: even in the fog of social media, content is still king.
2.0 allows anyone to post whatever they like on blogs, Twitter and discussion boards with no quality control whatsoever. Twitter is the classic example. The advice from Twitter pioneers to the uninitiated who couldn’t understand why they would want to be bombarded with hundreds of messages every day from random strangers they had decided to follow, was essentially that you have to jump and experience it before you will get any value from it.
No one can possibly read all of these messages so why would you want to receive them? The answer, ultimately, is content. Amid the avalanche of dross from the morons who will follow anyone on Twitter and post meaningless trivia about their lives and their pets, there are real nuggets of extremely valuable information. The reason it is valuable is because the sender has put some thought into and decided it would be of interest to like-minded people.
Some examples. Mashable, the Social Media Guide, tweets like crazy all day. The last time I checked this afternoon they had posted 17,243 tweets and they have 1,187,803 followers –it will no doubt be more by the time you read this. The reason so many people follow them is because they are delivering a really valuable service sharing with the world everything they are finding out that might interest those of us into social media.
Andrew Ballenthin is another social networking guru who is worth reading. He has more than 500 LinkedIn connections and his blog attracts between 4,000 and 7,000 pages views every week because what he writes is worth reading.
Dublin Airport has started Tweeting as well. What a fantastic idea to send instant messages to those who are interested about flight delays. I follow BBC Scotland because it gives me regular news updates all day. A restaurant in New York tweets table cancellations. That way, regular customers might get a last minute reservation, and chances are the place is full every night. That’s a sensible business use of Twitter and those who follow that eatery value the information they receive.
Bit of a conflict of interest here, but my partner in Breen Media’s specialist insurance and reinsurance public relations firm rein4ce, Mairi Mallon, tweets as reinsurance girl. In just over two and half months of tweeting, she has attracted 99 followers (and it would be many more if she didn’t delete many of the nutters who follow her at random). It’s not an astronomical amount, but she is very successful. Why, because in her tweets she regularly shares information that is of genuine value to those in the industry and rein4ce is communicating regularly with influential people in our market.
That, at the end of the day, is what separates those public relations practitioners who are using social media innovatively from the pests. Those who perform a real service to their online community by trying to help out by posting high quality content are worth reading and following. Their reputation as experts among their peers grows, traffic to their websites increases, and the long-term effect is more contacts and more business.
So the lesson for PR people remains the same: even in the fog of social media, content is still king.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Why content is still king in good PR
As a former journalist , I’ve come across my fair share of pointless press releases that would never in a million years make it into the paper. You know the type. A blatant piece of self-promotion or a tedious release that has absolutely no news value whatsoever.
It really makes you wonder what on earth that company’s PR team were thinking about sending this stuff out. Or, what is probably the case, the public relations department doesn’t know what it is doing. There is one school of PR practitioners that journalists really hate – the type who think their job is simply to keep saying nice things about their clients. Wrong. While there is undoubtedly a place for good news stories – especially these days – the basic point remains that if you want to get publicity for your client, you have to have a story to tell in the first place.
The best PR people are those who think like journalists. Newsrooms in Scotland and across the UK are under more pressure than ever to produce more content with less staff. The advent of social media and the need to upload quickly onto the internet means reporters are drowning under a tsunami of information and are having to churn out stories at breakneck speed.
This means that intelligent PR operatives have the chance to be a real friend and resource to reporters. Rather than wasting their time firing out the sort of self-serving guff that has spike written all over it, good public relations consultants can make life easier for overworked hacks by giving them proper stories – preferably backed up with a decent picture.
That means good PR people need to manage the expectations of clients and have the courage to tell them that some of their ideas are simply too boring to get any coverage.
News and information is being distributed through a bewildering array of digital and traditional platforms, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that content is still king. It’s surprising how many PR professionals haven’t got that.
To see more of my blogs, go to the Breen Media website
It really makes you wonder what on earth that company’s PR team were thinking about sending this stuff out. Or, what is probably the case, the public relations department doesn’t know what it is doing. There is one school of PR practitioners that journalists really hate – the type who think their job is simply to keep saying nice things about their clients. Wrong. While there is undoubtedly a place for good news stories – especially these days – the basic point remains that if you want to get publicity for your client, you have to have a story to tell in the first place.
