SMEs "get" social media while large co's miss the boat

Two reports were released today that indicates a big discrepancy in how small business and large enterprise are embracing social media: with the small guys leading the charge. One study claims that social media has become indispensable to small businesses and another claims Superbrands aren't latching onto Twitter.

According to V3.co.uk, this year’s largest UK survey of small and medium businesses was released today in the 2009 Business Pulse Report, conducted by BT and the British Chambers of Commerce. The survey indicates two-thirds of 72,000 small business respondents rated high search engine rankings as being very important to their business. And 73 per cent felt online presence was important to the running of their business.

Meanwhile over at new media age, a self-conducted study was published saying that of the 500 brands in the 2009 Superbrands list, a whopping 74 per cent had no presence on Twitter. Of the 500 brands, just 29 brands were tweeting every hour; just 50 were tweeting every day.

Certainly the most compelling story here is that big businesses, with all their resources, personnel, and fancy budgets, aren't getting the value of social media. Is that because social media is comparatively free, and they can't see value in anything that's not burning marketing budgets? Small business is benefiting from Twitter, even if the benefit is hard to quantify. One of the more interesting quotes in nma's coverage was from the head of creative at Innocent Drinks, who have built a following of 20,000 fans on Twitter, and yet who believe that by not defining a Twitter strategy, they have gotten more value out of it.

Dan Germain is quoted as saying: “If we’d had a set strategy at the start and defined some sort of ROI, then it wouldn’t be successful because Twitter doesn’t deliver on that,” he said. “For us it’s just another channel for talking to people.”

That says it all, really.

World's most marketable personality needs new publicist - stat

Since the weekend I've been resisting blogging about Tiger Woods' crash and subsequent PR "incident" but I just....can't....help....myself, especially as the mistakes keep rolling in.

It's implausible that the world's most marketable personality has publicists working for him who apparently don't understand reputation management, but that is exactly what appears to be the case. I just don't geddit.

Since his crash last Friday, it's been a catalogue of errors. Let's go through them:

MIstake 1: Lying about what happened. We are supposed to believe his wife shattered his back window to pull a 6'1" muscular man out of an SUV from the back? When the crash happened in the front of the car, not on both sides? Sorry, what?

Mistake 2: Allowing police reports to be the only source of information about the incident, when the reports pretty clearly show the couple wasn't entirely truthful about what took place.

Mistake 3: Not keeping to your commitments - if you want to show the world there is a problem, pull out of your next tournament, which happens to be your own tournament. if you want to show the world there is nothing to talk about, play in it like you were supposed to.

Mistake 4: Trying to cover up for his wife. If she shattered his back window in anger after seeing his name get trashed by the National Enquirer, causing him to crash, so what - a lot of women could relate to being that angry. It's infinitely more plausible than what they claim to have happened, so just own up it. Don't try to put all the blame on yourself, Tiger - it takes two to tango.

Mistake 5: Not being upfront about the fact your marriage / personal life is going through a rough patch, just like every single marriage on the planet does from time to time. Normal marital issues involve huge arguments once in awhile. If there are any marriages out there that are completely free of arguments, well, it's not a marriage I'd want to be in. Don't let it railroad your professional commitments though, or you do start to look abnormal. Normal people have fights and minor car crashes and show up to work in the morning.

All in all, the world can forgive and forget - Tiger is only human like the rest of us. Just look at Kate Moss's turnaround. In fact this incident could have even strengthened his reputation by making him seem more human and approachable. But basic tenets of reputation management haven't been followed. Any cover up is worse than the truth, and if you want the world to see you are on top of things, keep to your commitments.

Tiger: you need a new PR team and we happen to be available. Plus, we both really love golf. ;-)

Shocking headline of the day: Twitter users read The Guardian

Avid Twitter fans know the link between Twitter, and its bedfellow liberal paper The Guardian, so won't be surprised to learn a study has suggested the group of Twitter users, as a whole, are the 3rd most liberal group in the UK just behind liberal democrat voters but ahead of the traditional leftist group of 16-34 year olds.

Dicey stats from a study written by Captain Obvious. But what is interesting to ponder is that leading media site Brand Republic has lent publicity to such a direct link between Twitter and liberal papers. Are we at risk of alienating the 'other half' of the population entirely? Twitter's best attribute is its democratic nature. If we alienate rightists aren't we undermining the very point of Twitter? Discuss.

Social Media 09 - big budget noise, but where's the innovation?

New firm Run Marketing started up recently with an excellent website for digital marketing advice for small business. Hatch PR associate Chris Lee, director of Run Marketing, attended the Social Media 09 conference last week in London and posted a good summary of what was on offer.

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to hear the agenda was dominated (apparently) by big budget examples of brands using social media for integrated campaigns. For a start, the London conference schedule is rammed with shows like this and I wish they'd taken a different stance with this new show. Where are our grass roots, innovation on a shoestring examples? Small business showing how clever marketing doesn't require huge dollars? Isn't that exactly what social media is all about?

After all, how much is a Twitter account? Free. Creating a Facebook group? Free. Conducting question and answer sessions over LinkedIN? Free.

But many a 'digital media' agency seems to be perversely charging clients big sums for creative and innovative social media campaigns. If ideas have been the bread and butter for PR for a longtime, the 'value add' that comes as standard with every programme but doesn't have its own price tag attached, shouldn't social media be the same? Traditional PR requires some use of tools and resources that cost overheads. But social media doesn't. So why should social media cost a lot to implement?

Like Run Marketing says, we want to see examples of grassroots social media campaigns. They are more interesting, less error-prone (thinking about the Habitat debacle with that comment) and far more 'viral'. That's more effective, in our book.

"Taglines: The Cheesy Way to Express What Your Business Does"

There's a lot of hilarious stuff out there on the World Wide Web. My current favourite source of belly laughs is People of Walmart - but I digress, as that site is purely for recreational purposes.

On the odd occasion, you stumble across a hilarious site that wasn't posted in jest. I found an amusing post today that wasn't meant to be funny at all - UK Business Labs asked, well, UK businesses to post their company taglines. And boy have they delivered.

I have a strong aversion to company taglines, when BtoB firms try to come up with three-word descriptions of who they are. Taglines are cheesy and they over simplify your message. It's like the corporate equivalent of sticking political bumper stickers on your car. No one wants to see that while driving. And every time a corporate marketing department has attempted to come up with a tagline, it's the most excruciating "brainstorm" experience I've sat through. Why? Because no tagline works in the BtoB world. You're not Nike and you can't tell your customers to 'just do it' without getting them all confused as to what you're really on about.

So, trust me, ditch the taglines, say what your company does in the most straightforward way possible (E.g. Hatch PR is a PR firm for digital companies) and carry on doing the great business you do. Stop wracking your brain for cheeseball, roundabout ways of saying it. You just wind up sounding like a Hallmark card on corporate crack.

Recession '08-'09 Baby Boom - you heard it here first

In PR one of our jobs is to second guess media trends. We want to tip you off early on the Recession Baby Boom - because it's just a matter of time before you start hearing whispers in the mainstream press and PR campaigns start targeting the burgeoning baby products market.

Like all good media stories it may sound counter intuitive. People should have less money now, right? And we always talk about how expensive babies are. In fact, in the US it's a generally accepted fact that a baby currently costs its parents $250,000 from conception through to age 18. If you're the type of mom who accommodates her son well into his 30s, subsisting on your laundering abilities and meatloaf, your cost could soar well above that figure.

