It goes on to name business people like Manchester City deal maker Amanda Staveley, Viscount Weymouth and super businesswoman Nicola Horlick as notable recipients of PR advice for which they pay a hefty fee by all accounts and reasonable assumptions.

The inference is these are canny business professional folk and part of their business acumen is shown by their hiring of top level PRs.

The fees are immaterial because they add value and get business results.

By extension I sense the further inference that personal branding through PR is not really a consideration for those who are not “celebrity” business professionals.

Personal PR should be considered by good professionals across many sectors.  You don’t have to be a multi-millionaire or be connected to a royal family of some hue.

No, good professionals, be they lawyers, finance, architects or for that matter any sector should be looking to raise and cultivate their personal reputation through the media for their business and careers.

It is not a preserve of those with big budgets, indeed many company marketing and PR budgets should cover the fees.

In these harder more competitive times surely professionals with a little acumen should be engaging with PR to gain a competitive advantage for their company and their careers.

Stockport legal practice Belshaws Solicitors will become part of QualitySolicitors when they rebrand in April as it looks to further connect with the local community.

The practice, located on Greek Street, will take on the distinctive magenta and black identity to further show its commitment to providing high quality legal services.

The practice will be known as QualitySolicitors Belshaws.

The QualitySolicitors brand is only given to one legal practice in any given town or area and the firm is hoping this will give confidence to those that can benefit from legal advice but are perhaps unsure of how to proceed.

This latest launch of a new QualitySolicitors firm will take the number of locations to nearly 350.  The brand is moving closer to its goal of providing the first national “household name” for legal services.

Belshaws in conjunction with the rebrand is undertaking a range of initiatives designed to help members of the public connect and understand the legal industry and access legal help where wanted.

The firm already operates a very popular drop-in evening legal surgery that offers free first consultations.

The firm is also set to offer four, two week, internships to local students looking to gain work experience over the summer holidays.

Peter Belshaw who heads up the practice with his wife Andrea comments: “We want to make using a solicitor as familiar and easy as dropping into your local bank or opticians.”

Belshaws, which was established in 1995, offers family, personal injury, motoring, criminal and personal law services such as wills and probate.

Andrea Belshaw comments: “We want local people and businesses to know that there are quality local alternatives to trying to find a city centre practice.  Our rebranding under the QualitySolicitors name is one way we are showing that legal services can be accessible, friendly and offer value.”

“Partisans have been announcing the death of SEO ever since the web was in nappies. Till now, reports have been premature. But thanks to Pandas and Penguins and other changes Chez Google, top internet marketers are less willing than ever to rely on natural search.

The reason is, SEO’s perennial limits have been exacerbated. The old problems of narrow scope and exposure to changing search trends have been joined by two new problems: personal search listings, and ever shifting goalposts.

It all adds up to crisis time for any site with all its eggs in the SEO basket.

Before we go any further, let’s take a quick look at each of those limitations:

Limit #1: Narrow Scope
As any good SEO knows, you can only optimise a given page for a handful of keywords. At best, you’ll rank for umpteen variations on the same phrase, but it’s unlikely that you’ll ever get one page to rank for every suitable variation.

Example: a courier agency has multiple segments, like ‘parcel courier’, ‘mail courier’, ‘international courier’, ‘same day courier’, ‘motorbike courier’ and so on. And each of those segments will attract dozens (maybe hundreds) of different searches, from regional variations to random phrasing. So e.g. ‘parcel courier’ opens up a whole niche, including ‘parcel courier + region’, ’24 hour parcel courier’, ‘cheap parcel courier’, ‘courier packages’ etc.

It’ll take a lot of work to get your ‘parcel courier’ page to show up for all those searches, plus the dozens of others that will emerge through detailed research. And that gives you three choices:
(a) use paid search to boost visitor numbers
(b) create sub-pages within every niche to target stray variations
(c) focus on the best opportunity and forget about the other searches

Limit #2: Changing Search Trends
SEO depends on the ‘fingers crossed’ belief that if 1000 people search for ‘xyz’ this month, then another 1000 will search for the same thing next month. Spookily, that theory does kind of work, albeit with a 20-30% shift up or down from one month to the next. But there are still two weaknesses:

What if demand ebbs and flows with the seasons…or worse still, the keyword just drops off the radar altogether?

Seasonal demand mainly hits the obvious victims, like ‘seaside holidays’, ‘sun cream’, ‘Christmas presents’, ‘Valentine cards’ etc. (But hopefully, if your business is seasonal, you have other irons in the fire for the rest of the year!)

