mediations

One Step Behind

Kurt's jacket
Originally uploaded by OneStepBehind

Eat your heart out Kenneth Branagh!

With One Step Behind (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mediationspix), I am experimenting with Flickr and a few other social media tools in a project that explores Sweden through fiction.

The Press Officer: Exit, Orange and Yellow

Connie Amory, the journalist at the centre of Martyn Bedford's Exit, Orange & Red, is based in a "Hallam" shopping mall so not surprisingly she has regular dealings with the Urbopark press officer:

"Warren Bartholemew was consumately adept at managing information to Mall Admin's best advantage without alerting reporters to the fact that he'd steered them away from a more fruitful line of inquiry. Having recently returned from a Mediterranean holiday - Greece? Malta?, she couldn't remember - his boyish broad face was freckled and the eyebrows were bleached blond, lending him a startled expression ..... His southern accent (my italics - in Hallamshire, southern means shifty!) sounded bland and insubstantial after DCI Pink's Hallam."

Naturally Warren is a former reporter...

The press officer spread his hands "OK, OK, you're an independent newspaper, you have to cover stories without fear or favour and so on. I accept that Connie, I've served my time on local newspapers, as you know."

Fictional press officers almost always make stupid mistakes...

Among the press releases to spew from the Mall Link printer ... were two from Warren Bartholomew, head of Mall PRO... The first, a formal announcement that bids were to be invited for Mall Secure when the present in-house agreement expired at the end of the year. The second, purporting to be a statement from Mall Manager Roy Dobbs, warned of the iniquities of the minimum wage and EU edicts on workers' rights... Under the heading Mall Chief Hits Out At Threat To jobs, was a diatribe a perceived assault on management's right to manage (etc)...  What aroused Constance's curiosity about the press release was that she'd been sent a draft copy... wherever a paragraph in quotation marks required attribution, it was followed by the instruction [insert your mall manager's name here]...

When Contance phoned Warren Bartholemew (he didn't seem to appreciate) her observation on the remarkable fact that not only did all six Mall Build UK managers share identical views on these issues but they chose to express their opinions in exactly the same words.

... Send in the Clones was the headline on the diary piece about the mall manager's statement.

And Bedford - once a journalist himself - adds a nice touch at the end...

The Crucible also carried a news story - based on a reissued version of the press release.... and reproducing (the manager's) quotes as though they were his. Justifying the decision in a leader column., the editor said he regarded it as a valid and timely contribution to the general debate... He concluded: It doesn't matter who said what, it is what is said that matters.

 

Here lies Eric Ambler....

Just finished reading Eric Ambler's Uncommon Danger, partly for Scoop! (central character Kenton is a journalist) and partly because Ambler was admired by Greene and Hitchcock. In his introduction to the just released Penguin Modern Classics edition Thomas Jones notes that Ambler's writing career took off in the late 1920s:

 

"He was asked to compose a press release extolling the bogus virtues of a batch of dodgy bulbs for car headlights. They sold so quickly on the back of it that the company even thought about making more. As for Ambler, the experience may or may not have given him a taste for concocting plausible fictions with a pseudo-technical bent, but it certainly showed he had a talent for it. Before long he was working full-time as an advertising copywriter."  

 

Splendidly, the author called his autobiography Here Lies Eric Ambler... 

 

You can read a version of Thomas Jones's essay in the Guardian.

CIPR NorthEast Conference presentation

One of the aims of my contribution to the North East CIPR conference was to try and pull together some of the ideas and themes devdloped by an impressive line-up of earlier speakers, beginning with Robin Hamman, of Headshift, followed by Stephen Davies talking about Twitter, Simon Wakeman on social media and local government and Mark Payne from West Midlands Police.

My contribution was about encouraging delegates to think more carefully about the implications of the growth of social media on PR practice. Clearly, I was preaching to the converted in that they wouldn't have attended if that was not their intention, but I thought it would be useful to highlight some of my sources and suggestions for further reading.

