Learning quickly and earning quickly

I'm rapidly learning that mastering new technologies for marketing purposes is the easiest way to get freelance work at my age.

I can't believe that University doesn't teach any of this, nor why so many students aim so low when looking for part-time jobs.

Timothy Ferriss: The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9 - 5, Live Anywhere, And Join the New Rich

Tim is a clever marketer and has fully managed to get the blogosphere buzzing about this book. It's easy to see why, it tells people what they want to hear. That working less, earning more and living a satisfying life IS possible.

This book bills itself as a step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design. Luxury lifestyle design is about sitting down and deciding what you want from life. Tim wants to travel, learn languages and fight at a competitive level. From these early decisions you work out how much it will cost, in terms of cash flow. Then you set about finding ways to earn that money.

In short, you don’t need to be a millionaire to live the millionaire lifestyle. You just need to know what you want, and then begin setting step by step goals to getting that. Because by the time you’ve retired, it’s too late.

The Good

This is a very resourceful book. It inspires the idea and belief that people don’t have to be a slave to 9 till 5 labour. It offers alternative and innovative ways of saving money, thinking what you want from life, and getting more work done. The chapters on liberation from the office environment might also work for a lucky few.

For those willing to start their own company this book offers great advice. How to cut corners, source products, test products, marketing, advertising and much more.

It’s also packed with practical and almost instantly applicable advice. For busy managers it could easily save them a lot of time simply by applying the 80/20 rule and considering Parkingson’s law.

The Bad

The argument is suspect. Tim’s own company, Bodyquicken, has a very suspect website and it’s not such great PR for his company, especially the “how to be an expert in 4-weeks” chapter. Also, this book makes several assumptions through Tim’s own perspective. For example, this book presumes that people aren’t content and happy with their current jobs and arrangements. It assumes that everybody reading the book wants to work less, travel more and have “mini-retirements”. The whole purpose of the book is related to achieving those aims. Those that enjoy their jobs and like the social and challenging environments the workplace can create will find this book rather redundant.

Also the world could have lived without Tim’s interpretation of the Meaning of Life. Especially pg284 – 285 where he claims to have received an enlightening e-mail poem written by a terminally ill girl in a New York hospital, titled “Slow Dance”. I hope David Weatherford (who did write the poem) doesn’t press copyright charges.


Worth buying?

This is still a book worth reading, not for the philosophy and overall message of the book, but for the giblets of time-saving ideas and resources Tim offers.

A recruitment video that makes great PR

A friend of mine at Justgiving pointed this out to me. I've never wanted to work for a company so badly.



Great PR for Connected Ventures and they have no shortage of people offering to work for them. You do kind of wonder who's running the place mind.

Kudos: nfp 2.0.

Early Summer PR debates

I love summer. For students it usually means getting a 9 - 5 retail job and saving up some money for the next semester. I’m fortunate that I work on writing/marketing/entrepreneurial projects from my bedroom in my own time. So find myself with more freedom to pursue my own interests. As previously mentioned, I’m not doing a lot of PR work, so I’m bloggging less. However there has been some interesting PR-related posts in the past few weeks.

• Copyblogger - Do you believe in what you're selling?
  Roberta Rosenburg discusses if copywriters need to believe in what they're selling. Very relevant to PR. Do PR execs need to believe in their products? What if you don't? Personally i've always felt it is the responsibility of those above me to make ME believe in the product before I try to make others believe.
  
  
• The Future of PR is Participation, Not Pitching
  Steve Rubel outlines the future for PR execs. Perhaps the best advice from this is to pick an industry you want to work in, and begin participating within that community BEFORE you enter PR. Build up your own blog within that industry, network in it, participate on the bloggers of others. This will give you significant leverage when you apply for a job.
  
  
• The brand that saved baseball
  Seth Godin: change the rules of sponsorship, and you will find better sponsorship opportunities.
  
  
• A Manifesto for the 21st Century Public Relations Firm
  Grab a coffee, turn off the PC, get comfy and give this a read.
  
