Well, Raise My Awareness...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a charity, in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of awareness raising.

I'd like to apologise to Jane Austin for that, there really was no good reason for me to savage that quote...

Well, there was...

Because anything to sugar coat the next bit of information is good.

If you work for, in or around a charity in any territory you want to raise awareness, and any journalist working in any territory couldn't care less.

Seriously, there are small patches of mildew on a face cloth, in a bathroom on the outskirts of Baku, that hold more interest for the average journalist involved in daily news media. Each and every one of them could programme a radio station or fill a newspaper with the stories from charities that want to raise awareness... and no one would care.

The big problem is this is what a charity is for; to raise awareness of their chosen cause. It's built into the organisational blue print of 'Charity'.

So how do you get round this?

You supply content, you supply comment of current issues, you supply heart breaking stories, you supply NEWS.

The fact that you're trying to 'raise awareness' is the last thing you should say.

THE NEW JDOUBLER MEDIA ENGAGEMENT SEMINAR IS BOOKING NOW 3RD DECEMBER '13 IN LEICESTER JUST OFF THE M1

Prepare For Christmas.

2 things would fill me with dread when working for the BBC. One of them was Children In Need (I've never been a fan of forced jollity and news readers dancing).

The other was Christmas.

OK I now realise that I sound like an anti-fun stereotype. I do like Christmas, I've even warmed to tinsel and I want you to know that my home will become a grotto of delight for my 2 children. However, Christmas as a journalist is hell.

NOTHING.... EVER.... HAPPENS...

So why am I telling you this?

In the daily news media there are journalists, managers and producers up and down the land who are starting to prepare for the fallow period between Christmas and the New Year; they may only have it in their mind as a job that needs doing at this stage... and it's a job they all hate.

As a canny PR organisation, or as a PR working within an organisation, this is the time to think of how you can help those poor journalists with content.

Good content.

If you're thinking of things to do try along these lines (they are always the ones that get a look in at Christmas); Volunteering, working across the festive period, food waste, alternative presents, children, the armed forces / emergency services, animals and the awful things that happen to them and money. All of these will be trotted out every year without fail.

If you can dip your toe into any of these, provide case studies, no too many commercial mentions and access for a reporter to get it all pre recorded before Christmas week, start dangling it in front of them now. There will be journalists all over the UK who'll be so proud they have something to mention at the Christmas planning meeting in a months time.

Imagine their bright little face on that (nowhere near) Christmas morning when they open that big press release to find it's what every journalist asks Santa for... an easy life.

It's the gift that keeps giving.

THE NEW JDOUBLER MEDIA ENGAGEMENT SEMINAR IS BOOKING NOW 3RD DECEMBER '13 IN LEICESTER JUST OFF THE M1

The Big Stories

Every media outlet has its own list of 'big stories'; the core of the work they do. For daily news media some of the big stories are constantly running, for others it's something they come back to on a regular basis.

Today 5/11/13 Immigration has returned.

The BBC Website is reporting on a UCL study into the benefit of immigration. The report suggests that immigrants since 1999 were 45% less likely to claim benefits than the 'indigenous' population.

And now the cat is amongst the foreign pigeons.

The difficulty with the 'big stories' is that there are default narratives connected to them. The right wing press will shout that it's only since 1999, and immigrants from outside the European Economic Area are a drain to the system because they tend to have larger families. The left wing press hail the report as blindingly obvious and something that they have been saying for years.

So we're no further on. The argument continues and immigration remains one of the 'big stories'.

How can a PR professional, Marketing department, or business leader use the 'big stories'?

Identify them. Look at the websites of your chosen outlet, whether it's a trade story, or a wider news theme, and see how it's reported.

Add context or confirmation. It allows the story to change within their defaults and gives another bite of a story that lots of the journalists will be bored of.

Offer content that could break one default, but lets them build it into another. For example, one of the comments on the BBC website story suggests that undereducated indigenous young people are being passed over in favour of older more qualified migrants; this feeds the 'big story' on education and the slipping of standards. It gives the journalist the ability to change the story but remain on message.

When the sector 'big stories' appear you should be ready.

