Got back from vacation today with a massive email overload. I wish Outlook did conversation threading — would have got through the process much quicker. I may push for Google Apps* at work soon…
(*…yes, Google is a client. But I still love Apps).
Archive for the 'Work' Category
Brands2Life is fielding a team for this year’s Byte Night charity sleep-out - a team of five will head onto the streets of London and rough it for an evening to raise money for Action for Children - a great cause.
Byte Night this year is on the 3rd Oct — my birthday — so needless to say I’ve made a craven excuse and ducked out — but would really like to support the cause, so encouraging my readership to donate, and donate generously! I have donated some cash towards an office bake sale the team coordinated, offered my (limited) skills as a guitarist as a prize in the raffle silent auction (I’ll be giving someone a guitar lesson), and will make sure I have an ‘extra cold’ beer the night they’re camping out.
Please do donate generously here.
Apologies for another work-related post but, hell, we’re just doing a load of interesting stuff. Brands2Life, and its International network of partner agencies the Oriella PR Network, has just done a study into the changing requirements of journalists across Europe. The study was conducted across multiple countries covered by the Oriella PR network, and had 347 respondents. There were some interesting findings, including:
Half of the respondents (46%) revealed they are expected to produce more content for their respective publications.
Video is having a growing impact on journalism with over 40% confirming they are now responsible for producing online television or video clips, despite only 3% of respondents being employed by traditional broadcasters.
European journalists are increasingly required to deliver their content in differing formats – 44% of outlets offer journalist authored blogs; almost a fifth (18%) are now producing audio podcasts; and almost one in four (24%) offer video podcasts.
You’d probably have noticed much of this if you’ve visited a news website lately. The message out of this for us PROs, obviously, is that the game has changed. My boss won’t thank me for telling this story, but he remembers a time when press releases were sent by post or (at best) fax — email shifted expectations of what we had to deliver then, and social media and the multimedia delivery platform that is the web is beginning to have an analogous impact on the nature of reporting in Europe today. Of course, in many instances, you don’t need the latest whizzy Social Media News Release or funky viral — but in some cases there’s scope to provide much more compelling content to support journalists in their endeavours.
Of course, to all them PR bloggers out there this is a no brainer — you’ve been living, eating and breathing this stuff for a couple of years. However, judging by several of the conversations I’ve had with comms directors lately, the message is taking its time to sink through. I love this sort of research because the theory is one thing — but having journalists actually tell you that they’d like to see more multimedia content, would like more b-roll (web journalists as well as broadcast and national media), well, it warms the heart.
Have a gander at the report at the study’s website, and you can read Journalism.co.uk’s write-up here.
If I wax particularly lyrical about Google Apps in the near future, it is because I think they’re awesome, but it is important readers understand that we’ve been appointed to handle the PR for Google Enterprise in the UK. This is the division of Google that helps businesses organise their information with its cloud-based productivity applications, its Enterprise Search products and its Geo applications.
You can imagine this is somewhat exciting for me, and my increasing use of Apps is one of the factors that has me wanting an EEE PC so much.
And, to answer your unasked questions, no, I haven’t met Larry, Sergey or Eric, but yes, I’ve been to the Googleplex in London, and yes, it is as awesome as you’d imagine.
We’re after a Head of SEM to bolster our Interactive offering. The job spec is as follows:
Brands2Life is one of the UK fastest-growing PR agencies with clients such as Cisco, T-Mobile and Tesco. Our Interactive team has experienced phenomenal growth over the last two years and we are now looking for a Head of SEM to join the team. You must be an expert in organic SEO and have proven experience of implementing PPC/CPA campaigns.
If you have website design and build expertise too then that would be a bonus. You must be a team player as you will be working as part of our client teams designing and implementing integrated campaigns. You will gain all the benefits of working at an agency that has consistently been recognised as a top employer in the PR industry with best-in-class personal training and development packages.
I’m heavily involved in our ‘Interact’ offering so anyone interested, please do contact me direct on armand.david [at] brands2life.com.
