Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Pioneer, trailblazer…and some less favourable comments have been made since I started working remotely from Valencia over a year ago. It works for me and H&K but I knew when I requested to work remotely to my boss and the CEO that it wasn’t all going to be a walk in the park or in my case, on the beach! It is sometimes tough and you come against some serious issues. For example, once my laptop decided to just die on me and where once before I could get an onsite IT engineer to my desk. Suddenly being 800 miles away in Valencia presented its own problem. Thankfully that is the most serious incident in a year and with the support of a great company, and of course the marvels of modern technology, it can be accomplished to the benefit of all parties concerned. 

Here are my personal tips on remote working:

1.    Technology – Ensure you have a good ISP and connection. Wifi is great but I am sure most remote workers are cable connected to ensure a faster more reliable connection.  When I first got to Spain I had to upgrade the speed of our connection at home to cope with the stress of the work I needed to do.

2.    Routine – Be strict about doing the normal daily routine.  That includes getting up, showered, dressed and to you your work area fresh and ready for the day head.  It puts you in the right frame of mind and ensures you are awake, alert and ready to work. I know I couldn’t have a serious conference call with my boss sat in pyjamas… or worse!

3.    Environment – Ensure the area where you work at home is fit for purpose. Don’t sit on the sofa or in front of the TV. It just doesn’t work and your productivity will suffer!  I tend to listen to music during the day which I find works for me.

4.    Working hours – Just because you are working from home doesn’t mean your BlackBerry and/or phone has to be permanently attached to your hand.  That said, you do need to be contactable by the office during working hours, it’s just a balance.  Also, don’t be afraid to stop working when the office has finished for the evening too! 

5.    Don’t be a stranger – Return to the office as often as you can with agreement of your company. Working remotely can be great but you need to ensure that you are still a familiar face in the office. Nothing beats a face-to-face meeting and it is also good to connect to your colleagues this. You have to remember being out of sight should not mean out of mind…and as H&K in London has a fabulous bar, it’s always a great place to catch up with everyone.

Right, I am off to get a shower and dressed… it’s been a long day here chatting on twitter and Facebook! (Ha-ha – only joking!)

Client feedback is showing that one of the most popular sessions at our Demystifying Digital symposium was the rapid fire Pecha Kucha presentations. Often presented under the O’Reilly Media Ignite branding (as we did at Stream) it is a five minute way to get interesting content across in an energetic manner. We will get them all posted here for you, starting with Mikael Jungner, the Managing Director of the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE, and his look at corporations, pop culture, control and the meaning of Social Media. Nautiskella.

Business communication is suffering from a bad case of obesity.

To a degree we are victims of history.  Post-conquest, Norman French was the language of government and the law for centuries.  Plenty of time to develop our taste for Gallic gourmet language and its mouth-watering Latinate filling.

But why, six hundred years later, are we still in thrall to a three-syllable sandwich?  Are we so embarrassed by a healthy diet of good old Anglo Saxon?  It seems we are.  We’re a nation of Hyacinth Bouquets using ‘nice’ polite words because they are so much better than those ‘oiky’ small ones.

In my research for a series of writing workshops I found, time and again, the advice to use Anglo Saxon words in place of the Latin wherever possible.  It makes for more direct, personal, clearer writing, which has greater impact.  So why don’t we do it more often?

Local councils have often been criticised for using jargon.  But you read any typical company e-mail and you’ll see things ‘commencing’ instead of starting (“Eastenders commences at 8.00pm; don’t be late!”) And don’t even get me started on maximising, optimising, accommodating, requirements. (Is ‘needs’ so weak?).

Now I’m not demonising Latinate words, just pleading for a balanced diet.  We all need to think more about who we are writing to, what we want to say and why.  Serving a four course dinner to someone who only has time for a sandwich is a recipe for indigestion.

If you want to lose some verbal flab, why not take a look at the Plain English campaign: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/

Do you remember when you were at school and you would come in on a Monday after a haircut dreading the inevitable pisstaking from your classmates? I’ve been reminded of that this week. Anyone would think I had come into work having sprouted horns (not entirely unreasonable; remind me to tell you the story of when I sold my soul to Satan in exchange for good exam results one day), but no, all it is is that I now have short hair. For those of you who don’t know me, I now look like this:

Me, with a friend, yesterday

Whereas before I looked more like this:

Yahoo Serious. Younger readers will have no idea who this is. FIE ON YOU, YOUNGER READERS.

