The timing seems tough, with fears about jobs in the recession and with two British National Party candidates having been elected to the European Parliament representing northern English constituencies.

But Irina Stanescu of volunteer-run communications agency for the Third Sector Bright One tells Behind the Spin that it’s not so hard. All it takes is a Simple Act.

‘The Simple Acts campaign is about inspiring individuals to use small, everyday actions to change perceptions of refugees.

‘It consists of 20 actions that can be done by anyone and that encourage us to learn and do more with refugees. With every person who joins the campaign and does a small thing with and for refugees, we get a little closer to removing barriers between communities and to creating the kind of world we all want to live in.’

Simple Acts include everyday tasks like cooking foreign food or telling a child a story from another country.

You can follow the Simple Acts campaign on many social media channels: blog, Facebook group, Twitter and Wordia.

Whitney Port and Olivia Palermo seem able to run the public relations department, work at the fashion shows, network - and still have time to spend time each day shopping and creating drama while wearing 9 inch heels and having perfect hair.

Now, I am not being gullible - this show has some scenes added for dramatic effect but the programme does depict the glamorous side of Public Relations - with none of the stress and hard work that needs to be put in to make a campaign successful.

Doing my work placement in an award winning Public Relations agency, I have seen first hand the tension in the air when working against a deadline and the pressure is on.

Whereas on The City there seems to be no planning or research - just constant events. Aren’t events usually the final tiny part of a carefully put together campaign?

The City is not the only television show that has public relations as a high flying, glamorous career.

Absolutely Fabulous showed Eddy as the owner of a Public Relations firm who seemed to spend her time jetting off on holiday and drinking champagne at 11 o’clock with her plastic surgery obsessed friend. UKTV Gold puts it best- “if you thought PR was all about champers, parties and free lunches – err…you’d be right. Well if Ab Fab is anything to go by”.

The most famous public relations character on TV drama - and the person who first pops into everyone’s head - is Samantha Jones from Sex and the City. This public relations executive manages to bag the client, seal the deal and still be first in line for a new pair of Manolos while and Gucci and Vivienne Westwood seem to be her office uniform.

Obviously The City would not be a hit show if it showed Whitney doing the tedious jobs like creating mailing lists and doing research but why is it that public relations is portrayed as so sexy? Can the public relations industry live up to this glamorous representation?

Laura Silcock from PR and copywriting consultancy Room 53 thinks not. ‘No, I wouldn’t describe my job as glamorous. There are certainly aspects of the job that can be glamorous and there are definitely far less enjoyable ways to earn a living, but on a day to day basis it isn’t glamorous for me.

‘Much of PR is a sales job really – I spend a lot of my time on the phone to journalists (some of whom can be quite rude) pitching story ideas. That may not be true for other PR people who work in different industries or with different clients. I’m sure some PR people lead very glamorous working lives!  But I think TV does tend to glamorise PR, but only in the same way that it glamorises other professions too.

‘Showing someone spending hours on the phone trying to secure coverage for the launch of a new yoghurt wouldn’t make great TV. Showing someone flouncing about at a swanky party wearing a gorgeous dress and looking authoritative with a clipboard makes for more exciting viewing.’

There are very glamorous and rewarding parts to working in public relations but there is no way it is all about champagne receptions and meeting with clients in fancy restaurants. The first name that comes in to the head of the general public when thinking about PR is Max Clifford.

The PR guru seems partly responsible for the connection of PR and celebrity - working with the likes of Kerry Katona and Jade Goody and handling their press, mixing at all the showbiz parties, and with his name mentioned seemingly every week in the glossy magazines.

David Child , account director at Quest PR explains why he thinks PR is shown to be a life of glitz and glamour: ‘The bits of PR that get shown on television are glamorous in the main – partly because most jobs that are on TV appear more glamorous (who wants to watch people doing boring jobs!).

Also, PR is pretty complicated to most people whereas just showing party invites, guest lists at clubs, and celebrity management is closer to most people’s general understanding of how the industry works.

‘[Before I started working in PR] I suppose my perceptions were quite limited to what I’d heard, seen and read so, yes, I think I did see it as more glamorous than it is. It’s still a really interesting – and often exciting – job, but rarely does it become glamorous.’

It may be the fact that it’s such a female-orientated occupation and that is how it is portrayed in real life. Telling someone you are doing a public relations degree (after you have explained exactly what public relations is) usually brings an ‘oooooh’ or an ‘aaaahh’.

People who work in public relations need to be confident, charming, intelligent and quick witted. That’s because this is the nature of the job; if you’re trying to build reputations you can’t be shy and retiring. It is also one of the only areas in business that is dominated by females so it’s perfect for high achievers who want a rewarding and high pressure career but don’t want to lose their femininity.

There is nothing wrong with glamorising the public relations industry but it would seem that making it out to be a fun and carefree job undermines the hard work, tears and tantrums that go into making a successful campaign.

Photo shows Glam on the Rocks party by Kid Paparazzi (via Flickr)

So far I am on my second placement at Epilepsy Action, a UK charity that organises fundraising, campaigns and ultimately helps people who are affected by epilepsy. My first placement was at a Leeds PR agency, where I worked one day a week for about three months.

During my time at both placements I have noticed quite a few differences in how everything works. Friends and colleagues keep asking me the same questions: ‘which is better?’ ‘which is easier?’ and at first I wasn’t really sure about my answers since I’ve enjoyed my time at both placements and found both experiences very worthwhile. So I decided to draw up a list of the main differences to see whether I could finally answer these questions.

Agency Pros

Variety of clients and tasks
Opportunity to work with big clients and budgets

Agency Cons

Journalists are not always cooperative - and can be quite rude
Lots of admin tasks

Charity Pros

The feeling of helping a good cause
The chance to acquire specialised knowledge and help with fundraising events
Journalists are more receptive to stories

Charity Cons

Working with minimal or no budget for PR

Work variety
My experience at the agency was that they had a lot of clients, so they had a lot of the similar jobs to give me. These included: ringing journalists for forward features lists, creating media mailing lists, and finding cuttings in newspapers. This meant that I was doing a lot of the same things all day (but for different clients) which became a bit boring for me. I prefer to just focus on one client (the charity) and do all the different pieces of work that come along whatever they may be.

The media
At the agency, it seemed quite hard to ’sell in’ stories to the media. It was quite a battle to get them to listen and even more of a struggle to actually get them to use what you’re offering them. At the charity, it seems a lot easier to get the media to listen and also to get them to use what you’re giving them.

Celebrities
Another difference I noticed was that at both placements there were campaigns running for which they were trying to get celebrity involvement. Celebrities seem to be a lot like the media in the sense that they appeared a lot more willing to help the charity than they were to help at the agency when it was for a commercial company. So it seems to be easier to get celebrities on board if you’re a charity than an agency.

A Day in the life of…
In order to help my comparison between the two situations I decided to run through the common events in a day at the PR agency and at the charity.

9am: Arrive at work and switch on computer

9.10am: Check and respond to emails

9.30am: Select a daily newspaper and check for mentions of any of our clients, competitors and look for any interesting PR stories

10am: Meeting with colleagues to discuss stories in the day’s newspapers and plans for the day

11am Brainstorm with colleagues over a proposal for new business and ideas for existing clients over the next year

12 noon: Type up results of brainstorm

12.30pm: Type up a PR plan for the year for a client

2pm: Write a press release

2.45pm: Tea break

3pm: Phone a journalist to ‘sell in’ a story

4pm: Create list of councillors and celebrities for lobbying proposal

5pm: Leave office, turn answer phone on and computer off

8.30am: Arrive at work and check news for any mentions of epilepsy of Epilepsy Action

9am: Read emails and respond as required. Check to-do list and prioritise what needs doing

10am: Attend photocall with Bradford Bulls for Epilepsy Action Bradford 10K

11am: Proof-read press releases, internal comms documents etc before being issued

12 noon: Read government consultation and decide whether to respond

1pm: Meeting to discuss National Epilepsy Week 2009

2pm: Write a PR plan for upcoming campaign

3pm: Write campaign supporters’ newsletter

4pm: Radio interview with local radio station about Bradford 10K

4.15pm: Draft media pack for International league against epilepsy (ILAE) centenary

5.30pm: Plan to-do list for tomorrow, go home.

So there are many things that are common to both agency and the charity: checking the news, writing press releases and PR plans for example. I think these would be typical of any PR situation as the news is very important regardless of whether you are a profit-making business or a charity, as are press releases and writing PR plans.