But, taking an extremely unscientific survey of friends, family, and Facebook contacts ('cause you gotta) there is something we have heard over and over again lately: "I'm pregnant." Why? Well, these declarations have come thick and fast a few months after we heard the same thing over and over again from female, working friends: "Since the economy is shitty right now, and I might get made redundant, we may as well just get pregnant. It's not like I'm going to get anywhere in my career in this climate."

So people started taking their frustrations on the poor economy out on more fruitful, fun, bedroom-focused, endeavours. And the babies are starting to come screaming into the world.

The first concrete evidence of the Recession Baby Boom? Leading baby and maternity retailer Mothercare released its earnings today - moving onto the FTSE 250 leaderboard and Q2 sales are up 7 per cent. The stock has risen 65 per cent since May.

You heard it here first. If your company can find a way to weave a Baby Boom message into its PR strategy over the next three to nine months you won't suffer for it.

Guardian gag order - we're officially at the point of no return

The Guardian gag order story of today has demonstrated better than any recent news event how digital media / social media / TWITTER has completely changed the game in how we consume media and the types of stories we react to.

A great blog post on The Media Blog sums up why quite nicely.

Bravo to The Guardian for quick, decisive action against a disgusting legal move on the part of the despicable Trafigura and a law firm which will rue the day they entered this motion - Carter-Ruck.

Rumour has it Newsnight will be covering the story tonight - we'll be tuning in.

Why we need to leave the Nobel committee (and Obama) alone

This week produced yet another public relations quagmire for President Obama as he became the surprise recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He can't enjoy it, unfortunately, as people around the world are shouting that he won the award for rhetoric, not accomplishments; it was given far too early in his career; the fact that it's been bestowed upon him undermines the credibility of the award itself.

Why would the Nobel committee open itself up to such criticism? It's not like they wouldn't have seen this coming. They didn't bestow the award on Obama early in his career - they bestowed it really, REALLY early in his career.

They obviously want the award to become less reactionary, patting-ourselves-on-the-back type of Oscar-style exercise and more of an actionable, political aid for the world's most influential people who are working tirelessly to improve peace and prosperity for the world's citizens. They want to transform the nature of the award itself, throwing their weight behind individuals who are leading us towards greater peace. The Nobel can then give credo and additional influence to start conversations that wouldn't have been held, or to open doors that would have stayed shut, for people like Obama and future recipients who are still in the midst of their work. Effectively the award becomes a communications aid rather than an Oscar bestowed on retired greats who live on vineyards and ranches and spend their days sipping brandy.

In a world this messed up, with countless problems facing mankind, who can blame them? It's just this type of action-oriented, open communications approach, rather than introspective reviews of our accomplishments after they're done, that the world needs right now.

I suggest that we calm down and be grateful that the Nobel might help Obama achieve some of his lofty ambitions. Let's be honest - there isn't an award on this planet that isn't a PR invention, and inherently subjective by nature. The Nobel is granted on the opinions of a bunch of eccentric rich people in Oslo - it's never been any different. If they can start to make things happen rather than just being a reason to open a bottle of bubbly and donate a few million to charity, personally I think that's a good transition. Let's not blame Obama for being the first recipient of this nature.

And finally: if the Nobel wasn't granted on rhetoric, then Al Gore never would have gotten it for his undoubtedly incredible contribution to the fight against climate change. He has worked tirelessly to spread his message, so he definitely deserved his Nobel, but all the same, it's not like ice stopped melting in the Arctic Circle when An Inconvenient Truth came out. And that, my friends is an inconvenient truth.

I'm worth $1m, how 'bout you? Valuing web's latest thang

On the eve of Forbes' declaration that Faceback founder Mark Zuckerberg is worth $2 billion, investigative industry rag Silicon Alley Insider ponders whether MySpace is "now worthless" and whether it was even worth buying on the part of Rupert Murdoch. (He paid $580 million for it, which at the time was considered a steal. But that was back when people used the site ....for actual social networking rather than just to look up bands).

How quickly the tide comes in, and goes back out, in the internet world.

Let's consider the valuation of some of web's social networking trends, shall we? It's a fun game which a lot of industry sources like to play at - with no accepted formula and no right answer.

*Facebook - the social networking giant has been popular for awhile now, yet advertising revenues are still abysmal - the last valuation was published in May 2009 at $10 billion

*Twitter - arguably the web's latest 'thing' - currently valued at $1 billion - but no one knows if that figure is anywhere even close to accurate, since the company doesn't make any money and has no business model

*MySpace - currently valued at $500 million to $1.2 billion

*Friendster - remember them? they lost all their business to Facebook yet claim to have a handful of fans left in Asia - currently valued at $210 million

Again there is no right answer in this game, and perhaps this is what makes it so fun to watch. The only accepted truth is that once the site becomes unpopular, the valuation dips. Oftentimes this has no relation to the actual revenue the company is making. If only businesses in other sectors were valued on these vague, cloudy formulas! Just imagine a world where your bank was valued based on 'hype' and 'promise'!

Suggested reading: Ray Valdes at Gartner has posted an interesting and more educated viewpoint on how valuations happen and what they imply.

Doing business "globally" with Americans

The topic of 'how to do business globally, or even transatlantically' is so vast and constantly changing, you could easily fill a library on the subject. But even though it's a topic best approached with formal research and discussion, it comes up informally all the time, with companies constantly asking me for advice as someone who has worked in marketing in both the US and UK. Most of the time the companies that I come across are European companies that want to cut corners and launch a product or service to the US as cheaply as possibly, often making zero investment in the process, other than getting their product on the market there. A one hour conference call talking about America should do it, right? Spending marketing money on ensuring your company looks attractive to Americans is often the last thing invested in, or thought about. Dumb, huh? But I've seen it a dozen times. I'm sure the same exists for US companies wanting to get into Europe, I just meet less of them.

A topic that may be easier to tackle, and hence often the best place to start, is how to get your company's nomenclature up to speed if you are going to "appear American." Plus I'm one of those geeky linguistic types, who likes nothing more than to ponder the etymology of rarely-used words, so this topic interests me greatly.

For instance, someone asked me the other day whether their business should be characterised as 'global' or 'international' - and this got me thinking. It's a very good question. If you are running a business located outside the US, and want to be seen as American-friendly, you have to accept some truths about the country (truths which, I've often found, a lot of people from other countries don't like accepting).

One of these truths is a tendency on the part of Americans to use the word 'international' to mean 'outside America.' Weird, huh? Given that the US is part of this thing called the globe. And with globalisation ruling the roost, we can't really pretend to operate solely on our shores anymore - especially web businesses.

But true it is. Just look at how CNN International is the name of the part of the news organisation that's outside the States.

It is indicative of how a lot of Americans tend to look at the world: "us" and "them." If you don't like thinking about that truth, and working your product around it, you perhaps should look to launch in another country. But you won't, because the huge market opportunity of the US is so compelling, dammit.

So a top tip is, if you want to set up shop in America, and you are running a global business, you probably don't want to call yourself an international business. That just highlights the point about your company which you are desperately trying to sweep under the carpet right now.

Another thing is how professional your website looks. Trust me when I say that I use a lot of websites that don't appear very professional (in an American sense of the word). And they work just great and I love using them. However, to impress a mass market in the US, you have to remember that Americans are exceptionally protective of their privacy and safety. Intrusions on their person or home will be met with a proverbial shotgun. This extends to the look and feel of your website. If your site looks in anyway dodgy, you ain't getting invited in for fried chicken and biscuits, I can assure you. Having Google ads on your homepage is not the route towards looking professional, unless you are Google, that is.

