Immodium, Pollution and the Silk Market in Beijing

So i'm now in my second week of learning Mandarin in Beijing. It's coming along well, by no means will I be anywhere near fluent by the end of this 3 week shindig, but I should finally be capable of asking for Immodium without resorting to visual depictions. This is especially handy when the only English label of any container in the pharmacy read "Lamb Placenta".

The food here is becoming a problem, it's too cheap, nice and greasy. A most lethal combination. I'm bulking up quite nicely. Exercise of any sort is difficult too, Beijing is usually covered in a thick smog which keeps the heat in and makes it hard to breathe. It was not until today that we finally saw the sun through the smog for the first time. The shockingly visual level of pollution has surprised me most. You can see it nearly all the time. Sometimes the smog is so thick that it's impossible to see buildings just 100m down the road.

Yesterday a few of us went into the infamous 'silk market' as tepid negotiating amateurs, and emerged hard-nose vultures. Truthfully, the naivety of some of the students here amazes me. I hear frequent comments like "I negotiated these [fake] Nike Trainers from over 1000 Yuan down to 100!". No-one seems overly concerned they're still only worth 20 so long as they negotiated a great deal.

I think it's arrogant to feel smarter than those selling in the silk market. I assume that anyone that spends nearly every waking hour of nearly every day negotiating with westerners looking for good deals on fake clothes is going to sell at whatever they price they like. Generally, if you want to pay 50 Yuan for trainers you will only pay 50 Yuan for trainers, but you'll have to stand there and banter for about fifteen minutes as the seller very gradually reduces the price. This is the concept that they all get, they bargain their prices against the resource Westerners care about a lot.

Of course to get that price you'll have to endure flirtation, insults, and perhaps begging. It can be tricky to pursue lower prices when you're told "but I have to eat tonight".

It was tricky getting back from the silk market last night. Our return coincided with the biggest storm Beijing has seen in a few months. When we tried to get a taxi back to the hotel we were told by shrewd economist taxi drivers "No meter! 200 Yuan". The same taxi back usually costs 15 Yuan (roughly 1 pound). So we decided to sit down under some shelter and get a coffee...

Sitting Down: 100 Yuan.

I can only speculate how much prices will rise during next year's Olympic games.

Ni Hao!

'Ni Hao' my flooded and not so flooded friends back in the UK.

Things are progessing quickly here in Beijing, we've now started 5 hours of very intensive Mandarin classes a day. Given the limited time available, it's tricky for the teachers to keep students from such a wide variety of Universities (which induct students upon academic gifts) to keep going at such a speed.

I'm finding Mandarin a healthy challenge, my mouth and tongue need to combine to make sounds i've never had to make before. So it's never dull.

I've also been given my Chinese name. Mi Rui Cheng "Lucky Success"

I'm guessing "Top Gun" was taken.

Living a dream, just 16 years too late...

It's 12:56pm and our coach back to the hotel leaves in just 4 minutes. I'm standing at the highest point of the Great Wall of China (which, as far as walls go, isn't too shabby).

There is simply no way we can make it back to the coach in time. Or so we believed until we stumbled upon a beautiful construction of infant dreams. Amongst their greatest wisdom the Chinese had seen fit to build a humongous slide all the way to the bottom.

Barring an Olympian-sized scalectrix-track around the great wall (which judging by this huge slide might be a faint possibility), this is as happy as tiny tots and 'big kids' like myself can be.

What a ride, the slide took approximately 3 minutes to get from the top to the bottom. How perfect is that?

Pity about the 30-minute queue though.

I'm in Beijing, China

Hi everyone.

Just a quick note to say that i'm in China until August 10th. So don't expect too much blogging here. Oddly enough I can make posts, but can't view my own blog. Censorship perhaps?

I'll be spending these three weeks learning Mandarin thanks to a funding program from DfES.

So far, i've been very impressed with this city.

Wish I could write more but this cafe is closing soon.

Bye!

Will PR move in on Digital Biography territory

I spotted a piece on BBC News about the quickly evolving profession of Digital Biographers. These are people who undertake, say, Social Networking on behalf of a busy person. Generally, such people are needed when a busy-business type recognises the potential benefits, or even necessity of social media, but can't find the extra hour or 3 a day to get involved themselves.

So they hire others to do it for them. It's not new, politicians and even some celebs must have been doing it for a long time now. It's just now spreading into the business world in a way which could see PR agencies moving in and offering digital biography as a service to clients.

Here's a quote:

"People expect me to have a profile on all the social networks - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn," he explains. "I've got 12,000 connections on LinkedIn, 8,000 on Ecademy and now 500 on Facebook.

"I get up to 500 messages a day on the networks - and that's before my e-mail. It is very time-consuming, so I have to outsource it."

Ethically, it's going to split people. However, it's hypocritical to be in favour of any form of ghost-writing and not in favour of ghost-blogging or ghost-anything. Whether this will ever be called digital biography is unlikely.

David Petherick charges £369 just to carry out what he calls a "profile makeover" but there is no shortage of demand.

Public Relations? Really?

How many people working in PR ever physically speak to any members of the publics they're trying to influence?

