Simon Collister, PhD

Strategy + Consulting

Posts

Old dog. New tricks?

by simoncollister 2 Comments

Finally PR Week columnist, Kate Nicholas, wakes up to the reality that media/PR is being changed by the web. In her weekly opinion piece Nicholas discusses the possible impact of blogging and citizen journalism on PR. The article, Blogging revolution will force change in PR (could be subscription only), is a nice plug for Julia Hobsbawm’s new effort, Editorial Intelligence (or simply ‘ei’ if you’re part of the right set – maybe I’ll come back to ‘ei’ at some point in the future), but it drew conclusions that I a) hadn’t really thought about and b) ought to bring some happiness to PR practitioners.

Nicholas concludes that in a few years time media relations as we know it will cease to exist. Nothing new there. Both Philip Young and Tom Murphy used almost identical slides at the Sunderland conference (I wonder if they conferred before the Manchester one!) to illustrate the death of PR.

But her view is that it is the ‘media’ element that will disappear from ‘media relations’ rather than the ‘relations’ side-of-things ie PR. She writes that in the future, PR practitioners will still be around but selling their stories DIRECT to the consumer via blogs. It is the journalist who will become redundant!

This, I’m fairly confident, seems to turn on its head current ‘New PR’ thinking whereby companies etc can blog or podcast their way to media coverage. This may be a rather simplistic view of the situation, but personally I find it immensely interesting that I took such a PR-centric view of the the changing dynamic between PRO, journalist and the internet. I can only assume that Nicholas is doing exactly the same from her perspective as a columnist, but this perspective, for me at least, muddies the water as to the future of PR in an online age. I was blindly convinced that in a few years time it would be me as a former PRO out of a job and begging to be allowed a go at journalism rather than the other way around. There may be hope for us yet!

Winter Olympics representing fragmenting media?

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

I have just read the latest post by the god-like Jeff Jarvis. It was Jeff’s sporadic column in Media Guardian that whet my appetite for new media and made me delve deeper into the seismic shifts happening in media and, by extension, PR.

However, I made a promise to myself when starting this blog that I wouldn’t let myself get too carried away with how much the world around is being changed overnight by blogs and podcasts. Don’t get me wrong, important areas of the media and society are being re-fashioned with new values and contexts as we speak but sometimes we in the blogosphere can overlook the bigger picture.

Jeff’s post suggests that low viewing figures and relative disinterest for the Winter Olympics in the US represents the fragmentation of ‘traditional’ media channels and the ubiquity of information through the web which mean that the concept of the ‘Big Event’ no longer exists.

I like his ideas but my instincts tell me that the Winter Olympics have never been the big draw in the way the summer games are, plus there may the issue of timing with live events not being suited to prime time audiences. For instance I can’t even remember there being a football World Cup in 1994, but there was. With the event held in the US live event timings were up the spout (although I was only 14!).

Add to that the fact that some of the American skiing/snowboarding competitors represent a self-styled collective that has rejected the official American Olympic delegation and there is more than just the issue of media fragmentation to consider.

A footnote might be how media fragmentation has helped make the winter games more accessible. I know, for instance, that what isn’t shown live on BBC1 or  2 might be televised on BBC freeview or failing that via the BBC’s website.

But Jeff is still god-like in my opinion!

Four things meme

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

I’ve been tagged by blogger Karen Bruce, who also happens to be the wife of PR Guru Stuart Bruce – he of small world shock syndrome (SWSS). This means that I am honour bound to follow suit and post potentially embarassing facts about myself. One thing worries me though: as this tag is a meme I hope I dont start meeting people at conferences who know my four favourite holiday destinations… or worse still I meet people at my top holiday destinations who have intentionally travelled there to see me. That’s too much!

Anyway:

Four jobs I’ve had:
Behind the counter in a newsagents
Charity grant administrator
British Council language assistant
Press/PR officer

Four movies I can watch over and over:
La Haine
Beverly Hills Cop 1 (for the soundtrack if nothing else!)
Doctor Zhivago
Top Gun

Four tv shows I love to watch:
Midsomer Murders
Brasseye
Time  Team (!)
Armando Iannucci’s Time Trumpet (watch out for this… Spring 2006)

Four places I’ve visited on holiday:
Malaga (actually very nice!)
Evian (for the water!)
Dublin (not for the water!)
Bologna

Four favourite dishes:
Sarah’s mexican extravaganza
Fish and chips
Bacon sandwich
Any pasta or pizza in Italy

Four places I’ve lived
Isle of Man
York
Groningen (Netherlands)
Bottomboat

Four sites I visit frequently
BBC
www.theresearchgogpop.co.uk (shameless plug)
bank/credit card (sadly)
Hotmail

Four places I’d rather be
Morocco
Reykjavik
At home
in fact…. anyway hot and sunny right now!

Elizabeth Albrycht
Tom Murphy
The good people at Audacious
Neville Hobson

Double edged sword

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

I heard a report on R4 this morning about a group of MPs warning the Government it has 10 years to save the high-street from the demise of small retailers. The story is in the Times and Guardian as well.

Now this made me smile. Only last month the BBC and Times were railing against the influence of business and lobbyists on parliament. The crux of their argument was the number of All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) being given support – or effectively being run – by lobbying firms/trade bodies.

One of the featured groups in The Times’s expose was the APPG on Small Shops which has secretarial support provided, allegedly, by a lobbying firm hired by the Independent Retailers Consortium (IRC).

You can see where this led. Some APPGs, according to The Times, were using lobbyists to front seemingly independent groups of MPs to draft reports and ultimately implement change policy.

Well, today’s report comes from the same-self APPG, which of course warns the Government that unless action is taken to curb high-street giants, then small shops (ie the same shops represented by the IRC) will become extinct. Still with me?

What I like to see is the media, who a month ago were complaining about the ‘misuse’ of APPGs and calling for urgent reforms to the system, are now happily reporting the group’s findings as impartial facts. Not one article I have seen refers to the process and environment in which this report was developed!

Don’t get me wrong, I have been involved in APPG groups in the past and the majority are sound tools for raising important issues at a national/parliamentary level and I’m sure today’s report is fundamentally accurate. But if PR people/lobbyists are expected to abide by one set of rules, then shouldn’t the media?

Told you so…

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Now I’m no soothsayer, but the other day I flippantly asked how long before Google buys up a mobile phone company? Well, it’s not quite a purchase but today’s Sun has a story on its City page entitled: ‘We’ll put ALL the net on your mobile’ about Google entering into partnership with Vodafone. The piece says that later this year Vodafone will offer users full access to the web through a direct link to Google via a phone’s ‘desktop’. Currently Google’s mobile service only offers limited access. Does this link to my previous post that phones are simply add-ons to the all-em[powering internet? I welcome thoughts from others on this.

The Sun’s article concludes that as data transfer via the internet is getting cheaper mobile operators are under threat. Today’s annoucement is, to quote the Sun’s punchy prose, an ‘escape route’! Told you so.