mediations

Ten books for every PR bookshelf

The new term starts on Monday so I am finally getting around to tidying desk and shelves. Although I am not the sort of person who keeps books in neat alphabetical order, I can see the point in collecting together those I will use on an almost daily basis over the coming academic year.

Here are the ten titles on my close-at-hand shelf:

Core texts for most modules 

Gordon, A (2011) Public Relations - really pleased to have a comprehensive introductory text at last

Tench, R & Yeomans, L (2009) Exploring Public Relations^{2nd Ed} - if students are only going to buy one book, this is it

Theaker, A (2012) The Public Relations Handbook ^{4th ed} - I have always liked Theaker and I think the new edition, bigger pages, brighter text, fresh faces, is pretty strong. And I wrote the Media Relations chapter...

Practical Guides

Gregory, A (2010) Planning and Managing Public Relations Campaigns^{3rd ed} - probably the best How-to guide for students and practitioners alike

Oliver, S (2010) Public Relations Strategy ^{3rd ed} - with Gregory, an essential for Level 2 strategy modules

Theory

Heath, R (2011) The Sage Handbook of Public Relations - brings together some of the sharpest thinkers in the PR academy

L'Etang, J (2008) Public Relations: Concepts, Practice and Critique - you can't engage with PR thinking without reading L'Etang

Botan, C & Hazleton, V (2006) Public Relations Theory II - along with Heath, contains some important chapters

Accessible critiques

Coombs, T & Holladay, S (2007) It's Not Just PR - Probably the most readable crtitique you will find. Don't agree with everything they say, but unlike some, they write in a way that isn't designed to baffle

Morris, T & Goldsworthy, S (2008) PR - A Persuasive Industry? The book I should have written! A level-headed, realistic appraisal that doesn't shy away from inconvenient truths

What do you think?

The eleventh book in my Top 10..... a well-thumbed Online Public Relations 2nd Ed is staked out on the operating table as David and I decide what is salvageable for the forthcoming Third Edition. (We don't do tweaks, we do major surgery - more RoboCop than Nip and Tuck).

 

Why bother with social media books?

Today Neville Hobson (@jangles) posted: "Curious: had another request for recommendation on what's the best book on social media. That's 4 requests just this week."

Minutes later, he RT'd a reply from @dsgold: "I don't recommend books on social media since they're outdated the day they're printed. Start with @Mashable and go from there"

If pressed sufficiently hard, I would probably say that Online Public Relations ^{2nd Ed} was the best... Well, one of the best that was published in 2009, anyway

You can see where @dsgold is coming from, but there are clear limitations this approach. Mashable has no guiding structure, no intro or conclusion, but more importantly it has opportunity for reflection - you can't understand the broader significance of an historical event just by reading newspapers.

One of the problems with conventional books (whether printed or Kindled) is it they take a long time to emerge; six to nine months from delivery of manuscript to book in store is considered a quick turnaround.

This is a real problem when your topic is as fast-moving as social media. David and I tried to avoid too many references to specific platforms or services as we knew they would be out of date way before OPR2 hit the shelves but we still have a book that is, at best, greying at the temples. A simple update is hardly enough. Ok we could update the number of Facebook users and we could include more on geolocation now we know about Foursquare, but that's simply not good enough.

Somehow we need to find a format that allows more than routine updating of the topical, we need to develop a more organic approach.

We need to curate Online PR. As I write, McAfee is updating my virus checking software. I buy the product, and a licence that gives me free updates for a year. Often the updates are pretty small, but occasionally they require a restart, which suggest the underlying structure iof the programme is being adapted. 

Now there's a publishing model that @dsgold might approve of. I certainly would and, you never know, it might win a recommendation from @jangles!   

 

PR, Media Studies and a disappointed Mum

"At least one of my children was doing something creative," (Mum) complained. "I had some hopes for you, Juliet, when you did that Media Studies degree. I thought you might go into television. Of course, I have no hopes for you now," she added cuttingly. "I gave them up when you started in public relations."