The best PR people are those who think like journalists. Newsrooms in Scotland and across the UK are under more pressure than ever to produce more content with less staff. The advent of social media and the need to upload quickly onto the internet means reporters are drowning under a tsunami of information and are having to churn out stories at breakneck speed.
This means that intelligent PR operatives have the chance to be a real friend and resource to reporters. Rather than wasting their time firing out the sort of self-serving guff that has spike written all over it, good public relations consultants can make life easier for overworked hacks by giving them proper stories – preferably backed up with a decent picture.
That means good PR people need to manage the expectations of clients and have the courage to tell them that some of their ideas are simply too boring to get any coverage.
News and information is being distributed through a bewildering array of digital and traditional platforms, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that content is still king. It’s surprising how many PR professionals haven’t got that.
To see more of my blogs, go to the Breen Media website
Monday, 20 July 2009
I'm digitally distinct!
I've just done a fantastic online quiz at www.onlineidcalculator.com to find out how distinct my profile is on the web. Found out I'm digitally distinct 'the nirvana of online identity'. Looks like all the time spent on social media is paying off!
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Public Relations - a vital tool to beat the recession
In tough economic times, it is tempting for businesses to cut back on the things they believe are dispensable - like training, advertising and public relations.
This is a big mistake. During recessions, businesses in Scotland and throughout the UK need PR and advertising more, not less. Too often, with revenue declining businesses can slip into panic mode, paralysed by fear like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights. If your business is thinking this way, chances are, so are your competitors.
With your rivals distracted and their confidence shot to bits, now is the perfect time to move in and steal a bigger share of the market. By hiring a public relations specialist, you can start to dominate media space by spelling out why you are doing so well, thus stealing a significant march on the competition.
Think of the message it sends out. Your business appears like a confident player in the marketplace so you stand out from the crowd - and confident businesses attract customers. Remember the story of Kellogg's? During the Great Depression of the 1930's when his rivals were slashing back their advertising spend, the visionary WK Kellogg doubled his advertising budget. As a result, by the time the good times had returned, Kellogg's totally dominated the market, as they still do today.
The phenomenal growth of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace where millions of consumers are talking about brands in real time means businesses simply cannot afford the option of not having a PR strategy to keep abreast of these conversations and trying to shape the discussions.
Finally, the conditions for raising the profile of successful businesses are good right now, because the media is desperate for good news stories amid all the doom and gloom.
At Breen Media, we recognise that many businesses are struggling and counting every penny, but now is also a time of great opportunity for those companies that are innovative and forward-thinking. These are the types of businesses that need to have a well thought-out PR strategy offered at a competitive price.
For that reason, Breen Media will soon be unveiling a cost-effective public relations offer that can get them started.
Stay tuned for more details.
This is a big mistake. During recessions, businesses in Scotland and throughout the UK need PR and advertising more, not less. Too often, with revenue declining businesses can slip into panic mode, paralysed by fear like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights. If your business is thinking this way, chances are, so are your competitors.
With your rivals distracted and their confidence shot to bits, now is the perfect time to move in and steal a bigger share of the market. By hiring a public relations specialist, you can start to dominate media space by spelling out why you are doing so well, thus stealing a significant march on the competition.
Think of the message it sends out. Your business appears like a confident player in the marketplace so you stand out from the crowd - and confident businesses attract customers. Remember the story of Kellogg's? During the Great Depression of the 1930's when his rivals were slashing back their advertising spend, the visionary WK Kellogg doubled his advertising budget. As a result, by the time the good times had returned, Kellogg's totally dominated the market, as they still do today.
The phenomenal growth of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace where millions of consumers are talking about brands in real time means businesses simply cannot afford the option of not having a PR strategy to keep abreast of these conversations and trying to shape the discussions.
Finally, the conditions for raising the profile of successful businesses are good right now, because the media is desperate for good news stories amid all the doom and gloom.
At Breen Media, we recognise that many businesses are struggling and counting every penny, but now is also a time of great opportunity for those companies that are innovative and forward-thinking. These are the types of businesses that need to have a well thought-out PR strategy offered at a competitive price.
For that reason, Breen Media will soon be unveiling a cost-effective public relations offer that can get them started.
Stay tuned for more details.
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