Whatever...

It ain’t what you say, it’s where you're from?

By Joe Banks

An interesting story came out the other week featuring Mike Lynch, the big man at Autonomy, talking about what it takes for a UK IT company to crack the US market.  His conclusion?  It’s “PR, PR, PR”…

Lynch accuses our American cousins of arrogance – something of course which Lynch himself knows a thing or two about – because they assume that only US companies can produce technology that’s good enough for their home market. 

It’s a pretty provocative position to take, but I have to say that there’s definitely the ring of truth about it.  The US has a business culture that still encourages and endorses local success, whereas the UK gave up on the idea of ‘Buy British’ many years ago.  What’s happened to the British film industry is analogous to the perception of UK IT: people are happy to wait for the latest Hollywood/Silicon Valley blockbuster – already ‘proven’ by US sales even if the actual quality may be lacking – but assume that home-grown product won’t ‘travel’ or scale.

This is reflected in the way that technology is written about in the US media – while UK pubs pride themselves on a cold objectivity verging on outright cynicism, and love nothing better than a failed IT project, American journalists often adopt what can only be described as a cheerleading tone when writing about new companies and developments, and are a primary source for the kind of tech boosterism that inflated the original internet bubble before it burst.  And while there was a bit of soul-searching afterwards, you only need to see how the Web 2.0 ‘phenomenon’ has been hyped in the US by journalists and pro-bloggers alike for confirmation that old habits die hard…

So, that brings us to PR – but also to something of a paradox.  You’d kind of assume that the way PR is carried out in the States would reflect its media ie. upbeat and forthright, but in my (admittedly limited) experience of US agency* pitch materials, they tend to be pretty mild to say the least.  In fact, they often amount to little more than ‘Company X is releasing new product Y, and, err, would you like to speak to them?’  Now, perhaps it’s all down to super persuasive phone work over there… but still, I’m constantly surprised at the apparent lack of cut and thrust in their outreach.

What kind of PR is Lynch talking about then?  In the UK, we PR new companies by coming up with the issues that their technology addresses, talking them up as thought leaders, and promoting the benefits of their products for potential customers.  In the US, does PR just highlight how 'X' is another great example of US technology prowess in some kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop??  In which case, UK companies are at a definite disadvantage in the American market how ever good their products are.

Still, Autonomy has done alright in the US, so it’s clearly not impossible for UK tech companies to break through.  But ‘PR, PR, PR’ isn’t everything, and perhaps the most telling aspect of the original story is Lynch’s assertion that UK companies need to ‘Americanise’ themselves if they want to really succeed.  I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to how Lynch has done this at Autonomy…

* JK disclaimer: Joe obviously isn’t referring to any of our US partner agencies, who are superior in all possible ways to their peers.

“What do you want?!” “Information…”

By Tom Kirkham

In classic 60s TV show 'The Prisoner', a character known only as Number Six is subjected to identity theft, hypnosis, mind control, dream manipulation and hallucinogenic drug experiences in order to extract the reasons behind his resignation as a government agent.  His captors never obtain the truth, and in fact Number Six spends the entire series interrogating them about who they actually work for, though ultimately, he is also unsuccessful.

The Prisoner then concerns the quest for knowledge and information, and whether we can ever truly be satisfied with the answers that we get.  With the exception of hallucinogenic drugs (as far as I'm aware), this makes it not dissimilar to PR. 

We PRs spend much of our daily lives trying to find out about forthcoming product launches, the status of customer deals, internal changes, whether or not our client is about to be swallowed by Google or go bankrupt.  And while we can obtain many of the parts, it's often impossible to obtain the whole.  Either the information can only be found via a chain of thirty different people, or it exists only in the CEO’s head and the CEO hasn't made up their mind yet, or it doesn't actually exist at all.

Similarly, clients are often mystified as to why they've been painted in a bad light in an editorial column, why a journalist has met with them on a number of separate occasions, but still hasn't written anything, or why a profile piece in the FT hasn't generated the number of sales leads expected.  And while we can usually hazard a pretty good guess, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the client will accept what they’re being told.