I used three core themes. Firstly, I tried to illustrate the way in which the very rapid adoption of social media technologies has changed the "vector of communication" (see Online Public Relations 2nd ed, by Phillips and Young). Suddenly, almost everyone can pass on their views to almost anyone else, and these views are linked and searchable; reputation is the aggregation of individual opinions, and this aggregation is empowered by social media. At a micro-level do a Twitter search on #necipr and see what views were expressed in real time by a significant percentage of delegates; searchable reputation, or the doing it because we can twitterings of a small, self-selecting group of technophiles - you choice!).

Secondly, I used the CIPR's own eyes-ears-mouth logo to stress the importance of listening and watching as well as speaking, and suggesting the two to one ratio expressed visually is actually at the top end of talking. To varying degrees, I think all the other speakers made similar points.

My third theme was ethics, based on my optimistic belief that the reach, transparency and porosity offered by digital communication (see Gregory and Fawkes 2000 JoCM paper Applying Communications Theory to the Internet)  brings the work of PR into the public gaze in a way in which we have not seen before. In one sense all this is saying, bluntly, is that you have to be more honest because the internet means that if you try to deceive you are much more likely to get caught. More importantly, social media forces PR practice out into the open; it is harder to be the invisible hand shaping messages when the communicators are tangible and named.

I used a video made by the United States Air Force to examine how it sought to enlist social media in the battle for truth in the propaganda war on terror; lots of explosions cast an intriguing light on the notion of a PR offensive. The video is helpful in showing how the USAF tries to harness new techniques, and the importance of storytelling as communications tool, but at the same time showed little willingness to create dialogue - more shoot first, ask questions later than a Grunigian attempt at two -way symmetrical communication.

I also used the USAF guide to responding to adverse blog posts. It is very rigid and formulaic but worth careful consideration - especially if, as many delegates were, you are communicating on behalf of an inherently conservative and inflexible organisation.

Having talked about dialogue, we thought about who we need to talk to. Like the final speaker, Robin Wilson, of McCann Erikson, I used the ladder developed by Groundswell, and also drew on analogies linked to discovery developed by David Jennings in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll. Maybe I should have said more about foraging, crowdsourcing and social bookmarking....

To put all this effort into context - remember it is effort, and it therefore must mesh with the organisational plan - I looked briefly at David Phillips' visualisation of a Grunigian view of PR.

My things to think about included Steve Rubel on lifestreaming with Posterous and the growth of services such as Audioboo - see Neville Hobson for up to the minute exposition.

        

PR in Fiction: But how does he know?

Although Mark Mills seems to present a credible picture of a British Information Officer working in 1942 Malta, how can the reader tell if it is in fact accurate? Here are a few excerpts from an apparently straightforward explanation of Max Chadwick's role. He is talking to Lilian, the half-Maltese, half-British newspaper deputy editor, trying to persuade her to run a picture of an old man who shot down an Italian plane with a rifle; it's a good story but it might be seen to promote illegal behaviour.

The Information office and the only Maltese-language newspaper... might make for natural bedfellows but Lilian's loyalties were not always served by the British policy which Max was bound to promote. This made for an uneasy collaboration, a tentative trade of services. Lilian advised Max on how best to pitch the tone of his publications and in return she received the kind of of information she could not get from anyone else.

(Max) crushed out his cigarette against the sole of his shoe, anything to avoid her eyes. "There are a lot of things I don't tell you - can't tell you - you know that."

Before the war, Max was an architect, with no inclination of his future role.

"...it was still strange to him that the task of manipulating minds came so naturally to him. He had always regarded himself as something of a loner.... yet here he was, deep in the minds of the masses, second guessing their reactions to events, guiding and enlightening them, a high priest at the altar of the great god Morale."

The question is, how does Mark Mills know that an information officer and a journalist would have had this kind of relationship? Conceivably, through careful research - the newspaper is real and there presumably was someone doing Chadwick's job. But how much comes from Mills own preconceptions of what the relationship was? Does Mills have direct experience of such a relationship?

These are questions that could be asked and possibly answered, but do they need to be asked? It is the author's task to persuade the reader that the setting for his fiction is credible, not to prove that it is accurate or true. In this case, Mills does not need to be accurate, rather he must create a situation that is believable, that resonates with the conception of such a relationship that shared by his readers.

In terms of the representation of PR, this resonance allows him to explicitly refer to Chadwick's work with the phrase 'manipulating minds'.

Maybe Mills has read Bernays...