Posts Tagged bournemouth university
Why did I enter the PR profession
Posted by John Weet in Public Relations on January 16, 2010
I have been asked many times why I entered the PR profession after having spent so many years in Engineering. I was asked again this week when I was lecturing at Bournemouth University to a group of MA students. My rather Flippant answer was “mid life crisis, bought a motorbike and changed career”.
Me at aged 16
I thought about this later and started thinking about my career to date. At 16, after taking my exams, I was all set to go on to sixth form college and then on to Uni. Despite getting good exams results I decided that I wanted to leave full time education and earn money. I opted for an engineering apprenticeship and eventually progressed to being a “fitter turner”. A 5 year, part-time college course also gave me the mechanical Engineering theory to support my practical experience.
It was at the age of 21 that I moved into an office based Engineering role. The next ten years saw me change roles every two years, gaining experience and responsibility as I went. I moved through product engineering, quality engineering, service centre management, project management and then into sales. After some time in sales I moved into a customer support role, acting as a consultant to some of the major processing plants in the south of the UK. These included Exxon, BP, Dow, Elf, Mobil, National Power to name but a few. I also gained an MBA along the way.
This takes me up to my mid-life-crisis. I knew that I wanted to do something different but wasn’t sure what. My sales role had moved me away from the main hub’s of the business, moving wasn’t an option so continuing my career with my existing employer was out of the question. I managed to negotiate a leaving package without having anything else lined up to go to. It was at this point that I was approached by the marketing communications agency I work for now. Following a couple of interviews I found myself working in PR without really understanding what it was all about.
The transition was easy because our agencies main client is my ex employer. It was easy to write about products and technologies that I knew intimately. A CIPR diploma in Public Relations added to my knowledge and enabled me to understand more about the public relations role other than just writing press releases.
Now I get to the point of this long ramble. I did stumble in to PR – the same as I stumbled into every position I held. I didn’t have a career plan in mind when I left school, however if somebody had written out a plan for me all those years ago that followed the route I had taken it would have all made sense. I can see that each role I have had has built on the one I held previously and made me the person I am today.
I believe I am fairly unique in our industry, I can go talk to the engineers and understand what they are talking about, I can go talk to management and understand what their goals are, how they link to the overall business goals and what affect they have on the bottom line. I can then take that information and structure a press release or an article that is relevant to the readership. I can put together a campaign plan that truly addresses the needs of the business. I am comfortable and confident in what I do with our technology clients.
Other PR professionals may choose a different route to get to the end destination. Coming back to the PR students I was talking to this week, they are choosing to start their career in public relations, and who would blame them I think it is an excellent career choice. What they will have to remember though is that in order to be comfortable and confident with their clients they will need to invest considerable amounts of time and energy in understanding their clients businesses. After all, I spent 30 years understanding mine.
Media Myths & Realities survey
Posted by John Weet in Social media on February 6, 2009
Bournemouth university and Ketchum have issued a press release announcing the survey mentioned in my previous post. The full press release can be seen here.
According to the release, the survey compares the media usage habits of 500 British consumers, 1,000 Americans consumers, 500 American communications industry professionals and 500 adult consumers in Brazil.
There are many interesting points raised and I really do need to try and get hold of the survey results.
One point worth mentioning, especially in light of the money programme that aired on the BBC last night, is the fact that in the UK consumers read national newspapers at nearly three times the rate of consumers in the U.S. (53 percent compared with 18 percent). Brazilians are even higher at 62 percent.
What is not said in the press release, but was stated in the presentation that I sat through, is when people say they get their news from the Telegraph, as an example, they are talking about the brand and not necessarily the newspaper. The brand will of course include the web site.
This is interesting in that a representative of one of the large UK nationals that was interviewed in the BBC programme has stated they are trying to take that brand into the US market. The reason is one of economics.
With printed newspapers you generally know the majority of your audience. They are constrained by the boundaries of your circulation. This make it easy when selling advertising space. Not so with the web, your audience could be anywhere. Not always an easy sell to a potential advertiser. If the brand has good recognition however, in the US markets then that opens the door to the vast sums of US advertising dollars that are lying around waiting to be picked up, simple isn’t it!
I started this post with a mention of Ketchum so plan to finish with one too. What a good example of how not to use social media. Off to give a talk to one of their largest customers on the use of social media a senior representative of Ketchum arrived at their town and made a twitter post “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’” This post was subsequently seen by somebody at the company he was going to visit. A company who are fiercely proud of the town where they are based. To see the full story click here.
Media in the 21st century
Posted by John Weet in Social media on January 28, 2009
Attended an interesting presentation last night by Tom Watson of Bournemouth Univerities business school. The presentation was about research that they have been conducting with Ketchum on media in the 21st century. You can see the Ketchum press release on the study here.
What we saw was only a very truncated sneak preview of research that is to be published next week. We were only presented with the bare figures and very little analysis but what I did see was very interesting.
What we were shown was the differences in media consumption between the USA and the UK and the relative credibility that people applied to that media. The UK Questionnaire can be seen here.
I’m going to try to get hold of the full results as I feel this may change the way that I view certain media. Some interesting figures were the fact that only 14% of people would look to trade mags for their news but 65% would find that news to be credible.
I know that the survey results are looking at news in general so I don’t yet know how much to read into this, that’s why I need to see the results.
What else was very interesting was the generally low use of digital media. The stats on personal blogs for instance make me wonder whether I am wasting my time even typing this post…. But then I do it for the love of it and not because I genuinely feel somebody is going to look at it to get the news.