We loved your ideas, we loved your team but most importantly, we loved your strategy and how honest you were about how we needed to change…….

…..now can you write a tactical plan as we really need to hit the ground running and show some results.

Sound familiar?

There is nothing better than winning and starting work on a shiny new account…the ideas are overflowing, enthusiasm is high and the team is desperate to show what they can do and wow their newest client.

But don’t rush.  Get it right at the beginning and the ideas you proposed will work.  Pick up where the old agency left off (which probably wasn’t working or they wouldn’t have changed) and you are doomed to fail the same way!

Whilst demonstrating value quickly is paramount with a new client, if you don’t spend time getting the strategy right at the beginning of an engagement, the chances are you’ll never get opportunity to make the tweaks you recommended and that the client hired you for.

This article from Jay Fry at Poynter, examines just that.  Jay focuses on media organisations (but much of it is applicable to PR agencies IMO) :

The age of the individual brand was inevitable, a natural consequence of the way digital media has remade our reading habits. In print, columns have a home on a section front or on the opinion page, but online the basic unit of reader consumption isn’t the section or page, but an article — or a video or podcast.

When readers search for or share columns, what’s found or shared is a single article. Meanwhile, writers spotlight links to their own work on their Tumblrs, share them with their Twitter followers, and hope for comments on their Facebook fan pages — all activity that spotlights their individual brands and pushes the institutional brand deeper into the shadows.

How then can smart employers ensure that their agency’s brand benefits from the halo effect created by individuals?

…in the print era, there was no such thing as a reader who picked up the paper, turned instantly to C3, read one article and threw the rest in the trash. And the higher individual brands rise, the more likely someone will try to pick them off, or that individual will begin to think of himself or herself as distinct from the institution.

Jay identifies four ways in his original article and I think they can all apply to the PR world….here’s how:

Identify your most valuable individual brands. 

For PR agencies, this means identifying who are your most well-connected account staff and who has developed a solid (on and offline) network around them of contacts that could benefit the wider organisation?

Turn centrifugal force into centripetal force, or at least balance them.

See how you can accommodate the interests, passions and direction your rising stars want to go in within the business.  How can their hobbies/external interests be applied within their jobs? Be interested in their interests. Look for commercial ways to support their ideas and digital personalities.

Make your individual brands into institutional gateways.

Work with your high-profile employees to become links to your organisation’s brand. Encourage them to explore ideas across both blogs or sites, look at ways you can cross-post or feed content into the company homepage and LinkedIn pages, share materials across the individual’s own and the company’s Slideshare accounts. Involve your rising stars in the agency’s ‘s social media strategy so they get to input and co-develop how their own brand interacts with the wider agency footprint. Don’t scare employees off with guidelines and rules, ultimately, search is driving people to your site so look at ways that the two parties can collaborate and share traffic and content.

Get really good at building brands.

Help your existing employees build their brands to levels of those you’d target were you hiring/replacing them.  it is cheaper to build up the people you have than hire new, agencies are always looking at ways to retain staff and keep retention levels high. It is also great practice to work with staff on their personal brands encouraging the halo effect to spread throughout the organisation.  People remember people, not company names so prospects will often search down an individual and not an agency anyway. Help your staff become easy to find and impressive in digital terms and it will only benefit you as an employer in the long run.

Important to remember though that just as you gravitate to people with high public visibility, so do others in the market so make sure you are looking after these people from an HR perspective too. Don’t underestimate the importance of good HR practice, appraisals, remuneration and above all, interesting projects to work on. Building the brand is one thing but keeping the value high relies on relevant and recent achievements so make sure your staff are getting the opportunities, support and clients they need to stay high-profile.

This is cross posted with my employer, Ruder Finn

As press releases and hoax stories flood newsrooms, the Media Standards Trust has found a way to sift fact from fluff

via Churnalism or news? How PRs have taken over the media | Media | The Guardian.

