Tomorrow I’ll be boarding a plane for Delhi and I won’t be connected to the Inter-world (other than to send friends and family emails, and you if you want them!) and so this will be my last blog post and tweet until September.

If anyone wants to meet up, get in touch or have me send photos and worldly experienced stories (!), you know how to get in touch.

I hope that you all have a wonderful summer and I look forwards to boring you all with stories and photos when I get back!

Don’t you, forget about me!!!

I love reading these, but it’ll probably be a few years before I’m important enough to have my own in The Guardian’s Media Monday. So I thought I’d write one now and give you all an exclusive for the future…

Newspapers

Obviously my daily consumption of newspapers is pretty heavy because of monitoring and clipping, so enjoying the papers is something saved for the weekend. I get The Guardian on Saturday and sometimes the Indie too, and I love to get the Observer Music Monthly. If I’m having a funny day I might by a tabloid for a few laughs, but it’s pretty rare that I stray from my Grauniad.

Magazines

I tend to have phases of buying different types of magazines. It really depends on what mood I’m in and what I’m up to that month. Generally speaking I only regularly read PR Week, but if I catch sight of a feature or interview I’m interested in, I’ll read anything.

Books

Books are an absolute obsession. I studied English Literature at university and found some excellent antique bookshops where I found leather-bound classics for 50p each - I spend around £100, so now I have an admirable collection! I’m currently halfway through The Black Swan and I’ve decided that Umberto Eco’s theory of unread books is something I’m naturally adhering to! I’m also halfway through Flat Earth News, 1984 and PR! A Social History of Spin. I never used to be able to read more than one book at a time but starting in PR has given me a lot of primary reading to catch up on and I’m still reading (and incidentally adding to) my list of books that I need to read before I’m 30 (you can email me for the whole list).

TV

I don’t really have a regular schedule of programs, so I love to watch things on the interweb (I would give a link at this point, but it would be a bit naughty!). I love Peep Show, Family Guy, Black Books (RIP), Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Mock the Week and any documentaries that are on something that currently interests me (which is currently the Detroit music scene).

Radio

It’s rare that I get the chance to listen to the radio and when I drive into work I usually listen to a CD. When I get chance though, I’ll use the Radio One website to catch up with Zane Lowe and I do enjoy Radio Two on Saturday morning… I really should listen to more radio.

Ads

I like adverts that either polarise opinion or are quirky. So the new Glass and A Half Full adverts are great, as are the irritating adverts that stick in my head day to day. I’m also (obviously) a huge fan of adverts that encompass a variety of platforms - the ‘Get Some Nuts‘ is a probably the first example to come to mind. I honestly believe that for advertising to work it either has to be ridiculously focused (Facebook Social Ads) or multi-platform to reach a variety of demographics.

New Media

New media is integral to pretty much everything I do! I syndicate, blog, Google, Wiki, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Tweet, YouTube and probably a hundred other things that have become habit since beginning in PR…

So, three days into my extended leave and I’m still not relaxed. I still check my email obsessively, I read every paper every morning and I’m still looking for ways into the editorial pockets - but that’s enough about that. This is the rebirth.

I’m expecting my day of disconnection will probably fall in parallel with arriving into a dawning New Delhi.

Hopefully you’ll now all be intrigued as to these plans and you’ll have forgotten that this is a personal post rather than a professional post… I wont make a habit of it, I promise.

So, to ‘the plan’…

• India
• Thailand
• Cambodia
• Vietnam
• Australia
• New Zealand
• Fiji
• America (LA, San Diego, Vegas, NYC)

If any of you are around those places between now and September, give me a shout and you can buy me a beer!

If any of you would like to be included on my mailing list, get in touch and I’ll keep you updated with pictures and stories!

I’m not sure where I’ll be working in September, but I’ve had some interesting conversations and I’ll be sure to keep you informed as to my whereabouts.

If I don’t see you before, I’ll see you in September.

It’s officially my last day in work, drinking my last coffee and writing my last ‘from work’ post. I feel quite odd (and incidentally, old).

The last few days have been spent explaining what I actually do to make headlines and boost bottom lines and handing over current and potential leads to our MD so he can monitor everything and respond to any enquiries.