Americans are also exceptionally thorough people, both at home and in the workplace. When they do QA on a product or service, they do QA. Just asking your four best friends to look at your site for glaring errors might work in Europe, but it is nowhere near enough to satisfy the appetite for quality that you will be met with on American soil. Americans are louder than average and more quick to lodge complaints. If they find something wrong with your website, they aren't likely to keep it to themselves.

If you want to see what a professional website looks like to an American, look at the types of online services that Americans gobble up. (E.g., Hulu.com looks a lot more professional in an American sense of the word than PirateBay.org). Just because you are a small startup - the "small guy in a big overbearing market" - a "fighter" - doesn't mean you are going to be held to any different standard than that. Which means that you do have to consider making that investment in 'frilly' things like look and feel, ensuring your language is friendly within the boundaries of the country you are launching it in, and ensuring your entire marketing image fits into a marketplace where your positioning will always, without fail, change the minute you cross the pond.

It's a huge topic that I hope to blog about more. A few starting points to ponder, anyway.

President Obama's back to school address: carry an umbrella in a media shitstorm

It's now four hours till President Obama's much debated back to school address. The speech, at 12 pm EST today and intended to be aired live to students of all ages, will focus on the importance of staying school. (You can watch it online at WhiteHouse.gov). Bizarrely, there has been a huge media and political backlash in the US from opponents claiming that Obama's speech is "political" and therefore unsuitable for children to be forced to hear in school. Crazy, right? Especially considering plenty of other presidents have given addresses to schoolkids. But this media shitstorm got so serious that many parents were surprised to find their kids carrying permission slips home which they had to sign to let Junior watch the address. Yeah.

Disclaimer: I worship at the Obama altar so this post is bound to be a bit one-sided; however, I grew up in Oswego, NY, in the days when the TV got wheeled into the classroom on a huge mobile cart for every important televised event, be it a presidential address, or the launching of the Challenger space shuttle. The latter event obviously went disastrously wrong and I still remember how shocked teachers were went it blew up in front of our very eyes, and how confused all the kids were as to what had just happened. I was in the third grade (about 8 years old) and didn't fully understand the enormity of what had just taken place.

We also stood up every single day at 9 am, without fail, put our hands on our hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance simultaneously with the entire school. I don't know how common this practice is anymore, but I loved it, and I believe patriotism is one of the things that makes America great.

So - Obama's had to deal with a media crisis over an innocent strategy to stress a very non-political education agenda. And meanwhile his opponents' claims that this is "political" are completely hypocritical because that is exactly what their protests are.

One friend on Facebook described this as "a wholly embarrassing chapter in American history." I couldn't put it better myself.

Obama's media team expertly put the text of his speech online 24 hours before it will be televised to ensure a) any journalist covering it has no excuse not to get his words exactly right; b) to convince any naysayers that his address is actually for the good of children and not pushing some sneaky agenda; and c) to demonstrate just how pointless these weeks of debate have been.

Another masterful move in media manipulation from the Obama camp, the main reason being that his strategy is simple and follows the laws of common sense. It's a media strategy that seems remarkable only for its lack of complexity, but still, it's something that other world leaders could learn from: "carry an umbrella in a media shitstorm." It's not a bad lesson for schoolkids to be reminded of, either.

Why don't teens tweet?

It has emerged this summer that teenagers aren't getting into Twitter with as much vigour as the 25+ age group. Mashable posted some statistics that seem to confirm it.

If Twitter can't woo the younger, tech-loving crowd, it not only has bad implications for its future but also for its monetisation model (presuming that Twitter, at some point, wants to try its hand at making money). Particularly since one of the monetisation models that other social networks have used successfully, virtual gift giving and buying, is something that teens seem to take a lot more seriously than adults. After all, on my wedding anniversary I won't be sending my husband a virtual pint over Facebook. But my teen neighbour might be more prone to sending one to her crush.

The interesting question is, why? Why don't teens like Twitter? Some people think it's too 'geeky' for teens, but teens are into all sorts of geekware.

I'd be interested to hear other people's views. For me the answer is obvious - that is, Twitter isn't obvious enough for teens. Teens today want immediate gratification. In my opinion Twitter takes at least a month of fairly heavy usage to build up a community and start seeing how to use it properly with followers and followees, and gain some benefit out of it. Just following celebrities isn't exciting enough to keep teens interested; they will need to build their own communities of friends and other teens with similar interests. And this is something that takes time to build up. Also Twitter's background customisation tool isn't exactly easy to use and teens want their own identity on everything they touch. Will average non-techie teens bother playing with it? It took me ages to get mine right and that was with the help of a professional designer.

Or, are teens actually using Twitter and they've just managed to fly under our radar in terms of how they are accessing it? The Mashable article briefly explores this question, which isn't easy to answer, especially since Twitter is allergic to giving out usage figures.

Do you agree or have other reasons in mind? Would be interested in hearing your comments.

Pulling the grass out from under the organic industry

Yesterday's Food Standards Agency report found that organic vegetables aren't necessarily healthier for people to eat than normal vegetables. Apparently, the vitamin and mineral content is the same as in conventional vegetables.

So what?

This report got enough negative media attention, it could single-handedly quash the nascent organic industry. I woe the day my supermarket's organic section shrinks even further. What a huge, massive shame. The main reason for buying organic is not to fulfil some pipe dream that one is going to get super charged with vitamins. Vegetables already have amazing nutritional benefits that one shouldn't live without, and expecting organic vegetables and fruits to have 'more' is just quack science. The point of buying organic is that small goal called 'saving our planet,' or how about 'treating farm animals with humanity.' Not to mention 'fighting the case of the small farmer,' 'defending our precious farmland against the negative effects of intensive farming' and 'not wanting our nice, vitamin-filled fruit to be covered in a white ash of pesticides.'

During the BBC's broadcast coverage last night, out of an approximately 1 minute long piece, these other positive impacts of organic were only mentioned in the last 2 seconds and only the environmental benefit was mentioned.

Congratulations to the media, who have (largely) focused yet again on the wrong headline and irresponsibly reported a story with the power to kill an industry that has done nothing but good things for our communities.

It cannot feel good to go home at the end of the day, as a journalist, knowing how the power of your pen can be so perverse at times.

Spinvox response - how to approach a media crisis

This is part 2 of a blog post we started yesterday, found here.

We aren't trying to attack Spinvox or kick them while we are down. One of our bloggers is a big fan of the service. However, the company's response during their media crisis is just too good a case study to pass up. This is one of the best examples I've seen in awhile of a technology company under fire, and maybe this story has been cooking for awhile, but for many readers, it came out of the blue. We can't resist but to analyse how the company has dealt with it.

And Spinvox brought a lot of this attention on itself by not responding for a whole day.

Last night, the company broke its silence on the TV news show SkyNews.com (that's what it's called - not a typo). And it did several more things wrong.

Here are the key elements that need to be in place to face a media crisis.

