I love reading these, but it’ll probably be a few years before I’m important enough to have my own in The Guardian’s Media Monday. So I thought I’d write one now and give you all an exclusive for the future…

Newspapers

Obviously my daily consumption of newspapers is pretty heavy because of monitoring and clipping, so enjoying the papers is something saved for the weekend. I get The Guardian on Saturday and sometimes the Indie too, and I love to get the Observer Music Monthly. If I’m having a funny day I might by a tabloid for a few laughs, but it’s pretty rare that I stray from my Grauniad.

Magazines

I tend to have phases of buying different types of magazines. It really depends on what mood I’m in and what I’m up to that month. Generally speaking I only regularly read PR Week, but if I catch sight of a feature or interview I’m interested in, I’ll read anything.

Books

Books are an absolute obsession. I studied English Literature at university and found some excellent antique bookshops where I found leather-bound classics for 50p each - I spend around £100, so now I have an admirable collection! I’m currently halfway through The Black Swan and I’ve decided that Umberto Eco’s theory of unread books is something I’m naturally adhering to! I’m also halfway through Flat Earth News, 1984 and PR! A Social History of Spin. I never used to be able to read more than one book at a time but starting in PR has given me a lot of primary reading to catch up on and I’m still reading (and incidentally adding to) my list of books that I need to read before I’m 30 (you can email me for the whole list).

TV

I don’t really have a regular schedule of programs, so I love to watch things on the interweb (I would give a link at this point, but it would be a bit naughty!). I love Peep Show, Family Guy, Black Books (RIP), Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Mock the Week and any documentaries that are on something that currently interests me (which is currently the Detroit music scene).

Radio

It’s rare that I get the chance to listen to the radio and when I drive into work I usually listen to a CD. When I get chance though, I’ll use the Radio One website to catch up with Zane Lowe and I do enjoy Radio Two on Saturday morning… I really should listen to more radio.

Ads

I like adverts that either polarise opinion or are quirky. So the new Glass and A Half Full adverts are great, as are the irritating adverts that stick in my head day to day. I’m also (obviously) a huge fan of adverts that encompass a variety of platforms - the ‘Get Some Nuts‘ is a probably the first example to come to mind. I honestly believe that for advertising to work it either has to be ridiculously focused (Facebook Social Ads) or multi-platform to reach a variety of demographics.

New Media

New media is integral to pretty much everything I do! I syndicate, blog, Google, Wiki, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Tweet, YouTube and probably a hundred other things that have become habit since beginning in PR…

Over the last few months I’ve seen that ‘evaluation’ of the effectiveness of public relations has always been a sticky issue. I’m yet to stumble across a single method of effective measurement, but yet I face a constant battle to explain how effective my work can be for my company as a whole. Public relations is often defined as the management of reputation, but how do we give ‘reputation’ a scalable index? And are there other avenues that we can address using public relations that could give much more influence on the bottom line?

From my five months in public relations, I’ve started to think the following…

Maybe effective measurement can be attained with a trident approach;

• Traditional column inches/A non-traditional web presence
  • An important part of raising awareness of any company
  • A way to improve opinions and general thought
• Website visitors
  • High levels of traffic can then improve Alexa ratings, which can be effectively used to improve search engine rankings, in turn increasing traffic even further
  • An effective sales team should be able to convert visits to sales
  • An innovative design should ensure that a visitors attention is kept and that they then return in the future
• Sales that are directly driven by public relations
  • This can be measured by simple questioning of customers. Eg, “Where did you hear about our service?”
  • Social media public relations should improve sales through a high forum profile and should help to improve brand transparency

The other avenues to improving the bottom line through effective public relations practice could include (but not be limited too);

• A transparent forum presence
  • This ensures that customers and potential customers can passively view the way in which your company operates and also opens up a more relaxed avenue of communications
• Giving customers the opportunity to directly contact you, by any means
  • By highlighting that you are not a sales person, it immediately gives customers a sense of security
  • If you then distribute a wide variety (email, telephone, IM) it allows for relaxed contact. These customers can then be handed over to the sales team at an appropriate time
• Introducing social media into a daily routine
  • By increasing social networking/media presence you can connect with passive customers
  • This also allows for stealth marketing (this was the only name I could give it). By listening (passively or actively) to your customers, service, pricing and product can all be improved.
  • By increasing corporate transparency, a product or service can become totally integrated with the needs of the consumer, and immediacy allows for the product to reflect the (sometimes) constantly changing needs of the consumer

Some of this might be painfully obvious to the weathered PRO, but I hope that I might have included some minor details that could be new, or that I might have better articulated existing thought…

Anyone care to comment?