The main differences in the day would be that at the charity there’s a lot of emphasis on government bodies and any stories that come out about the government that might affect people with epilepsy (for example if they are proposing to change the law surrounding epilepsy drugs then Epilepsy Action would obviously have something to say about that and might want to launch a campaign to try and stop the government doing so). At the agency, however, we did not really look into too many government stories as it is unlikely that they are going to affect the business other than obviously financial ones such as the VAT reduction.

After looking at my experiences at the agency and the charity, my preference would have to be with the charity as I like the fact that everything is geared towards helping people and focusing on just one client as opposed to a mix like at the agency. But I can equally see why others would prefer the variety of an agency placement.

As I approach the end of my time at university I can’t help but think do I need more than just a degree? At work we mix with many colleagues within the industry but how well are we doing and to what effect? These are the questions I set about trying to answer.

New media, new messages

As the role and techniques of public relations evolve so too do the methods we choose to use.  The London bombings threw the media world into the unknown – the area of citizen journalism where social media comes into its own. Here was a new medium for organisations to communicate directly with the consumers who buy their products, and for individuals to communicate with each other too.

Social networking is defined as: “the grouping of individuals into specific groups, like small rural communities or a neighborhood subdivision.  Although social networking is possible in person, especially in schools or in the workplace, it is most popular online.  This is because unlike most high schools, colleges, or workplaces, the internet is filled with millions of individuals who are looking to meet other internet users to develop friendships and business relationships, too.” (whatissocialnetworking.com)

Face to face networking is not to be undervalued by any means but it’s not the only way. Other avenues need to be considered too as we move with the changes of the industry.

Social success stories

There have been several noted success stories through networking online, notably Huddersfield  PR graduate Matthew Watson who was offered a job at Speed Communications by Stephen Waddington following his tweet about looking for work.

Then there’s recent PR graduate and blogger Ben Cotton.

“My most successful story of online networking came thanks to my blog. I promote PR Chatter via Facebook and this led to someone who I used to go to school with (who now works for a well-know PR consultancy) forwarding my blog to her boss. I was in turn offered a trial with the offer of a job at the end, if I impressed. I was told that I would not have to undertake the usual press release writing and other test as I had demonstrated many of the required skills in my blog. For me this really hammered home the power and potential of online networking and continues to provide me with the motivation to update my online presence.”

Kent State University in the US integrates blogging into its PR degree as a module, forcing students to blog to help them develop social media skills and build up a network prior to graduating into the real world.

“Blogging helps students land jobs,” comments Bill Sledzic, associate professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication within Kent State University. “The blog enhances a digital portfolio by showcasing online skills and understanding. It’s especially helpful with employers who are late adopters of 2.0 communication.”

While working as a CIPR rep I was able to network frequently at our hosted guest lecturers building up a good base of key contacts within varying areas of the industry. Face to face contact not only allowed me to put across my professional capabilities but also enabled them to view my personality too – expressed more easily in person than through text.

Amanda Fox, another placement year student, sums up the benefit of face to face networking: “When you are networking face-to-face, such as at events, you meet a wide range of individuals who will notice you for the person you are - not by your qualifications or CV. Therefore be yourself, show confidence and you never know what may come out of it.”

Rules of engagement

The key to networking face to face and/or online is to recognise that both methods are different and require different rules of engagement.

In a social environment you are often on the fringes of a conversation and it is ok to interject, where you see fit, with your point of view. Online it is slightly different; a relationship first needs to be built up over time whether this is through dialogue on twitter or simply by commenting on their blog – do not go straight to befriending a stranger on Facebook.

Each networking site serves a different purpose. Twitter is good for simply sharing thoughts whereas LinkedIn is better for building professional relationships. Jeroen Panjer highlights LinkedIn’s main benefit: “It’s not about the people you know, but the people they know.” Ensure you use each for the correct purpose and to suit your needs.

Careless talk costs jobs

We all need to remember that social networking takes place in the public domain. You may have heard of Kimberley Swann who was sacked for her status updates on Facebook commenting that her new job was ‘boring’. Although there are certain things you may be able to keep private by using the privacy settings available, whatever you put up in writing and will potentially be recorded in an internet archive forever.

Should you consider networking online you need to remember that it is time consuming but in turn can reap the rewards – consider it an investment and in turn it might turn into a passion (like it has for me). To see what presence you have on the web already, search for your name + PR (here’s my result). The more online social networks you are involved in, the better the search results you will have.

Let’s face it, networking is vital for a PR student or graduate full stop whether this be face to face or through social networking. A combination of both is recommended – you need a personality as well as being able to demonstrate good writing abilities to a larger audience.

When asked which was better, Samuel Brookes, O2 sandwich year placement and Leeds Metropolitan student, says: “Both! Use online to branch far and wide with so many people but you have to do it face to face to get the benefits of more personal relationships!”

Whether you are collecting business cards at an event or tweeting away online, always remain yourself and above all enjoy it. Who knows what it might lead to – but if you’re not networking, there’s always a danger you might end up not working.

This scenario has led me to consult with practitioners, graduates and academics to ponder what the best approach should be. Clearly students want to be able to demonstrate to a prospective employer that they have the skills coupled with the aptitude and experience for the job. However some are put off by the idea of dragging in a cumbersome portfolio, but do not dare to adopt the nonchalant approach.

Compelling case

I found that many in the industry believe the answer to be graduates putting their best work online. The more I looked into the concept of online portfolios, the more compelling the argument for them became. I have always been a firm believer that each generation should distinguish itself from the last and we as digital natives should behave as such. E-portfolios offer the perfect opportunity to do just that.

Traditionally, it has been difficult to marry the needs of university and industry and hard copy portfolios did address that need. However the PR industry and technology has evolved since their inception and e-portfolios are the best way to bridge this gap. Everyone accepts that if you understand HTML, know about podcasting and have implemented an online PR campaign, the digital world is the most logical way to display this.

The general consensus of practitioners is that an e-portfolio should contain the same examples of work that would make up a hard copy. However, the big advantage of digital portfolios is that they can be made up of different types of technology. By including video, audio and blogs a student can demonstrate they are web 2.0 savvy, something which is an increasingly desirable skill in a competitive job market.

Behind the Spin’s editor Richard Bailey has been an advocate of portfolios going digital for some time, whilst across the pond in the US, Robert French’s students at Auburn University have been doing it for years now.

Robert French says e-portfolios can:

• Give your resume/portfolio a broader audience.
• Allow you to illustrate your skills in an online environment.
• Be easily enhanced with video, audio, photos, and PDF files.
• Make the interactive process faster via email and chat.

French adds: “often I learn from recent graduates that one of their first tasks is doing work online, working on an intranet, researching in social networks, creating social media releases, and more. All may be illustrated much better with an online portfolio.“

Karen Russell of Georgia University also speaks in glowing terms about e-portfolios: “the biggest advantage is that you can use multimedia, videos, flash, blogging and more to exhibit all of your skills. They also show creativity and initiative on the student’s part. So even if those particular skills aren’t needed, the applicant might gain from being seen as a person with those qualities.“

Google as personal reputation engine

Employers have been quick to recognise their value too, Stephen Waddington, managing director of Speed Communications says: “e-portfolios are a superb shop window into an individual’s skill and expertise. They enable a student to demonstrate the extent of their knowledge in an open and transparent way. We all leave a digital footprint on social networks and user generated content sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Linked In and Twitter. Inevitably employers are using Google as a personal reputation engine and scrutinising these types of sites to review an individual’s career history and work ahead of hiring an individual.“

I also spoke to Roger Warner, founder of Content & Motion PR. He mentions how portfolios have been the norm in creative industries such as graphic design and fashion and are now commonplace in PR. He also stresses the importance of social networking sites and how they can be used as a gateway for employers to recruit staff. Warner says: “if someone has Tweeted about a new client or a successful piece of work, do not be afraid to ask if they will be recruiting more people for that account. This demonstrates an interest in the consultancy and that you understand social media.“

Warner adds: “to really impress, why not give a presentation of your e-portfolio and show results using a combination of Google analytics, press cuttings and testimonials.“

David Turnbull of Skywrite Communications created an e-portfolio when he was a final year student: “I believe that being able to produce something a little different, whilst also demonstrating proficiency with technology is something that appeals to employers.”

