Business
Children’s TV shouldn’t be for idiots
Dec 23rd
My daughter Esme (two and a half) loves it when me and Karen read her Beatrix Potter stories. She has a full boxed set that her Granda bought her. She loves turning the pages and she knows some of the stories so well that she even attempts to recite them from memory as she’s too young to be able to read them herself. She knows books are precious and even wants to help put them back on the shelf after we’ve read them.
Imagine my delight to read in the Guardian that there was to be an ‘All new Peter Rabbit for the 21st century’. Brilliant, I thought, a children’s TV show that actually has really strong stories. Then I read the quotes from Chorion chairman Lord Alli and I have to confess that the air turned blue as I’ve rarely read such dumb comments.
What Lord Alli and Chorion mean by ‘updating’ is apparently dumbing them down to suit the lowest common denominator. All they are doing is taking Beatrice Potter’s fantastic characters such as Peter Rabbit and Tom Kitten and creating new and ‘appropriate’ storylines. According to Alli this means: “Peter Rabbit’s father being caught by the farmer and being baked into a pie is not going to be our first episode. We’ll be skipping over some chapters.”
So there you have it, Chorion is planning to make an anaemic and pointless show that will have no resonance whatsoever with children or parents who love Beatrix Potter’s beautiful tales and characters.
Ghost writing blogs: right or wrong?
Dec 11th
On Monday I attended Dell’s excellent B2B Social Media Huddle. One of the hottest topics of debate, both at the event and on Twitter (#dellb2b), was the issue of ghost writing blogs. What I found most interesting was that not only were there legitimate differing opinions, but also there was perhaps even more misunderstanding and misinformation.
Some people thought that the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 outlawed ghost blogs. They don’t. They outlaw fake blogs, which are a totally different issue. Fake blogs are where a brand or agency create a blog that that appears to be independent or from a customer, when in fact it is being written by them.
A ghost blog is where a blog is transparently from the company or organisation, but where the posts have been written by someone other than the person identified as the author. Neville Hobson sparked the debate by stating that ghost writing a blog post was inherently wrong. Some in the audience thought it was OK and likened it to a speech being written for a politician and that people thought was was acceptable and therefore a blog post could also be ghosted. Neville’s argument (I paraphrase) was that a blog post was personal and therefore couldn’t be ghosted.
I’m a realist, not an absolutist. The politician’s speech analogy is a good one, because it actually helps to prove that ghosting can be acceptable. In reality the substance of most political speeches are actually written by the politicians. A good politician will brief a trusted staffer to write the actual words of the speech, but the ideas, tone of voice, emotion and meaning are all the politician’s very own. Step one is the politician, step two is the writer, step three is the politician polishing the writer’s work.
You can quite legitimately create a blog post in exactly the same way. The reality in many companies and organisations is that there are lots of people who only half want to blog. They want to do it, but won’t/don’t because of barriers such as a lack of time, insecurity about their writing ability, worries they can’t think of enough topics etc. That’s where the in-house public relations team or external PR consultancy can help. They can work with an author to create a post that the by-lined author is happy with. That might mean dictating the copy and the PR person typing it and polishing the prose. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of the post, but can mean turning it into plain English by reducing jargon. Usually, as long as the blog makes it clear that the author had assistance then that’s totally acceptable.
There isn’t just one right way to write a blog. There are hundreds of different approaches that all work, there are also hundreds that don’t. That’s why appropriately experienced public relations people can help an employer or clients to get it right. Unfortunately you too often get the problem of PR people who don’t have the appropriate experience or expertise and then provide bad advice.
Matt Bamford-Bowes, head of social media at MediaCom Beyond Advertising tweeted “it isn’t surprising that companies pay PR teams to maintain blogs. It gives aligned tone of voice and point of view.” I disagree that the role of public relations should be to ensure an “aligned tone of voice and point of view” as that sounds far too much to me like turning it in to corporate or brand speak and the type of thing that marketing people who are used to controlling the message would want to do. If that was the role of the ghostwriter then I’d be opposed to it.
Vikki Chowney was faster off the mark than me and has already blogged about it. In the comments Benjamin Ellis makes a sensible reference to the divide between social media natives and traditional PR/corporate folks:
“It will be a 50:50 split in the big wide world :- social media natives will say “bad bad bad” traditional PR/corporate folks will say “fair game”.
Lots of mature businesses are stuck with “can’t blog won’t blog” senior execs – the temptation for PR folks to ghost blog for them is almost irresistible. That doesn’t make it right of course. The biggest down fall is when the CEO meets a customer and the customer starts to talk to them about what they said in the blog post – big #fail / embarrassment, or if a customer posts a comment and someone else responds as the CEO #biggerfail.”
His example ideally illustrates how PR people shouldn’t crudely simply ghost write a blog, but there are so many other ways we can help clients to blog which legitimately do involve helping to write posts.
Citizen journalism in action, or not?
Jun 25th
Today’s Guardian diary leads with a piece about me Twittering an indiscrete conversation I overheard on the train. It appeared to be an executive from French energy company Total talking about how Total could beat the unions at the Lindsey oil refinery.
In one respect it’s a great example of citizen journalists. Companies have to behave more responsibly because there are so many extra ‘citizen journalists’ watching what they do and ready to expose malpractice.
In reality the reason two national newspaper journalists called me for more information and the Guardian ran it as a diary story is probably because of the number of ministers, MPs, journalists and other PR people who follow me. The papers and unions would still have found out about this without social media. I’d have simply have phoned them to tip them off (waiting until I was somewhere more discrete!)
It would always have been a stupid thing to do to have such a conversation in a public environment like a train carriage (particularly in one that was almost empty and quiet). What social media means is that number of potential witnesses are far more and it is far easier for them to spread the word.
I’ve worked on issues management for client companies who are in the midst of industrial disputes, plant closures and redundancies. As a lifelong Labour Party and trade union member (Unite) I’ve found this isn’t as difficult as you would suspect and it is usually never at conflict with my beliefs. Closures and redundancies are often a necessary evil, but it’s up to the company doing it to decide if they want to do it in a moral and responsible way or an immoral and deceitful way. When I’m providing public relations consultancy it’s to help them do it right and to help ensure that corporate social responsibility is about the way they behave and not simply a publicity stunt.
Jaw jaw is always better than war war. A lesson that the management at Total would do well to learn. Total appears to have managed its relationship with employees, the unions and the media disastrously. It comes across as an arrogant, foreign owned company attacking and undermining the rights of British workers. I suspect Total isn’t as bad as it appears to be, but it’s doing a terrible job of explaining its case and indiscrete, (and one would therefore assume badly trained) executives like the two I heard don’t do anything to help its case.
