I know I’ve been blogging about food non-stop (its the diet, the wedding planning, the general mania), but tomorrow I’m going to take a little break and get back to technology with a post about a new global broadband study we’ve been working on with my clients over at Cisco. It’s a topic I feel pretty passionately about myself and there’s some interesting perspectives being published tomorrow – watch this space.
Category Archives: Work
The dangers of collaborative playlists
Had my work stag do on Friday night. It was awesome, needless to say – I work with good people, and my work best men did an exemplary job in organising the venues.
In the hour or so before we left the office, as is our habit on a Friday afternoon, we kicked off a collaborative playlist on Spotify to get people in the mood. Given my impending marriage, you might expect some cheesey / romantic tunes, and indeed, there were one or two of those. However, it seems that there are some cynics in the house (and even more on Twitter as @qwghlm, @krsjn, @flashboy and @jat45 started kicking in their own contributions). Think Charlie Brooker’s moodkill playlist and you’ll have a sense of what’s on there.
If you want to see how the final playlist shaped up, point Spotify here. Be warned; there are some fairly horrible songs in there :-).
Q1 review
It’s been an astonishingly busy three months, both at work and at home, and that’s my excuse for crapness. Sorry!
At work, I’ve been working to support a big client event, a major trade show, an uber launch (that had me sit across the virtual table from about 10 CEOs from major tech companies), learning about alternative fuels, talking about Twitter too much, publicising the changing world of work for a major UK media group, and much much more.
At home, I’ve been wedding planning, booking a venue and a date, negotiating with the churches, thinking about colour schemes (ok, not very much here), writing to travel companies, making guest lists, failing to organise an engagement party, finishing the renovations (the Streetview pic of my house is completely misleading now), and trying to maintain some kind of fitness regimen. Oh, and I went to NYC for a weekend with some Airmiles that were due to expire to visit Damo.
Phew. I’m tired just thinking about it. But sorry – will no doubt try to pick up something resembling normal service in the weeks ahead.
Waiting for Gmail
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).
Byte night fundraising
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.
European journalist study
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.
Full disclosure
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.
Recruiting for Head of SEM
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.
Jobs at Brands2Life
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.
From Shorthand to Broadband
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.