Emma Long who is on her sandwich year at Air Products says: “I would like to think an e-portfolio will give me a competitive edge - whether it be showing a good use of new media skills or simply because employers are able to see a sample of work a lot sooner. It also allows interviewers to begin thinking about potential questions regarding your work allowing the interview to be a lot more thorough and cover more ground. “

Whilst the benefits of e-portfolios are slowly being recognised and more students are taking the digital leap, some predict they will not replace hard copy portfolios, but accompany them as Robert French argues: “e-portfolios are not going to replace the paper version, but they do supplement the resume/portfolio process.“

Karen Russell adds: ‘‘I think most people can see the benefits of e-portfolios, but many (including me) recommend that students retain some form of print portfolio as well. Most interviewers won’t stop the interview to call up a student’s site, but they will flip through a paper portfolio.“

Security and confidentiality

E-portfolios by nature are a very public tool to demonstrate work to the world, but this also brings up the issues of identity theft, client confidentiality and online safety. Robert French advises his students not to place their phone numbers online, unless they have a forwarding phone number from a site like Kall8 or Skype. French also suggests that students create a Gmail or other email account solely for their e-portfolio.

Karen Russell cautions: ‘’I advise students to save individual items as PDF files so they can’t be altered and to remove identifying or personal information, such as telephone numbers, client information, or contact information for references.’’

However, French concludes: ‘’I always return to the positive results we’ve had with e-portfolios. Students do get jobs based upon their work. If nothing else, the digital resumes and portfolios allow them to stand out from their peers. I’ve had many instances where students feel that it was their digital work that made the difference and landed them a job or internship.’’

PR is a communications industry, so perhaps practitioners, academics and students need to sit down together and work out what a portfolio should include. We need to get to a situation where portfolios have enough academic weighting, but also and perhaps more importantly demonstrates the skills that employers want.

• Keep your e-portfolio updated, treat it as something that evolves.
• Promote your e-portfolio online via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogging.
• Buy a domain name. They are relatively cheap and will give your site a professional touch.
• Plan your e-portfolio and make it easy to navigate. Simplicity is king.
• Display the work you’re most proud of first. Even if you’re featuring 15 pieces of work, a prospective employer is only likely to view the first 3 or 4.
• Ensure that you explain what each item is displaying - it is very easy to showcase your work but not include what input you had or what skill(s) it demonstrates.
• Try to segment your work so that potential employers can easily view work they are interested in.

Stuck indoors

The reason I was stuck indoors smelling like a bad takeaway? I had decided to pass up on being a student that year and watch my career-minded friends begin their university lives without me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go to university, it was the fact that I didn’t have a clue what to do if I went, and I was worried that I’d choose the wrong course if I rushed into it.

The irony is that I took a year off to decide what to do, didn’t do any of the travelling adventures or work placements with amazing companies you’re supposed to do in a gap year, and when I did go to university, realised I was on the wrong course after all.

Wasting the summer stuck in an uncomfortable office with people who were interested in little other than garlic bread motivated me to make a decision, and after several lunch hours spent trawling through university websites, looking at course after course, I decided on Public Relations at Leeds Met.

A student at last

As university was a new concept to me, I imagined it with the naïve stereotype so many others do: night after night of drinking and waking up with your shoes on, followed by days spent in the library writing essay after essay. Thankfully I escaped the first of the two as I wasn’t living in Leeds full time, and more to the point couldn’t think of anything worse than a night involving dressing up as a cartoon character and drinking concoctions of alcohol that always appear to be a shade of dark brown.

The second stereotype of essay writing, however, I was quite prepared for. I had achieved my highest graded A-Level in Communication Studies as a result of the course content being mostly focussed on individual writing projects and enjoyed it above any other subject.

So when people said PR wasn’t what they were expecting and I said it wasn’t either, we weren’t always on the same wavelength when they were referring to the Sex and the City box set as their only PR experience and I was referring to Communication Studies.

However, the Writing for PR module in my first semester did offer some similarities to what I was expecting, and is possibly the reason I achieved my best grade here and enjoyed it more than the others I studied that term. Come semester two, I saw my motivation and grades take a drop.

As most students will know, each semester of a degree is differnt from the previous one, presumably to keep the subject open to various angles and sectors for the many areas of interest within PR. The problem for me was that the subjects taught got further away from my interests each term, and even though I didn’t clearly know what these were, I realised I was enjoying the academic modules more than the business ones, yet the emphasis on these became more apparent each week.

Some academics say university is about preparing you for work, and admittedly it should include this, otherwise graduates would arguably be untrained, but for me the course had completely lost its academic focus and now seemed to revolve around business models and preparations for running your own company. But what if that wasn’t what you were interested in?

When I started university, everyone was asked their reasons for studying for a degree. While most people stated their belief that it would lead them to a better paid job or valuable career, my reasons were mostly for personal achievement. It turned out reasons like this also motivate studying for personal interest (something I should have realised before I started), therefore being programmed for successful business wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

What I also realised is that whatever your reasons for studying, if you don’t have the motivation to do so - or anything to motivate you - then you won’t succeed.

Another important factor contributing to motivation, I found, was the people you spent most of your working time with. Several people in the first year admitted they were only at university for the nightlife or as a way to get out of working full time (most of these weren’t still there by the second year).

Typical students

‘Typical’ students are one of the few stereotypes I did see at university, though few of them ever showed up. What are you supposed to do when you’re ready to gain good grades by producing quality work when you’re told you have to work with others like this?

The visions of mountains of essays were quickly replaced with mountains of other’s work when it became apparent most modules required the same element of group work.

The benefits of this are obvious and are there for everybody: the students are able to distribute work between them, playing on individual’s strengths and weaknesses to create a strong team, while tutors are able to save themselves valuable time in marking four or more students work at once in roughly 20 minutes, rather than the long process of reading through individual essays.

However, the benefits which students gain are only viable when you have a good team, similar to a business working well with the right people to work within it. And when 75% of your team doesn’t show up, or worse, when you’ve never heard of them they attend so little, it results in one of two scenarios. The first is simple: you fail, or else do very badly and get judged for being unable to work as part of a team by your tutors. Or second, you do four people’s work and when you do receive the grade you aimed for, so does everyone else who had very little input.

The other downfall of group work is that you need to be flexible to everyone’s working styles. Some people work best under pressure while others prefer to have a finished assignment weeks in advance of the deadline. Of course university is often not local for everyone. Group work distributed over Christmas and Easter holidays is either not thought through very well, or meant to convince everyone to stay at university for their ‘break’. How exactly is a group supposed to meet to practise a presentation when everyone in the group lives in opposite corners of the country?

With the basis of PR being focussed on communication, I wondered why the tutors weren’t communicating with each other, and realising they were all giving us exactly the same tedious work.

Not the business

In January of my second year I read the titles of that semester’s modules to myself which may as well have been ‘business, business and more business’: not totally off the subject of PR but not quite on it either. So when I said to a friend jokingly during the introduction of one module, ‘if every module is assessed by group work again I’m leaving’. I did honestly think I was joking at the time, but two weeks later I’d attended them all and genuinely not been interested in a moment of it.

When I told my friends I’d decided to change courses, one of them replied, ‘I wish I had the guts to leave’, and slowly it became apparent nobody really enjoyed PR like they had in the first year. Since then a few others have decided to leave too, for different reasons. Some feel they should broaden their areas of knowledge if they’re going to graduate in a recession, while others have just decided on a completely different direction. One thing we all had in common though, was being able to agree that communication is the key to not only successful business, but a successful degree, and that’s something that was lacking enormously.

Now I’ve chosen to study a degree focussing on more than one area, and one I had originally looked into while at college, with the ability to choose your own modules and make the programme suit you.

I had a fantastic time at Leeds Met and leant some invaluable lessons while making some great friends, but overall the most important thing you can learn at university is what you need to get out of your degree and how to make it work for yourself if you’re going to succeed.

But there’s another more fundamental driver that the industry has dodged for more than a decade - measurement and the ability to tie a given input to a guaranteed outcome. Outside universities, PR has long been an ill-defined discipline lacking formal planning and rigorous measurement.

PR consultancies have typically been very good at creating content and energetic in their efforts to engage with the media. But the industry has lacked formal methods and as a consequence its ability to work with other elements of the marketing discipline has been limited.

Financial performance

In 2007 the top 150 agencies grew by 22 per cent to a fee income of £779m according to the annual rankings published by PR Week. The comparable figure for 2008 was 10 per cent and a fee income of £858m.

But the headline numbers only tell you part of the story. The number of people employed within the top 150 firms fell from 8,200 in 2007 to 7,990 in 2008. Industry growth has slowed and consultancies are doing more work with less people. The data for 2009 is likely to continue this trend.

