Hill+Knowlton Strategies

There is a fascinating documentary series running on the BBC at the moment called the Tube. It gives quite a unique perspective on what it’s like to work as part of one of the world’s largest transport networks, dealing with headaches such as grumpy commuters and technical failures.

Monday night’s episode focused on fare evaders. Featuring a mix of sheepish and aggressive tube users and the London Underground’s very own Cagney and Lacey, the programme gave an interesting insight into the tools the London Underground has at its disposal to crack down on fare evaders.

From a tech point of view, it was surprising to see that the NFC-powered Oyster Card, which has been dubbed by some as Big Brother’s evil invention, isn’t necessarily the answer to Cagney and Lacey’s prayers after all.  Because of data protection issues, London Underground can’t simply pin point where a person is or link a card with a person’s name and address details in real-time with CCTV.

Instead, when spotting suspicious or fraudulent activity linked to a particular Oyster Card, Cagney and Lacey need to trawl through hours of grainy CCTV footage and try to spot the culprit. They then need to just wait (and wait…) for that offending Oyster to be used again and arrange a stake-out to catch the person in the act.

I somehow would have thought that in this day and age the process would be more advanced, perhaps featuring an action-film type lock-down with alarm bells and flashing lights when that suspicious looking bloke with the red head phones passes through the gates at East Finchley.

It seems that the London Underground still has some way to go before this type of scenario becomes a reality. Even though fare evaders cost the company around £4 million a year, they probably have enough on their plate with the Olympics right around the corner.

Still, it was a fascinating documentary! You can view it on the BBC iPlayer here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01cyt4l/The_Tube_Episode_2/

Launched as a closed beta in March 2010, Pinterest is a lighthearted niche platform getting serious amounts of mainstream attention. It even made it to the Channel 4 News tonight in a well rounded report by Benjamin Cohen who compared it to one of my favourite places in London, the amazing John Sloan Museum. So via popular demand, I’m posting the briefing email I wrote for our clients on the top three things that make this growing platform important for big brands.

UPDATE: Pinterest is addressing use of copyrighted material and other issues. They’ve updated their Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Acceptable Use Policy. Considering that over 80 percent of content is currently re-pinned rather than original content, I think there is a huge opportunity for brands to offer legally pinnable, aesthetically pleasing content to their users.

Pinterest self describes as a Virtual Pinboard and their wonderfully simple interface is as intuitive as tacking postcards on a bulletin board or pasting images in a scrapbook. One of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2011, data from comScore shows Pinterest recently hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history and had a 55 percent gain in unique visitors between November and December 2011. A hot site indeed.

1. A niche network for a heartland audience
Especially for all brands courting the 18-45 female consumer demographic, the reports that 97% of users on Pinterest are women are music to a social marketers’ ears. Fashion, food, and family milestones like weddings lend themselves to visual image Boards made easy by Pinterest. But don’t discount this site as an addition to your social strategy just because your audience skews male or your brand is B2B. I think we’ll see use of the platform from all sectors. Check out a macho Board from GE titled Badass Machines or our own Duncan Gallagher’s Race and Rally Car collection.

2. ‘Frictionless Creativity’
We all want to be creative, but not everyone can be a famous artist or a Martha Stewart. The stats around Pinterest rocket ship growth are interesting, but we can learn more studying the reasons why people love it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ahead of Mobile World Congress next week, Jay Andersen from H+K Strategies’ analyst team examines the explosive growth of smartphones. Here are his thoughts.

Current Situation

Over the past five years, smartphones have moved from the realm of executives and early technology adopters towards mainstream adoption. According to Canalys, smartphone shipments surpassed personal computers for the first time in 2011. Vendors shipped nearly 490 million smartphones for the full year, driven by lower-priced devices and increased interest in web browsing and mobile apps. Gartner reported that worldwide smartphone shipments reached 149 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, a strong 47% increase year-over-year.