Of course, sometimes, there just isn’t a logical explanation - and failure to acknowledge the role that chance, circumstance and the unknown play in everyday PR activities can easily lead to a misfiring PR campaign.  A client or PR who tries to ruthlessly dictate every facet of the campaign – "we'll stick to our six month timeline by hook or by crook" – with no scope for flexibility or change, hasn’t recognised that some factors, some pieces of information, will always remain outside of their control.

Number Six may never find out who is in charge, but he uses the snippets obtained to help him achieve his ultimate goal and escape.  Similarly, PRs need to engage with businesses to understand their internal processes and formulate better ways of improving information flow, in order to achieve more effective communications with their audiences. 

Furthermore, many PR companies - recognising that campaign evaluation based around quantity of namechecks is hugely limited - have rightly started formulating more scientific approaches for assessing the effectiveness of their clients' campaigns, as well as engaging more with the journalist community to better understand their wants and needs.

By accepting that we can never hold all the cards, and channelling the information we do have as efficiently as possible, PRs will greatly improve their relationships, reputations, and the chances of receiving strategic, quality coverage, without the need to resort to hypnosis or mind control.

Johnson King: work hard, play harder…

Yes, it’s like the 80s never ended at JK, where we all regularly work 16 hours a day before partying like disco monsters at the capital’s finest nightclubs til dawn…

Errr, perhaps.

But this adage from the age of shoulder pads, leg warmers and hideous perms was certainly in evidence last Friday at the JK AGM.  Not for us the staid conventions of a sit down meal at some over-priced restaurant, oh no…

With Malibu & Coke to fuel us, and Hoddle & Waddle’s Diamond Lights to ‘spur’ us on, JK’s London, Paris and Munich offices came together in an epic clash of –

HUMAN TABLE FOOTBALL!

It was hard, it was bruising, and it didn’t half make you sweat.

These pictures tell their own graphic story…

 

Everything’s gone green?

By Juliana Wimmer

For years, environmental issues have been of great importance in Europe.  In particular, climate protection is increasingly at the centre of discussion in German politics.  Attention has focused on how different industries can reduce their emissions, such as the environmental pollution caused by the air traffic industry.

The IT industry is also being targeted to reduce CO2 emissions, adopt energy-saving measures, and recycle e-waste etc.  This is especially important considering that IT equipment is responsible for about 2% of the global CO2 emissions, which is actually equal to the pollution caused by air traffic.

However, it seems that the importance of environmental issues in the IT industry is viewed differently across Europe.  According to a survey by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Scandinavia and the Benelux are outriders in the field of green IT: for one third of the CTOs there, green IT is a key priority, whereas only 14% of their German and middle-European counterparts share their opinion.  A worrying 27% state that green IT plays no role at all.

But perhaps surprisingly, given the US reluctance to ratify the Kyoto protocol, it’s American IT companies that are taking the lead in environmental protection.  IBM for example has launched Project Big Green, which has allocated 1 billion dollars per year to develop more environmentally-friendly technologies.  The project includes new products and services to sharply reduce data centre energy consumption, with an aim to ‘green’ the world’s business and public technology infrastructures.

Other big companies such as HP, Dell or Sun are cooperating in an industrial consortium called the Green Grid to lower the overall consumption of power in data centres around the globe and to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve IT energy efficiency.

The question is, will such initiatives provide just guidelines or will they become coercive for all IT companies one day?  In Europe, the regulations (eg. WEEE, RoHS, REACH, EuP) already implemented put a certain pressure on providers and end-users by fixing limit values that must not be crossed.  However, I believe that further regulation is necessary to permanently reduce CO2 emissions and turn good intentions into action.

For instance, a recent survey by Forrester shows that 85% of the CIOs think that environmental protection is important, but only 25% believe that green IT should be an inherent part of the procurement process. Is it because they’re not familiar with green IT yet - or because they’re lacking the will to actually do something?