Anyway, enough of this crap. On with the web-related crap instead.

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A few weeks ago I posted about Jamie Oliver’s presentation at TED and his about to be launched ‘food revolution’ in the US. If you didn’t get chance to see it take a look here – a very powerful campaign platform.

Well Jamie’s US series aired for the first time last Sunday night on prime time and, if you believe what you read in the press (hmmm) then he’s not getting a great welcome. The article here in the Huff Post seems to be about as balanced as I’ve seen (admitedly though not exhaustive analysis).

I don’t know if Jamie’s getting a hard/unfair time or not. And I can guess our US cousins aren’t crazy about a ‘Brit’ coming into their backyard and perhaps offering some home truths. But the stats on obesity speak for themselves people! – and c’mon, pizza and chocolate milk being served for breakfast in schools??!

Fellow PR blogger, Hill & Knowlton alumnus and generally all-round good bloke (of dubious football supportership) Adam Vincenzini is embarking on a mission over on his Comms Corner blog. Should you choose to accept it, he’d welcome your contribution to the development of a crowd-sourced etiquette guide for geolocation…things (yes, I’m a Super Mayor who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In social media gurudom this is known as #irony).

In principle I like the idea, particularly following on from this week’s “UK PR agencies don’t get foursquare” slapping, which saw the Twitterverse explode with PR people signing up and unlooking the Newbie badge.

Here’s another case of #irony though, because my understanding of social media is that it’s meant to be, well, social-like. That means you do it #if_you_want_to. Not because you read it on some marketing blog.

So, #only_if_you_want_to you should follow @HK_London on Twitter, and if you’re #inthebuilding and on Foursquare or Gowalla then check in and also read our Tips. But seriously, only do it if you want to.

(Disclaimer: The author claims a right to start soap-boxing about geolocation applications, the slightly laughable phenomenon of using #hashtags at random in the vain hope the world will follow your lead and start talking about #I_last_had_chocolate_milk_when, and the invention of pretend words like “geosocial” because he has unlocked the Repressed Inner Geek Badge on Foursquare by becoming Mayor of his place of employment. The author hopes his fearless leader is suitably impressed by the dedication)

Why are the polls narrowing? Well, we can rule out one thing. They are not narrowing because Labour is suddenly enjoying a surge in support. They are rattling around between a base of around 30 and a glass ceiling at 33 per cent of the vote.

But Tory support looks to be ebbing away faster than Stephen Byer’s career prospects. Rarely reaching to the mid-forties even when things were going for the Tories, the forty barrier seems re-erected and mid to high thirties is becoming the norm.

What has gone wrong for David Cameron when the Government still looks accident prone, economic pain endures and the image of politics continues to sink into a gutter that seems to have no bottom?

Cameron’s leadership started with him successfully winning something his three closest predecessors never had – permission to be heard.

We can debate how far he actually has reformed the Conservative Party, but riding with huskies, talking about the politics of happiness and complaining about chocolate being sold at check-outs did seem to make him look different enough to give him permission to speak and the public listened. Now they seem to have their fingers in their ears.

Yes, there has long been the suspicion that Cameron has failed to ’seal the deal’ with voters. His vision of what a Tory Britain would look like is still not very clear. But is that enough to becalm the powerful forces of ‘time for change’ which seemed to have been unleashed?

I don’t think Cameron’s stutter has been caused by any dramatic startegic move by Labour – nor indeed any major blunder by him.

It’s the failings of his class which cause the problem – and that is nothing to do with where he went to school or how posh he is.

The fall of the political class, from Cameron to Dennis Skinner, William Hague to Harriet Harman has removed his ‘permission to be heard’ as it has removed it from almost every frontbench mouthpiece on all sides. Why, even the blessèd Vince Cable seems to be doubted these days.

The expenses scandal has turned into a dripping roast of sleaze, which drip, drip, drip erodes the credibility of all politicians.

There is little sign that the public are warming to Gordon Brown. But there are signs they have come to terms with him and many have decided they can put up with him. That is why allegations about his violent temper made no impression. Gaffes and blunders don’t seem to matter. Public expectations of politicians are not high.

The PM himself has grasped this. In a recent speech he said that with him, for good or ill, what you see is what you get. He is not pretending to be perfect, or better than anyone else any more – just effective.

In a sense, if the public think politicians live in a sty, you might as well ‘oink’.

Cameron seems to be denting his own authenticity by trying to do what ‘forces of change’ are supposed to – look different from the politics they are trying to replace.