It’s handing things over that feels the strangest. I’m a self-confessed control freak over external messaging and to hand everything over and know it’s going to be handled in a particularly lo-fi way is very strange.

This role and the exterior messages I’ve been building have been like my baby. I remember the first telephone interview (with the wonderful Nicola Woolcock!) and thinking ‘This is horrible’ and then my last telephone interview thinking ‘I cant wait to go for that drink!’. Being the lone PRO, I’ve been given the opportunities to dictate the whole image of the company, and now I’m worried that someone else might morph that image and lead it towards the bad end of town! It’s given me the skills and knowledge to know how to win friends and influence people… That was a joke, by the way!

Trying to hand things over has been difficult too. I’ve had to quantify daily tasks and write down my thought process when finding angles to make things newsworthy - apparently I have a very skewed sense of logic! It’s only really been these last few weeks that I’ve realised that I’ve begun to think in a PR way.

(This part is quite heavily influenced by Paull Young’s post!)

So much has changed in six months. I’ve never been the child (or adult) who knew what job they wanted to do. I’ve just always loved writing and making friends.

I never meant to become a PRO, it just happened!

I’m done now.

Excuse my awkward emotion, I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to feel.

I’ll have to update my bloody ‘About Me‘ page now too…

Before I began my job the phrase ‘In-house’ conjured up images of an antiquated old flack who was edging closer to retirement and this was a sentiment echoed in a conversation that I leapt into on twitter yesterday with Simon Collister, Dom Whitehurst, @stedavies, @bmcmichael and @lewiswebb.

I think it’s generally thought that in-house PROs are much less dangerous and outgoing than their agency counterparts. That they’re less likely to blog, involve themselves with community, network with other PROs and generally thrust themselves into the limelight. But some of us do all of those things! Which got me to thinking about the differences in the two types of PRO…

I think I’ve cleverly (gag) summarised the differences with two cute (gag, again) analogies;

Galactico Agency Staff
Agency staff need to be stars and each PRO in an agency should be a brand. The best analogy I can think of is football clubs. A football club is made up of players, each bringing their own strengths into the team, and helping to boost the teams’ results. If a football team signs a ‘Galactico’ then they bring with them a wealth of attention and more fans go to watch the teams’ games, but along with the increase in gate receipts, the new great player will also improve things on the pitch…

For an agency, this is (surely) no different. They might have to pay more to capture high-profile signings, or they may be a feeder club nurturing young talent. When you’re on the field, the world is your stage.

It just so happens that ‘the stage’ is increasing. It used to be the newspapers and industry WOM, but now it’s blogs and social networks. A talented junior PRO can talk to CEOs on IM or tweet at them, these days of access and transparency are not only great for our clients and corporations, but they are great for our careers - as long as we want the exposure and can climb up onto the stage.

Olympian In-house Staff
Agency staff spend all day with other PROs whereas an in-house PRO may only work with one other, or may even be alone (sometimes, I get so lonely…!). But in-house staff are part of a wider, more generic team.

If an agency can be analogised as a football team, then the in-house comparison would be Olympians. Olympians are all fighting for the same cause, gunning for victory for their country, but in different sports. Therefore because they all compete for the company/country, they share a team ethos, but on the contrary they don’t all compete in the same sport so they never really achieve the unity that comes from competing in the same sport.

Ramble
Wow, this post began as a challenge to stereotypes but it’s now turned into a call to arms for all PROs… Sorry to deviate, I hope it kept you entertained anyway.

Do you think that these analogies stand up?

There has been a mass of blogging about bad pitching and scattering-gun approaches to press releases, primarily bought about by Wired’s Chris Anderson and the Gina Trapani issue, and now everyone appears to be at loggerheads about what the correct protocol is and why we build relationships at all.

I thought I’d through my (albeit green) opinion in.

Public Relations is the art of building relationships with every stakeholder, for corporate gain. We (the PR people) are the conduits to the whole world, controlling every message and shaping image. How the hell is a PR person supposed to build a relationship by sending out group emails to people they have never even conversed with? A relationship is a mutual situation. PR people need to sell themselves and their interests before they sell a story, and they should only try to sell when they know the recipient wants to buy.

PR people who email random reporters are as bad as the renegade windscreen cleaners at traffic lights. They charge along, burst the personal space bubble and then demand a return on their time investment.