For consumers, making telephone calls is often secondary to being able to play games, watch and create movies, and connect with friends and families over social networks. Business workers use smartphones, both company-issued and their own personal devices, to access enterprise-class applications without needing to carry a laptop or be tied down to their desktop.

“In the space of a few years, smartphones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to become a truly mass market proposition.” – Chris Jones, Canalys

An interesting constituency to next week’s GSMA’s Mobile World Congress event will be government regulators, including many from emerging markets where policy-makers are looking to wireless technology to help in the promotion of economic growth, education, and healthcare. Mobile technologies have played a key role in enabling developing countries to ‘leap frog’ many of the aging-infrastructure issues that developed economies have grappled with.

Some of the most talked-about technologies at the show will include:

• Smartphone Operating Systems: The battle between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS will continue unabated, and adoption of Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is expected to grow, driven largely by the Microsoft-Nokia partnership.
• Mobile Applications: With the widespread adoption of smartphones, applications will continue to be an important topic at MWC, especially for operators looking to drive data usage, and enterprise software vendors looking to differentiate themselves.
• Mobile Commerce: Vendors are working on a set of wireless communication standards to allow smartphones to be used for mobile commerce. This technology appeals to a wide swath of industries including phone makers, carriers, financial services, government, healthcare, education, and retail.
• Advanced Computer Power: Vendors, including Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia are expected to unveil customer wins for their advanced, multicore mobile processors that will power the next generation of phones and services.
• Low-End Smartphone: Phone manufacturers are partnering with semiconductors vendors to develop affordable smartphones. These Android-based devices feature some of the capabilities previously only included in high-end smartphones of previous generations and are particularly appealing to emerging markets.

Outlook

Analysts expect smartphone explosive growth to continue. Forrester predicts that over one billion smartphones will be in use by 2016. Interestingly, Forrester expects to see a strong percentage of smartphones in the hands of consumers with only 35% of the smartphones expected to be issued by businesses to employees. Spending on smartphones is also expected to explode with overall mobile spending reaching $1.3 trillion, and mobile applications sales hitting over $55 billion. Currently about a fifth of the world’s mobile subscribers are currently using their smartphones to browse the Internet; Forrester expects global penetration of mobile Internet users will exceed that of PC-based Internet users in 2016.

With the millions of new smartphone users, enterprises will need to carefully manage how their employees use their devices at work. IT departments will need to invest in mobile security and wireless infrastructure to insure that employees can safely and efficiently use their smartphones.  In addition to companies needing to invest in infrastructure, wireless operators will need to build out their networks to handle network congestion from growing data traffic.

“Mobile is the new face of engagement. Businesses should stop thinking about it as a small Web site on a tiny computer, and start thinking about mobile as being deeply embedded systems of engagement. That turns out to have huge implications.” – Ted Schadler, Forrester Research

For more analyst insights, check out the HK Briefs’ page.

- Ching-Han Wan

Last week saw the conclusion to the third successful series of ‘Social Media Week’ in London which has gone from strength to strength since its inauguration in February, 2009 in the US. Chinwag played host to one of the last seminars of the week, The Firewall: The Social Business Revolution supported by Nokia on February 17^th at the Design Council in Covent Garden. The session moved at a swift pace as we heard from: Adrian Cockle, Head of Online, WWF UK; Euan Semple, Leading Consultant on Social Business; Anirban Saha, Global Head of Social Innovation and Intelligence, Nokia; Simon Morris, Director of EMEA Marketing, Adobe, Chaired by Will McInnes Managing Director, Nixon McInnes.

The central discussion point was how social businesses should look at the way people interact with digital experiences and how they can apply any insight gained to a variety of business processes.

In order to be a ‘social business’ social tools are required to help build your business and can help a huge organisation feel like a startup by bringing people together for example:

• The WWF uses an Intranet called Arena to help support peer to peer communication. Key features:
  • Provides survey applications to gauge opinions before and after their internal lunchtime debates.
  • Showcases thumbnail galleries, journey sharing tools, discussion forums
  • Includes a Google map highlighting 180 of their projects around the world so that staff can see the breadth of their work.

