Every now and again I meet people who’s PR agency sound as though they take a lot of money for not a lot in return. This really sticks in my craw. To err is human, but to not deliver your client what I consider to be the very basic elements of a solid media relations programme is tantamount to a rip-off!

The section on this website which looks at why Blaze PR is different raises a lot of the basic issue that clients have with their PR agency. It’s not rocket science, so get it right please as it makes the PR industry look pretty poor and takes us one step back from the professionals we were all talking about last night.

One of the many interesting points that Sue made is that to be a PR practitioner in Nigeria you need a licence from the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations. The Law mandates NIPR to regulate the practice and direct the development of Public Relations as a profession in Nigeria. The law also makes it illegal to practice Public Relations, under any title, in Nigeria without NIPR certification. Is this totalitarian or a way to ensure high standards of professional and ethical practice? A whole new debate for another time I think! However, we all agreed last night that it would be wonderful to see all 48,000 people employed in Public Relations in the UK, strive for professionalism.

I do have sympathy for poor Ben though – our Hacked Off Flack has listed a few client moments that have nearly pushed him over the edge.

Top five client annoyances – courtesy of PR Moment http://bit.ly/uylxTg:

1. A client asked us to arrange for Tony Blair to attend his webinar. Seriously, I’m not joking. Teflon Tony was, funnily enough, too busy.
2. We arranged a journalist to call a client to discuss a new initiative at a time the client had suggested. When the journo called, he was surprised to be told by the client that he was sick and tired of interfering journalists bothering him all the time. The client then decided to rant about why he thought all journalists are scum.
3. We were asked to ensure that the Financial Times wrote a story about our client, because it has just won an industry award. Hmmm 4. Talking of awards, when another client went up to collect an award recently (for effective communication), he decided to give an unprompted, unwanted and very drunken speech. Not such an effective communicator after all.
5. After a client behaved rather inappropriately with a journalist at a business briefing, he asked us to arrange a one-to-one with the same journalist the next week. She wasn’t quite so keen.

We are rather concerned that the “grocers’ apostrophe”, once berated by our elders and betters in the PR world, is now seen as nothing to worry about. Surely good punctuation and grammar is an essential element of being able to communicate effectively? Hopefully this particular skill isn’t as dead as Elvis.

If you want to improve your basic writing skills, an excellent place to start is the CIPR’s Skills Guide and a great book I’d recommend is John Foster’s ‘Effective Writing Skills for Public Relations’.

Another example of ‘seat of your pants public relations’? It’s an all too common phenomenon, where companies think about how they are going to promote a new product or service too late in the development process. Typically they bolt on some PR effort either after the event or with too little notice to get good results.

PR is not a bolt-on, but needs to be part of the business plan from the inception of a ‘good idea’. Publications have deadlines that can be many months in advance, so to make it relevant to them careful planning of when to release stories is needed. And, websites won’t cover something that has happened – it’s old news and is the Internet equivalent of tomorrow’s fish & chip wrapping.

Remember, that when you are planning something that you think might have PR potential, to start talking to your PR department or consultancy as early as possible. They can then come back to you with a suggested timescale that will help them to get the best value out of a story.

I wish Ms Tolfield lots of luck in her new role. I just hope that the PR horse hasn’t already bolted before the Government has shut the stable door!

A whopping £838million was the figure PR Week put on the total fee income of the top 150 public relations agencies. Number one was Bell Poittinger Group with £67,818,000 and number 150, Eskenzi PR with £812,000 in fee income for 2010.

Overall the future looks rosy for us PR types then. However, I counted 30 out of the 150 which had actually posted a drop in income. That’s still 20 per cent of agencies that haven’t grown, but have in fact shrunk.

Both I and all of my freelance friends are very busy at the moment, which is great news for us and I guess great news for our clients. They get a senior, experienced PR person doing all of the work on their account, at the fraction of the cost for a larger agency. There are of course trade-offs working with one person – holiday and sickness for a start (we aren’t robots, although touch wood I haven’t been sick in two-and-half years!). But, the fact that they don’t get the junior staff on their account most of the time and it costs them less, seems to appeal to many. I have been referred to as a ‘bargain’ before!

Anyway, it’s horses for courses and great news that the overall trend is for the PR industry to be on the up.