Surveying the figures.

This isn't the first time that I've blogged about 'polls'... they make me a little bit cross; polls rarely produce robust figures that can be made into robust news stories.

The latest poll has been carried out by the BBC.

I'm not concerned by the reported findings, I'm not concerned by the political comment, I am concerned by the use of the poll to create news.

Why am I so troubled?

FIRSTLY - 1032 people were polled; this equates to 0.0016% of the UK population, or 0.002% of the adult population. If I showed you 0.002% of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel you'd think that Michaelangelo had an unhealthy nipple obsession (dependant on which 0.002% you looked at)

SECONDLY - ICM conducted the poll over the telephone. People who respond to telephone polls are the sort of people who respond to telephone polls. The background drivers for their reasons to talk on the phone with a polling organisation are many and varied; they want to be heard, no one has ever phoned them, they have nothing better to do, they are bored of writing angry letters to the Daily Mail... many reasons.

THIRDLY - The results are used to fuel a wider narrative; in this case they flip the default (which all journalists love doing) and give a better view of cuts to public services than previously reported.

FINALLY - I have too much time on my hands.

When polls are reported in a news context it makes me sad, because I know the pressures journalists and producers are under, I know what it's like to have to report the same basic story day after day after day... for years on end, I know what it's like sitting in a production meeting trying to work out how the hell you're going to make the story interesting again.

Polls are not the answer... and 100% of people surveyed agree with me*.

*survey sample of 1.

The Perfect Press Release

The perfect press release does not exist. No, literally, it's a press release that doesn't exist.

Coming up on the 15th of March I'm holding a seminar to look at the ways that small business and sole traders can take advantage of the media in the same ways that the well-connected big businesses can and my starting point is the press release.

I hate press releases.

During the time that I was a professional broadcaster, producer and journalist I can't remember a time when I covered a story from an unsolicited press release, from an unknown contact.

It never happened.

So why didn't they work? In an average day I would get at least 200 emails, two thirds of which were press releases; of those press releases three quarters would be from people that I'd dealt with before, and of those the majority would be from media companies whose job it was to place interviews for their clients. So I had to make a decision between trusted sources and unknown quantities... I'd go for the trusted sources.

You have to put this into the context of how a radio newsroom works and the sort of staffing involved. I presented for a station that had 100,000 listeners. I presented and produced the programme with the second highest figures but the longest hours of the station. I was the most important voice on the station after 9. So how many people were working on this behemoth? Yes, that's right, there were 2 of us and as much help as we could buy in...

2 of us to producing and presenting 15 hours of live radio a week. Both working 8 hour days. 3 of those hours were on air 1 hour would be preparing before the show and 1 hour was eating lunch. That gives you a grand total of 3 hours production time a day to find around 35 stories to broadcast each week.

I don't want to give the impression that I didn't love the job, it was great, it's just that the perception of what presenters producers and journalists have to do is very different from the outside. I used to meet people who would assume that I worked 3 hours a day and had everything done for me by a team of minions. Not in the provinces.

So back to the press release issue. If I only had 3 hours to deal with things the fastest way would be to go to the sources that I knew would deliver value and, the chances are, I wouldn't even read past the headline of the unsolicited press release from someone new.

I have to say that this revelation of modus operandi is no shock to anyone who's worked in any news room outside the nationals or network. You have to do what gets the job done.

So where does that leave you as a small business or a sole trader with a wonderful story? It leaves you with one option that a lot of the big boys forget, it leaves you with an option that so few people attempt because it fills them with fear. It may be that you are able to pin competitors to the floor in business but as soon as you step outside the comfort zone it all changes.

What do you do??

You make a phone call....

Scary eh?


For more on "Journalist Whispering" Join the seminar.

£55 per person including VAT (£44 excluding)
09.30 - 12.30, Thursday the 15th of March.
Gloucestershire Enterprise Training Centre, Twigworth Court Business Centre, Twigworth. GL2 9PG

Email for more detail via info@jdoubler.co.uk

Expert Help for Small Business

There are some things that small businesses need to do... and they do them, and there are some things that small businesses need to do but they don't. Often it's because they fall outside the field of experience, some times it's just the feeling that, well, it's all a bit difficult and scary.