1. Act quickly. This means your management team needs to 'get along' and collaborate well on key messages. This is no time to show cracks. Waiting a day to respond shows cracks.
2. The PR team needs to be a driving force, not a team that's just along for the ride. There should be internal or external PR people ready to face a crisis by going on the offensive - quickly.
3. Any written response should be factual but should not read like classic corporate drivel, which is what Spinvox's blog post yesterday was.
4. The CEO should be offered up for comment, not a director of engineering as Spinvox offered. This is a defining moment in the company's history and no one other than the CEO is placed to deal with it.
5. The company should be extremely honest, and attack the allegations with numbers, statistics and facts. In this case, Spinvox's best response* (which we have yet to see) would be a graphical description of i) how many voicemails / what percentage are listened to ii) what sorts of info is usually in those voicemails - numbers, etc - that make it hard for the algorithms to work iii) exactly how their encryption engine works iv) exactly what the timeline of 'learning' looks like to prove that the 'learning' is actually that - and presumably over time decreases the number of VMs listened to.
*This is reprinted from our comments on Mobile Industry Review's insightful post about Spinvox from yesterday.
6. If a live broadcast is the first response, as with Spinvox on SkyNews.com last night, the spokesperson needs to come prepared with the above. Just giving vague statements like 'some voicemails are listened to' is merely dodging the issue and doesn't help fight the crisis.
7. Taking an attitude such as 'we're being attacked unnecessarily! Feel bad for us!" doesn't work and shouldn't even be considered.
8. The best PR team will view the crisis as an opportunity and figure out a way to make their offensive push messages that maybe weren't heard before.

If your PR team (and management team) is not able to withstand the pressure and deliver the above, you need to consider whether your technology company is prepared for a crisis.

Will Spinvox get its vox back?

It wasn't a good day for Spinvox, the voicemail speech-to-text company which was accused in a BBC article penned by Rory Cellan-Jones of some very serious data protection breaches.

Allegedly, rather than having ground-breaking technology that listens to spoken voicemails and converts them to text, the company has been paying countless call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines to listen to at least some of the messages and translate them manually. Obviously this raises some eyebrows in terms of privacy implications and whether it meets the data protection act.

At the time of writing, Spinvox was radio silent, though the story was also picked up by Sky and is all over the Twittersphere.

Spinvox has no choice in this situation but to go on the offensive and prove the credibility of its technology. And it needs to be specific about how its algorithms work. Ambiguity will get the company nowhere at this stage.

There isn't much else to say at this point until they respond, but a point worth making is the age-old 'any PR is good PR' thinking. Many people who didn't know what Spinvox did, now do - and some of them won't care about Rupert on the street in South Africa hearing what their spouse picked up at the supermarket for dinner that night. Most of us receive voicemails so dull they would probably put the call centre staff to sleep rather than incite drama, though staff apparently claimed in Facebook group posts to hear death threats, sexual messages and all sorts.

Waiting to see what transpires.

UPDATE: According to Sky news Twitter correspondent Ruth Barnett, someone from Spinvox will be be on Sky News channel 501 at 7pmish tonight to talk about the issue. This is one interview we won't miss.

FT trying to teach an old dog new tricks

Old habits die hard and everyone knows it is pretty impossible to teach an old dog new tricks.

But the FT isn't past trying.

Financial Times editor Lionel Barber predicts that within a year most news sites will be charging for content. He's bedded in with Rupert Murdoch in their stance against 'free' and they are both (now) very outspoken that the free online newspaper content model is broken.

The trouble is, there is a world of difference between being annoyed at a business model you yourself had a hand in setting up, when you find it doesn't work, and changing that model when you've already trained your audience to expect something else.

Freesheets are marked by crappy, poorly researched journalism and they're, on the whole, bad for the media scene. If you want proper intelligent journalism you should need to pay a small fee and enable the journalists to eat. I get that side of the argument, I do, and I often make it myself. I also get the 'give bits away for free and then charge for heavy usage' model that the FT claims to have invented. Although I read lots of stories on the FT's website and never seem to have to pay.

And so the fact remains that only 1 per cent of users actually go on to pay for journalistic content. If the newspaper industry is serious about this battle against 'free,' they need to make that 1 per cent their worst enemy and do something very clever indeed to increase it. With the (very free) blogosphere breaking every major news story, the (very free) Google enabling access to news stories at the touch of a mouse, the (very free) digital media sector enabling news at a glance and making it possible to read nothing beyond headlines for your daily news diet, and kids in our societies being brought up on a diet of free, this is not a job I'd want to handle.

Furthermore, dare I say it, but in countries like the UK with socialised media (the Beeb's online news site) giving great content away for free to the taxpayer, and probably rightly so, it's never going to work. In the US, I think there is more of a fighting chance with independent regional papers leading the newspaper scene.

And at the end of the day, no one feels that bad for Murdoch or the big papers at the loss of their profit margins. But everyone mourns the loss of their local paper and the horrible impact that has on unwatched politicians free to play with information at their choosing, unmanned regulators and all the implications of the loss of an investigative press. It's the small, local papers that suffer and we suffer with them. And the primary reason for their downfall is not free content being available online, but the free classified advertising marketplace the internet creates.

What do you think?

Recipe for the next Twitter

As Twitter becomes less and less conversational and more and more "one-way broadcasting" we think the time is nigh for a next Twitter to barge into the scene.

If you don't agree with me that Twitter is becoming pretty one-way broadcasting in nature, rather than what it is at its best, a two-way conversational tool, consider the latest big Twitter stories that were covered in mainstream press:

-Iran conflict - citizen journalism to get the word out when 'real' journalism was stifled - one way broadcasting

-MJ death - yeah, sure, a lot of people Tweeted about it. A blog still broke the news, just like what would have happened with a big news event 8 years ago

-Habitat's horrendous attempt at a social media advertising campaign, highjacking stories of human suffering to push furniture - one way broadcasting on crack

-Ashton Kutcher's one million followers tirade - if he thinks it proves that he wants to converse with a million fans, rather than just broadcast to the world how 'special' he is, his ego has damaged his ability to reason

Finally, maybe it's just the people I follow, but I find that about half the Tweets coming up on my list are one-way thoughts rather than conversation starters or links to interesting stuff. And more importantly, when an interesting two-way conversation does come up between two of my followers, I have to click into one or both profiles to see what they said first, then click back for the next comment, then so on. I get lost and distracted while trying to trace a conversation.

A lot of early Twitterers were worried that as Twitter became more mainstream, it would somehow 'get worse.' I'm starting to believe it is getting worse. But I don't think the primary reason is that it's becoming mainstream.

The thing Twitter is doing wrong is not improving and evolving its UI to amplify the two-way conversational tools and steer it away from the one-way broadcasting direction. I still think Twitter is a breakthrough tool and I'm still a fan. And some of the one-way broadcasting, like the Iran conflict, is hugely important. But in some ways the UI is clunky and lacking basic functionality - especially for people who use it primarily as a two-way conversational tool. The stats are unclear about how many Twitterers use only the web UI and no other applications like Tweetdeck, but it seems to be at least half, if not the overwhelming majority. [Source for statistics: Hubspot, thanks to @handlewithcare, and Nick Burcher's blog, thanks to @crispyducks] Sorry to be harsh Twitter, but you are one of the most talked about technologies on the market today and your UI still needs a Tweetdeck for people who want more? Houston, we have a problem.

In my opinion, by not evolving the UI, Twitter has allowed a door to open for the next big thing to stir things up.