  
• Duct Tape Marketing - My Daughters Are So Pissed
  Facebook offers so much potential to small business marketers.
  
  
• Scanning
  Stephen Davis, now up the M1, makes some observations I couldn't agree more with. So many bloggers are blogging so often to become experts in their field. This makes it ever more difficult to keep up. Expect more niches to appear.

Pick the right week for your client

Did you know that it is National Microchipping month? National Microchipping Month is organised by the Kennel Club to "Highlight the importance of microchipping as a means of permanent identification and ensuring customers details are up to date in the holiday season". A most noble goal indeed. One might dubiously suggest that this event could be an ideal opportunity to promote their own microchipping products.

Sadly National Microchipping month is battling hard for attention, it is also Everyman Male Cancer Awareness Month and First Feet for Animals Month. And these are just the organisations battling for June as a month. When you look at this week the competition for our attention becomes even more fierce.

This week is Homeopathy Awareness Week, Architecture Week, Motor Neurone Disease Awareness Week, Bike Week, National Childminding Week, Learning Disability Week, Mad Hatter's Week, Refugee Week and Child Safety Week. That's a fair few organisations that have staked a claim on this week.

Perhaps just aiming to conquer a single day is the best to get attention, it's only World Refugee Day Today.

There are three points to make about all this.

1) It is very useful to stay abreast of upcoming events, even those organised by other organisations. Journalists are far more inclined to write about your Childminding products during childminding week. It is a way of making untopical clients, suddenly topical. I used to get some good hits through this.

2) Is it worthwhile making your own week? If your client sells burglar alarms is it worthwhile to suddenly create "Home Safety Awareness Week" or "Burglar Alarm week"? Consider who else is staking claim to your week.

3) Is the mass number of weeks claimed by so many different organisations making all these events and weeks a little redundant?

Note: Count Me In offers a good comprehensive list of events.

I'm going to spend three weeks in Beijing

This is a great way to celebrate my 200th blog post. I've won a place to study in Beijing for three weeks this summer. Over 1200 people applied for 200 DfES funded places, so i'm quite pleased to be going.

The classes will take place for either one morning or afternoon a day at Beijing Normal University, with the rest of the time given to optional activities (Tai Ji, Calligraphy, cultural trips) or pursuing our own interests. I will thus be away from July 18 to August 9th, so don't expect too much blogging during this time.
I'm hoping, aside from the obvious perks of this trip of meeting new people and exploring new cultures, that this really is a well taught course to helping us to make the most of a great opportunity.

The timings are tight. I have until Monday to send through confirmation that I have booked the tickets, and then less than a month to sort out VISAs, vaccinations and other arrangements. So two busy months ahead.

Getting caught spinning discs

Noticed this quote:

"Just one week ago the North American HD DVD Promotional Group issued a media release broadcasting that HD DVD "HD DVD is significantly ahead in the dedicated consumer electronics player market with 60% of all high definition set-top players sold." However, the announcement that the Blockbuster video store chain will stock only Blu-ray titles in its remaining 1200 stores after an initial 500-store trial exposes HD DVD spin for what it is."

Why lie? Consumers are much smarter than those in these marketing/PR professions give them credit for. When do we cross the line from being a savvy consumer to snobby marketers?

Bud.TV

Why do beer companies usually get it so right?

Generation Y: Time to get some satisfaction

If I wanted to read a book telling me everything I wanted to hear, I would read Brazen Careerist. After writing about Penelope Trunk last month I dropped her an e-mail asking if she had any review copies going spare. This is the review.

I still can’t make my mind up about it. It’s either a dangerous book telling me to do everything I want because “Generation Y has changed the rules” or it’s the most essential career advice I’ve ever come across. I’m going to assume the latter, but I’m biased.

Essentially this is street-smart 21st century career advice, most of the stuff that Universities wont tell you. The key theme of the book is that us generation Y types aren't as concerned about money as us parents. Money, is important, only to ensuring we can meet life’s necessities, after that we need to pursue career and life satisfaction, and this comes in many different ways.