PR is one of these things. There are hundreds of businesses that are watching competitors grow because they have been in the paper, they were on the radio or there was that bit about [insert business your type here] and they interviewed [insert name of your competitor here] on the 6 o'clock news. How did they get there?

There are ways that any business, big or small can get into the conventional media.

1) Know how journalists think.
Journalism is a miss-understood profession. The things that drive journalists are far simpler than the search for exclusives and exposes.

2) Know how Journalists work.
Disappointingly they don't all rush into news rooms with their trilby's on their heads shouting 'Hold the front page'.

3) Know how to take advantage of Journalists.
No, not like that...

4) Know where the sweet spot is.

This is something that I've realised over my 16 years of being in news rooms. There is a sweet spot for journalists and it all revolves around the idea of Effort going into a story, the Quality of the final story and the overall Feedback once that story has been published. Journalists may say that they are in it to tell the truth, but one of thier drivers is the praise that they get... like anyone else really.

So the best story for everyone is the one that takes all their effort becomes a great quality story that gets lots of praise; that is DIFFICULT, so let's put that to one side.

For the Journalist the PERFECT story is one that is great quality that gets praise and awards but takes little or no effort. I've witnessed a few of those in my time and it's brilliant for an organisation to achieve that. It is, however almost impossible to engineer that without the journalist pulling the plug with a sense of 'too good to be true... so it isn't'.

The everyday REALITY of journalistic life is that you really make an effort on a story, that turns out not to be as good as you thought, but you put it out anyway and no one really cares. Most of the TV, Radio, and News Paper content is stuff that was really good in the news meeting and then it became average when it came to publishing/broadcasting.

The sweet spot for most businesses sits at the end of this chart. It's the story that is HOPED FOR. It's the story that takes just enough effort for the journalist to feel happy that they have done a days work, it's good enough to be above average so the effort feels even better and it receives more positive feed back than expected (from audience, management & peers). It's a story that every business, with a little preparation can produce.

5) Get your timing right.
If what you want to say is said when they don't want to listen what's the point?

6) It's the way you tell 'em.
Frank Carson was right...

To help with all of this I'm holding a 3 hour seminar on the 15th of March at The Gloucestershire Enterprise Training Centre in Twigworth. There are a limited number of places available and we'll go through how you get great PR without writing a single press release. To book a place click here and email me, John Rockley. I'll send you more information and a booking form.

Take Advantage Of The Media (or PR without Press Releases for Small Business.)

Thursday 15th of March 2012. 9.30 to 12.30

£55 per person including VAT

Gloucestershire Enterprise Training Centre
Twigworth Court Business Centre,
Tewkesbury Road,
Twigworth,
Gloucestershire.
GL2 9PG

Brownian Motion

You finally create PR gold. You know that everyone in the world will listen to your message and your client will want to give you a great big bonus payment and possibly bear your children. You know that this is a career changer.

And then this happens...

Neil Marshall was set to see his film "The Descent" open in cinemas on the 8th of July, it was his second feature as Director and it was going to be a far bigger opening than his first cult classic "Dog Soldiers". The film is the story of cavers who get trapped underground and then... well... things happen.

I interviewed Neil Marshall after the DVD release of 'The Descent' and he spoke eloquently about the difficulties of the publicity campaign, but it no doubt shook him, and certainly took its toll on the box-office.

Why am I telling you this?

It seems that PR professionals are often guilty of having 'project blinkers' on. They get to the end of a project with a release date and a final outcome and they don't look up to see what else is happening.

In the case of the publicity for 'The Descent' there was no way of knowing that a horror film would be a bad idea on July the 8th 2005 (let alone one that was about being trapped underground) and the publicity was rapidly changed. If there was more time between event and release then I suspect the release date would have been shifted.

This example is famous and extreme, there are hundreds of messages sent out every hour that will just not work, the story is old, the agenda has moved on, something more important has rendered the message meaningless, it has suddenly become distasteful due to a change in popular opinion. If you get caught on the cusp of these changes then your perfectly pitched story idea is just going to be ignored or in certain cases serve as a warning to others.