Here is our recipe for The Next Twitter - a groundbreaking conversation tool. If we had time to develop this ourselves, we would, but given how many proverbial pies we have our fingers in at the moment I'll give it to you as a freebie so someone brilliant can get it done:

1. Take the easiest web interface you can find, and make it interoperable with mobile (similar to what Twitter has done - we applaud them for their mastery of simplicity)

2. Shamelessly copy the follow / unfollow brilliance of Twitter. It's subtle and it works

3. Make search absolutely central to the tool. Don't confuse 'simple UI' with 'featureless' and don't kid yourself that any feature is more important than search. Twitter got this wrong in the beginning, and it still hasn't righted itself completely

4. Combine microblogging with elements of old-fashioned message boards, being the best of both, minus the annoying elements. Give people the ability to see entire conversations in a single glance on one screen, using plus/minus buttons so you can dig further into the conversations you want to see, and minus out of the ones you don't care about - all without having to navigate to a new screen. This seems technically hard to do, but I saw some truly innovative declarative UI programming technologies recently at our client Nokia Qt Software, and I have faith that techie geeks know how to do it and fit it all tidily on one screen

5. Initially, focus on convincing people how they can use it for their jobs and hobbies - Facebook's already got the masses' personal lives in the can

6. Excite and engage the media and PR scenes (much like what Twitter has done) to get the word out most quickly

7. Shamelessly market yourself as the thing that will unseat Twitter. The technology business world needs to take more lessons from athletes when it comes to bold, brash, super competitive statements

8. Be really strict with bots and spammers to keep them firmly out

9. Shake up the above ingredients, don't stir. Stick it in the oven and watch the world take notice

Do you agree with our recipe? Have other points to add? Let us know. We are dying to see this mystery tool be developed as we want to start using it now.

Don't forget about the Facebook land grab

Facebook's 'vanity URLs' became available on Friday and the land rush ensued. Facebook has taken measures to keep poaching at bay, however. You can only reserve one bit of 'URL real estate' per registered Facebook user and it's only available for accounts that have been running since May. So you can't create an account to grab space. And if you want to grab your company's name, well, you have to link it to an individual and since I use Facebook for both personal and business use, that didn't seem realistic. So Facebook has really put the kibash on any sort of branding possibilities, in my opinion. Or maybe I'm just being shortsighted with that observation.

I clicked on the right place (here) to create my vanity URL today. Facebook puts on the pressure by informing you that once you select your URL, you cannot change it. This is always the moment where I feel least creative - under pressure!

After trying several iterations of my name to no avail (there are apparently a lot of digitally-savvy Emily's out there) I finally settled on emily.live. I thought it sounded better than my boring, samey samey name. It's kind of corny, but then again, so am I. Good luck coming up with your vanity URLs - and report back what you've chosen! :-)

PR for free? A big resounding no.

The best business advice anyone ever gave me was, "never give something away for free that you're good at." Taking it further, you should know to price it well, if you're good at it.

In these credit crunchy times, people and companies get desperate. We've had a couple recent incidents where we've lost a pitch at the hands of a PR whose price was "Free." Yes, free. In these cases even the prospect found the situation a little ridiculous. And I never mince words when I tell a prospect that I do not respect that model, no matter what the supposed 'rewards' are at the end of it.

Is this starting to become an even bigger problem in the PR industry? it completely devalues our work. And you're smoking something if you think people in the industry are convinced you are going to pick up the phone and pitch a company to the press (well), and do a good writing, tracking, measurement and reporting job, all for free. That's like offering to go to jail when you haven't committed a crime. It won't help a struggling PR's career and it definitely won't dig you out of the rut you'd have to be stuck in to even consider something so crazy.

A colleague pointed out that it seems very '2001' when companies were digging themselves out of the dotcom bust. I think it's downright toxic to our industry (which you've probably picked up on). PR planning takes an incredible amount of business creativity, the execution is hard work and it is very specialised work. No matter what the situation, unless you are doing your best friend a HUGE favour, should a business service like that be given away completely free.

NB: Some type of compensation model based upon performance is a different story, and we'd agree that it can often be the right pricing model. This post is purely about proposals given for zero, nada, nothin.'

So - I'm really interested to hear if other PR's have faced this situation and what your thoughts are.

To newsletter or not to newsletter

A lot of companies are keen to jump on the 'company newsletter' bandwagon as an outlet for talking to their market and current customer base. It's nuthin' new - the newsletter has been around since the dawn of business - it's just easier to distribute now through digital channels.

I am signed up to several, and read them mainly because I'm always asking myself, "Can and should we do a good newsletter for Hatch?"

The word good is pretty key in that sentence. The vast majority of company newsletters that I receive are almost entirely self-serving - they mainly involve the company banging on about how smart it is, how great it is, how great its employees are, and how great its customers are. And, they are almost always about the company's core business, which if you're aware of the company already, you really don't need to know more about.

Honestly? Even if I'm your number one biggest fan, a newsletter like that is a) not interesting and b) actually off-putting. It undermines the very purpose of the newsletter itself - to build brand reputation.

If your newsletter is gossipy, funny, or says something completely new (such as putting our monthly statistics that only you could publish) then fair enough. Or if you put out a newsletter with interesting material that has very little direct relevance to your brand, that can work too. An example would be highlighting the work of local up-and-coming artists or local free Wifi cafes - it obviously depends on what industry you're in. But if you look at your newsletter and find that it's just a bunch of self-serving goop, directly related to the work you are doing, spare yourself the trouble as it often does very little for your brand.

The reality is that putting together a good company newsletter takes a lot of time, even more creativity, and can't just be an activity crammed into a full schedule at the end of the week. If it's going to be a key communications vehicle, it needs a fair amount of resource put against it - not just the summer intern's activity. And before hitting 'send', someone in the organisation really needs to take a critical eye to put the kibash on any parts that sound like your company is collectively patting itself on the back.

I can only think of a handful of newsletters that meet these criteria and they are all really professionally done, and clearly take some time to put together. And I don't roll my eyes when I read them.

Twitter a PR love-in, says Hitwise

Hitwise posted a picture today of the news sites that receive traffic direct from Twitter. And oh, oh yes, these numbers are sweet.

Twitter delivered a staggering 9.7 per cent of all its traffic to sites in the 'news and media' category in April 2009.

Why do we love this? It is the best PR tool since sliced press releases. It proves that the Tweetvolution was largely thanks to PR people and journalists championing it. It goes further to show the power of PR. And finally, one could even extrapolate that this means PR people do, indeed 'get it,' and understand how to utilise the digital medium.

It's also super interesting to see which news sites are using Twitter the best. Although The Guardian will always front itself as top of the pops in this regard, even Sky News, who some Guardian journalists guffawed for appointing the media industry's first 'Twitter' correspondent earlier this year, is attracting more traffic from Twitter. She's doing a great job and props to Sky for the foresight as it's obviously not done them any harm.

We like this very much. Thank you, Hitwise.

Internet World 09: Everything to everyone - and nothing to all

Walking around Internet World yesterday in Earl's Court, London, I wasn't awed, I'll be honest. I'm usually somewhat critical of tradeshows where the main goal seems to be checking out what your competition is doing. But to me, last year's Internet World felt way more exciting and new than this year's version. Granted, there was something small in between called THE CREDIT CRUNCH. However that fuels my argument even more - that the vast majority of exhibitors mistakenly wanted attendees to believe they did, literally, everything - when clearly they do not. List out anything that one could ever do on the web, and you'd fill the Library of Congress. "The interwebs" spans as many diverse areas as life itself, in which all of these exhibitors were claiming to be experts.

It's amazing how the one most basic rule of marketing can be so blatantly ignored, or just missed, by so many companies. Try to be a jack of all trades - and become, by default, the master of none. When it comes to marketing, I was taught that you should blow your trumpet about your USPs. How can 80 per cent of Internet World's exhibitors be the 'leading provider of' SEO, digital marketing (how nebulous is that choice of phrase anyway?), targeted direct marketing, email marketing, web design, creative web presence, content management, social media, AND etc etc etc.