Ultimately, it all comes down to whether the implementation of environmentally friendly strategies will contribute to cost reduction.  As one CTO has put it: “We would produce green because it’s reasonable for the business, not because it’s green”.  Another was even more direct: “We don’t do this because we’re nice people, but because we want to make money”.

Going green for profit – now there’s an idea…

Read me! READ ME!!

By Flora Haslam

That we're drowning in email can hardly come as a surprise (and indeed might not have been such a big story this week were it not August), but the latest research from the Universities of Glasgow and Paisley made for some surprising reading in the recommendations it drew.

Its suggestion that email senders at work should set aside dedicated email reading times to catch up on their messages and never press other employees to respond to email is a slightly worrying prospect for the PR industry at least.  Meanwhile, the recommendation that workers should check their emails just a few times a day seems somewhat unrealistic, particularly given the research was conducted among academics and creatives. 

I daren't think how quickly a PR agency would go out of business if this was the case, or how many pitches the journalist that sent out a response source three hours ago would have already read by the time you got around to opening his email!

Yes, unlike a phone call, email allows you to make a decision about whether to respond straight away - assuming the sender hasn't slapped a read receipt on it and isn't circling with their hand on the phone receiver from the moment you click open - but I for one certainly haven't got the willpower to refrain from opening a message as soon as I see it. 

Whether the contents are good ("I'd be delighted to profile your client in the FT") or bad ("I'm afraid our CEO is now unable to make it to London for the day of briefings you've arranged tomorrow"), I still want to know as soon as possible.  And my suspicion is that anyone - in our profession at least -  able to leave emails unread for hours on end is simply not cut out for the job.

Granted it's vital to have a system that allows you to get work done without email taking over your life, but I'm not convinced that email reading slots are the way forward.  Maybe we just need to cut back on the fantasy football and cats that look like Hitler chat that regularly circulates the office.  Err, or is that just our office?!

I THINK I'M PARANOID

By Tom Kirkham

The UK's information commission has just issued a warning about the low level of public understanding regarding the sharing of personal details, and the implications this can have on our legal rights.  Richard Thomas, the information commissioner himself suggests that Britons have woken up in a 'surveillance society' without debating its emergence. 

Not so at JK Towers!

Many of my colleagues have been outraged, frustrated and more than a little concerned about their civil liberties for as long as I can remember.  Some of these conspiracy theorists :o) have even gone so far as to make their feelings on CCTV and data-sharing known to the wider world.

Now I don't necessarily disagree with these concerns - I don't like the idea of my personal details being passed around the houses, or companies like Google keeping track of the websites I visit.  Nor do I want to be spied upon as I head to my local supermarket, or have my groceries logged and recorded on a police database.  However, I guess I just tend to take the optimistic (or maybe naive) view that as I'm not a criminal, and I don't present a significant terrorist threat, I shouldn't have anything to fear.

Despite these sentiments though, a new study from Jupiter Research has alarmed me slightly, and got me thinking about how much we the general public might be contributing to the surveillance problem.  The study claims that a sizeable proportion of consumers in the US are now looking to get their hands on location-based tracking devices. While the parental uses for these devices aren't without merit, I was astonished to see that 26 percent of mobile owners in the 18-to-24 age bracket would pay extra for services that tracked friends' locations.

Is it not enough that we all have mobiles in the first place?  That we all have SMS and can immediately contact one another if we realise we're going to be 30 seconds late for dinner?  That we can access our email and our IM and our Facebook wherever we go?  That doubtless in the near future we'll be able to do all these things on the underground and in the air as well?

This may be a US survey, but when you consider how quickly we've come to embrace and now obsess about social-networking, and how the texting revolution took off in the first place within the UK, surely it's only a matter of time before market demand crosses the Atlantic - a real cause for paranoia!

We don't need this level of insight into each others' lives.  It's not condusive to improved social interaction, it won't make us any safer, and it won't stop us being late for dinner.  In fact it's far more likely to breed compulsive snooping and result in distrust, anxiety, damaged relationships and goodness knows what else. Most worryingly, if we get it, there's a real chance that we won't be able to do without it. 