But the outright drop-off factor can strike just about anywhere.

The biggest driver is innovation. When a new product hits the shelves, the old product name immediately loses popularity (except on eBay, Gumtree and co).

Plus there are economic, social and political forces at work, each with the power to wipe out search trends and make SEO efforts redundant. Prime example, we haven’t seen many searches for ‘100% mortgage’ in the last few years!

Of course, Limits #1 and #2 have always been there, and SEO bods have put up with them because of the untold advantages of getting free traffic from Google. But now we’ve got the two newbies…

Limit #3: Personal Listings
Google’s mission is to tailor its listings to individuals, based on available data like previous search habits and peer endorsements. That adds a whole new layer to SEO.

In its plainest form, it means that if Mrs Jones searches Google for your type of business, she’ll be more likely to see your listing if she’s been to your site before, or her social media contacts have given your page the thumbs up.

I spoke to some members of the Google crew about this recently, and the party line was they’ll only factor in ‘Plus 1’ endorsements through Google Plus – i.e. not Facebook ‘Likes’ or other votes through social platforms. How long that position will last, we don’t know, but I’d be loathe to take Facebook Liking out of the mix, especially if you want traffic from sources beyond Google.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is additional work and a lower addressable market. You have to jump through extra hoops (building a network of endorsers with your likely prospects in their circles) and still, you’ll get fewer listings, because inevitably competitors will touch the circles that you can’t.

Limit #4: Shifting Goalposts
The move towards personal listings has rewritten a slice of the rule book. Traditional link building is no longer the be all and end all. And that’s typical of how the goals are shifting month after month.

The latest example is anchor text. Till recently, it was deemed good practice to present links to your website through keyword-rich anchor text. So taking an example where you want to rank for “Children’s shoes”:

ABC Shoe Shop sells all kinds of children’s shoes

…would be more effective than a ‘naked link’, as in:

For children’s shoes, go to www.abcshoeshop.co.uk

But that’s (kind of) changed now. Google has recognised that too many webmasters have been exploiting anchor text, with the same anchor links repeated time and again across the web. So the key now is, make sure (1) all anchor links are uniquely worded, and (2) you’ve got more naked links than anchor links pointing to your site.

In fairness to Google, this was always best practice – they’re just doing more now to clamp down on offenders, and in some cases the penalties are likely to get heavy. But it’s all in the interests of improving the user experience, so we can’t cuss and moan about it. We just have to roll with the punches.

Still, it can hurt, especially if you’ve been badly advised in the past and acted in good faith using tactics that Google is starting to frown on or outlaw.

And the pain goes deeper, because this process will never come to an end. Google will always be tweaking the algorithm, to keep its users on cloud nine and stop the nasty black hat types who are hell bent on working the system for their own evil and spammy ends.

So where does it leave the ethical, quality business who just wants to do the right thing?
The best way to show up on Google is to follow their one guiding principle, that good quality content is the only thing that really matters. In other words, put the user first, instead of stuffing the page full of keywords – and don’t try to trick the search engines by plastering the web with badly placed or badly worded links. They’ll catch you out!

That said, there are still a few tactics. Using keywords in title tags, headings and sub-headings is as effective as ever, as is letting them fall naturally into the body text. And prompting endorsements through social pages can’t be a bad thing either. Just as long as everything happens naturally.

If they sense you’re overdoing it, pain will surely follow.

So back to the big question: has SEO had its day?
No. But it’s not the straight forward process it used to be. It’s not about ticking boxes then reaping the rewards, it’s about doing right by the reader in a way that’s a bit less tangible now.

And that has two consequences:

One – SEO is only worthwhile if you can take it on warts and all. That means putting in the investment of time and money to make it work, and accepting the delays and obstacles as an occupational hazard.

And two - it’s a brave decision to rely solely on SEO traffic. Play nicely and it will come, but it will take time and in the early days it will be harder than ever to forecast. So a mix of paid search and other traffic sources (especially social media) will be a sound security measure.

That’s my tuppence. What do you think?”

