Guess my job

Ever since I started at Willoughby almost six years ago, I have been involved in student career and networking events and have taken responsibility for offering a lucky few the change to experience public relations first hand. I believe there is such value in investing time in meeting the potential PR practitioners of the future, be it for five minutes at a speed networking event, taking part in a guest lecture or participating in a mentoring scheme.

The key strength of my degree course at BCU was the chance to meet with professionals and the impetus given to securing work placements. Opportunities such as these can be hard to come by but if agencies don’t offer support through work experience or becoming involved in student skills initiatives such as the excellent B-Hive work placement scheme, how can you expect future job applicants to have a firm grasp of PR and what the job entails?

That’s why I went to a ‘Guess My Job’ careers event last week, run by BXL (a not-for-profit charity that aims ‘to advance the education of the public by the provision of advice and guidance in relation to careers, training and personal development opportunities’). Together with a policeman, fireman, care worker, business improvement manager and other varied professionals, this event was to show year nine students (aged 13 to 14) the variety of jobs available and give them the chance to discover what skills they would need to follow any of these paths.

I felt that a PR Account Director would be one of the most difficult things to guess, particularly as it can be difficult enough to describe what we do ourselves let alone to teenagers whose experience of PR is limited to Max Clifford (shudder).

However, I discovered that during the six classes, my props were often unnecessary (I armed myself with my address book, notepad, phone and a stack of magazines and coverage). Whilst not knowing what PR was specifically, many of the students managed to deduce my job with ideas such as ‘you put together ideas and sell these to the press’ and ‘you promote a product or service through the media’. Alright, it’s not completely on the money, but it was encouraging to see that PR wasn’t a completely foreign concept to them.

Some of the other professionals taking part even seemed to have job envy (I shameless named dropped a little to get the students onside) and the feedback has been very positive indeed. According to BXL, most of the students gave the session at least nine out of 10, and one student even said it was the best day of year nine so far -praise indeed!

It was a fun and eye-opening event to be a part of and it hopefully gave a unique insight into a range of professions, including the weird and wonderful world of PR, and I encourage others to consider ways in which they too can help support the professionals of tomorrow.

BHive 2011: For those driven students who want to get ahead in PR, as well as the other creative industries of marketing, advertising, graphic design and web design, I urge you to enter B-Hive this year for your chance to win paid for work experience with top agencies such as ours. Submissions are due by 7th March.

AV ‘No’ Lobby needs to find a coherent argument

Today the Prime Minister will set out his reasons for voting against the Alternative Vote System in a Referendum in May. The electorate must now brace itself for nearly three months of political arguing and posturing over how we will elect our politicians in future.

The problem for the ‘No’ campaign in the coming referendum on AV is that a ‘No’ vote for AV (which actually is understandable in that it is by no means a perfect system) is also a ‘Yes’ vote for the First Past The Post (FPTP) system we currently use. As both Martin Kettle in the Guardian and Steve Richards in The Independent have pointed out in recent days, the anti-politics sentiment of much of the electorate is tipping the scales towards change, any change.

However, it also strikes me from listening to the opening skirmishes in this battle that the ‘No’ campaign is struggling to get its arguments straight.

Firstly, they argue that AV is undemocratic, in that voters have to choose a second and third choice who could, ultimately, emerge as the overall winner. Well yes, that could happen, but FPTP is hardly democratic either in that it virtually guarantees a job for life for MPs in vast numbers of constituencies around the country. As a case in point, the Conservative Party could set off a nuclear warhead in Bromsgrove High Street and the town would still vote Tory, in large part due to the boundary changes brought in many years ago which added the terribly nice suburb of Barnt Green into the boundaries of the constituency.

Secondly, the ‘No’ voters argue that AV leads to hung Parliaments and back room deals. Well, isn’t that what happened after May 6th? Is the Prime Minister going to stand up today and say he can’t countenance such grubby, undemocratic bartering of the type which got him into power after the last election?

Finally, it’s costly. The ‘No’ campaign argue that AV will cost us £250 million (this is a much disputed figure) and tell us on their website that it is a straight choice, schools or AV? Only it isn’t because my recollection is that the Government, elected under FPTP has already cancelled the Buildings Schools for The Future programme.