Whatever your political inclination, you have to admit that the TUC march at the weekend should have created a powerful picture to get their message across – at least until the minority spoilt it for the majority. In the Sunday papers the march was overshadowed by the ‘anarchist riots’ in the West End. Bad news makes the news pages unfortunately and the coverage continues today.

This is a very extreme example of how important timing is for PR stories. However, even with the best laid plans there is no accounting for serendipity. The most perfectly executed PR work can sometimes fall foul of unpredictable elements.

PR Week dedicated an entire article to it http://bit.ly/elgZ6U and the responses to it have been coming thick and fast.

I have noticed how journalism has changed since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, and often point this out to clients. When advertising budgets were slashed, seemingly overnight, so editorial teams were similarly reduced. This meant that journalists were still expected to produce copy, but with fewer staff. They had less time to speak to clients to get ideas and quotes for features, and this meant that they increasingly favoured emailed quotes over time-consuming interviews.

This was closely followed by the expansion of media channels from print, to websites, to Twitter etc. How can a small editorial team be expected to write 100 per cent original copy with less people and more channels to fill? Before using PR copy any journalist worth their salt will check out its accuracy, or if they know it is from a trusted source, in the form a reliable PR person, they will use a good news story.

I agree with Mark Stringer, founder of Pretty Green. He says: “The fact is that good PROs know what journalists want and write good press releases to help provide content for them.” And, we PROs have always done that. If you don’t try and write like a journalist then what’s the point? Press releases are not advertising or sales copy. They are news and should be written as such – concisely, accurately and without any ‘spin’.

Anyway, this is obviously a storm in a tea cup as apparently only 54 per cent of PR material finds its way into news stories, which shows that journalists still like to uncover their own news. So, if your PR person has achieved some coverage for you, they have done a damn fine job persuading the journalist that it’s a story worth covering. The relationship between journalist and PROs hasn’t changed that much, it’s just evolved to keep apace with 21^st century comms channels.

Once a upon a time, it was hard to get a spoken sentence out of a teenager, so perhaps this current online phenomenon is just an extension of the more traditional trend. However, I do believe (maybe with rather rose tinted spectacles you may argue) that at least teenagers could string a sentence together on paper when required in the ‘good old days’.

Feeling Facebook frustrated I ‘Googled’ the topic and found this article in The Telegraph bitly.com/932q93 .

Last year, Jean Gross, the new Children’s Communication Tsar, was warning that a generation of teenagers who communicate via the Internet and by text messages are risking unemployment because their daily vocabulary consists of just 800 words.

Apparently, while they know an average of 40,000 words, they tend to favour a “teenspeak” used in text messages, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and in internet chat rooms like MSN.

One poll, commissioned by Tesco, revealed that while children had the vocabulary to be articulate, the top 20 words they used – including the Vicky Pollard lexicon of “yeah”, “no” and “but” – accounted for about a third of all the words they used.

Jean Gross was planning to launch a nationwide campaign to ensure children use their full language potential.

You only have to look at Facebook posts like – “I cnt uno at work n they took fb off cos I keep goin on it lol” – and hope that the current Government is also doing something about this. By the way, if anyone can explain exactly what that sentence I quoted from Facebook means, I’d be most grateful. I do get the gist, but quite frankly I’d stand more chance of fully understanding Mandarin.

Facebook, email, texting etc is now so ubiquitous that for many teenagers it’s the most common way to communicate and they have grown up thinking that this is normal. Perhaps amongst their peers it is, but I cannot help worrying that as they emerge onto the job market many of them will fail to adapt how they communicate with the rest of us grumpy old sods.

You only have to read my blogs to know that I am no guardian angel of the Queen’s English, but I do worry about how the next generation of prospective PR and marketing employees will cope in the real world. Or perhaps we’ll all speak like this in twenty years time. If we do, I am booking a one-way ticket to Switzerland.

I have now stepped off of my soap-box!

The effusive Barry Scott couldn’t do better – ‘bang, and the recession has gone’!

Yet another example of why marketing activities like PR shouldn’t be cut during tough times. I’m pleased to see that in this instance there’s proof of a direct correlation between upping marketing spend and increasing profits. When times are tough, it’s no good not trying to shout the loudest to get the few people that are buying doing so from you rather than the competition.

And who better to conclude this blog than Bill Gates, who apparently said: “If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations.” Wise man!