“PR agencies have apparently employed various strategies in 2008. Some have gone for growth, through capacity or adding new skills, and some for efficiency and profitability. The question for 2009 will be whose strategy turns out to be the best for the challenging environment the industry now finds itself in?” says Adam Parker, chief executive of RealWire.

It’s a tough time for the industry. But it undoubtedly has a strong future. Now more than ever companies need guidance to manage the conversations around their brands and modern PR, with its roots in creating influence through the editorial process, has a lot to offer and much of it tangible.

Digital changeover

The question is whether the industry is quick enough to recognise and adapt to the changing dynamics. The real threat is not the contraction of the industry but its ability to modernise and adopt the formal planning and communication methods made possible by digital techniques. Here lies an opportunity for new businesses to be created offering new propositions.

The PR industry has the skills and the tools to lead clients into the new area of marketing called social media. Those that are making a bid to adopt the lexicon of marketing and the disciplines of the marketing team are already reaping the benefits. If PR fails to innovate and deliver the services and products that the market demands digital and media agencies will undoubtedly be quick to grab this contested territory.

PR agencies currently fall into three distinct camps: consultancies that are embracing and actively creating the digital PR future by retooling their businesses; consultancies that believe digital calls for traditional techniques to be transposed to bloggers and via networks such as Twitter; and those that are standing still.

History is repeating itself to an extent. The dot com boom and the resulting bubble kick-started a period of entrepreneurial activity in the PR industry with consultancies such as Rainier PR (my former business), Mantra PR, Hotwire PR and Brands2Life started.

The next wave of independent PR businesses that will call the industry to account within the next five years and top the league tables is being created now using digital as an opportunity to develop a disruptive proposition. Companies such as 3WPR, Diffusion, Escherman, Immediate Future, Liberate Media and Wolfstar are winning business off more traditional firms and developing a strong reputation.

“Innovation in any industry is always driven by risk-takers that can foresee the demise of the old ways of doing things and pinpoint where the new opportunities lie.  Our motivation for starting Diffusion was to build an agency from the ground up with digital at the very core of our business model and approach to tackling clients’ communication challenges. We also wanted to play a part in defending PR from digital, advertising and search marketing agencies,” says Daljit Bhurji, managing director of Diffusion.

Team work

Steve Earl and I started Rainier PR as a technology challenger in 1998 tooled up to handle the booming telecom, electronics and software sector. We built it to a turnover of £2.5m before selling it to Loewy in 2006.

During the past 12 months we’ve integrated the three PR businesses and five brands within Loewy and re-positioned the new business squarely around the emerging opportunity for digital communication and marketing. We firmly believe that we’ve created a robust digital offering and investment in formal methods has created a robust planning and measurement methodology.

I worked with Earl for four years before we started a business together. We’ve worked together for 15 years and have seen each other through the highs and lows of client wins and losses, an attempt to defraud the business, all nighters in the office, and HR nightmares. That’s important. Running a business can be a lonely task.

Guidance from mentors is crucial for the same reason. Grey hair brings experience. We have always surrounded ourselves by people that have experience in areas that we lack. It’s by far the best way to learn.

Business models

The agency or consultancy model is incredibly simple. At its most basic a consultancy business matches people with client work. In the PR industry, salaries typically account for 55 to 60 per cent of fee income. Overheads should account for 20 to 25 per cent, leaving a balance of 20 per cent or so profit.

Clients are attracted to talented people, a strong brand and a robust proposition. They are also typically risk adverse so you can expect to have a tough time persuading clients to come on board in your initial few years. Your first few clients are likely to be mates. But that’s okay. De-risk your own investment by starting small and keeping an iron grip on costs.

Many of the services around a PR business are now commodity products. Distribution is almost exclusively via networks.

“Use Realwire or Sourcewire for press release distribution. Use Getting Ink Requests to find out about editorial opportunities. Use Google Alerts via RSS to Google Reader and Google Blog Search for monitoring,” says Andrew Smith, Escherman managing director.

Smith showed recently in a blog post how it is possible to build a PR business on a credit card. His post was tongue-in-cheek but it proved how little it costs to start a business. But the fundamental point that he makes is sound. PR is a knowledge-based industry that doesn’t require significant outlay in capital assets.

Wealth creation

Creating a business is one of the few ways of developing an asset that will have a significant and tradable value in the event of an exit. It is a long term game but is a sure route to breaking the link between the hours you work and the income you generate.

I have immense admiration for anyone that starts up their own business and delight in the fact that Rainier PR and Loewy have spawned numerous start-ups. It’s healthy for the industry as it encourages new thinking, promotes innovation and drives up standards.

Write a 12 month and a five year business plan to map out your objectives. And then measure yourself against it on a quarterly basis

Cash
Produce a cash flow projection to determine what level of investment you need to get your PR consultancy off the ground

Team
Going it alone is tough. Consider pulling together a team of people with complementary skills to share your risk

Brand
PR consultancies are typically poor at marketing themselves. Create a strong brand and invest some energy behind it and you’ll well on your way to winning for first client

Proposition
The PR industry is a crowded market. You need a proposition that will create cut through and engage prospects

Sales
Don’t expect people to seek you out. You’ll need a programme to drum up business

Infrastructure
What investments do you need to make in capital assets to get your business off the ground?

If we talk to a journalist, we’ll probably hear something disparaging. PR people engage in spin; they don’t tell the truth; they can’t write; their calls are as welcome as double-glazing salespeople, and as for their emails, sorry PR people, you’re blocked.

A business or marketing manager might acknowledge that public relations is growing in importance and is a vital function for many businesses (Microsoft is often named, with Bill Gates quoted as saying ‘if I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on PR’). But you might hear an objection to PR’s lack of measurability (’if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’.) It sometimes seems too soft, fluffy even, for the profit-and-loss world of private sector business.

So we’ll ask a young woman why she’s applying to study public relations at university. Though she’ll have rehearsed an answer to this, she’ll hint at glamour, at celebrity, at no two days being alike. Does she know what PR people do? Though she’s seen Samantha Jones in re-runs of Sex and the City, unfortunately the details of the job prove elusive (controlling the guestlist to glamorous parties is the closest we come to her PR world).

So the same activity that’s looked down on by some, is very attractive to others.

As Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy write in PR - A Persuasive Industry? ‘compared with journalism the prospects are better: [public relations] now offers more jobs at higher salaries and with better working conditions. In the United States and the United Kingdom public relations has overtaken advertising as a source of employment, and is rightly regarded as offering more varied career opportunities. Compared with marketing, which is sometimes perceived as a somewhat dry discipline, PR is often seen as offering more human interest and more scope for intuition: PR remains an art not a science and thus appeals to the creative.’

So public relations is seen as a desirable - glamorous even - career choice. But what exactly is it? And how can you get your PR career off to a flying start?  In this introductory feature, we’ll try to answer these basic questions.

What is public relations?

There are many definitions of PR: at one level, the name describes it very well - ‘the management of communication between an organisation and its publics’. Other definitions talk about reputation, or relationships, or mutual understanding. Meanwhile, the public perception of PR is usually much closer to publicity or media relations. There’s also an overlap with marketing, or more specifically marketing communications.

If you choose to study public relations, you’ll have time to look into this in more detail.

To counter the perception that public relations is a branch of events management, I have described it to first year students as ideas management. This description is simple and memorable and hints at what’s required.

There’s a demand on PR people to come up with promotional publicity ideas. Sometimes the idea is turned into a event or a photo opportunity; often it’s turned into words (for example, in the form of a news release). So visual and verbal skills are required.

Public relations operates in the ‘marketplace of ideas’: sometimes shouting louder will gain you attention, but in a crowded, noisy marketplace and with so many distractions all around, it usually takes something rather more entertaining to stand out.

Ideas management also covers the more senior PR roles: public affairs, issues management and corporate communications. Here PR people advise organisations on how to manage issues of public concern such as the environment, animal rights or equal opportunities. So having an antenna tuned to political issues and public debates is important. Successful PR practitioners keep up with the news and tend to read widely across different genres (fiction, politics, popular science etc).

One reason a simple definition of PR is elusive is that it describes a broad range of activities practised in the public sector (government, health services, police), the private sector (in-house and in consultancies) and in the not-for-profit sector (charities and campaigning organisations).

How do I get into PR?

A degree is not an absolute requirement (any more than it is for success in business), but given this connection between public relations and ideas, it’s now seen as a graduate-level activity. This suggests four possible routes into a public relations career.

