Manufacturing has been the Cinderella of the UK economy for decades. Neglected, underinvested, denigrated and shamefully ignored by governments of all persuasions. Yet it survives in spite of them.
What has changed significantly is that the shining stars – services and finance – have lost their twinkle. The balance of power is changing. In this new environment, where the pound has fallen to a level that makes British goods very competitive, UK manufacturers need to push for greater recognition and support.
Many UK companies out there produce world class products and are making inroads into overseas markets. Look at Street Crane, a 60 year old engineering company with innovative products that are winning a loyal following throughout the world. Rowe Hankins a specialist in rail engineering that is also successfully trading globally.
Fuel monitoring equipment for fuel management
There are also smaller, technology, based businesses that are winning business overseas. Fueltek, a fuel management company, is attracting buyers from as far away as Australia and Angola. Detectronic, who produce survey instruments for the water industry, are attracting business from as far away as Kuwait.
Britain has thousands companies like these with world-class products. Let’s hope that the next government has the wisdom to recognise the value of manufacturing with tangible support.
The communication problem for manufacturers is that many in government, politics and the civil service have little industrial understanding. As technical PR specialists we are committed to helping companies like these fight their corner and get the credit they deserve.
I am just back from Crete. It is a place I have visited seven times and I will continue to return. In the villages in the hills life is still lived close to the land – simple and very honest. In these remoter parts of Crete, keen walkers like myself, are given an open and generous welcome that extends everywhere you go.
Imagine what it is like after a long walk in the hills to return to your room and find a tray with local wine together with figs and pomegranates from the garden. Buy a beer in a taverna frequented by locals and you will likely also get a free plate of mezzes – perhaps toast, tomatoes, olives and omelette. Buy a meal in the evening and you will almost certainly get a generous complimentary Raki (local fire-water) to finish and maybe a plate of melon or other fruit.
These gestures are not bribes but honest and simple ways of saying thank-you for my custom. How often in our pressurised business lives do we forget the simple gestures that make that vital human connection, cost little and create so much goodwill? It is this micro-PR that will keep me coming back to Crete. Find ways to say ‘thank-you’ to your customers and they are sure to keep coming back to where they are made to feel appreciated!
‘Solutions’ is a word that crops up everywhere. Often it is attached to some other phrase or word that also tells you nothing about what a company or organisation can offer you. Every marketer knows that people only really buy the message when they understand it – when they can connect with it, when it answers the question: “What’s in it for me?”
I am prompted to make this comment by an entry in an online directory that encourages local businesses to link-up and promote themselves to the wider business community. The company concerned provides ‘one-to-one solutions’! Do you know what that is? To clarify things further, in the directory space where they could choose a category they helpfully tell me ‘other’. I’m intrigued, but not so much that I can be bothered to find out what they do.
A really useful book that anyone in marketing should make time to read is ‘Don’t Make Me Think’. The basic proposition is that if you want anyone to do anything such as visit your web site, fill in a form or pick up the phone, then you should make the pathway as simple, clear and as uncomplicated as possible.
So come on, let’s ban this meaningless word ‘solutions’ and start telling people what we do – don’t make them guess!
A battle for readers and advertisers is developing that will have profound consequences. News International is retreating from the ‘free to consumer news’ business model and is canvassing other publishers to follow their lead. Is this the last gasp of a news delivery system that has had its day?
Is free news dead
The News International retreat is signalled by two events, the closure of the thelondonpaper (a free evening newspaper aimed at young London commuters) and the announcement that web content of the Sun, Times and Sunday Times will no longer be free from next year. Rupert Murdock argues (quite rightly) that good journalism is costly. With advertising revenues crumbling, it is understandable that publishers want to bolster revenue. Justification for the ‘paid for’ news model comes from the success of on-line content from the likes of The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.
Just as this happens the (London) Evening Standard has announced that it is to become a free paper, and double its print run to around 600,000. Their business argument is that the larger circulation will pull more advertising revenue and so more than offset the loss of the cover price.
I suspect that the transfer from free to paid will fail. The first reason is that to obtain a fee for news, the content has to be genuinely of value to readers. The on-line FT does have information that has real-time commercial, but is this true of The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun?
The second reason is that there is a younger news audience out there who have never paid for news – either in print or on-line. If they cannot get this from News International they are savvy enough to find other free outlets to fill the gap.
Also there are many competent bloggers out there. Even Twitter has the potential to link people to key events, break stories and spread comment. There are already aggregators who are able to gather content and create new, virtual, interactive, rolling news channels that may take over the role of traditional media. Many established journalists are establishing themselves in these news outlets too and feeding them.
What does this mean for the PR industry? I believe, very little. Our role has always been to produce publishable content. On behalf of our clients we can use the same technologies to talk direct to their audiences and create inclusive conversations with them. Better still we can gain more immediate and better feedback. This is the other screw that this turning on traditional media which is trimming editorial staff, pages and budgets.
So is free news dead? Not any time soon – but there will be a split in content. Where media owners believe they can legally ring-fence the value of content, they will do and make a charge for it. However, this will prove near impossible for most general news where reporting is no longer the sole preserve of the large media owners or news agencies.
I have just received an e-newsletter from a designer that showcases a web site created entirely in Flash. It is a very beautiful web site with some first class photographic images that really do show his clients product and expertise to perfection.