The talk will focus on:

• Managing priorities
• Working with limited resources for business improvement
• Having little time to work ‘ON’ the business rather than ‘IN’ it

The aims for this taster session are:

• to show how the order winning criteria and business constraints for any manufacturing business can be broken down into 10 key elements.
• to show how the combination of priorities and current performance levels of a business can form the cornerstone of a highly effective and strategic action plan, tailored to the needs of that specific business
• to stimulate the interest in making the prioritisation tool work for your manufacturing business

For further information please contact The Business Growth Hub on 0161 359 3050 or info@businessgrowthhub.com

Thanks to Mick Greer, advertising copy writer, Nigel Moore brand professional of Ten Communications and telemarketer Chris Harding of I am Telemarketing

This is a recent case study for Oil and Gas Job Search, a leading oil and gas jobsite servicing a worldwide client base.

Oil and Gas Job Search in conjunction with Hays Oil & Gas produce an annual salary survey based on the responses of oil and gas professionals and recruiters from around the world.

In 2010, 7,000 surveys were completed and used to compile the 30 page report covering not only wages but sentiment and confidence in the industry.  In 2012, it was 14,000, making it the most comprehensive guide available to the industry.

Artisan was tasked with promoting the guide in December 2010 as its potential to generate and raise profile within the industry had not been fully exploited.

The campaigns aims were to:

• Raise profile
• Generate additional online profile in Google searches
• Generate significant number of links from reputable and powerful sites
• Result in downloads of the guide from new registrations

The following deals with the 2012 campaign, which started in mid-February.

Artisan began the campaign by producing and writing specific releases by country and industry i.e. logistics, HSE and engineering.  Some 15 releases were produced over the Christmas period and into early January to ensure all parties had plenty of time to review and sign-off.

The campaign kicked off with key selected journalists at specified target  publications being personally contacted prior to the launch.  The list was in part selected on the basis on those that had covered the survey in 2011 or had shown an interest but had not run the story.

This resulted in newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and Scotsman using the Salary Guide as they had done a year previously, but also in newspapers such as Ted Daily Herald ( a Scottish national that had been interested in 2011 but had not gone further) doing a write-up of the salary survey.  Similarly, BBC Scotland had shown an interest in 2011 without going further, in 2012 there was a radio interview and a link from the BBC website.

This was followed up with press releases for a number of key group, which each had their own customised releases to address their interests, these included:

• General world release
• UK release
• Scottish local press (as Aberdeen is a key hub for the industry) to target areas where many oil professionals and recruiters live
• USA, Canada, Africa, Middle East, South America (translated into Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish), Australia (distributed with good results by Hays (who also did well for Singapore)), Netherlands and Norway.
• HSE, logistics, engineering, drilling engineers, graduates

Oil and Gas Job Search combined the PR by using blogs, LinkedIn and their own website to attract oil and gas professionals to download the guide.

The combined results were as follows:

• 152 pieces of coverage worldwide, with notably strong coverage in the UK, Middle East, US, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Australia and Norway
• Recruitment press covered the guide, such as onREC & The Recruiter as this is a key client target
• Over 50 links generated – the value of links can range from £50 up to £1500
• Over 60,000 guides to date downloaded
• Dominance for terms “oil and gas salary guide” and “oil and gas” in first 10 pages in Google, including first 5 listed on page one.
• Significant number (in the 10s of thousands) of new candidates registering

The increased brand strength, raised profile and the developing of the reputation of the client can also be factored in the analysing ROI.

This makes the Salary Guide a valuable PR tool that can make a significant contribution to being highly competitive in market that is not short of competition.

Pinterest has all the ingredients to become the next big thing for social media – the truth, and you don’t need to be a digital guru, is it is probably well on its way to becoming a stable of the social media world.

It is easy to use, easy to connect, fun (depending on your point of view) and has the potential to reach tens of  millions as it more widely adopted.

It can work for business, not just for PRs or marketers of consumer companies, but solid B2B PR.

If a business has a product that is demonstrative, can be shown visually, it can work.  Designers, architects, advertising agencies all spring to mind as being made for Pinterest.

And while businesses selling time, professional services essentially, might struggle, there will be some that could benefit (trainers for instance) providing their audiences are on Pinterest – a point that needs to be considered further.

But there are at present reasons why it might not be right for B2B, and here are some to consider:

Time – Social media is time consuming, it can be valuable but to do it well takes time.  If there is limited resource for a B2B company surely LinkedIn or Twitter might serve the business better than a new social media channel.

Tumbleweed – Pinterest is easy to set-up and get to grips with and so a new account can be set-up in a few minutes.  But the challenge of social media is to keep thing fresh with regular interesting content.