I’ve no doubt there are good reasons for rejecting AV, but the ‘No’ campaign needs to find them fast, because at the moment you can drive a bus through the holes in their arguments.

So the bankers want to be loved - it'll take more than a couple of press releases!

Fascinating story in this week's PR Week, namely that the entire banking sector is going to employ a PR agency to rehabilitate its reputation.

Apparently, there is great concern that bankers are no longer viewed as supportive by SMEs. That's probably because bankers aren't supportive of SMEs.

As a case in point, I recently visited a small precision engineering company in the North East which has won a major aerospace contract for the new Airbus. In order to fulfill the order more efficiently, the company decided to spend approximately £70-80,000 on new capital equipment, namely machine tools.

The MD made a big presentation to his bank (who shall remain nameless) and then nothing more was heard. Phone calls were not returned, emails were not answered. Finally, two months later the answer came back. "No, we think you are going to go bust."

There was of course no evidence of this, the bank manager concerned just assumed that every company in the manufacturing sector must be teetering on the brink. How massively supportive?

In the end the MD turned to his own savings, credit cards and Finance For Industry to help him invest in the equipment needed and fulfill the promises made to his customer.

My point is that it is going to take a lot more than a barrage of press releases to rehabilitate the banks amongst SMEs. What is required is for the banks to regain the trust of the business community and the public in general by making credit, namely the principle of buy now pay later upon which modern society is founded, actually available, in the form of loans for capital equipment and mortgages for you and me.

Much was promised by Project Merlin last week, but even a cursory read of the fine print demonstrates that the banks have inserted plenty of caveats, which the more cynical amongst us believe will be used to renege on the promise to deliver £190 billion this year in credit for business.

Time will tell.

The second interest rate domino falls

Just a few quick thoughts on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee minutes which were released a couple of days ago and can be read HERE. The interesting bit is of course that a second domino vote has fallen in favour of a rate rise, namely Martin Weale who, along with Andrew Sentence, is now lobbying for a 0.25 per cent increase in the rate.

The minutes read: “The continued elevated rate of inflation, which was forecast to persist, posed a significant risk to inflation expectations and hence to the medium-term outlook … this made more powerful the case which had been building for a gradual rise in Bank Rate.”

The balance has now therefore shifted in favour of a rise in rates by the middle of the year, which will take more money out of people’s pockets. I’ve blogged previously that it is inevitable that interest rates will increase over the medium term but it now looks as if that day is getting closer, even if we are still a few votes short.

The question is of course whether Mr Weale would have voted for a rise had he seen the economic data which came out earlier this week?

Andy Gray saga should bring all punditry into question

The best response I’ve heard to the Andy Gray sacking was from a friend of mine last night, “couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke”.

Personally, I think sacking him has let Gray off the hook. I’d have liked the ridicule to continue for him around every football ground in the country.

There is however a wider issue about football punditry which needs to be addressed. Namely, it’s rubbish!

Match of the Day viewing figures are apparently going into freefall and it is not difficult to work out why. My guess is that the viewers are increasingly seeing through the ‘analysis’ offered by Hansen, Lawrenson, Dixon and Shearer and their views are beginning to irritate.

Twenty years ago your average football pundit was from an identikit. Former player, often a bit of a lad in his time (usually helpfully described as “the thinking woman’s crumpet” by the tabloids) whose only qualification for the job was being able to say, “I know, I’m a former player”.

And who were we, the British public, to disagree. The only people who could disprove what was being said were nerds armed with back copies of the Rothmans Football Yearbook, but they had no means of responding or getting their message out.

All that has changed. There is now a mass of information available on the web, from OPTA football stat’s through to transfer spend information and, most importantly, an army of statto nerds who are willing to interpret it all. These people could tell you the exact pass completion percentage of Xabi Alonso during the 2006 season and illustrate it in the form of a Venn Diagram!

Paul Tomkins, a Liverpool fan for example, has written numerous books on football using statistics to measure the correlation between transfer spend and team performance. His greatest pleasure at the moment seems to be driving a statistical bus through most of what Alan Hansen has to say. Crucially, Tomkins also has a means of getting his message out, his own website called the Tomkins Times.

It was brought home to me recently when I was watching a discussion on Sky News about who the new Liverpool manager should be. Various names were put forward by fans, including Ralf Rangnick and Andres Villas-Boas. The presenter asked a former player in the studio what he thought of the two names mentioned and the former player replied: “I think Liverpool fans are looking for bigger names than that.”