A few UK tech agencies seem to be hiring at the moment, judging by Drew & other folk’s blogs. Well, we are too — so if you’re an entry-level PR or in your first two years in the industry and want to work at (what we think) is one of London’s most exciting PR agencies (’scuse the cheeky SEO), drop me a line — armand.david [at] brands2life.com, or leave me a comment.
We’re looking for smart people, with an understanding of social and traditional media and an interest in both B2C and B2B PR. Whilst our focus is on technology-driven brands, we do dip our toe into other spaces as well.
We’d much rather hire people directly / via social media than through agencies; for one, it’s cheaper, for two, we get a much better sense of who people are if we get to read your blog as well as your CV.
Recruitment agency people — I’m afraid if you don’t already know us I’m the wrong person to speak to. But leave a comment anyway and I can pass your details on to HR.
For those of you with an interest in technology, public relations, marketing and the media, my agency, Brands2Life, has done a really interesting piece of research looking at how journalists’ jobs have changed in the 15 or so years the Internet has been around. The headlines on point to journalists across all media types (not just technology or online) working harder and having to manage multimedia content and reader communities — a very different brief to what “traditional” journalism usually entails on a day-to-day basis. You can read the story in depth by downloading the research report from here. There are some graphs up on Flickr if anyone wants them.
The name - “From Shorthand to Broadband” - inspired this video which summarises the development of the media story. Have we got the whole story in? Is there something else you would have included / subbed out?
My personal view? From a business perspective, we’re at a really interesting point; one business model (traditional, ad-sponsored, print and broadcast media) is struggling in the wake of having to share its revenue with the online world, and the online world hasn’t yet developed a business model more substantive than relying on Google adwords. From a consumer perspective, broadband and web technologies are available and accessible to the point where the way everyone interacts with media has changed, whether they realise it or not. Not everyone’s there yet, of course, but where a few years ago you wouldn’t have been that surprised if someone from a different generation didn’t know how to Google something, today I’m having conversations with my mother about Facebook, and helping her organise to deliver a plenary speech at a conference via Skype video conferencing.
From a PR perspective — with journalists having to work differently, is it surprising that PRs will have to as well? Conversations in the industry — even with technology companies traditionally on the edge of new things — indicate how early on we are with this part of the story. A lot has changed since the ‘Martini lunches’ of legend, and even more is set to.
Be interested to hear from people who’ve been in one side and out the other — whilst there’s a lot of “web 2.0″ that’s hype, I have a feeling that where we are with “social” media today is a pale, pale precursor to the way we’ll interact online in the future.
Some of my colleagues at Brands2Life put Bravo Two Zero’s Chris Ryan through his paces for T-Mobile, to raise awareness of its mobile broadband ‘Web ‘n Walk’ service (of which I am a satisfied, paying customer). Some of the videos that came out of it look pretty awesome (including Chris abseiling down a building in Mancheter, training a football team in Birmingham, training an American Football team in Leeds and boating around the Thames in London.
Looks like it was huge, busy, thrill-filled fun as a campaign…
[I do promise I will do some personal, exciting blog posts soon. Things are busy. Parents in town. Please forgive.]
Had a really interesting week at work last week - amongst other things, was working with a couple of fascinating senior Cisco-ites (Richard Allan and Robert Pepper) to campaign for wireless broadband to get some of the spectrum that is being freed up following the Digital Switchover. If you don’t know what the digital switchover is, check this… and this. For those who need disclaimers, obviously Cisco is a client…
In any event, here’s what’s happening. The analogue TV transmission signal is being switched off, in stages, starting last week in Whitehaven, Cumbria. In 2012, or just before, Ofcom will ‘auction’ off the license that is being freed up, as digital TV transmissions are more efficient, and can be compressed to use less spectrum for more channels. Various people, including the HD for All group and the EU commissioners (as I understand it) are campaigning for different things — the HD group for the spectrum to be allocated to HD over Freeview, and the EU has some thoughts on allocating some spectrum for DVB-H (mobile TV).