Traditionally Flash has been a no no if you want your site to be recognised, indexed and ranked by search engines. If you ignored this you ended up with a pretty site – but only the people who knew the URL could find it. Now this has changed, the search engines are improving the way they index text content in Flash, but how effective is this? The following post, from Brian Ussery, an expert in these matters, will provide some food for thought www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/google-flash-seo/.
Pictorial content has huge impact and value. But it is important to strike the correct balance between image and written content. From a Googlebot perspective the correct selection of domain name, title tags, page head titles, sub headings and well written body copy that is key word/phrase rich and relevant to each other will boost ranking and initial traffic. Textual content is still king.
The information needs of the visitor must be paramount. Crucially, sites need to be relevant and the content consistent with the promise. It is easy to build a site around a few decent images, often backed up with clichéd shots from photo libraries or material culled without thought from company publications. However, it is much harder to research and write the tight, readable copy that humans will also happily read and enjoy so you site achieves the engagement you want, builds goodwill and encourages further enquiries.
The Royal Mail is unable to offer a satisfactory business mail redirection service if you are relocating from premises in multiple occupation. That’s official and comes from the office of the CEO, Adam Crozier. This is not good customer relations – it is not good PR.
Royal Mail - a public relations disaster
This will not prevent them accepting a fee for the service. If you complain about their non performance, it may improve – temporarily – but may then lapse. If you chase the CEO, you may eventually get an admission that they cannot deliver the promised service and your money back – eventually being the operative word.
This is our experience having relocated a business with two brands two months ago.
We tried the official Royal Mail complaints channels first. In the best traditions of such organisations the service is hopelessly under resourced. To get through takes persistence, time, and costs you money. Faced with a call centre with multi-layered options and pre-recorded protestations that their lines are all busy – how many people just give up? This is not good customer relations – it is not good PR.
The Royal Mail in not unique in poor PR and customer service. The proliferation of automated call handling, poorly trained call centre staff and failure to recognise and rectify problems speedily is sadly far too common and is corrosive of trust, brand and reputation.
Persistence does pay. After two rounds with the complaints system, 14 minutes and six minutes respectively, and various email exchanges with Adam Crozier and his staff we got our money back with an admission that the redirection service has problems.
If you already have signed up for this service – and have had the same problems we did – ask for your money back and accept no alternative. They will offer to extend their useless service for longer if you don’t insist on your money back.
Bypass the useless complaints procedure and go directly to Adam Crozier, who does seem to get things moving adam.crozier@royalmail.co.uk – good luck. Incidentally if you have other complaints against organisation and you want to go direct to the top, then CEO E-mail addresses is a useful web site to explore.
The launch on June 16 of the Riversimple sustainable hydrogen powered city car is very significant. It’s significant for environmental reasons, for technological reasons and for economic reasons. This company has turned conventional wisdom on its head. Providing the source of power used to produce the hydrogen is clean and sustainable, we are on the verge of having personal transportation without pollution.
Oil based combustion engines have been the power plant of choice for personal transport. Despite pollution problems, their compelling advantage was that they used fuels with a high energy density. So does Hydrogen. Allied to the use of an efficient fuel cell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell) to produce electricity, high power capacitors for storage and motors at each wheel on the car to recapture energy during breaking this is a wining combination.
If all this wasn’t enough, Riversimple have thrown out the traditional business model. We won’t buy this car, but lease it, with maintenance and servicing rolled into the monthly fee. The cars will be built for a 20 year life. And the manufacturer wants to make the technology open source – so other manufacturers can take and adapt the idea and produce different configurations of the vehicle.
It takes courage and vision to do things differently. If you need help with creative thinking, then there is some advice in the brainstorming checklist on our free PR advice site.
Here we are again, repetition of details of MPs expenses. Important in a way – yes; more important than the real news it sidelines – definitely not. Compared with the billions the banks have squandered while blatantly rewarding themselves for their failures, the sums involved are tiny. Against the plight of the world’s starving, the implications of our involvement in wars and how the UK relates to the rest of the world, MPs expenses are non-news.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there is a greater principle involved, when it comes to public servants being caught with their hands in the cookie jar, it is right that it is aired. However, it should be kept in proportion. Traditional media is in decline and in quandary over readership/listeners/viewers. Their revenues are dwindling, perhaps they should start to think about what those readers, listeners and viewers really want.
The continual repetition of non-stories is a real interest killer. In a half hour news programme on TV they continually repeat the same information. When conducting an interesting interview, they cut the interviewee short because ‘we have run out of time’ only to go on and repeat the headlines from five minutes earlier.
The red-tops sold their soul to the devil in turning themselves into little more than comics – reporting TV soaps as though they are real life events. Now they find they can’t compete with the web for that instant ‘news as entertainment hit’. Even Radio 4’s Today programme results in a tedious car journey to work made even duller by needless repetition. The only solution – switch off!
Sometimes there are world events that warrant this kind of news treatment, but MPs expenses is not one of them. It really is no surprise that where there is a procedure for people to claim expenses there are also claims that appear wrong. Could it be just as interesting for the public to know how BBC journalists pocket their expenses for example? After all, it too is a public funded organisation – so, as the bible says, ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’.