I can't tell you how many press releases have been sent to me over the years and I've just thought 'How did this happen?' it'll be from a smaller agency that's building it's client base, they'll be pushing to get the PR out, possibly a junior member of the team has pressed the send button after a cursory glance over from a team leader and it will be out there. The hope is that they stop at me, the journalist, but they often build thier own head of steam in public. Take Quantas for example...

Quantas the Australian Airline have managed to screw their own PR with their own Bad News doing the job of many journalists in one fell swoop. The story in a nut-shell is that they break off union talks about staff conditions and contracts and then proceed to ask about Luxury on the twitter feed for a competition #Quantasluxury.

Did anyone think that may be a bad idea?? Anyone?? Seriously?? No-one?? To appear to care little for their staff and then to ask about Luxury?? The project couldn't have been stopped?? This is a great example of project blinkers coming together with The Brownian Motion of News.

Watch how news works, and watch how stories bounce off each other, how the interplay of public opinion and attitudes towards life circle round each other. Consume the media that your target consumes, become them and anticipate what the reaction will be and when to just pull the plug and rest an idea... then you'll never have to resort to PR damage limitation.

Christmas is coming, the Journo is getting stressed

2 things would fill me with dread when working for the BBC. One of them was Children In Need... if the money used to make the programme was donated then they wouldn't need to make it... possibly.

The other was Christmas.

OK I now realise that I sound like an anti-fun stereotype. I do like Christmas, I've even warmed to tinsel and I want you to know that my home will become a grotto of delight for my 2 children. However, Christmas as a journalist is hell.

NOTHING.... EVER.... HAPPENS...

This is one of the reasons that the murder and subsequent discovery of Jo Yeates' body was such big news. It was the Christmas period and there was nothing else happening. It's how news works, if that story had come to light during the August Riots we wouldn't have been told of each twist and turn. It would have made the news but it wouldn't have been THE news.

So why am I telling you this?

There are journalists, managers and producers up and down the land who are starting preparation for the fallow period between Christmas and the New Year; and they are really hating that job.

As a canny PR organisation, or as a PR working within an organisation, this is the time to think of how you can help those poor journalists with content. Good content. If you're thinking of things to do try along these lines (they are always the ones that get a look in at Christmas); Volunteering, working across the festive period, food waste, alternative presents, children, the armed forces / emergency services, animals and the awful things that happen to them and money. All of these will be trotted out every year without fail.

If you can dip your toe into any of these, provide case studies, no too commercial mentions and access for a reporter to get it all pre recorded before Christmas week, start pitching it now. There will be a stressed journo somewhere who will be delighted to get something in place before the end of November.

Imagine their bright little face on that (nowhere near) Christmas morning when they open that big press release to find it's what every journalist asks Santa for... an easy life.

It's the gift that keeps giving.

Real News

Last week the news broke that the BBC World Service Journalist killed in Afghanistan in July was shot by American forces. Ahmed Omed Khpulwak was killed in a case of mistaken identity.

Journalists around the world will have had a moment, however brief, of reflection. The news is real and too often that's forgotten.

I still remember the day that the news became real for me; I was working in Stoke-On-Trent presenting the early show and marketing the radio station. My friend Heather was reading the Breakfast news bulletin and was leading on the top local story of a young man who had been killed in a terrible car crash the previous night. It was just a news story and we thought nothing of it.

The morning continued as it always did, she read the news I made tea and tried to get more people listening; we had a laugh and then got on with stuff.

When the programme manager came in we knew that there was something a little wrong... She was an ebullient woman who would bound in, call me her 'prank monkey' and then we'd catch up and she'd start work. Today was different. It wasn't that she was glum, more preoccupied... She went into her office closed the door and made a phone call.

I'm nosey, you have to be if you're a journalist, so I tried to catch a sense of what was going on. I didn't listen at the door, but you can tell a lot from the tone of voice of someone in another room. She was sombre. All of a sudden she came out of her office and gathered the morning team around her.