But when MPs have fiddled their expenses, go on foreign holidays to exotic locations paid for by foreign governments and flog themselves for five grand a day to the highest bidder, it is difficult to sound credible when a politician claims to be different.

He compounds this when Cameron tries to make sleaze a party political differentiator, as Blair did in 1997. In the current climate it just confirms he is a politician like the rest of them.

The background noise from the decline of politics has drowned out Cameron’s ‘permission to be heard’. The public don’t buy moral compasses any more. Playing the virgin in the brothel doesn’t work anymore.

Maybe just saying you can run the brothel better is the way to win an election when the public seems to want everyone to lose.

No double digit leads any more. Just two fingers from a public returning the contempt to politicians, which those politicians showed to the public in every expense claim they signed.

It might have worked in ‘97. But in today’s Britain, the only change people believe in, comes from a fiver, NOT a politician.

The most intriguing business story of the past week as far as I’m concerned has been the announcement of the ‘Atlantic Gateway’ – a plan for historic city rivals Manchester and Liverpool to link up and create a regional zone to stimulate new jobs and investment. The zone, to replicate the ‘Thames Gateway’ would bequeath Liverpool with a deep-water port and include a £10 billion redevelopment of the Mersey waterfront as well as the BBC’s Media City development in Salford. Low-carbon infrastructure projects will be prioritised in the zone that takes in the places in between such as Warrington and Chester.

What was particularly interesting about this story is that anyone with more than a rudimentary knowledge of history, football and contemporary culture knows that the two cities aren’t exactly the most natural of bedfellows. Liverpool FC and Manchester United enjoy the fiercest rivalry in the Premiership. This rivalry stretches to music too; Liverpool has produced the Beatles whereas Manchester has given birth to the Stone Roses as well as the seminal Oasis. Liverpool has Cream, Manchester enjoyed the celebrated Hacienda.

However, the Atlantic Gateway initiative is long-overdue and must be applauded for a number of reasons.  Firstly, the UK as a country has been dominated by the south-east for far too long. Judging by the media’s bias towards London you’d often think that cities like Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle and Leeds were insignificant backwaters instead of the prosperous, attractive and multi-cultural locations that they’ve become over the past 15-20 years. These cities, like many others in the UK, often offer a better quality of life than the capital plus excellent opportunities for career-advancement. If the British economy is to recover its former vigour it certainly has to look outside the capital with its inherent imbalance towards the financial sector.

Secondly, the regeneration of British provincial cities during the 1990s has been crucial in moving the UK’s economy to a more sustainable and knowledge-based model. Both Liverpool and Manchester have strong universities with tens of thousands of students. Many graduates from both cities will undoubtedly contribute to the Atlantic Gateway if and when it comes to fruition. What could be a better way to attract foreign investors than to demonstrate the strength of an eco-system of local knowledge and expertise in infrastructure projects, business and regeneration.

Thirdly, in a world undergoing considerable globalisation, cities like Liverpool and Manchester face challenges from cities far beyond the UK and even the EU. Effectively, they’re fighting for investment from China and the far-east, Canada and the Gulf. Scaling up and joining forces makes a lot of sense.

Finally, this all poses the question as to whether the two cities could join sporting forces with one football club – ‘Atlantic United’? A strikeforce of Rooney and Torres would send a shiver down the spine of any top European club side manager.

Somehow I doubt this will ever happen – and we wouldn’t want it to either…

You! Yes, you! Welcome, once again (presuming that you’ve been here before – if you’ve stumbled across this whilst searching for pornography then I apologise in advance for the lack of nudity but offer you a sincere first-timers’ welcome) to Web Curios.

God, that was a desperately poor intro. Sorry. What can I say? It’s Friday afternoon, and I’ve spent the entire week feeling a bit hungover under the weather. Not to mention the impact on my mood that this has had. It’s hard sometimes being a webmong (as you will well know). Nonetheless, I am putting my personal feelings of exhaustion and ennui to one side to bring you another selection of stuff I found online this week that one or two of you could conceivably find moderately interesting.

(It should be apparent by now that I am not a salesman).