I work in PR, and I will admit that when I first began my post (my first job with no knowledge or experience in PR) I was told to create email lists as big as possible and follow up every email with a phone call;
Me: Hi, I was wondering if you got my press release?
Journo: Yes, I did.
Me: Do you need any more information?
Journo: Nope.
Me: Will you be writing about it?
Journo: Nope.
#dial tone#

After a few of those conversations I realised that that is not the way to build relationships, it’s the way to burn them.

Jeremy Pepper has nailed the cause of this… Budgets and training.

Budgets mean that relationships aren’t forged, can’t be maintained and never flourish!

Public Relations needs to evolve and agencies need to invest in training potential stars properly, otherwise they’ll end up on the scrapheap before they’ve even shone.

I also realise that I’m probably the last person in the entire world to write about this, sorry. It’s taking me a while to get up to speed, but bare with me!

Over the last few months I’ve seen that ‘evaluation’ of the effectiveness of public relations has always been a sticky issue. I’m yet to stumble across a single method of effective measurement, but yet I face a constant battle to explain how effective my work can be for my company as a whole. Public relations is often defined as the management of reputation, but how do we give ‘reputation’ a scalable index? And are there other avenues that we can address using public relations that could give much more influence on the bottom line?

From my five months in public relations, I’ve started to think the following…

Maybe effective measurement can be attained with a trident approach;

• Traditional column inches/A non-traditional web presence
  • An important part of raising awareness of any company
  • A way to improve opinions and general thought
• Website visitors
  • High levels of traffic can then improve Alexa ratings, which can be effectively used to improve search engine rankings, in turn increasing traffic even further
  • An effective sales team should be able to convert visits to sales
  • An innovative design should ensure that a visitors attention is kept and that they then return in the future
• Sales that are directly driven by public relations
  • This can be measured by simple questioning of customers. Eg, “Where did you hear about our service?”
  • Social media public relations should improve sales through a high forum profile and should help to improve brand transparency

The other avenues to improving the bottom line through effective public relations practice could include (but not be limited too);

• A transparent forum presence
  • This ensures that customers and potential customers can passively view the way in which your company operates and also opens up a more relaxed avenue of communications
• Giving customers the opportunity to directly contact you, by any means
  • By highlighting that you are not a sales person, it immediately gives customers a sense of security
  • If you then distribute a wide variety (email, telephone, IM) it allows for relaxed contact. These customers can then be handed over to the sales team at an appropriate time
• Introducing social media into a daily routine
  • By increasing social networking/media presence you can connect with passive customers
  • This also allows for stealth marketing (this was the only name I could give it). By listening (passively or actively) to your customers, service, pricing and product can all be improved.
  • By increasing corporate transparency, a product or service can become totally integrated with the needs of the consumer, and immediacy allows for the product to reflect the (sometimes) constantly changing needs of the consumer

Some of this might be painfully obvious to the weathered PRO, but I hope that I might have included some minor details that could be new, or that I might have better articulated existing thought…

Anyone care to comment?

So after spending hours trying to write an ‘About Me‘ section that didn’t seem pretentious, I resigned myself to writing the current one. It might change. If I find a method of exonerating Jed Hallam from the pretension pile, I’ll be the first to employ it. Maybe spending hours on it makes me narcissistic.

I didn’t quite comprehend how difficult it would be to set up a blog, I just presumed it would be like that terrible Colmans advert (Bish Bash Bosh… Ergh, it pains me to write it). So, I’ve finally settled on a layout, a colour scheme, what widgets to include, how much contact information to disclose (all of it…), the content of my ‘About Me’, the blogroll…

If you’re still reading at this point, you might be questioning what relevance any of this has to the wonderful world of public relations? You’d be right to question it, but I can’t give you any answers right now. Some relevance will come soon, I promise. I should be updating this page a few times a day, but you can also follow me on Twitter, which should be updated a little more regularly.

My original intention is to use this space to comment on my personal development in public relations, I’m still very new to the game, so some of it is bound to be common sense to many of you, but I’ll try and bring a fresh approach to the blogosphere.

P.S.

If you’re reading this now because you’re on my blog’n'roll, then I’ve been passively reading your blog for about four months, I’ve been a little comment-shy, so please excuse me! From now on, I’ll try to be much more vocal!