Route one: gain a PR degree

Public relations degree courses are increasingly popular, and are widely taught at universities. Some teach PR alongside business and marketing; others teach it alongside media and journalism. Look for courses that combine the teaching of academic concepts alongside practical skills. Since a degree alone will not set you apart from hundreds of other job seekers, we recommend you choose a degree course that offers the chance of a year’s work experience before graduating.

Route two: gain any degree

Graduate jobs in PR are open to a wide range of applicants, so are also attractive to those with first degrees in anthropology through to zoology. Some employers say they prefer to train up a bright candidate, regardless of their degree though some recognise that a PR graduate may be better equipped from day one.

Route three: gain a postgraduate or professional qualification

Many of those who entered public relations with a non-specific qualification are subsequently choosing to study the subject at Master’s or professional level. Some graduates are choosing to study a one-year taught MA as a way into public relations (and there are Master’s courses taught by distance learning too). Professional qualifications are taught by block-release and/or distance learning: these include the CIPR’s Advanced Certificate and Diploma qualifications. The former is suitable for those new to public relations or in the early years of their careers; the latter is for more experienced practitioners.

Route four: transfer to PR as a second career

Ask a group of fortysomething practitioners how they got into PR and they will almost certainly mention working in another area first: journalism, the armed forces or management consultancy, say. Some experience of life and of working in different sectors can be helpful in a subsequent PR career. That’s why it’s helpful for graduates also to demonstrate relevant work experience from a placement year.

There are numerous stories of how non-graduates worked their way to the top. As Mark Borkowski writes in the preface to his latest book: ‘I stumbled into the publicity game in 1979 and it became the heartbeat to my life - I was soon utterly intoxicated by it… I fell into publicity because I failed to get into university to read history.’ Borkowski’s book is a history of the Hollywood publicity machine, so it’s clear that his lack of a degree did not hold him back from a career in PR (or the study of history). Yet there were far fewer graduates thirty years ago; his would be a hard path to follow today.

How can I learn about the business?

1: network

It’s easy to ‘meet’ PR practitioners online by following their blogs, tweets and by joining a free, dedicated social network for PR students, lecturers and practitioners: PROPenMic.

2: read the press

The two main weekly print sources for PR news, comment and jobs are Media Guardian (free with Monday’s Guardian newspaper) and PR Week (available on subscription, free for CIPR members).

3: read some introductory books

Here are some introductory texts that we recommend:

• Anthony Davis (2003) Everything You Should Know About Public Relations: Direct Answers to Over 500 Questions, Kogan Page
• Anthony Davis (2nd edition 2007) Mastering Public Relations, Palgrave Macmillan
• Simon Goldsworthy and Trevor Morris (2008) PR - A Persuasive Industry?, Palgrave Macmillan

Online Public Relations: A practical guide to developing an online strategy in the world of social media
by David Phillips and Philip Young
274 pages, Kogan Page (PR in Practice Series), 2009 

‘I believe that the distinction between digital and offline will gradually disappear’

Rob Brown’s book contains one pleasant surprise, and one disappointment. The surprise is that it’s written in narrative form and provides a very readable introduction to public relations in the internet age. He claims in the preface that ‘this is a book about how radically public relations is changing’.

In defence of this claim, the author provides a useful overview of media and technology, and challenges the notion that the internet is just another medium, like TV (’it is far richer and more complex than any of the traditional media channels’).

Having reviewed the loss of control that worries the old brand guardians, he asks about the role of public relations: ‘who should public relations people be talking to? The answer, ultimately, is quite simple and the clue is in the description ‘public relations’. PR people need to be talking to the public just like they have always done’. So where is the radical change?

The revolution versus evolution discussion takes place throughout these pages. But is the decline in the effectiveness of the news release and the emergence of its social media replacement revolution or a sign of evolution?

Let’s agree that the world is changing and so is public relations. ‘The future of marketing communications rests with the art of conversation. Engaging in conversations is what public relations people have always done. PR has always operated through intermediaries and persuasion and reasoned argument have always been important elements of what we do.’

‘Now the content comes from lots of different places, the skills that are important to the marketing function are not hard technical skills, nor are they predominantly aesthetic but are the softer management skils of diplomacy and influence. In short, these are the skills that PR people have always used in their interactions with traditional media.’

I agree, but both these statements contradict the claim that there’s something radically new.

Brown has written a good introduction to the media (including, of course, social media), and he has a useful perspective on the role of PR within marketing. He’s also good on search engine optimisation and covers ethics (including an astonishing first-hand example of Max Clifford in action, though it had nothing to do with social media).

He extends the usual contrast between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) to include a new category: consumer-to-consumer (C2C). This is a very helpful concept when understanding the conversational web and when trying to decide whether an organisation should blog (’the answer to this is a qualified yes they should, but they need to be careful and need to do it properly’).

The problem with the book comes from the narrative structure that works so well at the beginning. By the end, what was needed was a gazeteer of social media tools because I must have read the same entries about Twitter, Facebook and social bookmarking tool delicious three times over. The focus on tools also means that this book will date very quickly.

It’s a good overview suitable for undergraduate students and confused clients, but I can recommend an even better read covering the same ground: David Brain and Martin Thomas’s Crowd Surfing published last year.

‘The internet is about the exchange of information - and so is public relations’

It’s almost a decade since the first edition of Online Public Relations was written. For the second edition, David Phillips has teamed up with Philip Young.

While tools and technologies have changed rapidly, what do the authors claim for PR?  ’For public relations practice the unavoidable conclusion is that nothing will ever be the same again; the advent of an online world means almost every aspect of the discipline needs to be rethought.’

Fasten your seatbelts; we’re in for a much more ambitious ride. It’s not just the practice that is changing, it seems, but its role and purpose. After a short section on the basic toolkit, this book deals in concepts: transparency, porosity, agency, richness and reach.

We assume transparency to be a good thing, and porosity (leaks) bad. But they are the flipside of the same concept. ‘As with transparency, there are benefits. The authentic voice of the organization that flows through the corporate shell has tremendous impact outside and may be part of the managed process of making organizations more competitive.’ Yet as the authors ask (in the context of ghostwritten blogs), ‘where does the ‘authentic voice porosity’ stop and managed transparency begin?’

There are big challenges: ‘the practitioner with ‘messages’ to present to a public is now confronted with this changed communications environment.’ As the authors describe, it’s a mixture of one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many and many-to-one communications channels.

But here’s the problem. While Rob Brown’s book presents a simple (though not simplistic) view of public relations in the age of social media, Online Public Relations presents a very complex picture. That’s because the authors view public relations operating in the realm of relationship optimization. This implies a practice that will be unrecognisable to many since ‘untruths, half-truths, hype and extravagant claims become reputation time bombs.’ This is no doubt true, but it presents a counter-factual view of the practice in a similar way to the famous ‘two-way symmetrical’ model, which still feels idealistic 25 after its publication.

So ‘the internet brings public relations closer to the heart of corporate re-engineering, corporate governance, corporate and brand relationships, reputation promotion and issues management.’ It’s a very different picture from that depicted by Rob Brown. If Rob Brown’s book could be renamed Marketing Public Relations and the Social Web, Phillips and Young’s could become Corporate Public Relations Online. I described the first as suitable for undergraduates and confused clients; the second is for advanced students and practitioners.

Let’s summarise some of the changes identified by Phillips and Young. ‘The traditional website has become a place of record and commercial exchange. The new social media web is a place for interactions.’ And ‘the extremes between a press release and a telephone conversation require flexible policies in terms of approval of corporate statements. Social media need the same kind of flexibility.’

‘In the past, a PR person might have been judged by the volume of coverage generated for a client. The key today is not volume but influence: that is, how deeply into the networks did the story reach and for how long did it actively set the agenda in the online ‘conversations’?’

At its heart (chapters 15 to 21), the book provides help with developing a corporate internet strategy (’there is an overwhelming case for improving capabilty to strategically manage online presence, interactions and stakeholder relations by organizations.’)

The challenge is to bring the linear, rational process of planning up to date to cope with rapid change and uncertainty (even about the very nature of the organisation). ‘Put simply, we need to be able to plan for surprises in this fast-changing world… The idea that one can run a ‘PR campaign’ is now flawed. A ‘campaign’ once had time limits and could thus be dropped after the event, but this does not apply today.’

The book cannot provide a template for your corporate internet strategy, but it does discuss approaches and adapts existing tools and models, and has particularly strong sections on risk assessment and legal and ethical issues.