How can PR teams respond to bomb threats?

The Tesco PR team have got a curveball to deal with at the moment.

Someone has been calling in bomb threats to Tescos stores.

Naturally, Tesco evacuated all stores and alerted the police. Presently it is thought that these calls did not originate from extremist groups, but more likely disgruntled stakeholders.

So how do you work that story? How do you convince your customers that your stores are safe, and explain why someone is so upset with Tescos they would go as far as phoning in bomb threats that cost the company millions of pounds.

Perhaps, speculatively, how would you handle the issue if it had been from an extremist groups, if terrorists did begin targeting the UK's largest employer. How could you possibly convince the public that your cheap prices are worth customers risking their lives?

Why I used to write rubbish press releases

The first few press releases I ever wrote, were terrible. They were filled with superlatives, one actually used the phrase "the uk's leading...", and they contained plenty of industry jargon. The problem was that I really wanted to write good press releases and hit the ground running at my placement.

So before I started my PR placement, I read about 20 or so press releases from the PR Newswire service. I noted how they were written, the tone they adopted, the similarities and common phrases amongst them.

In short, I picked up a bad habit by studying press releases. My error was to assume that the majority of the industry would be good at writing press releases. One of my first posts here was on this very topic.

I got better, quickly, largely thanks to advice on PR blogs, notably Richard Bailey, Matthew Stibble, Copy Blogger and BadPitch Blog.

It's natural then that people come into PR with a view that press releases ought to be dull, corp-speak. Which means that I really shouldn't be surprised that PRs and journos are slamming press releases again. GettingInk has written two highly readable posts about headlines in press releases. Meanwhile Stephen Waddington has actually got an intern to count common words in 150 press releases. 68 from 150 releases used the word 'best', many had a headline longer than 30 words.

Have to pity the poor intern given that task though.

Some ammunition for PR pros to suggest social media campaigns to clients

David Wilson has blogged about a Social Media expirement where someone was paid $10 an hour to undertake social media work for an entire year. This person brought in 93,207 hits over the course of a year, whereas Google Adwords brought in 2,057 visitors.

In summary, Social Media Optimisation visitors cost $0.04 each, compared with the $61 from Adwords.

Pretty nice figures huh?

So why is this important?

This is important because it gives PR agencies some ammunition to suggest social media campaigns to clients. Rather asking for retainer fees in exchange for press releases, fire-fighting, feature pitches, it could instead be a retainer for engaging with communities to bring traffic to a website. That's even a measurable result, something that most PR isn't.

It also demonstrates that there is a growing market for people who know to get engage in online communities. Is this a market for PR? For marketers? For a new breed of community managers?

Read David's post, it's important.

Your dream PR agency

I've recently finished reading Seth Godin's Purple Cow. By no means a new book, but one that's been sitting on my shelf now for a good six months. I'd recommend anyone on a marketing-related degree to read.

It's got me thinking, how could you create a Purple Cow PR agency? Here in Cheltenham for example, there are plenty of PR agencies that try to stand out by being regional, and in doing so they blend perfectly with every other agency.

So think, if you owned your own company and had to design your dream PR agency for your business, what would it be like? Here are a few ideas:

• Charged by hits achieved, not by the hours spent "developing relationships with journalists".
  
• Your work was only handled by senior staff members
  
• Offered plenty of free advice and ideas to improve the public image of your business
  
• Could easily introduce you to key contacts (both journalists and WOM advocates) within your specific industry
  
• Agency members were respected figures within your industry

Any other ideas?

The World's Leading Competition

One of my biggest fans, TWL, is holding a competition in association with Edelman.

"Competition entry requirements could not be simpler. We’re after essays of up to 600 words on the future of the UK PR industry and, specifically, the role that PR will play in the world of social networks, user-generated content and all things online.

Take as wide or as narrow a view as you’d like; sector-specific or general; conservative or entirely outlandish; serious or, umm, not so. There are two categories: one for those of you aged 27 or under and one for everyone else. The only other rule is that you must be working in PR (agency, in-house or freelance) or a student of PR. That’s it.

Well, almost. The deadline for your entries is August 31st 2007."

Sounds like a good opportunity for a young PR pro to get noticed by one of the world's biggest PR agencies.

What would you like my dissertation to be about?

My University results came out today:

A - Press and Publicity
A - International Marketing
A - Research Methods
B - Marketing Communications

..and i'm disappointed.

But only because my Marketing Comms was a hideous 1% from being an A. I scored 80% on the coursework and foundered upon the exams. It's always the revision that gets me, I just can't face the prospect of re-reading the same units of text until they're engraved to memory. The problem is that memorising Kanter's six corporate PR principles isn't about to make me any better at PR. But then the PR degree debate belongs elsewhere.

Anyhow, it's a good semester and puts me on course for a First degree.

Time to think about the dissertation

Now I'm searching for a dissertation topic. It can be almost anything within the field of Marketing. Social media would be an obvious choice, or at least a niche within social media. But i'm open to any suggestions.

So, dearest readers, is there anything in social media that needs exploring over the next 8 months?