As the discussion continued it became abundantly clear that the former player did not have a clue who either were, despite the fact that Rangnick is one of the most respected coaches in Germany having taken Hoffenheim from the third tier of the Bundesliga to the first and Villas-Boas’ Benfica are currently ten points clear at the top of the Portuguese league.

This just isn’t good enough. Football punditry is going to have to grow up and enter the real world. Former players are going to have to work harder, do some research and not rely on old, tired clichés and generalisations.

The web is changing everyone’s lives. Football punditry is not immune.

The Return of Glass Steagall (maybe)

Sir Jon Vickers’ speech at the weekend had the desired effect on bank shares yesterday – they dropped like a stone!

Sir Jon, who is currently chairing the Independent Commission on Banking, used the two most fearsome words in his armoury guaranteed to send shivers up any self-respecting pinstripe – Glass Steagall.

For those who want to see the banks brought to heel this is heady stuff. For the uninitiated, the Glass Steagall Act was brought in by the United States in the wake of the mother of all banking crises, namely the Great Depression, forcing through the splitting of investment banking (we like to call them casino banks nowadays, usually made up of derivative trading, currency arbitrage etc) and retail banks (those that you and I have our salaries paid into, the same ones that won’t lend to business).

Sir Jon’s Commission was set up to make recommendations on various banking issues in the wake of our most recent crash, not least a reduction in systemic risk; mitigating moral hazards in banking (that’s code for anything which makes bankers think “we know we shouldn’t be doing this, but it makes us piles of money”) promoting competition and structural reform, which includes splitting.

Will it happen? Who knows, but the suspicion remains that this is sabre-rattling designed to get the banks to come to heel over bonuses, particularly in light of Nick Clegg’s support for the proposal on Andrew Marr’s programme on Sunday (I sense a Clegg u-turn coming on).

Sir Jon, who will instantly catapult to the head of my list of contenders for Man of the Year if he actually does recommend it (what more incentive could he possibly need), is due to report in the Autumn.

My suspicion is that we will have a compromise in the end with the investment arms of banks like Barclays and HSBC becoming subsidiaries with separate balance sheets and all sorts of other rules to stop any future ‘contagion’ infecting our retail banks should another crash occur.

One to watch.

Do we need to police the PR people?

The resignation of Andy Coulson as David Cameron’s chief spin doctor (God I hate that phrase!) tears another gigantic hole in the carefully constructed News International defence that all this phone-hacking nonsense was the work a single rogue reporter.

What is becoming clear is that both News International and the Metropolitan Police are now in deep trouble over this issue. Sienna Miller and Paul Gascoigne have recently joined the list of celebrities who are actively pursuing claims against the newspaper and there are demands that the police themselves be investigated for their conduct of the investigation with a public inquiry.

If we do get a public inquiry one clear avenue of investigation is the role that PR people played in the decision to limit the scope of the investigation to the hacking of Prince William’s phone, whilst ignoring all evidence that thousands of other phones had been tapped including, potentially, the then Prime Minister (Gordon Brown) and various other politicians, many of whom were working in security sensitive roles.

The New York Times in its mammoth piece on phone hacking published late last year claimed (subsequently denied) that communications people within the Met played a key role in persuading officers to limit their investigations by reminding them of the close relationship the Met enjoyed with the tabloids and the positive reporting granted to them.

If this is the case, and it remains a matter for conjecture, then it adds a further layer of concern about the role of PR in the publicising of police operations (witness the raid on Harry Redknapp’s house which was carried live on GMTV).

Certainly, there can be little doubt that the media is sailing very close to the wind in terms of prejudicing fair trials by some of their reporting. The question is to what extent are PR people behind some of these stories and tip-offs?

My own (albeit developing) view, is that those working in PR in the criminal justice system may well need to be policed (and protected) with a Code of Practice which details what can be told to the media and when.

The problem, of course, is that stories are often planted to aid an investigation in order place pressure on a suspect. This seems legitimate but the danger is that these tactics become the norm and go into everyday use rather than being used sparingly.

I’ve no idea who should be responsible for drawing up such as Code (the CIPR, PRCA?) or whether it would work, but I certainly think there needs to be a debate about it.