This book is divided into 45 easily digestible chunks of advice, each lasting roughly 3 pages. My favourite three chapters of the book are those on Starting Your Own Business, Don't Be the Hardest Worker and Getting a Promotion Is So Last Century. Largely because these are the three that might best apply to me. Which brings me to a big praise of the Brazen Careerist. What this book nails down, more impressively than anything else I’ve come across, is exactly what I WANT TO DO.

• Put the job hunt on hold to travel? Hell yes!
  
• Start my own company in my 20s? Sounds great!
  
• Change jobs 8 times before I’m 30? Sure, why not

There is also some dick-dastardly controversial stuff here. The sexual harassment sections will spark a fair bit of debate. In fact, i'm suspicious that the whole chapter on sexual harassment is rather irrelevant and only included for the purposes of courting publicity for the book, especially targeting female readers.

This book has two other minor drawbacks. The first, is that it is naturally targeted towards American readers, not just by language, but some of the advice is not directly transferable to UK readers. The second is that there is that it is highly critical of the career opportunities available to those working for in internal PR for large corporations. Penelope might well be right, but I couldn't write a review for a PR blog without mentioning it.

I have read a fair few business books so far this year, none though are as directly applicable to my life as the Brazen Careerist.

Also check out Penelope's career blog.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PR PLACE!

Happy birthday dear blog.

This blog is now one year old and is very unlikely to last another year. Primarily because Blogger is inexcusably rubbish for what I want to do with a blog, so I'll be moving this over to my typepad account. And also, because PR is too broad a topic for a blog these days. Thus in the near future I'm going to launch a "marketing to students' blog. I might keep this blog going, but certainly nowhere near the volume of posts seen in my first year.

Looking over how some other bloggers have commemorated their first year of blogging, it’s common practice to highlight your favourite 5 – 10 posts. How cliché. Instead I’m going to highlight what I believe are my five worst posts. It certainly hasn't been easy, there have been some wonderful stinkers. However after a careful consultation process, I've narrowed it down to these five.

• The insomniacs playground
  A rather pointless debate about insomnia which began nowhere, went nowhere and finished nowhere.
  
  
• Agency life
  A post that manages to make the rather exciting experience of working in a regional PR agency, sound suicidally dull.
  
  
• Automatic, systematic, hydromatic
  An utterly unfunny account about my life which concluded by mocking a client. Dumb.
  
  
• 'English' English in Lithuania
  I succeed in upsetting the inhabitants of my girlfriend's home country. Dumber.
  
  
• Clients should be getting more for their money
  I make a lot of women (and TWL) very angry by suggesting PR has been eroded by feminism. An unemployably silly post.

London 2012 Olympics logo

This is the new £400k London 2012 Olympics logo unveiled by Sebastian Cole today.

International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said: "This is a truly innovative brand logo that graphically captures the essence of the London 2012 Olympic Games - namely to inspire young people around the world through sport and the Olympic values."

These are a few of the logos designed in less than two hours by BBC News readers.




What would you pick?

Too much pressure on big agency execs?

Getting Ink notes this poor use of e-mail from a big tech PR agency.

So, this hack has started receiving calls from one or two of the bigger tech agencies saying: "I noticed you deleted that email without reading it. Can I ask why?"

[...]I can well understand the temptation to call some muppet journalist who has missed the story of the Century by deleting your precious press release - but is this really likely to increase the chances of getting coverage? Is it going to further your relationship with the publication? Thought not.

Why do we continue to misuse all the tools we're given?

I would guess that the PR types from big agencies which make these calls are under a great deal of pressure to follow up every press release they send out and produce a report detailing if it was used (and it's publication date), or why it wasn't used. Putting "press release was deleted before it was read" doesn't make for a good report.

Is the pressure on execs in larger agencies really so great that they need to ignore their instincts and make these calls?

McCanns appoint PR advisor to find missing daughter

It has been revealed that Kate and Gerry McCann will appoint a paid advisor in preparation for an "advanced publicity strategy" to find missing Madeleine.