"***** isn't coming in today" she said, "his nephew was killed in that car crash last night"

There was silence for half a beat and then Heather who had just been reading another story, who had just been presenting the news, who had been talking about a dead teenager as if he were a lost sock, burst into tears.

That day the news became real for me.

Last week the news became a little more real for any journalist with any sense of empathy. Ahmed Omed Khpulwak wasn't well known, but he was a journalist. Now he's news.

Authentic

This morning Stephen Fry and Ian McMillan were having a conversation about an authentic voice on Stephen Frys splendid radio 4 programme 'Frys English Delight'.




Authenticity is difficult because it means different things to different observers. In this case Ian McMillan is talking about voice about position about context. His voice would be seen as authentic commentating on the North/South divide or on the quality of Poetry inspired by the industrial revolution. He would not sound like an authentic voice on Native American Rights or the Struggle of Feminism in the 1970's.

Authenticity can also be used when an organisation has to build a narrative. I've been doing some training for The Meningitis Trust, a wonderful organisation that supports people who have had their lives altered by Meningitis; they have authenticity when it comes to narrative because they have access Case Studies. There is nothing more authentic than hearing a mother speak of the day that her 3 year old lost her legs to septicaemia. This is an authentic narrative it as context and it has truth.

One of the major problems a government has is presenting difficult financial information because although they sound well informed and inteligent they have difficulty sounding 'authentic'. Governments aren't filled with ordinary people but they have to make decisions that affect the lives of ordinary people. George Osborne will one day be the 18th Baronet Osborne he has an estimated personal fortune of £4 Million (not including what legacy he may receive) and was christened Gideon. George Osborne is the man that tells us there isn't any money for the things we used to have (like universal health care, roads or benefits) and he will never sound authentic doing it.

This is a combination of factors; firstly he doesn't know what it's like to worry about money and secondly he doesn't sound like he knows what it's like to worry about money.

Most of the rest of the country worry about money but he doesn't.

It's strange how times have changed, because one of the most authentic chancellors of the last 20 years was Ken Clarke a cabinet colleague of Gideon's George's

So what can an organisation do when there is a story to tell? Think about who the messenger is; do they sound authentic delivering that message and are they the best person to deliver it?

We're Going On A Weasel Hunt.

Let's play the great Weasel Word Game!

See how many phrases in the next few paragraphs that you should never use in an interview situation… Go on, print it out and see if you can find them all.

A growing body of evidence has shown that the vast majority of people have come to see that media training is of value. People say that up to 80% of what they learn can be used in practise. Now, critics claim that this isn't the case, but clearly it stands to reason that 4 out of 5 people would agree that they are wrong.

It has been mentioned that more people are using training as a way to improve their working lives and nothing will give the results that training can. Even though popular wisdom comes down on the side of more training as often as possible, common sense has it that just an increase of 50% can benefit businesses; experience shows us this.

It stands to reason that you will be better off after changing the way that you work. By replacing existing personnel with more flexible working practices then you're able to streamline the whole process, whilst reducing ill feeling by nearly three quarters.

In the past, mistakes were made, and those mistakes are being studied. We are aware that there has been a lot of research in this area. It was noted, however, that almost 30 of the people who responded were satisfied by the action taken. Studies show that number is more than enough people to be officially recognised.

So there you have it. How many weasel words did you spot?*

If your answers, press releases, posts or tweets contain any of those phrases without then going into specifics then you need to have a re-write. If you inadvertently rely on these phrases in an interview be prepared to back them up, any journalist worth their salt loves to go weasel hunting.

*29... probably.

Fireman Sam

Over the last few months I have been watching a lot of Fireman Sam. It's not out of choice it's because my son who's 2 and a half watches little else. He loves Fireman Sam with a love that appears to out-weigh the love he has for his parents. The problem is that as you sit with your child engaging with them and talking about what's happening on the television you start to question things.

Fireman Sam (if you're not familiar) is set in the coastal town of Pontypandy somewhere in south Wales. The town itself has around 150 houses (that's a ball park figure culled from many images of fire engines driving through). It has a supermarket, a fish and chip shop, and a fire station... and yet we only ever see 15 residents, and a sheep. 15. That's all. It seems that the Welsh Assembly haven't had their attention drawn to the town where 4 of the 15 residents are in the Fire Department, or, that the other 145 households are too scared to venture out of their houses due to the antics of the 11 pyromaniac residents.

