Filed under: Uncategorized
Under Strict Embargo has a new home over at http://understrictembargo.com/ so please update your RSS feeds. If you have been kind enough to include me in your blogrolls it would be great if you could update your links to the site.
Filed under: Diffusion, PR, recruitment | Tags: graduate recruitment, graduate scheme, PR Jobs
So, are great PR people born or are they made? At Diffusion we think it’s definitely a bit of both. The PR industry is home to a diverse mix of personalities rather than an overriding stereotype and as an agency we don’t believe in creating a team of clones who all dress, talk and think the same. The ability to apply multiple skill sets, view points and intellectual approaches to solving our client’s communication challenges, is just one of the things which sets us apart. That said, there are critical traits which we believe all great PR people possess and which you will need to demonstrate to gain a place on our diffusionGRADS programme.
To find out what we are looking for and how to apply please visit our 2009 PR Graduate Scheme page. Deadline for applications: 13 February 2009
Best wishes for a very happy holiday and an amazing 2009! Big thanks to everyone for reading and contributing to my blog this year. Click below to see the Diffusion PR Christmas card :-)
With a new year ahead of you it’s perfectly natural to be contemplating whether you are in the right job. Are you working for clients you love in a culture that is constantly innovating and pushing the boundaries of PR? Is your career where you want to it to be and can you see a clear path to promotion ahead of you? Is your employer investing in you to make sure you have the digital communication skills which are essential for effective PR today?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, perhaps now’s the time to see what fresh opportunities are out there? Here at Diffusion, we are looking for another Senior Campaign Executive to join our seven-strong team in early 2009. After 18-months in PR, you will have a Blackberry bursting with media contacts across the digital media, marketing, technology and national press. You will have a real interest in how brands are using the web to engage with stakeholders and a real desire to represent clients across a wide range of industry sectors, from hot digital start-ups to global consumer brands.
At Diffusion, you’ll not only get job satisfaction from doing brilliant work with great colleagues for fantastic clients, though we think that always helps. Through our commitment to Talent Management we offer fast-track career development to the brightest and a tailored training programme. And it goes without saying that your hard work and commitment will be rewarded with a market leading salary and benefits package. So if you want to spend 2009 and beyond working for one of the fastest-growing and most talked about agencies of 2008, we’d love to hear from you!
To apply and for further information, please send your CV to daljit.bhurji@diffusionpr.com. For more information on our Talent Management approach and benefits packages click here.
Closing date: 10 January 2009
No recruitment agencies please.
Being both a politics and digital PR junkie I’ve been rather spoiled and completely fascinated by the US Presidential elections. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to record a video podcast for PR Week on both my favourite topics last week, which you can watch here. I think it’s fair to say that we are witnessing the first Social Media Election, where online platforms have become more than just channels for raising money but central to campaign strategy for both the McCain and Obama camps.
While the US elections have no doubt showcased the scale of what the web can achieve, there is still so much more that could be done in terms of sophistication. I touch on the issue of better campaign integration in my podcast – amplifying the power of political campaigns through intelligently linking traditional media relations, Search marketing and Social Media. This is one of the areas I highlight where political parties in the UK, particularly the Conservatives are taking a lead and have a thing or two to teach our American cousins. The Tories live-bidding on Google for keywords spoken by Alasdair Darling as he was delivering his last budget speech is just a sign of the things to come.
Another example of integration in action, which I never managed to blog about at the time was Obama’s visit to the UK in July and his private meeting with David Cameron. Though most of the actual meeting was conducted away from the cameras, the party released a video on YouTube of Cameron discussing the encounter within an hour of it ending and then pushed this out via its press office, an email marketing shot and a sustained Google PPC campaign. The video made it into the Top 10 most popular YouTube videos that weekend, with over 20,000 hits in 48 hours, helping to ensure that the Tories at least matched the coverage given to Obama’s meeting with Brown.
As with most things Social Media we have barely scratched the surface, particularly when it comes to using the two-way communication potential of online platforms to the full. Watching how the UK parties fight the next general election online is going to be compelling viewing!
“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself” were the reassuring words of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 as the US faced the realities of the Great Depression. This week our own political leaders have been trying their best to reassure the financial markets and assuage the fears of ordinary voters worried about their jobs, homes, savings and pensions.
To help get his message across Gordon Brown on Thursday launched a new series of podcasts on the economic crisis – the first discussing the government’s rescue of the British banking sector. Hosted on the new Number 10 website and on iTunes, the podcasts are part of a concerted strategy to communicate government policy directly to voters, bypassing what remains a largely hostile media.
