Its going to be quiet around here for the next week or so.
My father, Alexander Bruce Smith, passed away last night – 6 days short of his 92nd birthday.
The world of hi-tech PR seems strangely inconsequential this morning.
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Category: People
Life can sometimes throw up some very bizarre connections.
You may well have seen on the TV news at the weekend or read about the care home in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, where 12 OAPs have been stuck on the top floor since Xmas Day due to a lift breakdown.
12 Trapped since Xmas Day by lift breakdown
As it happens I have some connection with the said establishment.
First, my sister works there.
Second, I’m very familiar with the lift in question, as I have been up in it many times. I should explain.
When I was growing up, I had friend called Duncan Eddie (now the Reverend Duncan Eddie as it happens). His mother was the matron at the home, so he and his parents lived in a flat on the third floor.
Duncan and I were big music fans. Duncan had the luxury of a very fine hi-fi unit, so I used to take my LPs round there to give em a good listen. I was more of an orthodox rocker, with a liking for Queen, Thin Lizzy and Led Zeppelin. Duncan was a big Bowie fan, and introduced me to Iggy Pop. However, when punk arrived in late 76 (I read Sounds, he read the NME), all bets were off. We used to make sure our meagre resources went as far as possible for LP buying by agreeing in advance who would get what. So Duncan got The Clash’s first LP the week it came out and I bought The Stranglers. The Buzzcocks Another Music was on his list, and I got Nevermind The Bollocks. When the Sex Pistols appeared on TOTP with Pretty Vacant, we both ran round to each others place to confirm that we had seen the biggest event of our lives in a state of heady excitement.
Seeing Clashfarquhar House on the TV at the weekend brough back memories on a different time – , growing up in the back of beyond in the North East of Scotland, the arrival of punk in 1977 made two teenage boys think that we were on the brink of a revolution – and we were the only 2 people in the town that were aware of it. The sweet naviete of youth.
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Richard Delevan’s new arrival
Link: Richard Delevan’s sicNotes: What I’ve Been Up To.
Congrats to Richard on the arrival of his son Fionn Fox – Richard and I worked together back at Brodeur in 2000. He is that rare breed of PR who moved into journalism and is now a highly respected socio/political commentator in the Irish national press.
Good to have Rod on board.
OBJECT MARKETING EXPANDS SENIOR TEAM
…Rod de St Croix appointed as PR director…
Shepherd’s Bush, London – 7th March 2006 – Object Marketing, the integrated marketing consultancy, has hired Rod de St Croix (39) as PR director. In this newly created role, Rod will work alongside the
agency’s co-founder Andrew Smith to grow and develop the PR practice.
Rod joins Object Marketing from Band & Brown where he was associate
board director. Prior to this he worked for several years as an
independent PR consultant advising B2B technology and online firms. He
began his PR career in 1995 with Brodeur Worldwide. Prior to this, he was an analyst with International Data Corporation.
Commenting on his appointment, de St Croix says: “I will be working
closely with the senior team here to grow the client base, whilst also
developing integrated campaigns that have a creative edge, and that
work hard for clients and generate tangible results. In addition, I
will be helping clients to reach beyond pure media relations to capture
the attention of the analyst and investment communities. I am looking
forward to making an important contribution to Object’s continuing
success.”
Object Marketing co-founder Andrew Smith says: “2006 promises to be an
important milestone in our growth and Rod will play a vital role in
helping us to achieve our targets. We welcome him as a key member of
the team.”
About Object Marketing
Object Marketing is a fully integrated marketing consultancy, based
in London, UK, offering clients strategic and implementational support
through the entire marketing mix.
Object’s sector expertise spans technology, financial services and FMCG
markets. Current clients include business performance management
software vendor Hyperion, leading Internet security specialist Zone
Labs, and MySQL, developer of the world’s most popular open source
database.
The following post on the Mediations site – Julian Henry in the Guardian – tipped me off to a rather extraordinary polemic about PR.
According to Mr Henry:
Most of the major
PR agencies in the UK construct their business around writing
strategies, drawing up Q&As, drafting positioning statements,
scripting advertorials, collating briefing packs, printing press kits
and countless other bits of waffle that underpin our daily trade. This
rationalising process gets charged to the clients, who in most cases
seem happy to pay for it…Get rid of all this stuff and you would demolish half the industry at a single sweep…
If you were to reduce the role of the PR consultant to its most
basic function what do you have? The man or woman on the phone whose
job is simply to offer a description of their client’s product in a
topical, creative and engaging way.
Now let’s take a look at Mr Henry’s own company website: "Henry’s House has a full time staff of 20 executives with experience and skills in media relations, strategy and brand planning.
We are big thinkers with extensive brand experience". (My emphasis). Based on his own analysis, does that mean he will be firing 10 people this afternoon – namely his own personnel involved in "countless other bits of waffle that underpin our daily trade."
Perhaps his clients will be pleased to know that they’ve been spending money on such "waffle."
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You are the weakest link
The following from this afternoon’s Silicon email newsletter shows that human beings remain the weakest link in the security chain.