For those outside the UK or unfamiliar with the story, Madeleine McCann vanished from a Portuguese villa (presumably taken) on the 3rd May 2007 whilst her parents ate at a nearby restaurant. This abduction has since received widespread publicity including a call for donations which has raised £400,000. The paid advisor will be paid from the £400,000 donated by the McCanns by the public across Europe.

There are a lot of issues here. Plenty of children are abducted every day, but why don't they receive similar publicity? Why is a fund needed, aren't the police forced to do this anyway? When do the McCanns awareness visits through Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany and Morocco etc soon going to be perceived as free holidays? Is this publicity having an adverse effect? If she's still alive it certainly limits the options open to her captor(s).

Regardless, the biggest problem facing this publicity advisor is that there is very little news coming from the investigation. For the first three weeks the McCanns were able to gain publicity purely by stating how upset they were or saying they were "encouraged" by any new development. Now the attention is dying down.

So without developments in the investigation the publicity manager is going to have the job on their hands to create new story angles and generate publicity. It's not going to be easy. At the same time the publicity manager also needs to continue raising donations so s/he can continue to be paid.

Is this laying the groundwork for future police investigations? Whereby rather than relying upon the police, the victims turn to PR managers to get what they want?

Consider it, someone steals your car, rather than relying on the police you embark on a PR campaign to find the culprit. As Philip Young noted a while back, we are setting a dangerous precedent for ourselves.

Offending sensibilities as a PR tactic

Most might have already heard about this reality TV show in the Netherlands. The premise of the show is that a terminally ill female patient has to choose between three people who to give her kidney to.

It's shocking, outrageous, and a frightening glimpse of the ethics-shirking direction that reality TV is taking. But the show creators had a twist (no, she wasn't born a man).

Just as the terminally ill lady was about to announce her decision, the presenter revealed that she was an actress, and that the three involved really do need a kidney donation and were aware of this from a start. The show was to highlight the number of people in the Netherlands which need organ donations to survive.

Personally, if they wanted to draw as much attention to the issue as possible, they have succeeded admirably. It's an idea that is reflective of society, mocking of reality TV attention, and drew comments from the highest echelons of the nation's government. They turned disgust at the show and contemporary culture into a huge PR coup in seconds - and I bet they did it with the night's highest television ratings too.

Ethically, it's rocky ground. Do the ends justify the means? Can you trample over people's sensitivities for a 'good' cause? If I'm putting my opinion on the block, then I think yes. I think this is a very valid attempt to get your 'good cause' message out there in a very noisy market.

Expensive press stunts are a waste of money

I think that expensive press stunts are a waste of money which could be better spent on other PR activities. Whilst the quantity of coverage can be extensive, the type and quality of the coverage of poor. I'm riffing a bit on what TWL covered a few weeks back here.

Here’s my case study. Some time ago I reported about a PR pro from who was accompanying Rod Baber on his trip up Mount Everest to make the world’s highest mobile phone call. This was a PR stunt by Edelman for Motorola.

I can’t begin to fathom how resource intensive this trip must have been. But did Motorola really benefit from it?

Chances are that Edelman can show their client a lovely selection of cuttings in many major media outlets. Certainly Justin seems more than satisfied. But of those cuttings how many mention Motorola in a substantial light?

Looking at some of the online news articles now, I see that some publications haven’t mentioned Motorola at all when covering the story. Baber, probably advised by the client, was even smart enough to mention Motorola within the text message: “One small text for man, one giant leap for mobilekind - thanks Motorola”

In some cases this stunt has generated negative publicity, emphasizing the distressed caused by people taking mobile phones everywhere.

• Daily Telegraph - Is this really the type of coverage Motorola need?
  
• The Times - does this coverage really help increase sales? Note: Look at second comment – genius.
  
• Daily Mail - Mentions of Motorola, but is it in the manner that is really going to make me buy a Motorola phone?
  
• BBC News - Two mentions of Motorola, was it worth it?
  
• ABC News - extra kudos here for deliberately omitting the Motorola part of the text message.
  
• The Sun

Disclaimer: Just noticed that Rod Baber is quite local to me and runs a company called Head 4 Heights – which is a competitor to a former apt client.