What do you mean “cancel the newspapers”?

13 Feb

Last week saw an uprising at Champion HQ as debate sparked over whether we should cancel our daily newspaper delivery.

For half of the team, the experience that goes along with sitting with a strong coffee and flicking through the Telegraph is unrivalled and essential. For the other half (and perhaps the younger members of the team), the quick fix of opening Google News has eradicated this need and provided a super-fast source for the day’s most important stories.

We are, of course, not the first to hold this debate – in the PR industry nor the general public.

Last week, BBC journalists were told not to break news stories on Twitter before they tell their newsroom colleagues. The new rules, which apply to all of the corporation’s correspondents, reporters and producers, were announced on Wednesday – a day after it was revealed Sky News had told its journalists not to repost information from any Twitter users who are not an employee of the broadcaster. The new BBC guidelines are intended to ensure that stories are fed into the BBC’s news-gathering machine as quickly as possible and without the delay of a 140-character update on Twitter.

How people get news and interact with breaking stories is certainly changing as social media and online hubs provide us with a “quick fix” of breaking news. But does that mean we should all jump ship and swap our over-sized broadsheets for the iPad app?

Yes, there is a danger of getting newspaper print on your fingers, and yes, online hubs can get breaking news to you first, but there is a dying breed that argue there is nothing like taking five minutes out of your day to really appreciate the years-old tradition that is, the newspaper.

A gasp of horror from certain members of the team echoed across the office at the very thought of PR professionals not reading the daily papers.

One day the newspaper will cease to exist. For now, we’re holding onto it with both ink-marked hands.

I lost another friend this week…

30 Jan

Over the past three months, my BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) contacts list has radically reduced. I remember a time, not so long ago, when I had around 100 connections, all readily available at the end of a ‘ping’.

On Saturday, my list of fellow loyal BlackBerry users dropped to nine as my friend declared she was going over to the ‘dark side’ – aka, getting an iPhone!

A few colleagues of mine believe the mass move from BlackBerry to Apple is because of the long stint of bad press RIM has suffered of late. Back in October, an embarrassing outage meant BlackBerry users worldwide had no internet access. The organisation of the London riots in August were also largely blamed on the use of BBM.

But I disagree. It reminds me of a time when everyone loved their Nokia 3210 and although found it hard parting ways with a device that could probably withstand a nuclear war, people found it hard to resist having a phone with a camera, colour screen and internet. It was hard parting ways with Snake II but can you imagine a world today where you still had to call Directory Enquiries to get a number, or actually use a computer to access your email?

The truth is, with the launch of the iPhone 4S, RIM is now even further behind the times. The only thing BlackBerry’s had over iPhones was BBM and the introduction of WhatsApp has quickly neutralised this advantage. Users don’t need to collate ‘PIN’s’ to be able to communicate with people anymore and the multi-device tool means you can instant message friends on Blackberry’s, iPhones and even Android devices.

The need for BBM is gone and a much more user-friendly app is here to stay. Just as people reminisce of the good ol’ days of the 3210, in 5 years from now, people will be sitting in a pub laughing about the days when we called the Blackberry ‘smart’.

Champion shortlisted for Small Agency of the Year in Golden Hedgehog PR Awards

13 Jan

We were delighted to be told last week that Champion Communications has been shortlisted for Small Agency of the Year in the Midlands, Wales and South in PR Moment’s inaugural Golden Hedgehog PR Awards.

It is exciting to see the magazine has crafted such a high-level panel of judges, including top dogs from both in-house and agency powerhouses, because being recognised by influential players helps us gain respect by being able to cite genuine proof-points to validate our lofty claims.

The new awards programme intends to celebrate outstanding campaigns and exceptional talent across the UK. For the Small Agency award, they wanted to see clear team objectives, examples of recent campaigns and achievements and how we tackled challenges.

Run with the support of headline sponsors Precise and the PRCA, the ceremony takes place in Birmingham on March 28. Everything crossed for Champion!

2011 review: Champion’s Joanna Timmermann on the portrayal of social media as the catalyst of unrest

30 Dec

2011 was the year of protest and political change. Technology and the use of social media were portrayed at least in the media as being the facilitator of many a nation’s voice and the breaker of news.

What intrigued me about the Arab Spring and later the riots in London was the way the media portrayed social media as the catalyst – as if without it nothing would have been possible. Here was a tool that enabled the coordination of actions as well as broadcasting the activities to the world. Now it’s true that BlackBerry Messenger probably did play a part in the London riots, and the subsequent videos being sent in by ‘Jonny on the spot’ citizen journalists enabled the TV news to show the world what was happening. We forget that this was all due to the fact that sitting in the UK we had access to the internet and wireless connections.

In Libya it was a very different story. When Gaddafi flicked the switch to off this ability to communicate with each other and the outside world was promptly slowed to a trickle, with freedom fighters going back to old-school text messaging services. For the media, it became increasingly difficult to verify whether the material that was coming out of the country over social media channels was legitimate and report it to the wider world in the same way as it had done in Egypt, for example.

What this highlights to me going into 2012 is that social media and how we or certainly specific demographics communicate, has changed completely – this is no revelation. But we forget sitting in our broadband offices, whilst tapping away on our smartphones that social media is simply a channel, it doesn’t protests as depicted by some media.

In 2012 the use of social media will continue to rise at pace, while institutions will continue to play catch up. The rise of Google+ in business and communications arenas is likely to be the big trend of 2012 as ‘social search’ becomes the business term of the year.