I can see, or rather hear, why the podcast medium is attractive for Gordon Brown. His deep Scottish brogue works far better on radio than on TV, where his visual tics invariably distract the viewer from what he is actually saying. The live interview format also usually results in Brown reverting to repetitive and robotic stock-phrases and apart from when being interrogated by Mariella Frostrop, I’ve yet to see a TV interview where he looks genuinely comfortable.
So the pre-record of a podcast works well and his delivery is relaxed and reassuring to the listener. I would however be tempted to experiment with different formats in addition to the standard Churchillian address. Perhaps have Brown “in conversation with…” the types of individuals he mentions at the start of his podcast – first-time buyers after a mortgage, small business owners trying to secure bank loans or a housewife trying to balance the household budget. Why not record it at the local Lidl? The conversations wouldn’t need to be confrontational or overtly party political, but would arguably help demonstrate how the government’s £500 billion intervention will positively impact on the day to day lives of ordinary voters.
Anyway, having listened to the Prime Minister’s podcast, my iPod immediately segued into Abba’s ‘Money, Money, Money’, which kept me amused for the rest of Black Friday at least.
I was asked to contribute to a fascinating article in the National Journal, a leading US political magazine, on Friday in response to the initially surprising news that John McCain is actually outspending Barack Obama on Google. Figures released by Nielsen Online show that McCain’s campaign purchased just over 7 million impressions via Google AdWords in June, compared to just over 1 million for Obama.
However, the really interesting stats are for spend on traditional banner advertising, where Obama is trouncing McCain. Obama invested in over 80 million impressions compared to just 16 million for McCain. Nielsen’s analysis shows that Obama’s banners have been deployed on popular portals such as Yahoo! and MSN and news sites such as CNN. The campaign also bought almost 2 million impressions on allrecipes.com, perhaps in an attempt to reach more of the women who voted for Clinton. McCain, who is still distrusted by much of the Republican base, seems to have focussed his banner spending on conservative sites such as the National Review and Lucianne.com.
As pointed out in the article, the discrepancy in the investment between banners and search advertising by the two campaigns is most likely a result of financial expediency rather than deliberate strategy. McCain has fewer resources and is therefore focusing these on more targeted and cheaper ads on Google. It’s difficult to tell from the outside the real degree of targeting by the Obama campaign in its use of banner advertising. It could be various ad-networks are being paid millions of dollars to simply get as many eye-balls as possible.
What is true is that the Republican campaign had had to play catch-up in effectively using the Internet as a campaigning tool and is learning fast. McCain’s recent adverts portraying Obama as both Moses and a blonde bimbo and the now famous response by Paris Hilton, has meant McCain has overtaken Obama’s lead for YouTube viewers for the first time.
Analysis from Tubemogul.com shows McCain’s videos attracted more viewers than Obama’s for seven days in a row last week, and on 11 of the previous 14 days. Maybe it’s time for Will.i.am to pen another ditty…perhaps featuring Paris’ much under appreciated musical talents?
At Diffusion we naturally believe that Public Relations offers one of the most stimulating, rewarding and intellectually challenging career choices for graduates. We’ll be opening applications for our 2009 Graduate Programme in December, but due to impressive client growth we have an opportunity for two exceptional graduates to join the Diffusion team this September.
So what are we looking for? Well we’re not ashamed to say our standards are very high – you will need a First or 2:1 degree from a leading University. What’s more important than what you studied is a genuine interest in communication. That means a passion for the media, for writing, for speaking and a demonstrable understanding of the PR process in the 21st Century. As you’ll be joining an agency at the leading edge of innovation in digital communication, an enthusiastic and natural affinity to all things online is essential.
PR is an industry where people buy people, so as well as holding all these attributes you also need to be likeable, engaging, and credible, generate trust and ooze common sense and creativity. As we said, our standards are high.
So what do we offer? Firstly a commitment to training and development. At Diffusion you won’t spend most your time scanning coverage and writing reports. We will ensure you receive intensive education in PR practice so you can also quickly start making a genuine and satisfying contribution to the success of client campaigns. As well as internal training from some of the leading PR practitioners in the UK, we also invest in external training in areas such as video production and web design, equipping you with the skills that are essential for pioneering PR today.
Our culture is supportive and open and we thrive on creative ideas, entrepreneurial spirit and humour. By joining a young and rapidly growing agency, you will be perfectly placed to enjoy rapid career and earnings growth.
Do you think you measure up? Then please send your CV and a covering letter to Daljit Bhurji, Managing Director, Diffusion at daljit.bhurji@diffusionpr.com.
For more information on our Talent Management approach and benefits packages click here.