Furthermore, once we endorse the idea of tracking and surveilling one another, it'll be a lot harder to object to our leaders doing the same thing.  At least the government will be doing it to try and catch criminals - we'll just be doing it because we're weird.

Guest blog - Everyone’s gone Facebook bonkers

As well as being a platform for JKers to have a good old rant about the world of technology and PR, 'Whatever...' will periodically be running guest blogs from friends who live beyond the (fire)walls of Johnson King Towers.

Here’s Graham Cluley, the man from Sophos, on the perils of squid and spanking online…

The papers were recently filled with stories of how Oxford graduates in a post-exam frenzy throw pieces of squid at each other in the street.  Bloody students you might justifiably think and wonder why those who went through the public school system don't use calimari.  But it turns out that university authorities are ploughing through students' Facebook entries, hunting for incriminating photographs of the fish-fuelled antics.  Students have been reprimanded - all because they were dumb enough to post the pictures on Facebook.

The Sun even ran a (rather tacky) story about a policeman who was daring enough to reveal he was gay in his Facebook entry.  According to The Sun this potentially put the policeman, who it was said could at some point, perhaps, guard the Royal Family, at risk from terrorists who may try to use the information he posted to blackmail him.  They even tried to outrage their readers by saying that the poor copper's Facebook page invited visitors to "bite, grope, lick or spank him".  Err - but just about everybody's Facebook page does that!

Then a recent dinner with my PR gang turned into an orgasm of Facebook talk.  The chattering classes (Facebook, remember, is for the educated and middle classes - not for the chavs on MySpace) are obsessed with the etiquette of who you become friends with, what graffiti you've left on so-and-so's wall and have you thrown a sheep yet with SuperPoke.  With people fatigued by yet another dull roll call of wannabes on Big Brother, the talk has turned to Facebook instead.

And the technology journalists are up on Facebook too.  They've created groups and networks where they hang out, talk about the most outrageous media trips they've ever been taken on, and ask each other for help writing stories.  But when you speak to them about it they all shuffle their feet, look embarrassed and say "they're only there for research".  Ahem.

And then it happened to me.  I did my first interview on Facebook.  Not about Facebook, I was interviewed by a journalist via Facebook.  He didn't email me, he didn't phone me, he didn't contact my PR agency.... he 'poked' me and asked me some questions about a computer security story.  Watch out, if you're a spokesperson for an internet company, it could happen to you too... 

Is this the future?  Should I be permanently logged into Facebook just to see if a journo is trying to get in touch with me?  Or will we all be obsessed with something else in six months time?

Are Web 2.0 and quality control incompatible?

By Laura Mead

I was recently introduced to Andrew Keen in an article I read on his latest book, The Cult of the Amateur , which outlines his controversial take on the state of the internet today – particularly those pesky Web 2.0 applications that have invaded our lives recently.  In a somewhat over the top manner, the article goes on to detail Keen’s personal relationship with the internet – for good and for bad…

After reading the article, I was tempted to jump on the bandwagon that proclaims Keen a contentious, self-righteous cynic.  But instead, I took a step back to try to understand what it is that he is in fact trying to convey.  While I certainly don’t want to go back to a completely paper-based life, I do think he raises some important points about the path the internet is taking at the moment. 

What really strikes a chord with me is Keen’s take on the content available online today.  Thanks to Web 2.0, essentially anyone can post information – in any format, any language and with no one overseeing it.  So, what exactly does this mean for the quality of the information itself? 

I had already started thinking about this issue when I gave in to peer pressure and signed up to Facebook.  While I’m continually floored by the features offered on the site, some of the content that gets posted (or ‘published’) is appalling.  I find myself trying to decipher the oh-so fashionable ‘txt’ messages, and wondering what state the English language will be in soon. 

And with some of the wall postings, groups, photos, and videos floating around on people’s sites, I wonder how this will impact the way we continue to communicate with each other.  With email nearing the end of its heyday, is this the next stage - instant communication via Facebook-like applications instead?  It seems such a crazy idea!