For the media this prolific growth creates new ways of getting content and stories, but the events of 2011 highlight that for large parts of the world we can’t get everything over social media when the pipe is turned off and old-fashioned journalism remains a necessity.

2011 review: Champion’s Adam Winfield on ‘hacktivists’ and his favourite things of the year

21 Dec

The second quarter of 2011 was a time of intense paranoia for many in the digital world as ‘hacktivists’ ran riot on the networks of global companies. The story that stuck with me was LulzSec’s attack on Sony PlayStation which left over 70 million users with compromised details, possibly including credit card information. It was concerning that a company trusted with private information could not keep it sufficiently secure, and the number of fiercely adept groups of hackers seemed to be on the rise. Were these groups really going to systematically disable the networks of the world’s largest companies, or was this just a bunch of secluded teenagers having some fun?

What made the LulzSec story so compelling was the taunting and bragging that preceded and followed. They tweeted “Hey @Sony, you know we’re making off with a bunch of your internal stuff right now and you haven’t even noticed?”, before threatening “This is the beginning of the end for Sony”. The PlayStation network eventually went back online after around a month of confusion and fear, and the hacking groups were quieter in the second half of the year, but who’s to say they’re not gearing up for a huge hit in 2012?

To lighten the mood after that here are a few of my favourite things from this year…

Favourite game of 2011

Batman Arkham City

2011 has quietly been a good year for games despite a feeling that more and more developers are going after casual players with increasingly dumbed-down titles (Call of Duty I’m looking at you). There were plenty of great games but the follow up to Arkham Asylum was my favourite. Running on a super-slick engine, it is almost perfectly polished and the game world is a great place to spend time in. The quasi-openness allows the game to hold a vast amount of content whilst keeping the narrative structure tight, and the combat is brilliantly balanced and exciting.

Favourite album of 2011

Samiyam – Sam Baker’s Album

Lots of albums were hyped this year but proved to be ultimately forgettable. This one was not massively raved about on release but stands out for me as the most memorable, cohesive and enjoyable of the year.

Favourite TV series of 2011

This Is England ’88

Shane Meadows’ second spin-off from the incredible 2006 film is by far the best thing I saw on TV this year. It was a bleak and brutally realistic portrayal of English life. I hoped Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s sitcom Life’s Too Short would be the best series of the year, however there seems to be universal agreement it was a disappointment.

2011 review: Champion’s Richard Cook on a turbulent year for the UK media

21 Dec

2011 has been a year in which the media was in the media like never before. We began the year still in the throws of the Wikileaks scandal, which continues to rumble on. Then there was the phone hacking scandal which led to the closure of News of the World, whilst super injunctions broken on  Twitter gave Ryan Giggs more exposure then he wanted. We had PR agencies falling into hot water for editing Wikipedia and Facebook was blamed for London’s riots. Social media was both blamed and credited for driving the Arab Spring.

The role of the media has to be to publish information that at least someone doesn’t want to be published. It is right and important that the media has the scope and freedom to be able to do this. When the media itself jeopardises this freedom in the way that the phone hacking scandal threatens to do, we are all losers.

Looking ahead to 2012, there are a number of highlights on the horizon we should be bracing ourselves for. Will the new regime in North Korea lead to a more relaxed view of the web, leading to an uprising in the population? How will China react to this? We are already seeing villagers protesting about building developments. Closer to home, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee is almost upon us and the Olympics will mean that London hosts one of the biggest media events  in history for the second year running. Following a rough year, 2012 holds some good opportunities for the British media industry to salvage its reputation.

Bell Pottinger’s Wikipedia edits a sad inevitability of PR’s tussle with the internet

9 Dec

When I read the news that the PR agency Bell Pottinger was being investigated by Wikipedia for actively editing the pages of its clients, I immediately considered two questions:

  • If Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and everyone, was there a line for Bell Pottinger to cross, or is it truly ‘anything goes’?
  • To what lengths would and should a PR agency go to when adding hyperbole and removing factual negativity surroundings its clients from what is intended to be an impartial encyclopaedia?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales clearly doesn’t believe in the ‘anything goes’ policy, and rightly so if he wants the site to be the ultimate resource for accurate information. He spoke of an “ethical blindness” and said the agency had committed the cardinal sin of their own bad behaviour bringing negative press to their clients. Bell Pottinger refuted by simply maintaining they have “never done anything illegal”, to which Wales remarked “that their strongest true response is they didn’t break the law tells a lot about their view of the world”.

My personal view is that a company is perfectly within its rights to create and amend its clients Wikipedia pages and add positive messaging, but if someone goes on to add negative details that are in the public interest, for example the CEO going to jail or the company being exposed for mistreating staff, common sense dictates that the agency should not delete it.

With the bad press now surrounding Bell Pottinger, I wonder why whoever ordered the Wikipedia cover-ups felt they should have such a commitment to a client to consider it worthwhile to put the reputation of their own company on the line. PR companies should focus on legitimate results; exciting press coverage and social media campaigns, rather than shamelessly disguising facts like an SEO drone.

At a time when the internet reeks increasingly of an enormous PR machine that is being strangled of creativity and freedom by Zuckerberg, Google’s ever dodgier SEO-mangled search results and the like, this is another disappointing concern on a website I once, many moons ago, cautiously trusted for impartial information.

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