Closing date: 28 August 2008: No recruitment agencies please.
Filed under: PR
It’s good to see that the Twitter effect is not stifling the supply of new PR blogs, with my old boss Brendon Craigie embracing this Social Media malarkey with the Weekly World View.
I have to say that I agree with Brendon’s take on the currently non-existent tech PR recession. As he points out the Social Media bubble has proven to be anything but and nimble, hungry and experienced agencies in this space are certainly in a position to make the most of it.
It would of course be naive to assume that there will not be an eventual PR recession. Friends working in IT sales are reporting both small investments as well as £multi-million infrastructure projects being mothballed by clients, especially those in the financial services sector.
Those agencies who are as Brendon puts it still peddling “the same old, same old” probably have a 9-month window of opportunity (at best) to ensure programmes are making a real, demonstrable and above all measurable impact on the bottom line.
So I was asked by PR Week on Monday for my views on Gordon Brown’s Ask the PM initiative on YouTube. This was the latest foray into the online world by Downing Street, following its recent embrace of Twitter. My assessment that Ask the PM “smacks of gimmickry and desperation” led the article and there was a clear consensus from other industry commentators, that this project was a typical case of ‘too little, too late’.
I had a couple of interesting conversations on Friday in response to the piece. These boiled down to the argument that as a Social Media evangelist I should have welcomed the initiative, however imperfect, as a step in the right direction. Sorry to disappoint.
I have come to a view, which has hardened in recent months, that high profile examples of digital tokenism such as Ask the PM, are actually devaluing the real potential of Social Media. They are feeding a scepticism which makes the pioneering work we are doing unnecessarily difficult.
A couple of years ago, the medium was the message when it came to organisations adopting Social Media. This was typified by those endless stories in the national press, with leading youth brands like IBM and PA Consulting opening virtual offices in Second Life. Today, the filter I always use when assessing Social Media initiatives, my own and others, is whether the communication objectives and creative approach are actually more interesting than the digital platform(s) being utilised.
Using this filter, Ask the PM just doesn’t cut it. It’s not a genuine attempt by Gordon Brown to reconnect and really start listening to a disillusioned electorate. His comment at the end of his welcome video, where he states, “I’ll be back to talk to you at some point…” betrays a total lack of understanding of the two-way conversation that Social Media enables. You may as well write a letter and stick it in the post – you’d probably get a quicker reply!
In my mind the YouTube channel, the Twitter feed and whatever online gimmick is announced next, is primarily about metaphor, the hope that some shiny digital zeitgeist will rub off on an increasingly lacklustre Prime Minister. Equally, it’s a clumsy attempt by the new Downing St communications team to ‘get with it’ and reduce the gaping void between their digital approach and that of the Opposition.
As I have been saying a lot this week in new business pitches, Social Media is not a magic wand. Ultimately whatever Stephen Carter and his team try to do, Gordon Brown at heart, will always remain an analogue politician in a digital age.
Following a string of recent client wins the Diffusion team is growing! We are looking for talented and ambitious individuals to help drive and implement next-generation communication campaigns built around our media relations, Social Media and Search marketing core. Please see our current vacancies below. We’re always on the look out for the best talent across the industry so if you’d like an informal chat about how we could help grow your career, drop me an email at daljit.bhurji@diffusionpr.com.
You really need a fresh challenge. With over three years as a PR professional you have an address book bulging with media contacts across the digital media, marketing, technology and national press. You have a real interest in how brands are using the web to engage with customers and a real desire to represent the companies who are pushing the boundaries of marketing services innovation. As an account manager you have demonstrated you can build relationships with senior decision makers based on trust, honesty and confident and considered client counsel.
Now you’re asking yourself – what next? As a Campaign Manager at Diffusion we promise you three things: innovation, responsibility and real job satisfaction. By working with leading players in our Marketing Services practice, you will be given the opportunity to help shape and deliver innovative campaigns. These will use your skills and love of media relations enhanced through the latest techniques in Social Media and Search.
You will be given the responsibility to manage and grow your own team and portfolio of clients through extensive involvement in new business development. You’ll not only get job satisfaction from doing brilliant work with great colleagues for fantastic clients, though we think that always helps. Through our commitment to Talent Management we offer fast-track career development to the brightest and you’ll be rewarded with a progressive salary and benefits package. Is this the challenge you’re looking for?
To apply and for further information, please send your CV to daljit.bhurji@diffusionpr.com. For more information on our Talent Management approach and benefits packages click here.
Closing date: 5 JUNE 2008: No recruitment agencies please.