The only way you wind up with a stand that says so little is 'marketing by committee' - and this show really smacked of it.

Maybe I'd gotten stuck in some web jargon black hole but I talked to at least a dozen companies in a row, all of whom did all of the above and none of whom could explain their business in less than a zillion words of gobbley-gook. The standout in that area of the show was the French Pavilion. Crammed in amongst the jargony jargoneers were a couple innovative Frenchmen and women, on a joint booth sporting a shoddy version of the French flag and great accents, but sadly no champers or soft cheeses. This last fact was duly noted by the president of Netways, a company with an impressive list of car-maker clients who execute integrated marketing campaigns. Thank goodness - I'd found someone who could point to real customers doing real stuff. I know what cars are. I even drive one.

Granted, they're our client, but a big standout for us was the area by the Innovation Zone, sponsored by Huddle, where some different offerings could be found - e.g. Webjam for creation of specialised social networks - Xero for online accounting software and Siondo for online ERP. Another highlight for me was an interesting conversation with the technical lead at punkyduck. Why did I remember them? No, it wasn't the hot pink stand. He stuck a stake in the ground and told me what they actually did - create Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIN apps to drive brand presence for everything from pregnancy brands (guess your baby's sex) to flixter to rate movies on your FB profile. I'm sure they do other stuff, too - they're smart people. But I 'got it' because he was willing to stick to one story long enough to understand their value-add. I'll find out later what else they do.

I then ran into a fellow American startup person who begged me not to ask what his company did, he was so sick of talking the talk. He'd attended the conferences and claimed to learn very little, though admitted the talks were well-presented enough to distract you into thinking you were learning something new. He ambled off home in a fog at 3 pm definitely brought on by too much of 'Teh Interwebs.'

Anyway hopefully you got a picture of the show if you weren't lucky enough to attend this year - the show coordinators claimed attendance would rise to 13,000 - ten per cent more than last year - but never have 3,250 people seemed like a smaller crowd to me. The lesson in all this for exhibitors is, be specific! Don't be everything to everyone and fall into a jargon blackhole - else risk turning into a comet that just passes in the night. (See how I did that?)

Women in IT - one personal story

The topic of women in IT has sparked a huge debate this week after the session at Geek n' Rolla which we previously blogged about. Some people (Mike Butcher and the women on the panel) get the fact that there is a lack of women in IT, and know that perhaps we should do something about it. They understand there is an inherent problem with an industry fostering males to succeed while perhaps not doing enough to attract women.

But other people don't. Without name checking them, look here here for an example.

Now I'll share a highly personal experience that happened to me, when I *swear* I was discriminated against by being a woman. I went into job interview for one of the world's biggest software companies. I felt well-qualified for the job. I felt I had a good portfolio. They told me I was on a shortlist of three for the role. But when I told the interviewer that I was getting married in five months, I swear, on my life, the entire feeling of the interview changed. A dark cloud seemed to wash over our previously warm discussion. I never heard back from the company, which was pretty unprofessional in those circumstances. I didn't get any feedback and I never even got an actual 'no.' I really suspected, afterwards, that they didn't hire me because they knew I was about 30, just about to get married, and thought I was at risk of being on the fast track to pregnancy.

Note: I could be completely wrong, they could have just not liked me. It's totally plausible. But you know that saying 'women's intuition'? On retrospect I wound up saying to myself: "Damn, stupid mistake, you should never, EVER discuss your marital status in an interview unless you have to.' How unfair is that? And if the situation was as I read it, it is their loss, because like a lot of married young women, I'm focused on my career and doing good things for other companies, not theirs. And if a man said he was getting married, it wouldn't signal such thinking. This is why I used the words 'discriminated against.'

Of course, this happened to happen in a tech company but it could have happened at a job interview in any sector. It's just that I happen to work in tech, an industry where there are far more men than women and where it feels like women have a higher cliff to climb to prove themselves. And it also seems to be an industry where teams are desperate to cling onto any competitive edge they have, and tend to freak out about small stuff, like a coworker having a baby.

Have you ever had a similar experience? I'd love to hear it. And I'll try to dig up the link to a great survey a recruitment company did about the exact issue spelled out above.

Why no women in tech? Blog from Geek n Rolla

Today's Geek n Rolla conference in London is making waves around the world (previous link to Washington Post's live video coverage) and has been truly fascinating at times (but who doubted that?). A winning session was the Just a Girl debate about the low numbers of women in tech startups. Here's the full transcript - the crux of the issue is that a) we need to do something more about the numbers of women in tech and b) there are no obvious answers. Wanting to hear the rest of the show precludes us from writing a well-thought out summary just yet, but I will update this post when things die down with a bit more of a Re:medial analysis on this issue. It's a fantastic topic, and hats off to Mike Butcher for including it on the agenda. This debate got firey, so hold onto your seats.

Just a girl - balancing tech culture: getting more women involved in startups

moderator:
cate sevilla, bitchbuzz

this session is about lack of women in tech. there are lots of studies on this problem. gartner did a study on women and men in IT - breaking through sexual stereotypes - number of women in IT declined 10% from 96 to 2004 - the study author said we 'need to change the game.'
some put offs for women in tech:
-men are too macho
-intimidating workplace
-are there simply less women who want to be in tech?

panellists:
leisa reichelt, user experience consultant
sophie cox, founder of worldeka.com
zuzanna pasierbinksa-wilson, huddle.net
nacera benfedda, director of product at viadeo

sophie
look more at education and training issues. making information accessible to more kinds of people.
is women interest the issue?
how conferences are set up and how information is given is part of the problem.

zuzanna
i took a little study to centre this discussion. around 200 quality respondents took the survey - people from within the industry. the stats showed that 50 per cent of women don't get into startups / tech because they don't want to.
less than one third said it's because they don't have enough good role models. there is more to this than women simply not wanting to get into tech.
women constantly make choices and sacrifices in their lives: "do i want to have a career or do i want to have a family." it's a question women always face.
in tech they also face others. when tech companies are hiring, do you want to fight established stereotypes and do you want to even go there?
then you need to think about maternity pay, etc.
it's a case of an old boys hiring network, hiring in their own image - there are already more men than women.
one commentator on my survey said "it's like not being let into golf clubs or smoking rooms."

sophie
that's the data and that's true, but if you look at the data on the tech scene in general we are quite liberal, left-wing and equal opportunity so if you compare to city boy network ingrained sexism in that culture, technology should be more accessible.
family time goes both ways - men need to get home to families too.
it is so ridiculous it is happening in a relatively liberal culture, like tech.
cate sevilla, bitchbuzz
sophie, your first profitable company was started when you were 16 is it the working culture or the risk?

sophie
no, it's personality driven, i know a lot of men that are scared of risk and would hate to work for themselves.
that is part of the reason i don't have kids - it's similar for me.

zuz
no it's slightly different for men.
women are the only ones who can have children and breastfeed so there is always going to be a difference. men can't take that on although we'd like them to.

cate
we should just work on that then - well done.

leisa
i wonder if part of the reason that we don't have enough women in technology is identifying with the industry -- i have friends who work in PR, for instance and only do PR for tech, but always say they are PR, not tech.
maybe we are counting a lot of people out.

zuz
in that case i would expect more PR and marketing people to be here.

sophie
they have done a lot of studies into why girls and universities don't want to get involved in tech companies. they want to get into creative industries like PR and stuff where creativity is more obvious.
we're one of the most exciting industries! the whole creative process of how you create something and push it out there is incredible.
there is something really sexy about developing.
you can go out there and do stuff that's absolutely astonishing.

