Posts Tagged Public Relations
Why did I enter the PR profession
Posted by johnweet 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.
Something different
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations on January 6, 2010
My brother Chris has stammered for all of his life. There is no doubt that it affected his education and also his social life. There were times that his stammering was so bad that, as a brother, it was painful to watch.
He hasn’t “got over it”, that is something most stammerers never do, what he has done is to learn to control it.
He has been attending group therapy sessions for a while and he suggested that they stage a public speaking event. this would have the double benefit of giving members of the group the opportunity to face some of their fears by speaking in public. It would also give them the opportunity to explain to others what it is like to live with a stammer and how they should deal with people that stammer when talking to them. Chris was given the task of arranging the event.
I was asked to help out by writing and issuing a press release, which I was of course happy to do. I wrote two releases in the end. One aimed at people who may wish to speak at the event and another to attract attendees.
My normal subject matter is engineering and technology products and applications so it was great to get my teeth into something different.
I issued the release to about 20 relevant outlets. The day after sending it Chris received a call asking for an interview, which he duly gave. This interview resulted in almost a full page of coverage. I believe there was more print coverage too and also radio mentions. Had I had more lead time prior to the event I would also have reached out to a couple of bloggers and a UK stammering group on Face-book.
Cutting courtesy of KM Media
The event itself was well attended and seemed to go very well (unfortunately due to other commitments i was unable to attend). Chris sent me a letter telling me about the event. Some of the experiences that stammerers have to contend with are dreadful. One guy was on the bus trying to ask for a ticket when the driver laughed at him. He was so embarrassed he had to get off. Another was once punched in the face just because he stammered.
My brother worked hard to stage this event and will be putting on more. I was just pleased that I could contribute in some small way to it’s success and also pleased to be able to extend myself by tackling an unfamliar subject.
Official government apologies
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations on November 16, 2009
I’ve just been watching Kevin Rudd the australian PM on the television, apologising for the uk kids that were shipped out there years ago with the promise of a better life.
I do wonder what these official apologies for crimes of previous governments are all about. They are after all totally meaningless, or am I in the minority for thinking that.
Does anybody ever take comfort from them, or are they just a PR stunt? If they are a PR stunt what are they trying to achieve, what message are they trying to give out.? The only message I take away from it is that the government will bow to pressure from any minority group.
They would do far better just standing up and saying they will not apologise for crimes they did not commit. It would certainly raise them in my estimation.
WordPress is soooo easy….
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations on May 19, 2009
When I took the plunge yesterday and decided to get myself a WordPress site I never thought it would be so easy. after only a few hours I have the site up and running and all the content loaded. I just need to “prettify” it a bit more and then I’m done.
B2B or B2C, is there really a difference?
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations on January 9, 2009
I get approached a lot by recruitment consultants trying to put me forward for various positions. I do not understand why they often ask questions that they can easily answer themselves by looking at my CV, which they invariably have in front of them. One of the questions that gets asked most is “do you have any B2C experience?” Again, a question that can easily be answered by looking at my CV. But does it really matter anyway?
The art of PR is understanding your audiences; understanding the message you need to get across to that audience, in order to have the effect that you desire; and then identifying the media that you need to use in order to get that message across. The technique is the same whether you are communicating direct to the consumer or to a business. Am I being naive by suggesting that there is no difference?
I did wonder if it is because the recruiters expect you to have an intimate knowledge of the consumer media or of the trade media but not both. Maybe they don’t realise that it doesn’t work like that (unless you are really specialising in a particular niche). I work in the B2B technology sector but when taking on a new client we still have to research their market and identify the media that we should be using.
It is an easy job nowadays to identify media. There are numerous on-line and printed resources to help us do that, and above all the client will invariably know which media he would use. Gone are the days that this information just existed in peoples heads.
I would therefore suggest that whether you have experience of B2B or B2C is irrelevant and recruiters, employers and clients should not get hung up about it. What is important is how skilled you are in understanding the messages, and how you get that across. For that you need to look deeper than the words written on the CV and ask relevant questions, not those that can easily be answered by reading the paper in front of you.
Effective Marketing Communications
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations on December 12, 2008
PR Disaster, what would you do?
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations on December 3, 2008
I had an interest in the Lapland Christmas fiasco http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/7758112.stm that has been widely reported in the UK media because of the close proximity of the venue to where I live. I first heard of the story on the local radio on Tuesday morning and then it was very quickly all over the national media.
The PR machine seemed to work well initially if this story is anything to go by http://www.thisisdorset.co.uk/stourandavon/news/Winter-break-Matchams-noise/article-405979-detail/article.html but the reality was very very different and the trading standards office has received numerous complaints.
As a PR professional I don’t know what I would have recommended to the company as a response, but it certainly would not have been to come out fighting. That is what they appear to have done.
The first time I heard their representative on the radio was last night when he was condemning the behaviour of some of the parents for being physically and verbally abusive to the staff, without any sort of apology for the shattered dreams and expectation of hundreds of kids. It’s true that there is never any excuse for violence, especially towards staff who are not responsible for the sins of their management. But their speaker was partly responsible and he should have been saying something to address the issues that have been raised.
I have seen reports this morning that have expanded on his comments, stating they have delivered what they said they would. This is clearly not the case if you look at the photographs that visitors have sent in. If you were paying £1 per ticket you have a certain level of expectation. When you are paying £25 per ticket you have another level of expectation altogether. To put it into perspective, a ticket for Paultons Park http://www.paultonspark.co.uk, a local amusement park are £16 per person (including Santa’s wonderland). There is no comparison in the level of entertainment being offered.
I would be very interested to hear how you think the event organisers should have reacted such that they go some way to restoring their reputation, bearing in mind that they do regularly stage different events there.
LinkedIn, How useful can it be?
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations, Social media on December 1, 2008
I am starting to get quite active with Linked in. One of my clients is in the process automation industry so i have joined a group on LinkedIn called Automation.
One of the other members asked a question about what people thought was the best product in a certain field. 4 out of the 5 responses recomended my clients product. From a PR point of view that is great, but it also enabled me to identify the person asking the question, the company they work for and their office location.
How valuable can that be?
When will PR professionals learn
Posted by johnweet in Public Relations on November 29, 2008
As PR professionals our job is to get our news out and to get it covered in the media that matters. I’ll repeat that last bit “to get it covered in the media that matters”. We should not judge ourselves on the number of releases we write and issue it is the amount of times our messages appear in the media that our target audience reads that matters.
This was brought home to when reading an interview in PRWeek with the editor of a web site. He says that his pet peeve is receiving emails saying “this’ll be good for your news section” when he doesn’t have a news section.
This is one thing that I keep stressing to the people I work with. If you want to get coverage you need to know who your audience are, you need to know what media to use to reach that audience and you need to have a clear idea of what you need to do to get coverage in that media. The scattergun approach is just not effective.
Approaching editors in the right way and only giving them news that matters to their audience establishes your credibility and makes it a “no brainer” when they receive material from you.
This works both ways of course. Within my sphere of technical communications I often get magazines calling me and asking if they can reproduce my press release for a small fee. My first question is always, so tell me about your readership. Occasionally I get, “I don’t know somebody else deals with that” or more often I get “our magazine goes to senior managers and decision makers in xyz industry” to which my response is generally “so tell me why a senior manager would be interested in reading about my widget”. That normally throws them.
If these people want me to pay for a placement with them they need to do their research, they need to understand what audience I am trying to reach with my press release and modify their pitch accordingly. Without that they have no credibility with me.