There’s no doubt that Web 2.0 applications are here to stay and that – even more importantly – they are set to drastically change both our personal and business lives.  It took YouTube no time to become all the rage – boasting an impressive 10% of all web traffic and proving that there is a desire for innovative technology to drive new forms of ‘communication’.  One thing’s for sure – as the various ways we communicate become more integrated, Web 2.0 will surely only become more dominant. 

So, although I agree with Keen in that much of the content we are exposed to today is ‘second rate’, I don’t think we have any choice but to embrace this new wave of communication.  The issue then becomes – as Keen rightly points out – how we control the content that’s being created.  There’s still a long way to go, but as with anything new, I think it’s only a matter of time before we figure out how to manage the unwieldy Web 2.0 beast.   

When PR goes flat…

By Claire Ayles

The latest spin from inside the wonderful world of PR is that flat organisational structures – where all agency staff have the same job title regardless of their seniority, experience or ability – are the way to go. 

The reason for this?  Well, according to one Soho-based tech agency, employees ‘should be judged on what they know rather than what it says on their business cards’.

Apart from this totally missing the point that job titles ARE a reflection of how much you know, I'm also rather cynical about the motives behind this trend.   

For one thing, there's a major shortage of good tech PRs at the moment, so some firms may be tempted to employ people and pass them off as more experienced than they really are.  After all, when everyone's a 'Consultant', how can you really tell if their experience amounts to ten years of strategising for blue-chip clients or a fortnight's work experience photocopying press cuttings?   

But why should agencies be scared of clients not valuing less experienced staff?  New execs can bring fresh ideas and energy to accounts and shouldn’t have to be hidden behind generic job titles. 

Clients know agencies employ staff with a mix of experience, so why not just be open and honest about it?  After all, homogenisation can easily work against you.  For instance, if I was a client and I was given a PR team where each member had the same title, I'd just assume this was because everybody was junior rather than brimming with experience.

Finally, good agencies are built on motivated staff – and one sure way of improving performance is the carrot of promotion.  We all want external recognition for our personal successes, but celebrating the fact that you've been promoted from 'PR expert' to, err, 'PR expert' is just laughable. 

The crux of my problem with this is that the PR industry already has a dreadful reputation for peddling half-truths and this only adds fuel to the fire.  The last thing we need is to become even less transparent to our prospective clients.

Let's all take a bite out of Apple!

By George Mensah

Apple has become the fashion label of the tech world, with the iPhone – its latest ‘must-have’ offering – dropping from the same branch as its illustrious predecessors, the iMac, the iBook and of course the iPod.  However, this time, Apple seems to have taken the concept of its products being embodiments of individuality and exclusivity to an excessive level.

The current iPhone package ties users to a two-year contract with service provider AT&T.  Apple’s keenness to strike up a long-term deal with just the one service provider is quite a new concept in itself, as phone companies for the most part do this on a very temporary basis.  But the real issue is whether Apple is abusing its position by removing freedom of choice in the market. 

This restricted usability has led to Uniquephones – a UK firm that specialises in unlocking phones – hacking through Apple’s software restrictions and enabling the phone to potentially be used over other providers’ networks.  Uniquephones has even said that it is willing to face the legal wrath of Apple to provide this service.

This news has been widely welcomed, with a reported 150,000 showing interest in ‘re-fitting’ their SIM cards and firmware with Uniquephones’ software upgrade.  This is a great example of a consumer revolt in action, with many contract phone users clearly unwilling to sacrifice cross network freedom for the sake of the iPhone and its features.  They want it on their own terms and are refusing to play Apple’s exclusivity game.

If nothing else, this should act as a reminder to Apple that most people want technologies that fit in with their own personalised way of doing things.  As delicious and appealing as the exclusive iPhone deal might be, there is a fine line.  It will either pave the way for a change in conducting business in mobile space or the lack of cross over functionality may just be too much for users, in which case Apple will have to offer the phone on all networks sooner rather than later.

Apple would have us think it’s produced another untouchable fruit from its technological tree of knowledge - but right now, its wisdom is in question.