• Adobe Vibe is an internal made micoblog which allows users to post daily updates, tweets and issues with no restrictions. Key features:
  • Create groups and access the service on a mobile device.
  • Created to help employees become evangelists for the business and to reflect on daily learnings as well as to share relevant findings.
  • Encourages teams to give themselves credit for their successes by featuring their best customers.
  • Every team member can share their status via Vibe, without having to send weekly e-mail reports.

• Anirban Saha from Nokia introduced their recently launched ‘social visualizer’ multi- screen installation called Agora. Key benefits:
  • He noted that as Nokia has more than 100,000 employees and cover over 150 markets, they needed to encourage employees to take an interest in monitoring what people are saying about them as a business
  • Tells them how customers use their products and how the business is responding and innovating accordingly.
  • helps employees to be immersed in the customer experience

As the panel discussion analysed wider industry and business challenges it was highlighted that the world of work has become so professionalised that we’ve forgotten how to communicate. As such there needs to be a push towards encouraging social media literacy and training to help professionals become a customer service agent and a spokesperson for their business. Ultimately, in order to take part in the social business revolution, businesses everywhere must look to provide individuals with the power to connect, innovate, enable, empower and listen!

Today, the IHG Newham team launched the opening of IHG’s newest hospitality training Academy at the soon to be open Holiday Inn London – Stratford City. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg attended in support of the announcement that IHG is creating nearly 3,000 new jobs over the next three years, including over 1,100 new jobs this year.

The pictures include Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, IHG Chief Executive Richard Solomons and students from the IHG Academy course overlooking the Olympic Park in what will be the gym at the soon to be open Holiday Inn London – Stratford City.

Despite a heritage in communication, the PR industry has one major problem – it doesn’t quite know how to communicate what it is that we do. As painfully explained in a recent Forbes article by Haydn Shaughnessy, the industry is confused – we lack external clarity.

Compound that problem with a pretty worrying perception issue and we’re left in a slightly disturbing grey area. Our friends think we live an Ab Fab lifestyle with champagne breakfasts and boozy lunches, our parents think we do some type of marketing and advertising mash-up and our own industry bodies can only suggest jargon heavy, archaic definitions such as:

- Public relations is the management function of researching, communicating and collaborating with publics to build mutually beneficial relationships
- Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their publics
- Public relations is the strategic process of engagement between organisations and publics to achieve mutual understanding and realise goals

Perhaps most worryingly, a lot of journalists (and now bloggers), our counterparts on the other side of the communications fence, still don’t seem to understand our complete role in the process.

PR is as diverse as it is simple. But it is not simply media relations. Long before the social media revolution, PR has been engaged in conversations with influencer groups beyond journalists.

We share characteristics with advertising and marketing. We take a message from a brand (our client) and help send it to the target audience (publics). There are many different channels (TV, print, online, social, mobile etc.) and an equal number of vehicles (face-to-face, telephone, conference, email etc.). The rise of digital has added new vehicles and channels, but at its purest root, the objective is the same – we want our message to be heard by the right people. This dialogue, argument or conversation can be with journalists, analysts, industry bodies, government or companies, the key is that we communicate a message in media that is earned rather than paid for.

So what’s this message and where does it come from? Depending on the client, sector and geography, the message can be anything from a new product launch to a financial trading update. Distilling the information we wish to convey, we carefully shape a message and arrange a suitable vehicle – the end result has the power to drive sales, change opinion or create a movement.

In the instance of traditional media, when we call press, we are communicating something that is very important to us and that has taken a lot of time to create – we are not mobile monkeys with journalists on speed-dial. The odd chimp may slip through the net, but the majority of PRs take their jobs seriously. After all, we are the voice of our client – all of their shareholders, employees, history and values rolled into one.