We begin, this week, with a video – If you do nothing else here this week, watch this. It’s 5 minutes long, and is by far and away the best description I have yet seen of how virality works. Ignore the scaremongering undertones, and just think about how the meme below spreads. Oh, and for the non-geeks among you, a quick explanation of what 4chan is – you know all the stuff that features on those lists of the ‘biggest viral sensations EVER’? Stuff like RickRolling, the Numa Numa kid, Chocolate Rain and YouTube Porn Day? They all start at 4chan (WARNING – that link is direct to 4chan; the landing page is safe but I take no responsibility for what you might find beyond that (clue: porn and swearing)). It’s…just mental, really. Anyway, the video….

Oh Nestle… – Other ’social media gurus/mavens/experts/(insert meaningless title of your choice)’ will do this at length over the next few hours / days, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the tone of Nestle’s reponses to comments on their Facebook page probably didn’t do them any favours… Of course, as my esteemed colleague Dan Leach pointed out, it could all be very clever work by Greenpeace…

EDIT: @Malbonster just pointed me in this direction – Nestle’s share price over the past 5 days. Spot where today is on that graph…

Twitter Announces @anywhere – Ok, so what this is (massively simplified) is Twitter’s next step in terms of integrating itself with other, 3rd party websites. The TechCrunch piece linked to in the title is a decent overview (and this is a shorter one)- what it doesn’t seemingly touch on, though, is the potential implications for the development of a ‘universal’ online identity. Could this be a first step into the creation of a one login / username culture, integrated across all platforms? The BBC’s announcement yesterday of greater integration with both Facebook and Twitter would suggest it could be…Oh, and at the same time Twitter also declared that it wanted to be ‘A Force For Good’. Isn’t that nice? And…er…haven’t we heard that before somewhere?

I WANT THIS TABLE IN OUR OFFICES. IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT THAT SOMEONE IMPORTANT IS READING THIS, CAN YOU MAKE IT HAPPEN PLEASE? THANKS.

Can I have the whisky too, please? Kthxbai.

The Times is set to introduce its Paywall in the next few weeks – Will be fascinating to see what happens (clue: it won’t be an increase in traffic) and how other big media players respond.

What a magazine on the iPad might look like - Women’s digital magazine Viv put together this shiny demo, showcasing how their content might work on an iPad. My first thoughts? Content for people who really enjoyed Sin City but who don’t actually like reading very much.

An iPhone app that lets you create virtual balloon animals! – If this doesn’t make you smile just a little bit then you are dead to me. Seriously.

A Few Nice PR / Marketing Case Studies

• Skittles for Valentine’s Day – Part of the ongoing trend in giving people real-life (cool) stuff in exchange for engagement with brands on social media (see also the Marmarati)
• Burger King’s Whopper Face – Your face, on a burger, in Brazil. Genius.
• Heineken Italy – Been everywhere this week, and rightly so)
• (NB – 2 of the above came courtesy of @webkitten, for which thanks are due.)

A Wonderful Collection of Social Media Infographics – useful, courtesy of Michael Schulz whose personal website is also very nicely designed.

CANNONBALL KITTY

I can haz projectile

And, to finish (I know, I know, tldr), this week’s video selection:

1)Losers – ‘Flush’ feat Riz MC & Envy: Great track, great video and Envy is set to be huge this year (obviously if she isn’t then I never said that)

2) I went to see this lot on Tuesday. Great gig, though I did actually cause someone to leave the venue towards the end. In the unlikely event that you ever read this: sorry, Annoying Pair of Girls, but you were really getting on my tits:

3) The Internet of Things: how the planet is developing a central nervous system. 5 minutes of frankly insane futurology here from IBM:

4) Finally, a music video of near-Gaga levels of insanity. WHY THE SELLOTAPE???

Its Friday afternoon and it’s been a long week. But I’m really looking forward to tonights BBC Sport Relief programme.

If you’ve been watching the Eddie Izzard documentary about his incredible feat of running 43 marathons in 51 days you can’t help but feel inspired. What he did was simply incredible.

Similarly the £1million charity bike ride led by David Walliams was both inspiring and raised a huge amount of money for the kind of causes that, when you hear more about them, offers you a serious reality check.

And of course you’ve got the classic comedy moments. This is one of my favourites (I actually know someone called Chinese Alan…..)

But what I love most is the fact that its sport that brings all this together. I’m a huge sports fan, both as a participant and as a spectator. Its influence and role in modern day society is massively underestimated. Its ability to help positively impact our physical and mental wellbeing, to bring groups of people together in a common cause, and to offer a respite from anything else that might be happening in the world, should not be taken for granted. 

As someone once said, “Sport is a religion, but without the religion….”

Have a good weekend everybody.