My Lurid Past, by Lauren Henderson 

Personal Reputation Management: Review

I am about to start teaching three MA and BA modules in social media, and all will include significant amounts of hands-on practical work. As Bernie Goldbach observed, there's really no other way to do it.

One of the challenges is that, unlike most university assessments where there is pressure to blindmark, and students can expect a high degree of confidentiality in feedback, social media assignments are by definition played out in public, with flaws, weaknesses and sometimes plain stupidity on show for all to see, cache and index forever.

One of the reasons I am keen to add Louis Halpern and Roy Murphy's book, Personal Reputation Management: Making the Internet Work for You (2009, HalpernCowan) to the reading lists is that it constantly invites people to think about key issues of privacy and identity.

From the outset it's worth pointing out that the authors need a lot of white space, design creativity and none-too-stringent editing to break the 200 page barrier; the important bits could be delivered effectively in a much shorter and more focused way. At the same time, this is a good book for dipping in to, and if the 'relaxed' format succeeds in making students think, all well and good.

Halpern and Murphy start from the very reasonable position that "In the internet age, your personal 'brand' or identity is never off duty and your reputation is always 'switched on'. The internet is your 'reputation battleground'.

They claim, with some justification: "Privacy is in the past. It's gone. It's history.

"Imagine a scenario where every bad decision you made or every indiscretion was opened up for all to see. Scary thought? Welcome to the very connected world we now live in."

Backed by examples ranging from the talk radio DJ outed as a BNP member to a man whose reputation was shredded by bad reviews on a dating site, they conclude: "Your reputation is in serious danger if you don't look after it."

The problem is a lot broader than being caught doing bad things. If people look at what you knowingly and freelyhave posted, what will they conclude?

"What facets of your personality are you consistently projecting? Are you friendly? Efficient? Dynamic? Do you get on with people?"  

It's a good point. I have several facebook friends who are always complaining about being stressed, moaning about being put up on by colleagues, habitually disorganised (me!) or perpetually unlucky or unwell.  

The authors recommend a reputation action plan, assessing the brand values you are associated with (whether you like it or not!) coupled with a reputation audit of all the platforms on whuich information about you apears. The goal is to achieve a positive, consistent message across all 'digital touchpoints" that acts as an "executive summary of you", which can be bolstered by projecting key phrases and words to show you in a good light and "to help clarify the best aspects of your brand."

Perhaps this can go too far - as they say, "social media also allows a person to present an idealised version of themselves online." There is some truth in this, experience suggests that even the most scrupulous a few rough edges to show through.

Where the book doesn't deliver surrounds strategies for cleaning up a bad reputation. They give a few ideas but reality is that reputations are fragile and even resorting to the law is only a partial solution.    

Anyway, Halpern and Murphy "foresee a time in the near future when reputation management classes will be taught at school's and universities."

Well, that time is already here at Sunderland, and my students can expect to spend quite a bit of the coming semester working through the exercises in this useful and worthwhile book.  

UPDATE: You can download the first chapter free from the Personal Reputation Management website

   

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky

Thanks to Penguin, I am reading an uncorrected proof copy of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which will be one of the most compelling and influential social media books of the year. The improbably named Clay Shirky has done a splendid job of bringing together a wide range of themes into a highly readable whole that effortlessly manages to be much more than a sum of its parts.

Shirky has a piercingly sharp eye for the spotting the illuminating case studies - some familiar, some new - and using them to energise wider themes. His basic thesis is simple: "Everywhere you look groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, take some kind of public action." The difference is that today, unlike even ten years ago, technological change means such groups can be form and act in new and powerful ways. Drawing on a wide range of examples Shirky teases out remarkable contrasts with what has been the expected logic, and shows quite how quickly the dynamics of reputation and relationships have changed.

The thesis is not new but the achievement of Here Comes Everybody is in bringing together the argument in a focused and accessible way. Put simply, it is an exciting read that demands serious attention. 

Expect to hear much more...

 

Product placement?

