A Media Person's Musings

Facebook Furore

Today the news was dominated by a story about employees' use of social networking sites while at work. Many large corporations have banned their staff from using sites like Facebook and MySpace within working hours. Now Trade Unions have come out to argue the case for the employees and promoting their rights to being able to access the sites in their lunch or break times.

This is, in my opinion, an old story. Now I am showing my age! When email first became widely used we had the same debate. Employers feared that their staff would spend all day on the Internet emailing their friends and not doing their jobs. Some companies even banned personal email. Now the story is very different.

I believe in networking passionately. Already through Facebook I have reconnected with people who I will do business with so I feel no guilt about checking it through the day and I am sure the same will happen with my colleagues. While these sites are a novelty they may well distract people a bit in the short term. However the novelty will wear off and then the site will become a resource (good or bad) to whoever is using it. For me it is great: I get invited to events and have become part of a connected community of PR people and journalists.

I am sure that if I banned the use of these sites in my office my business would suffer; not only in terms of morale (everyone is an adult after all) but also in terms of new opportunities. To really understand the way the digital world is going you have to be part of it.

Princess Diana's PR Coup

Will the Royal Family ever learn to take notice of their paid advisors? I cannot believe that Camilla's acceptance of the recent invitation from Princes William and Harry to attend the memorial service they were organising in honour of the 10th anniversary of their mother's death was not the subject of much informed debate. I equally cannot believe that she was advised to accept the invitation.

It is well documented that Prince Charles can be bullish and churlish when it comes to defending his ground. In some areas (organic farming, environmentalism and The Princes Trust) he has been brave and right. In others (Camilla) he has been wrong and resistant to expert advice.

Now Camilla has done a dramatic U-turn and has pulled out saying that she wanted to support William and Harry but felt her presence woiuld distract attention from the event. She is right! It would! So why didn't she decline right from the start and issue a pro-active statement saying she would not be attending for that reason? Then the (still brittle when it comes to Princess Diana) British public would have applauded the decision and moved on.

I am all for Charles and Camilla being together, being married, being happy. Good luck to them. They are in a goldfish bowl and I have a lot of sympathy for them. However they could do with listening to the people around them a little more instead of ploughing ahead in righteous indignation. And if they are not receiving the right kind of advice, I think (and hope) they are getting, then they should employ someone who will tell them how it is.

Added Value or Cynical Marketing..or Both?!?

I am down in Cornwall visiting a work colleague who works from home for us. While we worked today his wife and children went to Truro on a shopping trip in preparation for the new school year. They came back laden with bags of clothes, lunch boxes and shoes. The shoes caught my eye.

The shoes came from Clarks, one the best manufacturers of shoes for children, and the shoes in question looked very stylish, very sensible and very trendy. The added extras were what interested me. If you lifted the insole, in the heel of the shoe was a small well. In the well was a doll. In the other shoe there was another well and this one had a box of small toys that were accessories for the doll.

Here comes the best bit! The lid of the box that the shoes came in was fashioned like a pop-up book in the shape of a dolls house. This at first sight looked like a phenomenal bit of added value. On second thoughts it looked like a really cynical marketing ploy - like the MacDonald's Happy Meals toys.

After talking to my friend's daughter (seven years old) I realised that tchildren are very aware of these marketing ploys. I asked her if, next time she went shoe shopping, she would go back to Clarks because of the toys? She replied: "No, their shoes last ages and I only got them because they looked really trendy". It appears that they are getting their messages across through the quality and style of their products already - so why bother with the cheap promos?

Getting The Balance Right

Two bits of information came across my desk today that got me thinking. The first was a snippet from a colleague of mine in the US about an  AP-Ipsos poll that revealed 1 in 4 Americans didnt read a SINGLE book last year. A shocking statistic.

The next bit of information I got was that the law regarding UK holiday entitlement is shortly to change, probably to bring us more in line with our counterparts in the EU. The change means that as of 1 October employers will be obliged to offer 24 days' leave, moving to 28 in April.

I am all in favour of people getting adequate time to rest and recharge their batteries and have long envied our friends in Continental Europe for shutting up shop for the entire month of August.

Moreover it struck me that the reason that the people in the US read so little is that they simply don't have the time.

Record Results - Again?

The big news story of today is the fact that A-Level (for my American friends these are the last set of exams sat by teenagers before they go to university) results have come out today showing a national pass rate rise for the 25th year in a row. Furthermore more than one in four UK A-level entries were awarded the top A grade.

Every year they run this story and every year I get more and more flummoxed. The cleverer the youth of our nation become the worse they get at sending in decent job applications and covering letters. I have, over the years, had applications from graduates looking to get into PR and I can safely say, hand on heart, that if I filtered them based on spelling and grammar then I would have employed very few people!

This joyful trumpetting of our nation's brainpower sits in direct contrast to the lawlessness on our streets with the rise in knife and gun crime and gangs of kids beating people to death fuelled on drugs and drink. Are our youngsters more intelligent year-on-year? Should we be pleased that the next generations will move our country forward or are our standards slipping? Only time will tell.

Life's A Lottery!

Post office worker Angela Kelly was unveiled today as the lucky lady who scooped the UK's biggest ever lottery win of £35Million. While I am really pleased for her my heart went out to her as well: The 40 year old single mum from Scotland was clearly still in shock as she was rolled out to the world's press at a glitzy press conference. She says that she doesn't know how to keep her feet on the ground but also says that she wants to stay in the same flat because her son is about to go into his fourth year in school and he wants to stay near his friends. The truth of the matter is that their lives will change forever.

The very fact that she has decided to go public is worrying. She is clearly unprepared for this kind of media attention and when that has died down she will be prey to all sorts of other attention. I feel sorry for her as she comes to terms with the enormity of her win as she will never be able to rest easy about peoples' motivations in future.

The enormity of the prize is something else that concerns me. Winning amounts like this borders on obscene. I know the lottery donates hugely to charitable causes but surely it would be better to chop up wins like this between runners up. These rollovers are creating massive pots that ordinary people wouldn't have any idea how to cope with. Frighteningly Angela Kelly will make as much in interest in 2 days as she would have earnt in a year on her salary.

I hope that Camelot (who run the lottery) will be able to give her top line support and professional advice - she will need it.