Hill+Knowlton Strategies

What sort of training do you think someone needs who is working in PR today?

It’s on my mind as we’re in the middle of developing new training modules for TheHub, our internal training programme. And I got to thinking about just how different the agency workplace is to when I started in the mid-1980s.

For those of you who remember those days we wrote press releases by hand for someone else to transcribe on a golf ball typewriter. (I wish I’d had shares in Tipp-Ex.) The fax was a dazzling new gadget to provide media with content ‘instantly’. And we were all just a little more carefree – and badly dressed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of nostalgia in film and music; but not the workplace. Agency life today is so much more challenging than we could have imagined but its dynamism, variety and the continual expansion of our scope of work is a real rush.

From the days of being a ‘people person’ and a newshound we’ve rocketed into the cloud. And we’re still newshounds.

But we’re more business savvy, more expert. Our insights are deeper. We’ve become business experts not just communications experts – the division no longer exists (if we’re honest, never really did).

So what skills need to be acquired to operate in this brave new world? Digital expertise goes without saying. Client service ditto. But those are just for starters. We’d really like to hear your thoughts.

Yesterday, our client Aviva launched a new campaign under the banner of Back the Team, calling on the British public to get behind the Aviva GB & NI Athletics Team.

With only a few months left for athletes to prepare themselves ahead of the biggest sporting show this country has ever seen, the UK’s leading insurer has launched a through-the-line campaign, including national press and online advertising, PR, experiential and social media, to bring the nation together in support of the country’s best athletes.

Aviva's Back the Team campaign image

Aviva has been supporting British athletes since 1999 and this campaign will be asking fans to register their support by going to Aviva UK’s Facebook page or visiting www.aviva.co.uk/athletics. Fans will have the opportunity to win some great prizes, including a day with European Champion heptathlete and Aviva ambassador Jessica Ennis, who could be the guest at your village fete or give a speech to local school kids.

As well as posting messages, pictures and videos, people will also be able to show their support for the Aviva GB & NI Team on Twitter by quoting #BackTheTeam.  On the Aviva UK Facebook page and website, fans can get closer to the athletes through exclusive interviews and content.

European Champion, Jessica Ennis, commented:

“Aviva has always supported me and my fellow athletes in the GB Team both when things are going well and also when they are not going so well, and ahead of an important time for athletics, this campaign captures Aviva’s support for athletes. I know I will enjoy receiving everyone’s pictures and messages of support and know all of the team will feel the same.”

This summer, Britain’s best athletes will be going head-to-head at the Aviva 2012 Trials in Birmingham between 22-24 June and competing against the world’s best at the Aviva London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace on 13 & 14 July and the Aviva Birmingham Grand Prix on 26^th August.  The public can back the team at those events by visiting www.uka.org.uk/aviva-series.

How will you Back the Team over the next few months?

Even bigger UPDATE: Facebook Inc. said it is acquiring Instagram. $1 billion in cash and stock. Wow. I think most users will hope that Facebook keeps its promise “to building and growing Instagram independently”.

1. The Appeal of Instagram: Instant Creativity

Smart phones have turned everyone into a photographer, but Instagram turns our average snapshots into artistic images people feel proud to share.

This adds a layer of ‘Frictionless Creativity’ to the ‘Frictionless Sharing’ term Facebook wants to own.

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Hey you! Yes, YOU! You there, slack-jawed, disinterested white collar worker! DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE ARE BAD THINGS HAPPENING OUT THERE IN THE BIG WIDE WORLD???

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March! Spring! Hares! Yes, all of that stuff. Whatever this morning’s commuter rag may have told us, Web Curios is declaring winter over. So there. That’s ok then.

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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 »

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!

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?

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So we near the end of the first month of 2012 – WELL DONE US. Except that Italian captain. And Tom Watson’s intern. And all those naive enough to believe that the SOPA/PIPA thing has gone away (if those words mean nothing to you then read this). And Snickers. And unwitting singers at American churches. And the Russian police. And Bayern Munich. And Uzbekistan. Everyone else, though, pat yourselves on the back – especially me, who found my very own doppelganger last week! We survived the most depressing day of the year, and from hereon in everything will be just peachy.

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New Year, everyone (I feel that it’s inappropriate to bother with the ‘happy’ charade after nearly two weeks of workaday tedium). Well, it’s been a while. HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED! A new era has been ushered in, where a man’s political fate can rest on a small-if-perplexingly-executed typographical error, and where said typographical error causes the entire country (or at least the white-collar, desk-bound, twitter-using part of it) to down tools and descend into some horrendous infinitely recursive spiral of non-humour; in which a new way of drinking whisky is almost certainly the first harbinger of the forthcoming Mayan apocalypse;  in which a bunch of apparently sentient adults chose, of their own volition, to spend a night in a furniture warehouse; and, hopefully, in which this particular Italian politician will never again be allowed to make videos.

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