I have just tried to download a useful sounding programme - from a link in a novel. Unfortunately for me it turns out to be for Macs only and I have a PC. Here's the quote, from a rather good book called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Steig Larsson:

"The family was so extensive that he was forced to create a database on his iBook. he used the Notepad programme (www.ibrium.se), one of those full value products that two men at the Royal Technical College had created and distributed as shareware for a pittance on the Internet. Few programmes were as useful for an investigative journalist."   

Yes, the web link is in the novel.

British PR textbooks come of age

The new issue of Behind the Spin is out and the online version should be up soon. Here's a review I contributed that looks at three essential PR texts. 

Exploring Public Relations, by Ralph Tench and Liz Yeomans (Prentice Hall, £34.99)
Rethinking Public Relations: PR Propaganda and Democracy, by Kevin Moloney (Routledge, £23.99)
Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice, edited by Jacquie L’Etang and Magda Pieczka (Lawrence Erlbaum, £34.95)

Choosing an image to represent PR on a book cover, recruitment le aflet or course brochure is quite a challenge. PR doesn’t have instantly identifiable props; broadcasters have microphones, journalists have notebooks, dentists have drills, but PR people have… smiles?

It’s tough. So tough that a lot of publishers give up the fight and most PR textbooks look rather plain – and often achingly dull. Maybe the publishers take the view that students don’t judge a book by its cover, they buy (loan permitting!) what they are told to on a stuffy reading list.

But a new book that can be guaranteed to feature on pretty near every list for every PR degree course in the UK is breaking the mould. Exploring Public Relations by Ralph Tench and Liz Yeomans goes straight for the heart, featuring three cute meerkats, noses a-twitching, and sharp eyes gazing upwards.

Irresistible!

The three engaging rodents offer quite a useful perspective for getting to grips with an admirably chunky and comprehensive work. Yes, they do look cute, but they have unsettlingly thin faces and the one of the right seems to be baring quite sharp teeth. On closer inspection their fur seems a bit rough and not so cuddly. And there’s actually a fourth meerkat there too, a shifty and nervous looking character, peering carefully over the mound…

Reputation: The Egg and Sperm Race

In the Review section of today's Observer, there's an advert for Waterstone's bookshop. It reads 'Humans make the best search engines'. This struck a chord with me in that I am aware of missing out on intersting titles by doing most of my book shopping online, in an environment that works against casual discoveries. Good for Waterstone's I thought (whilst feeling a little guilty at not visiting my local (and very good) proper bookshop. Then I turned the page and found, in the same position, Let real people with expert knowledge help you to find the best books at Watestones.com. Over the page and the third in the series urges me to log on and register for the chance to win £1000 to spend at my leisure.

The first ad struck a chord as I had been thinking about how I actually find out information. Amazon now knows me sufficiently well to make informed recommendations and I have once or twice been pleasantly surprised by following them. But mostly I read reviews. And few Sundays go by without me adding something to a huge Amazon wishlist.

For me, social media plays little or no part in the process. Yes, I subscribe to a couple of book feeds (Penguin and Reading Matters, for example) but I can't remember buying something after reading either. I trust the Guardian's excellent Saturday review,  the Observer and then Sunday Times Culture, probably in that order. I gain an overall impression of a book's subject and tone, then try and decide whether the reviewer is the sort of person who likes the sort of thing I like; it is a complex and imprecise process, and one that I find hard to understand from a PR perspective.

Indeed, because I buy too many books, more than I can read, I try to read reviews to find reasons not to buy books I am initially attracted to. Matthew Cobb's The Egg & Sperm Race is a case in point. I enjoy science and science history, am intrigued by 17th Century Holland (where the action takes place) and having a passing interet in sex.

Ideal.

And the Sunday Times review is by Lisa Jardine, an excellent writer and interesting broadcaster. She paints an attractive picture of Egg & Sperm, "a fascinating subject, full of arresting material and personalities."

But in the very last sentence she writes, "It deserves a racier, more focused telling."

So there it is, my reason not to buy. All the author's hard work, all the PR and publicist's hard work, undone in a couple of words and I have saved £11.87. Until the next review...

Except I want to school with Matt and although I haven't seen him for 30 years I knew it would be good. You can read my five star Amazon review here.