nacera
one study said that women ? [nb: lost text]
women just don't know what startups are - what is high tech - that is the main problem - the lack of knowledge about our sector - each time i meet a young girl in my family i say to go work for a startup rather than an established company with very masculine codes. in startups it is easier to be a woman, but if women don't know that, it's impossible to attract women - the main thing is to spread the word around you to make them understand it's nice and sexy to work with programmers all around you!

cate
do we have a guy who can come up?
milo from the telegraph
i'm slightly uncomfortable with this discussion - i don't think this is quite the way to approach this problem - having come from an environment like law, finance, i think women have quite a good deal in tech. in asking why women aren't involved in tech at a certain level - we need to be quite careful not to engineer a game where essentially what we are doing is to worsen the issue.

cate
what needs to be done?

milo
what we need is a large, systematic study on the problem like what zuzanna has started. what we need to do is have a serious study looking at the actual truth of why women aren't in tech and we are tiptoeing around each other and i haven't seen facts till today.

cate
so you want numbers?

milo
we need some serious research done.

sophie
what you are describing is how men are different from women. how is research going to change any of that?

milo
if it's reasonably true that women in technology are facing these issues we need to be careful about apologising for that.

zuz
do you mean research about why women should have voting rights?

audience
he works for the daily telegraph of course he doesn't get it.

audience
i find it really interesting that 3 out of 5 women have said they are looking at reports being done but then only when a man comes up does he ask for research.
setting up a company in technology is just like setting up a company in any sector - leisa made a very important point, if you don't count yourself as technology how are you going to be visible - how to take that forwards - another thing is that a lot of people who start up companies in tech don't have a background in it - they just have insight and intelligence and have skills to lead something.

leisa
this discards a lot of the other factors involved - i have a 15 month old son and i run my own business but there is no way i could engage in a lifestyle where i don't have time to sleep, which is what i hear from a lot of tech startups.

milo
that is based on an assumption that men don't make sacrifices when they work a 22 hour day.

audience
you have lost the plot

milo
i don't think it's fair to suggest that men haven't made sacrifices.

leisa
if you are creating an environment where you need to work 22 hour days then that discludes a lot of people including men, yes.

simone from The Next Women
the statistics aren't totally right; the growth of women starting companies is much bigger than it has been before.
hurdles are that they are not getting investment. another hurdle is that women aren't exactly wanting high growth business. that has nothing to do with whether women have children or not.
women leading high growth businesses are no different from men leading high growth businesses - one of the biggest issues is the lack of funding to get there.

audience
two big points. first you started off saying that women experience a lot of isolation but a lot of men do too - that is probably why men go into the industry! the more serious point is, so long as at least 50% of the market for tech products is female than women will have a more crucial role for parlaying the technology for that market. if you are saying women can't get into the industry surely it must come from there.

audience
we did some research saying more women are on social networks. and companies that code for what women want, do better.

audience
another point is that solutions are developed by men and not women.

cate
so a solution is to have more women involved in coding and development?

sophie
milo came into this panel with the concept of positive discrimination burning in his ears.
we all think this is a business for women - we are here - there is a reason for it - there are a hell of a lot of jobs here - maybe its about getting the message out.
if you are working in tech marketing particularly in social media, you're in tech.

mike butcher
women in PR in tech are sometimes not considered in tech which is really weird because they are in tech!

audience
i started a company in 99 (a woman) and one of the reasons i'm in this industry is because it's so liberal and i have 2 kids. a lot of it is about perception of women of whether or not this is of interest to them.
it's more about what we perceive. maybe we are stopping ourselves!

sophie
it's women begin seen to do it as well.
audience
i'd like to ask advice - i have 2 girls at 9 years old. it is already obvious that the environment around our daughter isn't really well suited for girls to get into maths - already, in primary school, girls are being put in an environment where they aren't being asked to succeed in this way

nacera
did you raise her differently?

audience
we were very conscious not to just give her dolls and give her cars, toys for boys etc

leisa
i think there is this appearance thing - girls are primed to look good at such a young age, when i was young i was wearing track suits and covered in mud but today girls wear bras at 5
media - getting positive role models out there - this is part of it.

hermoine way, techfluff TV
technology is still seen as uncool for girls - we need to be showing them what can be achieved through studying tech

cate
yes, and save the sexy stuff for later.

audience
i don't think we need to beat ourselves as to why the genre in our industry is unbalanced. haute couture is only women and gay men. if you want to get your boyfriend into Vogue you are done. many sectors have these unbalances. when i started a company in tech everyone thought, 'who is this bitch?'

audience
we wouldn't be having this discussion in India today - women are in technology there.

cate
what do you think you are doing in india that we are not doing?

audience
education and perceptions of what is good for women.

audience
we are seeing a lot of women recruited into startups in round two. we are seeing at an early stage it is a more testosterone-driven team and then females get involved later.

bindi from microsoft
listening to this discussion, it's really about us as females in tech and what we do. i can think about an initiative we host where we bring girls, 250 per quarter into these sessions called girls in tech. i really think it's up to us as females to get involved in mentoring younger generations.

audience
we are startups! we don't listen to rules, we write the rules! why don't we just get on with it?

sophie
that is a great thing about technology. it's new, it's fresh.

zuzanna
and yet 40% of people who responded to my survey said that they would not employ a woman because they would be concerned about her going off on maternity leave. maybe these people don't attend conferences.

james garner CW.com
we have done loads of research - there are less women in tech!

cate
we didn't come up with any solutions but it was silly of me to think we could agree a solution when we can't agree there is a problem! thanks everyone.

Did Surallan fire the worst of a bad bunch?

Being big, no huge, TV fans here at Re:medial we felt it only fitting to provide a little analysis of the debacle of last night's UK Apprentice. For those unfamiliar, this show is brilliant television and much, much better than its US ancestor. Sir Alan Sugar and his counterparts Nick and Margaret are some of the best TV personalities to erupt on the small screen.

But last night I think Surallan made an error which he seems to make a lot - he blamed the project leader for the whole debacle. The freckly girl with kinky hair was a decent enough team leader, and she (Paula) was responsible for a nicely turned out product, however she pointed the 'costings' blame squarely on Ben and Yasmina. How on earth it's a good idea to put two people in charge of simple math, I've no idea. And this turned out to be her fatal error; Ben got off the hook by not really being responsible for making the ridiculous £700 per kilo versus £26 per kilo error (plus he DID pull his socks up during the sales bit and adds a welcome bit of humour to the sordid lot) and Yasmina was weaselly enough in the boardroom to point all the blame at her team leader even though she was clearly the one who made the critical math error.

Surallan often blames the project leader for big mistakes. In this case, I think he should have overlooked the damage to his pride that Paula's team had made a loss, and fired Yasmina for being generally sneaky and error-prone. But the team leader simply shifted responsibility, and didn't take on any proper delegation to ensure the roles would work out, and for that reason he ultimately felt she needed to go.

Paula didn't even see through Yasmina's BS and went on to say she should win it in her taxi ride. This I don't get.

In general, show producers really scraped the bottom of the barrel for candidates this season and alas we wind up with such atrocious outcomes as making a loss on a task as simple as soap making (with a bunch of experts on hand to tell you how to do it and completely free ingredients available such as 3 overflowing buckets [er, 300 grams] of seaweed).

God help Surallan this season..... he's got his work cut out for him.