Best of all, the book challenges us to rethink the role of public relations. ‘The previously unseen hand is moving into fairly sharp focus’ the authors state, in discussing the shift from communicating through journalists to engaging in social media conversations (moving from mediated to unmediated discourse). And ‘the fundamental vector of communication that shapes reputation and an organization’s relationship with its stakeholders has flipped through 90 degrees. Now, the truly significant discourse is that which surrounds an organization, product or service.’

Yet the authors also state, ‘Online PR is not an alternative to other forms of relationship building, communication and interaction; it is an extension of what has gone before.’ I call that evolution. The radical, revolutionary thinking is less about the relationship of public relations to the internet and more about the role of public relations within organisations. ‘New PR is also about new thinking’.

The standard histories list personalities such as Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays, though their legacy is questionable. Mark Borkowski’s alternative history of Hollywood publicity brought a new cast of characters to light, though their limited attachment to the truth makes them dubious role models.

Now a television drama has introduced us to a hidden hero. Channel 4’s Endgame depicted the secret talks held in England that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa. These talks were brokered by a corporate public affairs manager, Michael Young. His actions were sanctioned by his company, but he was still taking a great risk. The outcome was not obvious at the time, and the journey was tortuous.

In this video interview, the real life Michael Young speaks about the making of the film and of his role in it. He’s the opposite of the showman-publicist; he’s a self-effacing political operator who saw that his public relations skills could be used to good effect for conflict resolution.

Overall a record-breaking 465,000 people are applying to begin a degree this September, including a significant increase in the number of older applicants, official figures reported.

The number of applications from over-24s rose by 12.6% and the 20-24 age group increased by 12.9%, the figures published yesterday by the university application service UCAS revealed.

A last-minute boom in applications in the run-up to the December deadline is thought to have been triggered by people wanting to use academia to escape the recession and be better qualified by the time the jobs market picks up again, moving the competition for places to university in addition to the job market.

Vice-chancellors warned last night that with a 7.8% increase in undergraduate applications therefore 34,000 more than last year, students face the most intense competition in years.

Jerry Swerling, director of Public Relations at Annenberg, said he is seeing an overall increase in international student applicants from countries such as India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Canada, Argentina and Finland. “These students want to come here, learn about Public Relations, get internships, and then go back and build the field,” Swerling said. “We’re trying hard to position our program to have global perspective.”

Swerling also said the majority of Chinese international students are applying to the Master’s course in Public Relations because they want to learn the skills needed to help develop China’s slowly emerging PR industry.

”Students might be showing increased interest in the PR profession because it has not been as negatively affected as other industries have been by the recession”, Swerling said. He attributed this to companies looking for more efficient ways to communicate their messages to the public. He also said that, because of the increased need for skilled PR practitioners, the recession might even be increasing the profession’s level of support and credibility:

“Public Relations is a field that is thriving, even in difficult economic times,” Swerling said. “In the short term it’s going to be difficult, but in the long term this is probably the best environment that the PR profession has ever enjoyed.”

Betsy Whitwam-Kirkup, a level two student from Leeds Metropolitan University joined the hospice’s small PR team for a short-term placement earlier in the year and developed the idea with another member of staff.

The hospice’s small budget meant a different approach to fund-raising and media eye-catching was needed to raise the hospice’s profile and funding. Funds need to reach £3.9 million each year in order to be able to provide free care for its residents.

A local drama group were recruited to direct the event, with whom the fundraising team had built relations with in the past.

“I’d been taught at university that a good relationship with an organisation’s audiences was beneficial, so when I marketed the event and worked with them I got to see this in practise and deliver the event successfully based on the working relations we had with everyone involved,” Betsy said.

Being part of such a small PR team proved to be beneficial for Betsy, as more responsibility and tasks were able to be given out. This saw Betsy having full responsibility for many aspects of the event including publicity and liaising with the local press.

Fundraising events are the main source of funding for the hospice, but ‘Death by Chocolate’ was the first of murder mystery party held for this purpose.

We can know the history of public relations from documents and narrative accounts. In truth, we tend to get a US perspective featuring familiar names like PT Barnum, Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays. We also get an optimistic view in which past malpractices tend to be replaced by a more ethical and sophisticated present-day practice.

A decade into the twenty-first century, it’s increasingly fashionable to challenge this US-centric view. But what picture is emerging of the future of public relations?

Alan Freitag is a sympathetic guide, a US academic who in the preface to this book recalls challenging the assumption that global public relations necessarily involves exporting the American way of doing PR. What if PR practitioners from other countries started competing on American soil, in the same way as Japanese or German cars and office technology? His question at a conference in the mid 1990s was greeted with laughter, so ridiculous did it seem at the time.

That was the era of the End of History, the time after the end of the Cold War when the US was the unchallenged global superpower. Now, the rise of China and shocks to capital markets suggest this was a short-lived period.

This book is structured in three parts. First, a review of the common ground (what is public relations and what it’s not; the development of the practice and some major theories and methods). This is followed in part two by a look at cultural dimensions and media systems. Part three is a region by region review of the factors shaping the development of the industry.

This includes a good outsider’s account of Britain (or, as the country is correctly named here, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), though I raised my eyebrows at the assertion that ‘the British respect authority and rank’. I had thought there was much evidence to suggest that the age of deference is very much over. Perhaps this is a minor example of the danger of generalising that the book warns us about.

But there’s a startling omission here. Why no chapter on the United States? If the authors are consistent with the view stated in the preface, then they should have recognised the likelihood that readers from other countries might benefit from a dispassionate academic explanation of the factors shaping the practice of PR in the United States.

Here are two questions I would like to have seen addressed. Why, in a land that prizes free expression and has such a proud tradition of a free press, has it been so long since the press achieved anything like the Washington Post’s Watergate investigation? Have all institutions been beyond criticism and above investigation in the decades since Watergate?

My other question surrounds America’s brand of free market capitalism. The market is so prized, the private over the public sphere, that it seems to me that public relations has played second fiddle to sales and marketing in this promotional culture more than anywhere else in the world. Contrast this with a European country with its larger public sector and stronger emphasis on corporate social responsibility. Could this US promotional culture have hampered the independent development of public relations at the same time that US academics like James Grunig were giving it, in theory, such a distinctive role?

Others will note that not all countries gain much space here, but the authors are academics who are more interested in the principles than the details of the practice.

Theirs is an important review of the literature on global PR at a time when the future is looking uncertain. But it’s likely that the international dimension will be more, not less, important through this century and a sound understanding of history is a good way to confront the paradoxes of the present day.

I want to push the boundaries of the profession in understanding and managing the creative dimension, its use of brands as tools for delivering messages and memes - which are the DNA of communications. Also, I have coined the term ‘personal brandcasting’ to provide a model of how great communicators work.

Which PR sector has provided the most enjoyable work for you?

The next task I will be given, or come across.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard in PR?

As a young PR practitioner working in local government, I was frustrated that I worked really hard to get my council great, positive publicity, only to feel my efforts were undermined by councillors going on television and wanting to do things such as ‘ban Punch and Judy’ shows. I was fortunate to meet Warren Newman, who had done some great work in local government PR, and explained my frustration.

He said: “Andrew, all you can do is give them the reputation they deserve.”

So, whether you’re in-house or as a consultant, all you can do is give your clients the option, your best advice on achieving the reputation they deserve. If they fail to listen, contradict in their actions, then it’s their responsibility not yours. So don’t beat yourself up over things you are not 100% in control of.

What has been your proudest career achievement?

I once saved a Leeds-based ice cream company, Treats Ice Cream from closure and saved its 350 workforce from getting sacked in a campaign where I had no budget, no spokespeople for the client, could not be seen to act in public, with very little time to get Unilever to change its mind and succumb to stakeholder and public pressure.

A colleague at the time said: “Do you realize you are taking on Unilver?” To which I replied: “Do they realize who they have taken on!” That might sound big-headed, but I believe in a term I coined ‘Hibris’, where you have absoloute, positive conviction of your own abilities, tempered with humility to know your limitations, be prepared to listen and use information from non-usual sources.

What has been your best learning experience?

Always learn from each and every experience. And heed the Frank Zappa quote: “Just because several million people think you’re wrong doesn’t mean they’re right.”

What are your research interests?

Developing understanding of how we can be better managers of the creative dimension, harness brands and memes, personal brandcasting.

Word of mouth and networking are passions - and are brilliant opportunities for PR professionals to be managers of these tasks within their organization.

I am also interested in developing my model of what I call ‘paramemes’ explained in my book, ‘Effective Personal Communications’ - a tool to help communicators manage the context of their communications.

What is your opinion on the fate of PR in the current economic climate?

