Hill+Knowlton Strategies

One day I’m going to write a book, and on the dedication page I’m going to give credit to one Mr Matt Muir for what I’ve decided to call Muir’s Two Laws of the Internet.

However, I lack motivation generally and books are things that take time to write – a commodity of which I’m sadly short. So, in the interim, I’ve asked Mr Muir if I may share his two laws here with you, now. He said yes. So here they are:

Law 1:

Have good content.

Law 2:

Don’t be a ****.

That’s it. If you follow these two Laws to the letter (or asterisk), you can’t go too far wrong with your online communication. In fact, you’ll probably get through life pretty well also.

However, in order to make this post more comprehensive (it doesn’t need to be, but some will want it), here are some variations to the Laws.

Law 1:

good = interesting, informative, useful, funny, shocking, heart-wrenching, Old Spice.

Law 2:

**** = ****, ****, ****, faceless corporation, spam bot, instigator of pointless flamewars.

Seriously, this stuff should be on t-shirts.

We’re yet to find an example of internet communication / marketing, either good or bad, that achieves positive outcomes while violateing violating (eds due to Muir hawk-like vision) these two laws, but happy to be proved wrong.

Unfortunately, now we’ve published these there’s very little point to our jobs. Or those of most of Soho come to think of it.

At least Muir still has his Web Curios to keep him going…

For anyone who was hanging out on the interwebs (or email) yesterday, you probably encountered at least one link to this story on TechCrunch:

One of the 33 photos used to "resign" according to a TechCrunch story yesterday

 Ah. But did she really? Read the rest of this entry »

Regular readers of our Media and Crisis blog know I sound like a stuck record when it comes to the issue of how to best use social media in a crisis context. Along the lines of: “if you don’t already do it, now’s not the time to start”.

However like all the best rules there are exceptions, and as a case in point here’s a link to the Deepwater Horizon Response Twitter feed (@Oil_Spill_2010). Read the rest of this entry »

Oddly enough, most of my best lessons about working in communication haven’t come from people who are communication professionals.

Case in point – my grandmother’s advice: “If somebody doesn’t understand what you’re telling them, don’t tell them louder. Tell them different.”

Had Grandma been more entrepreneurial she’d have printed that on t-shirts and sold them at marketing conferences.

Freakonomics brought quirky social economics into the mainstream and made, if not household names, then at least front-window-at-Waterstones names out of Stephen D. Levett and Stephen J. Dubner.

Tim Harcourt, Chief Economist at Austrade, continued the theme of accessible economic thinking with his creation of The Airport Economist.

This idea of easy economics also finds its way into the mainstream media, and this is the bit I like most because really clever people like Stephanie Flanders (UK) and Ross Gittins (Australia) go to the trouble of explaining major economic decisions that affect my daily life, in simple language that I use…in my daily life.

It’s almost like they’ve realised they hold a special kind of knowledge the rest of us don’t necessarily have, and they’re trying to share it with us. The thing is…that makes me more interested in what they’ve got to say, so I make more of an effort to keep up with what they’re saying, whether or not I’m immediately interested in the content.

To me, that’s exemplary communication, and it’s what every corporate spokesperson should be striving to achieve evey time they step up for a media interview or public speaking opportunity. It’s also what my Grandma does. I hope she doesn’t open an agency.

(PS – for all of our UK readers – make sure you call your mothers and grandmothers on Sunday)

Today I’m loving a post on the Harvard Business Review blog titled Having Ideas Versus Having a Vision, by Roberto Verganti. Coming from a small, mature business market like Australia, I’d been well-indoctrinated to the idea that the British economy was bigger, faster, stronger. But like the old expression says: “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”, and boy, has this economy fallen (I’d like to point out that the correlation between my getting here and the world falling apart is entirely coincidental).

From an outsider’s perspective, I really believe part of the challenge facing the British recovery post-recession is a lack of demonstrable passion in the business community. There’s plenty of passion about things like bankers’ bonuses, quantitative easing and football players. But expert commentator after expert commentator has agreed for months now that after the initial shock, the global financial crisis became a crisis of confidence. Who’s job is it to inspire confidence? The Leader’s.

A crisis of confidence is, to a natural leader, an opportunity like no other. If you have a vision, and the courage to point to it and say “that’s where I’m going”, you’ll be one of very few. And while all of your competitors are sitting around waiting for the results of the next general election, their customers and staff will take a peek over your side of the fence. And a lot will jump over. Maybe they’ll jump to a new brand. Maybe they’ll jump to a new market. Maybe they’ll all bugger-off to Asia; so long Europe, it’s been a…time.

So someone needs to get angry. Someone needs to get up off the mat and say “enough”, and grab the cliche by the horns and give British businesses a damn good seeing-to. Someone needs to throw an elbow. Because that’s the kind of someone that others follow.

This is my first post on Hill & Knowlton London’s community blog, so it’s a bit sad that I’m going to use it for a crisis management post when I already have a whole other blog already dedicated to that.

But, this is far cooler than proper crisis management because it involves an iPhone and the app I’m loving today, which is the Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip of the Day (check it out in the iTunes App Store). Yes, I am completely geeking it up right now.

Last Tuesday’s tip (yes, I’m a bit slow with actually using all the apps I’ve downloaded) was titled 3 Components for Preventing Crises, and was adapted from the HBR blog post Finding Northwest Flight 253’s Lessons for Leaders.

The app itself is really quite simple – each day you get a new management tip, most of which seem to involve three bullet points that summarise a much more comprehensive blog post or article from the website. You can also access the tips by following Harvard Business Review on Twitter, but that’s not quite as cool.

More importantly, I now have a new source of inspiration for my own blog posts – we’ll take a look at this topic in a bit more depth later in the week.