I thought PR was about more than just endless cold-calling? Well we think you’re 100 per cent right. At Diffusion we’re looking for a candidate who wants to build their career within a 21st Century PR and Communications agency. As an ambitious graduate with a strong academic record, you will have over a year’s PR experience under your belt either in-house or in agency. You’ll also be an enthusiastic ‘digital native’, with familiarity with all things Social Media second nature.
Working across our Digital practice you will have an insatiable hunger to get real results through both media and Social Media relations. You will have equal enthusiasm for both consumer and business campaigns, for household names and new start-ups, relishing the challenges they each present.
At Diffusion through our commitment to training we will future proof your career. You will be equipped with both the traditional and online skills needed to deliver communication campaigns that really connect, both today and tomorrow. As a crucial part of a new agency you will have a unique opportunity to rapidly grow your career in a dynamic, entrepreneurial environment and carve out your own niche. Or you could carry on updating that call-round report.
To apply and for further information, please send your CV to daljit.bhurji@diffusionpr.com. For more information on our Talent Management approach and benefits packages click here.
Closing date: 5 JUNE 2008: No recruitment agencies please.
Filed under: PR
Word reaches me of two new PR blogs – the first is from the self styled ‘Bad Boy of Tech PR’, Hotwire’s very own digital media wunderkind Tom Malcolm. The intriguingly named ‘Reflections in an Open Window’ promises to “not take itself too seriously” which given the author is just as well.
The second is ‘Pete’s PR Hall of Fame’, from consumer genius Peter Bowles. He has just left the warm bosom of Hotwire and is off to do some very exciting stuff at Red. The PR Hall of Fame has a great focus which is to each day identify the one story which has used/abused the power of PR to get to the top of the media agenda. Add them to your RSS feeds now!
There are a many things which inspired the launch of Diffusion, but perhaps the most important was reading back in May ’07 a now famous article by Paul Holmes entitled “A Manifesto for the 21st Century Public Relations Firm”. It was a seminal analysis of the opportunities and threats facing the PR industry from consumers empowered by online and Social Media. Above all it was a wake up call and in many ways confirmed what I had been thinking for a while. Diffusion is really the answer to the question the piece finally triggered – ‘What are you going to do about it?’ – so cheers Paul :-)
Almost a year since it was published, it is debatable whether as industry we have really grasped all the manifesto’s core messages. There is some brilliant and innovative thinking and amazing online work being done, much of it by the people listed to your left. But a bit like the board of Kodak saying ‘that digital photography thing is all hype, it’ll never catch on,’ vast swathes of the industry remain blind to the new realities. There is an inertia grounded in inflexible business models and working practices and the limited skill sets of staff, which many agencies lack the energy to overcome.
Much has been written about the threat facing PR from other marketing disciplines, but I agree with those that argue that it is PR which is the real threat to the hegemony of advertising as the ‘owner’ of the brand. The skills required today to help clients create two-way conversations, listen and engage with audiences and harness the power of word-of-mouth are part of our territory and it’s onto to this ground that marketing as a whole is moving. Do we really want to be evicted from that space now by failing to adapt?
If I am being honest I was very tempted by the offers to develop my vision for the future of PR inside the comfortable and reassuring corporate structures of some amazing agencies. Call me brave, or call me stupid but I was attracted more by the blank sheet of creating an agency from scratch. I wanted to build an agency with amazing media relations skills where digital, Social Media and Search expertise are part of the DNA and don’t just sit in a separate division or practice. Something tells me it was the right move.
I’m very privileged to be working with Ivan Ristic and Barney Jones again, two of the most talented individuals I know. We are also lucky to already have some great clients and we’re looking forward to building a brilliant team who will do amazing work for many, many more in the years ahead. It may have become a cliché to say it, but that makes it no less true – this really is the most exciting time to be working in PR!
Filed under: PR
The CIPR have teamed up with the MOBO Awards to offer a Press Officer internship to a final/sandwich year PR student or junior PR available between June/July and October this year. This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who would like to get into music/entertainment PR and could lead to a permanent job.
You’ll work directly with Kanya King MBE and the Board of MOBO, who are looking for:
- A genuine knowledge, passion and interest in music of black origin
- The ability to negotiate coverage in the national, music and communications trade media
- Endless ideas, energy and commitment to communicating MOBO’s messages to UK and international audiences
- The desire to put your learning into practice immediately and the confidence to start your career working on a high-profile campaign
The MOBO Awards are for music of black origin – soul/r&b, hiphop, reggae, gospel, jazz – and are screened each year by the BBC and promoted via their 1Xtra brand. They’ve been running since 1996 and are attended by both British and international artists. Last year Amy Winehouse, Ne-Yo and Kano performed and the awards were hosted by Shaggy and Jamelia. More details about last year’s awards: http://www.bbc.co.uk/musicevents/moboawards/2007/
Any interested applicants should submit up to 1500 words to – dawnc@cipr.co.uk – by the end of April. We’ll then shortlist and invite these applicants to the CIPR to present their ideas in more detail at the start of June. The successful person will need to be able to start work in London quite quickly.