Cisco’s thrown its hat in the ring for wireless broadband, and I’m totally with them on this one. The impact broadband has on social and business development is remarkable and intuitively understood by someone who works where I do… a conversation with Damian highlighted the fact that, actually, it may not be so intuitive for others, but this is the role of education, and local business industry groups to work on. It is ludicrous that in this digital age, things like this happen — according to the Times, a woman had to wait 11 months for broadband to be wired to her home… 90 miles from London, the biggest Facebook city in the world.
There are a few reasons broadband needs this spectrum…
First: As Richard put it, it is the “Park Lane and Mayfair” of the EM spectrum (Pepper called it the “beachfront real estate” for you American readers) - it passes through everything easily, which a lot of wireless technologies, operating in their native frequencies, don’t. If you live in a big house, does your home Wifi signal penetrate through as many walls as you’d like it to?. Cisco’s actually technology neutral in this debate — they just “love broadband.” How else will you reach that 0.7% of the population (or whatever it is) that live outside the range of the fixed line infrastructure?
Second: Fixed line broadband needs viable competition! Wireless broadband will force the fixed line providers to up the ante and be good for consumers.
Third: In developing countries, we can skip fixed line altogether! But we need this spectrum - higher frequency transmissions apparently don’t pass through leaf foliage. Not quite so useful…
Fourth: You can still have video content delivered (over wireless broadband), which will be more interactive and generally better than the TV you’re used to (eventually, once Joost and IPlayer and applications like them grow up and get better). And, thanks to compression, you can still have HD over Freeview and mobile TV - just maybe not as many channels as people might like. But then, how much HD content is there? And, over time, we can re-allocate the current TV spectrum between SD and HD channels…
Fifth: The opportunity to ‘rezone’ the spectrum doesn’t happen often! We shouldn’t miss this opportunity by locking ourselves into a restrictive medium that doesn’t reflect the way people increasingly live their lives… (think of all the surveys that have shown that we surf the web more and watch TV less…)
There’s lots more to this debate, and some of it has been picked up by some of the journalists we spoke to - including Jane Wakefield’s piece on BBC News Online and David Meyer’s ZDNet article. There’s lots more interesting things coming - Google is rumoured to be putting a bid in for the US’ spectrum (which goes on auction in January) so there could be a whole spate of new, disruptive technologies coming into play.
Completely fascinating stuff, and great to be involved with them on this. Be interesting to see how the conversation develops over the next few years.
I was on Radio 5 briefly yesterday morning, talking about how this blog helped me get my job, to support a piece they were doing on a piece of research released by a client of my agency, Viadeo, looking at NetReps, or your ‘net reputation’. You can listen again to the piece here (until Tuesday 3 April), although you’ll need the dread RealPlayer and to zip through to 1h 56minutes through the stream. The research report from Viadeo is available here.
My story is that, when I was applying for jobs in hi-tech media agencies, having a blog about “technology, media, stuff and nonsense” helped demonstrate my passion for and knowledge of the industry to prospective employers, including the guys who hired me at Brands2Life. The discussion, curtailed by the pace of breakfast radio, went on to look at the possibility of faked or negative testimonials and what they might entail, and the whole thing raised the question of how you manage your internet reputation, an issue examined in the Viadeo report.
There were a few other angles that the BBC producer talked through with me before the show. For example, does the fact that people are Googling me bother me, from a privacy perspective? No: of course not, you put it out there, you gotta expect people to find it. Given how expensive it can be to recruit people, the recruitment process (certainly in my industry) is as thorough as it can be. That said, prospective employers looking at my StalkFacebook profile, for example, will probably take little from knowing that I like Tenacious D or think that Transformers: the Movie was cool.
Another issue that was raised on the programme was how to manage negative comments or posts. Having borne witness to several internet slagging matches and the sheer lunacy that is going on right now with the death threats etc, I can see how it would be a concern. Identity online is a complex issue and there are few straightforward ways of dealing with this: even with things like OpenID there are few obvious ways to conclusively demonstrate who you are. That said, the web is increasingly a community and a conversation so hopefully, over time, you’ll develop a NetRep and identity that is unmistakably your own.
All interesting stuff. Do social business networks help address the issue of managing your internet reputation? Let me know what you think. And if you want to add me on Viadeo, or Facebook (and I really know who you are, either in person or virtually), then please go ahead.
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