I feel the profession is at the crossroads of some magnificent opportunities, to place it in the driving seat of managing corporate and brand communications through extending its ownership of branding, word of mouth, networking, and social and digital media.
Given our track record, such as the tardy way the profession responded to the advent of the Internet and managing this dimension of organization, I am not too optimistic that we will fully realize this potential.

Do you have any personal ambitions or targets to succeed surrounding the recession?

For my part, a I am launching a new venture this year, a new book called ‘The Upturn:my part in its rise’ and plan to do a series of tours around CIPR groups and the wider community to promote the message of how we are living in disruptive times, which is fertile ground for disruptive thinking and for each and every one of us to create, make, and realize new ideas and opportunities.

But they are sadder days by far when the circulation figures are released now. The chip shop uses plain paper today; our local newsagent closed down last week. It has become all too easy to live without newspapers.

There are many new ways to receive and absorb news, and all are welcome, not least because young people with an alarming absence of curiosity about the world around them will nevertheless read the headlines while checking their Yahoo mail. It is not my place to decry Twitter news alerts or ignore the value of RSS feeds.

But I can’t eat my breakfast without a newspaper, or a magazine. In times of emergency, when the last page of the Guardian has been tucked under the defrosting fridge or shredded for cat litter, I’ve been known to read the Ikea catalogue at the breakfast table. The Times is terrific for a leisurely Saturday lunch; the Halifax Courier is great when there’s only time to stop for a coffee. There’s usually a supplement of some sort, colour or otherwise, to rely on when I’m stranded in the car, waiting for the kids, or a delayed train, or the rain to stop.

There is much to be missed in the selectivity of electronically-delivered news. Back copies of Behind the Spin have pride of place in my office, in seminar rooms, and in the kitchen magazine rack. It was a classy publication, good to look at, substantial to hold, and with fascinating content on every page.

Now I see only the “relevant” items, the feature about Twitter which mentions one of my graduates, for example, spotted and forwarded by a keen student. Here, in front of the screen, I don’t have the time to read the entire online version. (Time is not the only excuse, it must be confessed; eyestrain and arthritic fingers are other barriers. Be warned, all you who spend your days screen-bound.)

Filtering news

Selectivity and electronic options mean that students will choose to read about the Real Jade Goody rather than the Real IRA. They know which celebrities climbed Kilimanjaro but fail to recognise the prime minister of Zimbabwe. This is not cynical supposition but a claim based on sound evidence;

I run a weekly news quiz in seminars and it’s rare for the top score to be more than 4 out of 10. I’ve taught them how to Twitter, but I’d feel a greater sense of professional achievement if they carried the Indy, the Times or even the Mirror into class.

It’s not only the content that is being missed, but also that sense of perspective, required by readers as well as journalists, which is enabled by the graphological nature of the printed page. The juxtaposition of stories on the page is the key to understanding news agendas. (A friend who once worked for the Daily Mail told this story about news values and story placement. It was shortly after the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, and the news desk took a call about the murder of a young woman in South Manchester. A slot was saved on the front page, until the details came in. She was black, and a prostitute. It made two paragraphs on page 8.)

The PR world welcomed Andrew Currah’s Reuter’s Institute report (What’s happening to our news?) and recognised gratefully the value in his assertion: “..we view the PR industry as an integral component of the media landscape, and as a pivotal agent in the gathering, packaging and dissemination of news to consumers.”

Richard Griffiths, head of strategic media, Ketchum UK was quoted recently as saying that “Blogs and websites are not reducing the influence of professional journalism”. His argument was supported by Peter Jenkins, head of PR at the Energy Retail Association: “The rise of citizen journalism means consumers will eventually revert back to trusted news sources. The consumer will become increasingly sceptical and will look to specialist publications rather than blogs to get information.” And Zoe Arden, quoted in the same issue of PR Week, joined in: “No matter how big the blogosphere gets, information provided by a professional journalist will always be more credible”.

Local matters

So there’s a resounding vote of confidence in “journalism”, but print versions of newspapers need to be part of that media landscape. Andy Green, whose Overcoming Stupidity is propped on my desk, wrote recently about the demise of regional newspapers (where the situation is stark). He bemoans the loss of parochialism and regionalism: “In my part of the world, what makes news in Bradford doesn’t make news in Leeds (ten miles distant). Indeed, regionalism may have been deemed dead in some respects certainly at a local political level where people are not interested in what the councils of Hull, Leeds, Bradford or York have planned for their citizens.”

But he says that in spite of this “I still love the Yorkshire Post and buy it every day. Similarly, as a resident of Barnard Castle I bought the Teesdale Mercury every week when I lived there.

Local is so important in regional newspapers. Back in the day when I was still a journalist - that meant covering the Women’s Institute meeting, the Parish Council and the local art competition. The idiocy of the current situation is that the more you cut the editorial resource, the more you damage a newspaper’s ability to report local news.”

Yes, that news is available and should be available online, but in print as well. It is perhaps time for newspaper readers to fight back, to refuse the “inevitable” accession of electronic media as the only source of news. Co-existence must be possible, and we who wish to be semi-detached from our computers for at least some of the day, may have to state our case more loudly.

Photography by Victoria Louise Crampton

Working from a brief set by the Meningitis Trust’s in-house PR team, the students were asked to create a campaign strategy to increase awareness and donations from young people.  

The students, Zaena Leadette-Williams, Jody Dennett, Joanna Dey and Lauren Moss, devised the winning idea for the Meningitis Trust to employ an SMS messaging donation service in which the target audience can donate via text message to the charity. 

Harriet Penning, Senior Communications Officer of the Meningitis Trust said:

“We were delighted with the ideas that the team produced and will be looking to implement some of these into our work in the near future. We were really impressed with the professional approach that the team applied to the project and would recommend that any business, charity or organisation work with the university.”

The team’s success was the result of careful planning, research, and an intense day of competitive pitching to the charity. 

Last summer’s headlines featured record breaking fuel prices instead of soaring temperatures; autumn saw speculation on the costs of starting university, now proving too much for many while you could only pitch journalists stories on how to have an economical Christmas in the months leading up to the holiday season.

The recession was perhaps inevitable, and cutbacks in everyday personal and professional lives are unavoidable. The government is telling us to spend our way through the recession and companies are offering money-saving tips and ways to make our salary go further, but what about those who don’t yet have a secure income, and aren’t looking at gaining one in the near future? 2008 saw yet another high number of students graduating with fantastic results, but what use are hard-earned degrees if the country has no graduate jobs to offer?

So how is PR fitting into this? Some say that the industry will continue to demand new employees. But then again, we are talking about an industry that exists to put a positive spin on most situations, or at least to draw attention away from a negative one. Is that what PR has done for its own profession?

It’s true that PR could benefit from cutbacks to traditional advertising budgets, but the big picture looks rather less optimistic.

Every week sees a new announcement of redundancies, with the PR industry being no exception. PR Week ran a front page column listing the latest cutbacks in employees from well-established agencies recently, and a Bellwether report describing how business budgets are highlighting the suffering of PR: “Hardest hit were the budgets for ‘all other’, which includes PR, and the media category”.

Views of PR’s fate across the profession vary, from in-house having better prospects than agency, the public sector better than private, and companies having an excuse to downsize without criticism.

One opinion apparent at London agency, Edelman, is that bigger is better. An agency representing organisations from technology, consumer and financial sectors should be suffering, but staff say they’re ‘not feeling the credit crunch like other companies’, with their graduate scheme running as normal with no changes to recruitment levels.

The problem here is not recession, but the competition. All PR students know the industry is a tough and competitive one, with not just PR graduates applying for PR jobs. Students in PR, Marketing, Journalism and English, to name a few, are all competing for jobs that aren’t there, some who are still career-hunting after graduating a number of years ago.

This proves the importance of having a clear sense of direction about your career, before it begins. Completing your degree, going travelling and coming back and taking a year or two to decide what to do with your life is no longer an option. Students now have to know where they are heading and how to get there. Juggling university work with CV-boosting experience can be a struggle, but is now essential if a degree is to appear worthwhile to a financially-challenged industry.

While the opinion of some top professionals is still that of ‘if you’re good at what you do, you will succeed’, this is not being reflected in recruitment figures. Individuals who have never taken a sick-day in their life are now finding themselves staying at home with little more to do than worry over their finances while finding work even outside the industry is proving impossible.

The government is looking at ways to help and the idea of a placement scheme is being discussed. The scheme would encourage businesses to offer three month unpaid placements to graduates who need to build vital experience. Helpful for some, perhaps, but the idea of working full-time, unpaid, is not an appealing one, which is why academics are stressing the importance of combining placements with university, to save doing so as a graduate with no student loan to fall back on.

