Archive for July, 2009
Managing a clients reputation
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations on July 27, 2009
No blog posts for several weeks then two at once. I was visiting a client in Aberdeen last week as part of my day job. As you would expect with them being in Aberdeen, they are involved in the oil and gas industry.
This company are specialists in Oil and Gas measurement. Now I would not have expected there to be a similarity between the service that they offer their clients and the service that our agency offers but there is. One thing that I was told over and over is that they manage their clients reputation, just as we in the PR industry do.
The reputation of an oil and gas company can be damaged if the amount of oil or gas they report as being delivered to the pipeline differs (within a defined tolerance) from the amount the pipeline operator receives. A consistently different reading can mean that the pipeline operator bans them access to the pipe unless they sort it out. This, in effect, shuts them down. My client ensures this does not happen, protecting their reputation.
Not all their customers see it like that because it depends on the level of that person in the organisation, however this is one of the messages we have been tasked with getting across.
It did occur to me that as this is about reputation maybe one of our target audiences should be the PR departments of their potential customers. How do you think this would work, one PR person talking to another? Is this a non-starter or a good idea? Is the link with reputation too tenuous for an in-house PR person to take notice?
When will PR professionals get up to speed on social media?
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations, Social media on July 25, 2009
I was on a domestic flight today and used the time to catch up on some reading. I was reading a CIPR profile magazine from earlier this year in which they were reporting on the CIPR marketing communications seminar. A show of hands revealed that less than 20 percent of the people there were up to speed digitally. I’m not surprised but I am also a little shocked.
I am shocked that more PR professionals are not getting up to speed. I admit that I am a little scared that I will get left behind in this revolution and that I won’t be able to offer a full range of services to my clients when they ask for it, or even worse that they won’t ask me they will just go somewhere else. If I am scared then why aren’t more people?
Here in the Wessex region of the UK the local CIPR group are trying to do our bit. We arranged a social media fast facts workshop this week. The event was based on Pecha Kucha where each presenter gets 20 slides to present his topic, but here was the challenge, each slide changed automatically after 20 seconds, whether you had finished or not. This really did make for a fast paced and fun event.
We had six speakers who were, in order of appearance:-
Tom Chapman of Headstream presenting a case study on Samsung football.
Heather Yaxley of Greenbanana presenting blogging.
Yours truly presenting twitter
Darren Lilleker of Bournemouth University presenting how politicians are using social media
Dan Kerins of the Southampton daily echo on how they are engaging with their publics through social media
and finally Luke Williams of social tech solutions on Evaluation, Metrics and ROI of social media.
The event was hosted by Five by Five digital in Southampton and was well attended by 33 people. But, with a total CIPR membership in our region of 300 this is still only 10 per cent. If the 20 percent figure from earlier on is correct and if we were to assume that all people who attended were new to the subject then that still leaves 70 percent of our membership who may not be engaged. I know the maths is simplistic and relies on assumptions but it is still a large number that are not engaged in social media. What are thy going to do if a client or boss asks them about it?
If they want to offer a full integrated campaign then they will soon have to show that they have at least considered social media. they may consider that some of this stuff is a flash in the pan and will have a limited life but what they do need to remember, as Luke Williams told our group on Wednesday is, that the tools may fade and die but the concept will remain. The public are used to instant communications and it is unlikely they will ever settle for anything less. PR professionals will need to get up to speed at some point or risk losing clients and / or a job. This may sound like scaremongering but I believe it to be a fact.
All slides from the event are available here