We are very much the integral cog in the brand wheel. We work with our clients to create the idea and then help bring it to life. When not creating, we are maintaining conversation and protecting reputation. Our work is two-way. We not only transmit information; we receive and respond to it.

As the business world becomes more social and consumers and customers expect more dialogue from brands, the importance of a relevant PR strategy is underlined. Understanding and reaching the publics in the right place at the right time is essential. The brands that understand the value of PR are the ones that will succeed in the business 2.0 world.

It’s like Bill Gates said, “If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations”.

The British American Business’s http://www.babinc.org/ recent event, ‘Fixing Britain-the Business of Reshaping our Nation in 2012’, featured keynote speaker Lord Digby Jones, who over the course of the morning took some time to share the key points from his new book Fixing Britain  http://www.digbylordjones.com/fixing-britain.html

 After listening to months of news focusing on nothing but the doom and gloom of our struggling economy, it was refreshing to hear someone confidently speak about and celebrate the good qualities of UK businesses. In Digby Jones’s view London is one of the most attractive international financial centres, especially considering its political, financial and legal stability. We are also the 6th biggest manufacturing economy and home to one of the world’s most productive car plants – in Sunderland, managed by Nissan. The second biggest pharmaceutical company in the world, GSK, is also proudly British. For every Airbus which circumnavigates the globe, half of its parts including the Rolls Royce engine are made in….you guessed it, Britain!

Confidence tricks never go out of fashion and Digby Jones showed how displaying confidence can be a truly valuable commodity, which certainly helps to sell a new book or bargain for Britain at the trading table. He also answered a few questions on the state of the European economy relative to Asia’s and highlighted that Britain needs to better foster Asian trading relationships in order to remain competitive and harness our strengths. Warren Buffett once claimed, “when the tide goes out it shows the wrecks at the bottom of the sea” and in Britain’s case we are still fixing the social, political and corporate ‘wrecks’ which the recession has left us with.

Digby’s new book gives us some good reasons to celebrate what we are good at in Britain. In order to reshape our nation we can start by supporting British businesses, develop stronger trading relationships and use events like the Olympics and the Queen’s Jubilee to inject some much needs confidence into the economy.

I AM BORED OF FOOTBALL. Or at the very least the in-no-way-criminal, potentially racist / definitely racist, stroppy foreigner elements of it. Does anyone remember when football used to be a fun distraction from the woes of the world rather than a major constituent part of said woes? No, me neither, but there must have been a time. Personally I blame social media.  Could everyone stop talking about the DAMN FOOTBALL PLEASE?

Read the rest of this entry »

The future language of the Internet isn’t Mandarin, it’s video.

Video is the new currency of the web. We create it, watch it and share it. The internet is transforming from textual to visual. Of the 1.8 billion internet users, almost half post graphical content, photo or video.

In a blog post last month, YouTube revealed some of its own astonishing figures:

• Every second, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube
• A decade’s worth of video is uploaded every day
• Every 10 days, a century of video is uploaded
• There are four billion views a day on YouTube

Meeting the demand, savvy media outlets are riding the trend and adapting distribution channels to feed this online video appetite. In the UK, The Daily Telegraph already has an established video channel, while in the US The New York Times recently started its own daily businesscast. Other US titles such as The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post are following suit and announcing plans to join the visual revolution.

As The New York Times explained “The Internet and a fleet of devices like the iPad have made it possible for, say, The Wall Street Journal to compete with CNBC and CNN for viewers’ time”.

So what does this mean for us PRs? Well for the smart ones, it’s pretty significant. When working with our clients, we should champion visual content and consider how a story could transform into moving pictures. The days of independent broadcast pitches are over, a true pitch should translate to every medium – print, online and video.

Understanding how media is consumed is key to the success of any brand. If we continue to churn out text releases, are we best serving our clients’ needs? Is this really the most effective way of sharing our message?

The next time you pick up the phone to a journalist to sell your story, stop and ask yourself – is there a more imaginative way?