More detail on what MOBO is looking for and some guidance in making the application is here: http://www.cipr.co.uk/ciprmobo/
Firstly I’d like to say thanks for the comments in response to my last post on Phorm. It’s clear there is a growing sense of public anger which is being articulated through a motivated and well organised grass roots campaign. From reading the 36 comments so far, I don’t think the same can be said of Phorm’s PR effort to date.
I think there are a couple of immediate observations that will be of interest for those of us working in Social Media relations. Firstly the tactic of instant-rebuttal, responding to every single negative blog post or forum posting written about Phorm has done little to endear the company to its critics. As Paul C puts it,”What an utter PR disaster. Trying to slashdot their way out of a storm, not realising how cynical an exercise responding to individual blog posts will appear to the community.”
There is also the perception that rule No.1 of blogger relations – be authentic and honest – has been broken. The backlash against Phorm began in the tech community in response to articles on sites like The Register. This prompted a series of postings, credited to the ‘Phorm Tech Team’ which were not seen by these communities as coming from genuine techies. As M. Bishop puts it, “In a dissertation about how not to run a PR campaign, pretending to be a tech bod from a company and engaging in a technical debate with experts, only to eventually have to admit you really aren’t a tech bod, or even a Phorm employee at all, because you got so out of your depth, is probably pretty high on the list of don’t do’s.”
If Phorm wanted to engage in a ‘Geek vs. Geek’ debate, why didn’t they get the CTO or a named member of the Tech team to respond? As the ‘Phorm Comms Team’ point out in a comment today, these spokespeople were used in ‘traditional’ press interviews but apparently not at the start when engaging with forums and blogs. I think these initial mistakes and the approach of hiding behind ‘Tech Team’ or ‘Comms Team’ umbrellas only reinforced the growing lack of trust in Phorm and did little to emphasise the key message that company had “nothing to hide”.
Taking a step back, the emphasis being placed on the technology powering Phorm is symptomatic in my mind of the fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of both Phorm’s proposition and its wider communication strategy. Phorm sees itself as offering a B2B product when in fact its service is profoundly B2B2C. There seems to have been a scenario underpinning the business model where ISPs around the world would quietly adopt the service with the hope that the majority of their customers wouldn’t care or notice, everyone would be happy and could rake in their share of the advertising cash. That was never going to happen.
The issue isn’t about Phorm’s technology and the long list of safeguards that are in place. It’s about the benefits of the service to the ultimate end customer, ordinary internet users. Basically ‘better targeted online advertising’ is not a benefit to the average person, most would be happier if there was no online advertising at all. It certainly isn’t such a life changing development that consumers would be willing to enter into a Faustian pact for it, through giving up their internet privacy (real or perceived). Phorm seem to have understood this in part, hence the red-herring focus on phishing.
It’s basically all about perception. I have no reason to doubt Phorm’s privacy claims, and having worked in online technology for a decade I can understand their technology arguments, but the average internet user isn’t going to give a toss about the intricacies of IP address tracking, selective cookies etc. They will simply distill everything down to the Costs vs. Benefits proposition being presented by Phorm and their ISP and most will say NO.
CEO web chats, sharing the code, having one to one meetings with Ged Carroll and other members of the great and the good :-) or (ahem) re-educating Tim Berners-Lee on internet technology is going to do nothing to address the fundamental scepticism of mainstream public opinion.
If Phorm were hoping that the ISPs would take on that mammoth task for them, they are delusional. So far BT has arguably not confronted the issue head on, presenting the service which its is calling BT Webwise, with a heavy emphasis on online fraud prevention. BT is currently planning to make the system opt-out, whereas Talk Talk has succumbed to customer pressure and has been forced to make the service opt-in. Online advertising is a numbers game and the Phorm business model is not based on millions being able to escape the system.
The real PR danger now shifts to the ISPs. For players like Virgin Media the problems could be acute, with disgruntled internet users not only shifting their monthly broadband subscriptions to other providers but their TV and telephone subs as well. In an increasingly commoditised broadband market, being able to claim that we don’t invade your internet privacy and sell your personal data on to advertisers would be a rather strong USP. I can see why Sky and Tiscali have had the foresight to keep their hands clean at this point.