• Daljit Bhurji ACIPR – Managing Director, Diffusion (@Daljit_Bhurji)
• Mark Borkowski – Managing Director, Borkowski (@MarkBorkowski)
• Rob Brown FCIPR – Managing Director, Staniforth (@robbrown)
• Stuart Bruce MCIPR – Managing Director, Wolfstar (@stuartbruce)
• Dominic Burch – Head of Corporate Communications, ASDA (@dom_asdaPR)
• Simon Collister – Head of Non-Profit and Public Sector, We Are Social (@simoncollister)
• Gemma Griffiths – Client Director, Racepoint (@GemGriff)
• Katy Howell – Managing Director, Immediate Future (@katyhowell)
• Marshall Manson – Director of Digital Strategy, Edelman (@marshallmanson)
• Danny Rogers – Editor, PR Week (@dannyrogers2001)
• Julio Romo MCIPR – PR and Communications Consultant, twofourseven (@twofourseven)
• Philip Sheldrake – Partner, Influence Crowd LLP (@sheldrake)
• Stephen Waddington MCIPR – Managing Director, Speed Communications (@wadds)
• Robin Wilson – Director Digital PR & Social Media, McCann Erickson (@robin1966)

The panel aims to work across the CIPR to identify new opportunities, including social media measurement, publishing best practice social media guidelines, informal workshops to engage CIPR members with experts, and a series of interviews with some of the world’s leading social media thinkers and practitioners. Lots has happened in 2010 and lots more is planned for 2011.

I attended my first meeting last week and some things to look out for in the short term are:

CIPRtv – the monthly TV channel from the CIPR covering topics such as Big Society, digital democracy and providing a chance to see some of the industry’s leaders in the spotlight.

Social media guidelines for practitioners, currently on the wiki and due to be released in updated form early April.

The CIPR’s April conference on Social Media – information coming soon here

We’re currently formalising our plan and outputs for the coming 12 months and I’ll publish it here as well as on the wiki when it is ready. In the meantime, keep up to date by following the CIPR’s twitter feed and wiki or dropping any of us a line.

I meant to write this last week but hey, I’ve been busy.

Leaving the girls again after a year at home is tough, I can’t deny that, but I am enjoying being part of the working world and a bit of adult company does wonders for the soul.

So expect more from me over coming weeks as I find my feet and catch up a bit. If anyone fancies helping me out with the top 3 things I missed in 2010, I’d be much obliged (smiling at you nicely Wadds, Stephen, Chris, Ged, David, Paul and Jed)

Wade in PR folks…any more faves?

(Thanks to the team at Ruder Finn for crowdpitching in with some of these)

I came across this link on Twitter this morning (which is increasingly becoming my catch all newspaper anyway – see post) from The Guardian…it is a handy link to all the Sunday headlines on one page.  Great for a quick flick through and to save relevant / interesting stuff to Delicious to read/properly digest later.

Off to have a nosey at what the other papers offer by way of a digest….

Stephen did the same list a year ago and it was a great help to many of us in the industry…so what’s changed in the past 12 months?

• Well volume for one, there are a lot more journalists using the medium today.
• Also an increase in the use by regional, tabloid and trade journalists…last year the majority were national or freelancers but this has changed substantially.
• And finally, many journalists are figuring out how they want to be contacted via Twitter and their blogs and are posting guidelines on what they want / don’t want to receive.  Essential reading can often be found on their own blogs and I advise taking the time to do this before you get in touch with them.

As with all kinds of PR outreach…use people’s contacts with care and don’t give the industry a bad name by spamming the hell out of the list…I know, as if you would?!

1. No one knows what they’re doing which immediately makes messing about with it good fun
2. There’s a lot of high brow comments such as “can you see me typing” “is this working” when you first have a play with it…..and slightly stranger “what are you wearing” but perhaps that is more about the people I was waving with that the actual app
3. People can see you typing and therefore truly appreciate how shocking you are at spelling etc.
4. You can embed video into waves and er share YouTube clips etc.
5. You can talk rubbish with strangers, er, just like any other comms tool or in fact real life
6. You can work on docs together and then download them
7. You’ll have no contacts and upon starting to import/build them, you’ll realise your address book needs sorting out as your Google contacts don’t contain anyone useful or who has heard of Wave
8. You won’t be able to find the lightbulb for a while
9. It’s hard to figure out how it will all fit together with the other communication apps you use/have open all day – I have started googling to see what others say, see mashable as starting point
10. So far, I’d say it tastes a bit like chicken….

Tagging Jon Silk, Ged Carroll and Dom Whitehurst as other Wave newbies to see what you think / potential uses for PR etc.