And then buy the book.

But I would be interested to hear what those involved in 'you only get one shot' publicity do about things like this...

Essential reading: new PR texts

One of the tasks for this time of the year is to updated Reading Lists. Happily, this means working through some particualrly strong new titles...

As mentioned before, Exploring PR by Tench and Yeomans (Prentice Hall) is set to be the foundation for most UK PR degrees (I am working on a review for the next Behind the Spin).

Others set to become essential reading are:

• Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice, by Jacquie L'Etang and Magda Pieczka (Laurence Erlbaum)
• Rethinking Public Relations: PR Propaganda and Democracy (2nd ed), by Kevin Moloney (Routledge) (see Richard Bailey's review)
• Public Relations Theory II, by Carl Botan and Vincent Hazleton (Laurence Erlbaum)
• Ethics in Public Relations: Responsible Advocacy, by Kathy Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Bronstein (Sage)   

Maybe not everybody's idea of beach reading (though I reckon Maloney is a real page-turner) but these are all impressive titles and highly recommended for anyone trying to keep up with developments in the critical undestanding of PR and its impact on the world.

Anything I've missed?

Spin doctors

An exchange about spin doctors on Corporate Engagement, sparked by comments from Paul Taaffe (see below), chimed with a book I have just re-read for Scoop!, called ... Spin Doctor, and written by Michael Shea, who spent ten years as press secretary to the Queen.

I interviewed Shea about his book for The Journal, Newcastle, back in 1996. Here are a few excerpts:

"I believe the spin doctors rule. I believe that so much in political life is to do with perception, to how people are perceived, not what they really are. Perception is reality in public life and the people who control perception are the ones that are really running the place," says Shea.

"You take a B-movie actor (Ronald Reagan) and make him into a president, you take a nice little bank clerk in the shape of John Major and you make him into a prime minister."

Spin doctor is an Americanism, a term for those who practise the black art of manipulating public image, the illusionists who plant an idea here, a rumour there. Theirs is an ancient art, but one that has come into its own in these days of instant communication and media frenzy.

Shea explains: "The whole question of behind the scenes manipulation in political and public life is very interesting. There are the front of stage players, prime ministers, ministers, captains of industry and others in the public eye but I am interested in the people one step behind, those who are whispering the guidelines, the pullers of strings, the writers of briefs, the people who write the speeches for them.

"I am interested in the people who are setting agendas, the grey men and women of the inner corridors of power. That is much more fascinating, and also rather horrifying because these people are not elected, they are not answerable to anybody apart from the person they are working for."

Shea has created his own consummate practitioner, Dr Mark Ivor, to take centre stage in a gripping political thriller Spin Doctor. Ivor, dubbed 'the modern Machiavelli', is one of several people with the access and influence to 'play the PM'; his principal opponent in this web of intrigue is an old-style aristocrat with neo-fascist leanings, Lord Shand. Big business, the secret service, sex, murder and blackmail all play their part in a novel with a plot and texture that should make Jeffrey Archer weep with envy.

Because he has been there, Shea makes Spin Doctor sound all too plausible; indeed Ivor makes a rather self-conscious speech: "With a novel you can ignore reality, put in as fact precisely what you want... A novelist can blend truth and fiction, build warm, sexy relationships."

This reminds readers the book is fiction, but in a way that suggests there might not be so very much blending after all.

There can be a fine line between presentation and distortion, as Shea acknowledges: "Harold Wilson called PR organised lying and a fair amount of organised lying goes on, otherwise we would not have had the Nolan committee and the Scott report. At its worst it can be pretty obnoxious."

But Shea sees benefits too. He prefaces Spin Doctor with a quote from Talleyrand which has a resonance for him: 'Nations would be terrified if they knew by what small men they were governed'.

He explains: "A large number of people in public and political life today are pretty second rate individuals and if you have second rate individuals in high office the field is open for cleverer people to come in and manipulate them.”

Men like Michael Shea play the long game. As he says: "I am quite good at working out what the consequences are going to be of any given action, at weighing up various alternative courses of action and knowing how best to frame statements to put across a point of view."