Escherman Blog

Julian Henry’s rant in today’s Guardian

Post author By Andrew Smith
Post date February 20, 2006
1 Comment on Julian Henry’s rant in today’s Guardian

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."

Technology PR

I’m a PR veteran

Link: Blog.

Says Guy Clapperton – I feel flattered. And very old.

Uncategorized

FT wades in on blogging

Link: FTMAGBLOG.

Trevor Butterworth piece on blogging in the FT magazine this weekend – the link above is to the blog set up to discuss the piece. You can read the original article here:

FT on Blogging

In short, its a sensible piece that says blogging isn’t going to change the world too much some time soon. He also says that Orwell would have been a hopeless blogger. That’s possible. But as I have stated previously, I think he would have approved of the people being able to blog – not least as a way of recording political events and how they are reported – with the added bonus of being able to share this with others and see how others have viewed them.

Sadly, no trackback for the FT Blog.

People Technology PR

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.)

Technology PR

Computer Weekly Online – now you can sponsor phrases in editorial?

Post author By Andrew Smith
Post date February 16, 2006
No Comments on Computer Weekly Online – now you can sponsor phrases in editorial?

Link: BI software market set for steady growth.

The above story on Computer Weekly’s website piqued my interest – not just because we have a major client in the BI arena – but for the fact that I noticed that the phrase "business intelligence" in the editorial was in fact tagged with a sponsored link for an Oracle ad.

This is a curious development – and further shows how the lines are blurring between editorial and advertising. I don’t know how this actually works, but presumably the commercial side of Computer Weekly must have some prior knowledge of what phrases are likely to appear in the editorial in order to offer them for sponsorship. I guess it is conceivable that Oracle simply want to sponsor the phrase "business intelligence" and will not see which articles their sponsorship will appear in beforehand. But if they are paying for this as a service, it raises the thorny issue of how they get to choose which phrases and which articles they sponsor.

Imagine they are told there is a piece about a major competitor due to be published that talks about business intelligence? Will Oracle be told the content beforehand to allow them to decide whether or not to sponsor?

I wonder what CW readers will make of this – will they like sponsorship and advertising encroaching this far into editorial?

I’d be interested to know what people’s views on this kind of thing are.

People

Life and Times of Anders Hejlsberg

Post author By Andrew Smith
Post date February 16, 2006
No Comments on 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.

People

Seventeen Minutes With Bill Gates

Post author By Andrew Smith
Post date February 16, 2006
No Comments on 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.

Technology PR

The PR Surgery Is Now Open

Post author By Andrew Smith
Post date February 15, 2006
No Comments on The PR Surgery Is Now Open

PR Surgery – Trust Me, I’m A Spin Doctor

Doctor Spin is now always "in" to help diagnose and offer possible cures for PR ills – both for agency staff and in-house.

This is a free service – however, all advice given here comes with a
PR health warning. Only you will be familiar with the details of your
case. The Doctor can only provide general guidance and takes no
responsibility for any future outcome should you choose to act on his
advice.

I was told that Cheap Ambien was quite a popular drug, popular with insomnia.

If you’d like the Doctor to take a look at your PR problem, email him at prsurgery@gmail.com.

Technology PR