Credit crunch aftermath: longer queues

We're really lucky here at Hatch PR to still have jobs despite the recession. I feel grateful for that every single day. The credit crunch hasn't impacted me or my close colleagues in any extremely nasty ways unlike a lot of people who are really struggling right now. But now that things seem to have bottomed out (or, one can at least hope) I'm starting to notice the little annoying after effects that make day-to-day life run a lot less smoothly.

And that can be summed up in two words: longer queues.

As companies have dealt with the recession by cost-cutting, that sadly means cutting staff. In my opinion, a lot of enterprises have done the most vulgar thing imaginable and used the recession as an excuse to make lay-offs they didn't want to risk the negative PR for before. I hate that. But the bottom line is that not only are people losing their jobs but organisations aren't running very smoothly without adequate manpower.

I went to the Birmingham airport the other day, on a random Thursday morning (not a holiday weekend or anything) and the queues at every turn were absolutely massive. That's also true of New Street station, which we travelled through, too. We nearly missed our flight even though we got there with what should have been enough time. My local Cafe Nero had queues out the door yesterday at 10:30 am. We got sandwiches at Subway and there was one poor guy working along during the lunch rush and looking extremely stressed over the thought of another 6 inch cheese & veg.

In short, everything feels like it's bursting at the seams as organisations think they can get away with having just one sole employee behind the counter.

Note to airports, train stations and High Street shops: expecting one employee to be able to deal with trade during busy times is nothing short of stupid. You need to retain customers, not turn them away, at this most crucial of times.

Breaking News: All G20 Meetings Scheduled Via Doodle, Says Doodle

All G20 Meetings Scheduled Via Doodle, Says Doodle

--World leaders highly recommend online scheduling tool, discussing it over morning coffee--

1 April, 2009 – London and Zurich – Doodle, the popular Web 2.0 scheduling tool, is proud to announce all G20 meetings amongst the leaders of the largest 20 economies on the planet have been scheduled via Doodle. During today's morning coffee at Downing Street, world leaders chatted about how much time they saved by scheduling their meetings via Doodle.

President Barack Obama, known for taking things into his own hands, is reputed to have started the first Doodle meeting request. First, he needed to select a date for the conference itself. He offered several dates, including today 1st April and 8th April, creating the Doodle meeting request and emailing it to other world leaders such as Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel. The covering email to the UK Prime Minister is reported to have read 'Hey, Gordy, can you check the time you're free and fire this back to me? Thanks, Barack.'

Aides close to President Obama also indicated his covering email ended with a post script saying, "PS: If the conference is held on April 1st, Michelle and I aren't really going to attend, we'll just send 3D virtual avatars of ourselves. Ha! Gotcha!"

Michael Näf, founder and CEO of Doodle, said, "If Doodle is good enough for the world's leaders, it's good enough for you! Get Doodling."


- Ends -

Letter to Facebook: have you lost your mind?

Dear Facebook,

I used to be a big fan, but my love affair is waning very fast. I sheepishly admit that in the early days, I may have even called you 'FaceHook' on occasion. But now, things have changed fast, and I worry you've lost your mind. And here's why:

1. You aren't Twitter. Some say you are trying to Tweet-ify your homepage and jump on the microblogging bandwagon. Note: that's what your newsfeed, which you've unceremoniously killed, used to achieve. This new mishmash of updates/wall conversations/posts is ugly and disorganised. I long for the old newsfeed.

2. There is already a Twitter, and it's doing just fine thanks, given its growth statistics.

3. You used to be an experience site where one could store little pieces of life and show them around to ones' friends. Now, I can't even find pictures, groups, others' profiles or the other little things that made my experience better. Now, you just seem to be a weird cross between an RSS reader, microblogging and mess.

4. "New Facebook" amplifies your worst feature - the one your biggest fans hate - applications that do nonsense things like vampire fighting that annoy and take up space on one's computer.

And here's why I fear losing your mind could result in your death:

1. I no longer recommend that people in my mom & dad's generation will 'get you' and benefit from joining. My mom would have been just about OK on the old Facebook, but the new one? She won't be able to make heads or tails of it. She shops online, so I believe her computer skills are average or above average for the 60-70 years segment. Wasn't that your biggest growth segment previously? You've screwed that one up royally.

2. I will no longer put my pictures on your site and chose Flikr from now on. Once people stop posting their photo albums, you're not even living up to your name "Facebook" anymore.

3. Your users revolted about the new T&C's to the point where you had to retract them. You planted the seed of doubt in users' minds that you are about to infringe on their rights and privacy (bringing me to my next point....)

4. You have apparently been emailing people's non-member friends that they recommend they join. (This happened to me, despite me a. not saying that was OK with me and b. not even wanting the recommendation passed on.) If you carry on infringing on people's online rights, your users will desert you faster than Friendster.

Please, Mark Zuckerberg, I implore you to rethink this strategy. It ain't working, and 94% of your userbase agrees, from the recent vote. If you wanted to create a new service, you should have kept the happy Facebook bubble, named the new thing something else and given users the choice to upgrade, have both, or stay happily where they were.

Sincerely,
Emily

Twitter pitches: erm, what about confidentiality?

Guardian tech editor Charles Arthur has made headlines in the past week by stating that he will no longer use email, and instead, only accept PR pitches via Twitter. This isn't the first PR stunt Charles has staged along these lines; I went to a Full Run talk he gave years ago where he claimed he never reads press releases, so Twitter is just another quicker way of getting news, in Charles' eyes.

I agree with Charles in that pitching via Twitter is a wonderful thing, when the information in question is already public and/or has already gone out over the wire. It keeps things concise, to the point, brief. It forces us to keep things simple. But it has a major flaw. What about pitching information that is not yet a part of the public record?

There are some inherent problems with only using Twitter to pitch PR stories:

1. Most good stories worth printing, and therefore worth journalists knowing about, are pitched in advance, when it's still confidential
2. In order to use Twitter for a private conversation you need to be able to DM someone
3. Twitter is absolutely dreadful when it comes to updating DM so even though I have 600 followers, I can only DM about 125 of them. I have chalked this up to a Twitter bug; if anyone knows it is caused by something else, let me know. In a nutshell, Twitter is a game changer but it's not without its (major) service faults
4. If the person doesn't follow you back, and I know Charles doesn't follow most PR people back, the DM process is hopeless, leaving your only option a public Tweet
5. No PR person in his or her right mind would ever pitch an exclusive over a public Tweet. Otherwise it would be called an 'inclusive'

Charles, as well as many other journalists, want to do things quicker, better, easier. But even they can't change the fact that a large part of the PR process is hinged upon client confidentiality and restricted by NDA agreements and this will never change. Most good stories are restricted in terms of timing due to good reason (for instance, because the new service you're pitching hasn't yet gone live). Exclusives are a critical part of the pitching process and if you really only accept Tweets, it pretty much means you don't want exclusives.

Lots of journalists want to change this balance of power, but frankly, companies will always control their own newsflow and 'timing is everything.' If journalists still want the holy grail of exclusives, I don't see how you can ignore email altogether, unless you want PRs to start showing up on your doorstep to tell you about a story in person and hand you a printout or go back to the 70s and start faxing you text. They can Tweet it first: "On my way to Guardian towers!" Giving you just enough time to alert your security staff.

I'm not a stick in the mud, and I'm usually fine with embracing new ways of doing things, but I respect NDAs and confidentiality like a priest respects the Pope, because otherwise, I'd be grossly infringing upon the trust of my clients, not to mention the legal implications of our contracts.

Comments very welcome on this post.