It is more harmful to start using a new social media channel, stop and leave a jaded looking account.  Having an extra social media site to maintain is an issue for all channels, LinkedIn as much as Pinterest.  But if you have a limited resource decisions have to be made and LinkedIn at this moment in time is a better option for most , not for all, businesses looking to improve their online marketing.

Copyright – How do you protect your content, how do others protect their content from your (innocent) indiscretions?  What are the legal consequences? There have been no major legal cases as of writing that I am aware of concerning Pinterest, but it is an issue that could dog businesses looking to really engage through Pinterest.

Numbers of users – comScore noted that Pinterest had 10 million users by January of this year – the fastest site to reach this landmark for unique users.  But 10 million or even 20 million are not so many, Twitter reached 140 million around the time of its sixth birthday this year.  Pinterest has not reached a critical mass that makes it valuable for businesses yet, it will probably do so, but not yet.

Demographics – In the US Pinterest users are 83% women / 17% men, in the UK it is reversed to some extent: 56% men / 46% women and the age ranges were typically 10 years younger in the UK.  This could be good news or bad depending on your product or service.

Pinterest is a good tool for business, but any social media done well needs to be approached with a little bit of vision, a strategy and most of all a commitment.  Larger businesses can call upon the resource to engage through Pinterest, but for many SMEs it might be a luxury they cannot afford.

The purpose of crisis communications is to help your organisation control and manage the flow of information to the public via the media when it faces a major incident.

The crisis could be anything that threatens or harms people, disrupts business, damages reutation or affects share value.

No one enjoys being the focus of media attention when something has gone wrong. But it is the way senior executives and managers handle such events, which separates excellent organisations from poor ones.

Every organisation needs to think the unthinkable, now – before it happens.

So, devise a major incident plan, choose a team with people who are confident and telegenic, and role-play crisis scenarios today.

What’s the worst possible crisis that could hit your business?

Every week some organisation or business faces a situation, which could threaten its very existence, for example, the global engineering firm Jarvis facing legal action and further damage to its reputation following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002 in which seven people died. It finally admitted liability only in April 2004.

But in this era of 24 hour news the crisis need not be of that magnitude to bring print and broadcast journalists to your doorstep.

A fire, a faulty batch on your production line, an industrial dispute, a threat (real or bogus) to tamper with your product … suddenly you are in the media spotlight, and it is not a pleasant experience.

While the media is busy pursuing the story to sell papers or boost TV or radio ratings there may be activists or pressure groups looking to take advantage of your misfortune, and they tend to be more media savvy.

The Media is not your Enemy

Far from it, reporters provide the conduit through which your message can reach all of your stakeholders.

Treat them fairly but manage your messages.

And never say “No comment”. This translates “We are guilty and we have something to hide”.

If you cut off information journalists will go elsewhere for it, to disaffected ex-employees, competitors, angry neighbours and others. They will be issuing the memorable phrases and quotes and the story will be out of your control.

The way you communicate will have an effect on employees and stakeholders. Your employees are your ambassadors in a crisis.

Consider the Toyota Prius product recall PR disaster. The embattled Japanese car maker recalled more than 400,000 hybrid vehicles, following problems with 8.1 million others with regular combustion- engines.

Complaints centred on the braking system.

In addition to the immediate cost – somewhere between $50 million

and $220 million, according to analysts’ estimates the affect on the company’s longer-term price is more worrying.

The initial recall was bad enough. That put a large dent in the firm’s reputation

for producing quality products. It also erased about a fifth of the value of

Toyota’s shares, or US $34 billion.

But the leadership of the company was invisible and when interviews were given the utterances were complicated and full of business-speak.

Three errors to avoid

The single biggest mistake is to lie to the media

The chairman of Bradford City Football Club, which suffered a 56-death fire in 1985, said the fire was a “tragic accident” and “fate.” In fact months earlier he had recognised the stand, which burned down, was a fire risk and had tried to secure a grant to rebuild it.

The second biggest error is to put your head in the sand and hope that no one learns about your bad news.  In other words: do nothing.

The third biggest mistake is only to start to work on a potential crisis situation after it has become public

Before the news breaks, you still have some proactive options available:

• Test key messages

• Don’t make unrehearsed remarks to the media

• Don’t assume that because your company has a big name or reputation you will be saved. People will trust you. They won’t

• Don’t treat the media like the enemy

• Don’t be reactive instead of proactive. If you are not in control of the story someone else is. Keep ahead of the game. If you initial PR effort simply leads to more rumour and speculation you have not been effective enough

• Use simple language. Business jargon and arcane acronyms are not simply a turn-off, they create a barrier to your target audience.