The economy is going to be far from stable for a number of years to come, with reports of a further downturn in the next year and the possibility of a recovery being apparent no sooner than the 2030s being broadcast across the media. Graduates can’t wait until then to begin a career, and while many already established professionals are setting up on their own, students unfortunately lack the experience and confidence to be able to pursue this route.

“promote yourself through your blog, Twitter activity and networking. You are more likely to succeed if companies recognise your name, no matter how the industry is doing.”

PR professionals are all offering the same advice to students hoping to begin a career during these financially unstable times: promote yourself through your blog, Twitter activity and networking. You are more likely to succeed if companies recognise your name, no matter how the industry is doing.

Photo Credit: Victoria Louise Crampton, Flickr

Twitter is based around the interaction between individuals using ‘Tweets’, a message no longer than 140 characters answering the question, ‘what are you doing?’. Also known as microblogging, it’s now being requested by more and more companies as part of their digital PR campaigns.

University of Huddersfield graduate Matthew Watson was recruited via Twitter last summer, shortly after tweeting, “Good News: Had last exam & finished uni! Bad News: Didn’t get job at AxiCom or Cake PR. Good News: It’s sunny & I’m having beers & bbq!”

When asked to describe how his recruitment took place, Matthew described the simple process that occurred as a result of twittering: “After finishing my final exam I discovered that I’d been turned down by some PR agencies I had been interviewed by. I tweeted this and went out to celebrate the end of my degree with my class mates. A few hours later I checked my emails and found a message from Stephen Waddington, MD, Rainier PR, who said he had been following me on Twitter and had noticed that I was looking for a job.”

Twitter, along with blogging, puts your personal brand out there for recruiters to see and understand what kind of person you are and whether you could have a noticeable impact if recruited to their company.

Since the website was launched in 2006, Twitter has been ranked as the third largest social networking site, with 6 million users and over 55 million visitors to the site every month.

Most recently, Hatch Communications tweeted a simple message, telling followers how recruitment may soon be on the cards for the agency – a method which took seconds to display and potentially saved thousands of pounds in advertising and agency costs.

Michael Litman, now a Social Media Strategist for Consolidated PR was also recruited via Twitter, after an online friend recommended him to the digital department.

“No recruitment agencies were involved, no external costs, no bells, no whistles. Just me and Twitter. That’s a pretty big deal when you think about the costs of recruitment for one new hire. You can eliminate all of those costs in one fell swoop and be seen to be a very forward thinking company at the same time.’’

Twitter is rapidly gaining followers as PR companies, celebrities and others catching onto the free social media opportunity. Celebrity, Stephen Fry has become known for his favouring of the site, tweeting several times a day and being asked to talk about the site regularly in interviews and at appearances.

They enlist Cow PR, Public Relations Consultants’ Association’s (PRCA) agency of the year for 2008. Cow PR didn’t receive this prestigious title for writing press releases and doing generic PR. They won it for doing outstanding PR with the ability to make people sit up and take notice.

Cow PR took on the challenge of making the world’s most expensive burger the world’s most talked about. Burger King, one of Cow PR’s biggest clients wanted to convey their quality messaging through launching a limited edition burger costing £95, called THE Burger. You may have read about it, at least you should have done because the launch successfully created 139,098,922 opportunities to see within the media.

Burger King and Cow PR used this campaign to demonstrate the quality they put into all their products. THE Burger was created by Mark Dowding, Burger King’s Director of New Product Development and Innovation, a professionally trained chef. This acted as a unique selling point that no other quick-serve restaurant chain had to offer.

The £95 burger combined the best ingredients including Kobe beef, saffron, truffles and pate negra to produce a memorable taste sensation. But with no advertising being used to promote the limited edition burger it was up to the PR team to make sure that everyone knew about it, including typical Burger King customers as well as people who would never usually eat at their restaurants.

The official launch of THE Burger was on June 19th 2008 at the Gloucester Road restaurant in South West London, probably one of the few places in the UK where people could afford to buy a £95 burger.

To gain the maximum amount of media interest, journalists from key publications were invited to taste and review THE Burger the day before the official launch. Journalists who attended the pre-launch included influential ‘foodie’ Tom Parker Bowles, a well-renowned food journalist who writes for The Daily Mail.

Burger King wanted as much coverage as possible for this campaign. However with hugely expensive raw materials and a final cost of £95 the PR team were not able to offer free burgers to all the journalists who wanted to taste it. Each potential reviewer had to be assessed by the PR team, taking account of the total readership of the publication, the demographic of the readership, the influence of the journalist wishing to write the review and if they had written any articles about Burger King previously.

The goal was to change people’s perception of Burger King but if these journalists were overly negative towards the brand then it could have resulted in a negative review, which could have jeopardised the campaign.

Then onto the launch, proving that PR isn’t always about sitting in the office ‘phoning journalists. It was all-hands to the deck, with the majority of the team out of the office ensuring that the launch went smoothly. We were dealing with the restaurant staff, making sure they were fully briefed, taking enquiries from customers and, most importantly, dealing with the large number of media that attended the official launch.

My first responsibility was to deliver THE Burger to London-based radio stations for the breakfast shows. This included Alex Zane’s show on XFM and Johnny Vaughan and Denise Van Outen on Capital FM. Although it seems odd to be delivering £95 burgers to celebrities for breakfast you have to consider that the breakfast shows are renowned for achieving very high listening figures. These presenters could review THE Burger live on air to a big mass audience.

Back at the Gloucester Road restaurant a photo-call was taking place for online publications, late editions and the evening newspapers. Photographers from major newspapers and press-wires came to the restaurant to collect images of the first £95 burger being sold to a customer.

Throughout the day various print and broadcast journalists visited the restaurant to taste THE Burger, and to do some filming for FHM online, amongst others. The PR team had to help all of these journalists, ensuring that they had all the information they needed, setting up interviews with Mark Dowding if required, overseeing the preparation of THE Burger, ensuring it was ready in time as well as dealing with customers who wanted to purchase THE Burger.

Every good public relations professional knows that the most important aspect of any campaign is the result - not just the amount but the quality of the coverage. Getting a couple of mentions in newspapers sometimes isn’t enough to create a real impact. With THE Burger we wanted people to be talking about it at work, on the Tube, in the pub; we wanted it to encourage debate and discussion. In terms of “advertising value equivalent” it achieved £5,254,029, with major articles in The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Sunday Mirror.

However what was more interesting were the number of blogs written about THE Burger including world-renowned Perez Hilton, showing that it was a story with global appeal. THE Burger also appeared in the reader comment section of the London Lite and Style magazine on the Going Up/Going Down column, demonstrating how the story managed to get people talking about the brand and THE Burger.

Of course many people saw this as a money-making scheme for Burger King, but they were wrong. All of the money (not just the profit, the entire £95) went to “Help a London Child”, a charity that Burger King has supported in the past.

So did the PR team manage to create a successful campaign and meet the brief? Following analysis of the coverage we reached 61% of all UK adults on average 3.5 times, with 98% of this mentioning the Burger King brand and 86% of this being positive. Proving that for this campaign THE Burger really did become King.

Photography: www.freeimages.co.uk, Victoria Louise Crampton, Chris Ramsden

By early afternoon, over 2000 stamps had been placed in approximately 350 locations including parked cars, post boxes, walls and even Oxford Street itself was branded with the Extreme logo. This was achieved by stamping the Extreme logo into a suitable snowy surface using a laser cut stencil. The stamp, which was developed for Extreme should it snow this winter, leaves a crystal clear outline of the logo.

Al Gosling, CEO of Extreme Group, was approached by CURB in the early morning and soon seized the campaign opportunity. Al said “Extreme has a long history of both branding innovation and association with alpine adrenaline living, buts its not very often we get to bring these both together onto the streets of London. CURB were able to turn it around in a couple of hours and we were very impressed with what they delivered”

Anthony Ganjou of Curb said. “We were thrilled for Extreme to give us the go-ahead so quickly as it meant that we had the chance to get out there almost immediately. This has NEVER been done in London before - mainly because it rarely snows - and we wanted to be the first to do it. So our team quickly hit the streets. By midday we had covered central London with the Extreme brand and had also turned a lot of heads. The feedback from people we saw in the streets was really positive. They thought it was fun and clever.

Curb specializes in providing brands with new and innovative ways to promote their brands. From ‘clean advertising’ through to logo’s cut in turf, the agency is well respected for its creative abilities.