Turning a little bit Crimewatch for a minute, the Round-Up would like to begin by asking: "Were you in the City of London on Tuesday 14 February?"
"Did you see individuals acting strangely? Perhaps you saw them handing out CDs to commuters?"
Well, if you did, and you took said CD and put it in your PC at work then you were taking part in a social experiment to see whether employees, working in some of the capital’s most (you’d hope) security-conscious industries – such as banking, finance and insurance – would accept a CD from a stranger and explore its contents on their work PC.
And of course, you guessed it, a lot of them did.
Thankfully all the CDs actually contained was some code which would inform the organisers of this stunt, IT skills specialists The Training Camp, just how many people had been duped.
No personal or corporate data was transferred – the CEO of The Training Camp was very quick to point out – but there was enough information to indicate that employees within a major retail bank and two global insurance giants had fallen for it. And they were just the tip of iceberg.
Rob Chapman, that very same CEO, told silicon.com "this could have been someone wanting to cause havoc in the City".
And of course it could indeed. Fortunately this time though it was an experiment.
Even now some of you may be reading this and performing the classic full-palm-slap to a slightly moist forehead… the universal sign language for ‘I’ve been an idiot’ (though we like to think Round-Up readers are a cut above the kind of dolt who’d have been suckered in by this).
So what does this prove? It illustrates just how out of touch employees and companies are with the human threat posed to their network.
After all, why would criminals bother trying to come up with clever and sophisticated ways of breaching firewalls and perimeter security in order to infect a company with malicious code when they could just put it on a CD and tell commuters arriving in the City that it contains a competition?
Let them do all the hard work.
Bob’s your uncle, the employee takes the bait and for the cost of a few hundred CDs malicious code could be onto the corporate network before a witless employee’s first Starbucks coffee of the day is even cool enough to drink. (Starbucks hot beverages – hotter than the sun or not hot enough? Discuss.)
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Life and Times of Anders Hejlsberg
Link: Life and Times of Anders Hejlsberg.
Also a man not afraid to have a beer with the British press – he’d probably doesn’t remember wandering the streets of San Franciso in 1991 with a bunch of UK hacks seeking a drink at 4am – after we’d been turfed out of the bar at the St. Francis hotel.
Bet he doesn’t do that now.
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Seventeen Minutes With Bill Gates
Link: Seventeen Minutes With Bill.
In which we discover that Bill Gates:
– doesn’t watch TV
– is addicted to "24" on DVD (which he watches while working out on a treadmill).
– has a trampoline
– plays XBOX 360 at weekends
– he won’t be using Powerpoint at MiX06
He also plugs the new UI in Office12.
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“Why I’m So Great”*
*With a nod to a Nietzsche (who was no slouch in the self belief department) and his essay entitled, Why I Write Such Good Books.
The ever-entertaining Lucy Kellaway has another good column in yesterday’s FT. She cites a recent Harvard Business Review article that claims to have established a strong link between exaggerated self-belief and incompetence. In other words, the people most likely to overestimate their ability are those with little ability to start with.
I’m sure most people in their working lives have encountered just such a type. Certainly the world of PR seems to be populated with more than its fair share. However, as ever, there appears to be a paradoxical attitude to this in the world of spin (I can’t say whether this is more prevalent in other sectors). Senior managers appear to give these self aggrandizers the benefit of the doubt. Even though they fail to deliver the results, their “attitude” is deemed to be worth more than those who achieve what they say they would, but don’t crow about – or embark on internal self-publicity campaigns.
I guess the psychology is that people want to believe that these people can do what they say they can do – a kind of cognitive dissonance applies, so that they allow their logical concerns to be over-ridden. Of course, you can’t get away with missing targets forever – but the trick is to move on before someone blows the whistle – moving up the greasy pole and avoiding being brought to account.
As Lucy says, in the work context, “Self doubt is not allowed. You can’t say – I don’t know if this will work.”
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VNU buys The Inquirer
How things go full circle. Mike Magee has sold The Inquirer to VNU. Guy Kewney has already blogged regarding his possible role as a catalyst for the deal.
Guy Kewney’s Role in Inquirer purchase
This is an interesting story for a number of reasons. Mike founded The Register with John Lettice and Drew Cullen before falling out with them in 2001 (although many rumours emerged as to the real reason for the bust up, I don’t think anyone other than the participants really know what went on there). He left and set up The Inquirer shortly afterwards – I know a few people at the time weren’t sure whether Mike would be able to replicate the success of The Reg – but he ploughed his own furrow and getting a media giant like VNU to buy it must be viewed as somewhat of a coup.
What remains to be seen is to what extent The Inquirer will retain its unique editorial style now that it is under the VNU wing. The Inquirer (like the Reg) has never been one to pull its punches. Take for example Intel’s Guide To The European Press – whoever was Intel’s PR at the time must have wanted the ground to open up and swallow them.
Of course the terms of the deal are undisclosed. What next we ask ourselves? The Register being bought by IDG?
All the best to Mike on his return to Broadwick Street. At least now the distance from the office to the Star and Garter and Blue Posts can be measure in feet rather than miles.