• Don’t assume the truth will out and you will triumph over adversity

• Perception is as damaging as reality – deal with it

• Show empathy…like Richard Branson did when one of his Pendolino trains came off the rails in Cumbria

• Don’t just issue a written statement. We live in a tele-visual age and people want to see and hear what a spokesperson is saying

• Don’t over-react and think the story will mean the ruination of your company. Perrier recovered

• And finally, if incredibly lightning strikes twice don’t just do the same thing all over again and make the same mistakes

• Learn from the previous media interaction and put right what went wrong before

George Dearsley of Avante Media has worked with HP, The NHS, VW and Shell to name a few.  If you want to talk to George please click on the link or contact Artisan to be passed through.

In a recent blog entry on the Manchester PR scene I commented that there was more choice for prospective clients than ever before – a fact noticed by another Manchester PR agency blog.

A quick Google search will reveal many PR micro agencies and freelancers in Manchester and the North West – would this have been the case in a similar search 5 or 10 years ago?  Probably not to anywhere like the same extent.

It is a pattern that I am sure is being replicated across the UK and perhaps in other countries.

Some companies are open to considering smaller agencies, but I suspect many companies new to PR go to larger agencies as they only know a couple of names in the industry.

It is about fit in terms of of skills, experience, motivation, personality when selecting a PR supplier.   And of course a blue chip concern would be better paired up with a bigger agency for a range of reasons that I will not go into right now.

But if an SME considers a PR freelancer or micro agency, what can they offer?  Here area few points to note:

• Many PR freelancers and micro agencies can offer specialised knowledge picked up from agency or in-house experience

• Following on, there are PR freelancers that are experts in their fields and can offer a comprehensive service – I work with a financial PR whose knowledge would put many PRs to shame – it is a body of knowledge that has and is being used by banks and venture capitalists.

• Highly personalised service – you get who you pay for and not an account exec rather than the director who pitched and signed the contract with you

• Increased importance- if a big agency loses an account it might loose an employee (it might not though) but for smaller agencies each client is more of the income pie and so the loss will be felt more acutely.  Hence many smaller PR agencies deliver.

Now there are good and bad in all professions, I hear horror stories about bigger agencies and I am sure that extends to smaller and micro agencies.  (There are plenty of success stories from all types of agencies, it is far from being all bad news!)  Some PR suppliers will be a great fit for one company and others will not.  So it is best to select a PR agency/ PR freelancer on a range of criteria and an open mind, and that includes PR freelancers, smaller and larger PR companies.

The survey, which compares 2011 Q4 sentiment to the first quarter of this year, shows optimism registering a 39% surge to the anemic 2% figure for the last report.

31% think that the general condition of the UK PR industry is going to improve over the next 12 months, as opposed to 17% thinking it will deteriorate and 49% seeing no change.

Levels for new business (54% compared to Q4 2011′s 32%) also stand out as particularly encouraging.

Figures for new business activity, graduate recruitment, staff numbers are all very much up.

PR freelancers are not so lucky with activity remaining fairly much the same.  A surprise because if workloads are up after a painful period surely this type of PR specialist would be in demand until the situation was more certain?

You can question the survey as an accurate barometer of the state of the UK PR industry, but at a time when good economic news is in short supply perhaps it will not be scrutinised too much.

If you make a Google search for PR agencies in Manchester, or variants on the theme, you will find a myriad of suppliers.  The same results could be replicated for PR agencies in the North West and across the UK.  It all means more choice for businesses looking to raise their visibility and boost their marketing efforts in these austere times.

The recession has had a major effect on the PR landscape with more PR freelancers, micro agencies and smaller agencies to chose from than just three or four years ago.

The bigger agencies remain, some smaller, some bigger, and will continue to be part of the PR scene.

However those breaking off from agency life, perhaps through choice, perhaps through redundancy, can offer highly polished professional PR skills (in most cases) at a rate that can attract new consumers of PR as well as more experienced businesses looking for cost effective and highly personal PR.

If anything, clients, more than ever before, are spoiled for choice and can select the PR agency with the blend of skills, experience and interpersonal chemistry (I hope that does not sound pompous) to meet their needs.

It is still a task to chose the best agency for a business’ needs – this might help in selecting a PR supplier – but there has never been a better time to find a PR agency.