Every week there is another fire emergency started (generally) by Norman Price, a ginger haired psychopath who endangers life and limb and eventually gets a stern talking to. He deserves to be placed into a youth offender's institution. These emergencies happen invariably on the watch of Sam Jones, the titular Fireman Sam. Sam has a firm chin, a nice line in payoff gags and a simple way of dealing with life; if in doubt point a hose at it.

The recent debacle of "The Great Fire Of Pontypandy" is a great example of the worry I have for the residents of the town. Sam and his cohorts allowed a forest fire to threaten the town, causing a mass evacuation. The only people to turn up at the quay side to be taken safely out to sea were the usual 15 people (apart from Tom Thomas the random Australian helicopter pilot). Where were the others? Were they locked in their houses by the blood thirsty ringleaders left to burn in some sort of pre teen massacre?

So what is the point of all of this? Am I really that bored that I have to analyse children's programmes? No, doing something like this can really help us when we come up against the media. You may well have written a splendid press release that tells a story of light and love, possibly involving a benign fire safety obsessed welsh man and when you walk into the interview, you realise that they have really been thinking about it far too much.

How do you counter a journalist who has over thought it? Be honest, be clear and be kind. The popping of the over blown intellectual bubble that they have produced could shock both of you.

Just remember, sometimes the answer is... it's just a cartoon.

Soundbite

"A day like today is not a day for soundbites, we can leave those at home," Tony Blair 1998

Sorry Tony, but every day is a day for soundbites. Every day! The importance of the soundbite can't be underrated even if talking about them just seems a bit 1997, a bit Labour Landslide. It's a shame really because as soon as the word soundbite is mentioned people turn off or stop reading jolly helpful blogs...

Still here? Good.

Think of the soundbite this way; during the day we are exposed to far more headlines than the articles that we read, there's the web, printed news papers, scrolling bars on the news channels all of them are tiny bits of news poetry distilling the most meaning from the least number of words. If the headline is right then the eye is drawn into what the story is. It is, however, really very difficult to find the best soundbite for a press release that's being blanket sent to all of the print journos in the world. So what do you do? Do you jiggle with it for every publication and present them with a nice niche line? No. No you don't. You know full well that your average PR person has hundreds of other things that they have to do during the day, so why don't you take advantage of the cross pollination that news organisations perpetuate? Everybody steals off each other. If a press release is versioned for one mass market outlet, The Daily Mail for example, then you have a short hand for what the other outlets can version for themselves. Hit 'em with something that they can copy and paste into their house styles. If you want to know more have a look at this splendid site all about the world of Churnalism.

http://mediastandardstrust.org/blog/go-explore-churnalism/

They are decrying the lack of what they see as "proper journalism". From your commercial point of view take advantage of the situation and get the publicity.

So what about the broadcast media? There your aim should be the "news clip".

If you are interviewed on a local radio Breakfast Show then you'd be lucky to get a few thousand listeners. The radio station may say that they have 100,000 listeners but that's across the week for the whole station. A good breakfast show could only peak at 6000 listeners at any given time. If you're not on at the peak you may get 2000 if you're unlucky. So what can you do about it? You give good quote, you get out the big guns and have a lovely soundbite that can be run across the news bulletins for the whole day. If there are 20,000 listeners for the day then you may get all of them. Now that's worth your while aiming for the news clip isn't it?

What makes a good news clip? If it's a slow day virtually anything, from "local business man says cheese is lovely" to "local business man says cheese is horrible" but you need to aim a bit higher than that. You can't always hope for the slow news day. You want a new figure, to go against the perceived wisdom, to challenge a truth, to have some very good news, or some very bad news, and you need to do all of that in about 15 seconds, with the ability to write some bits round it. Simple eh? That's why Tony Blair had a team of writers all looking for what the soundbite was going to be.

Just being aware of some of the ways organisations get their headlines and how important a soundbite can be could be the little bit of extra focus that you need.