Since I’m being mean to PR companies this week, I had to mention something that happened to me in April.

I was writing a supplement for The Independent about eBay. I had put out a request on ResponseSource to find companies who used eBay in their business and a certain PR firm got in touch to say their client was the perfect case study.

We booked up an interview with the boss.

I rang him. His secretary tracked him down and put the call through. He said:

You *%£$!”s. eBay has all the ethics of a barrow boy with kleptomania. I don’t know why you’re calling me. I don’t want to speak you. You’re the scum of the Earth. Now, f*** off!

Or something like that. I stopped taking notes after the first two words. He hung up on me.

Why did he agree to do the interview? Why did his PR firm put him forward?

I would have thought that after this call either he would sack his PR firm or his PR firm would resign the account.

Technorati Tags: PR, interviews

Don’t hire an agency. Do it yourself. (Says Guy Kawasaki’s buddy.)

Through my company, Articulate Marketing, I work for giant companies, including HP, Microsoft and eBay. It’s great. They’re full of smart people who are fun to work with. They give me lots of opportunities to deploy all my skills and make a real contribution.

It is possible - and desirable - for small companies to work with big ones. Here is my experience:

1. It’s all about people. You don’t sell to an organisation, you sell to a person. If you can find someone who needs what you do enough, they’ll find a way to work with you. I call this person a patron (and bless ‘em all!).
2. Find a niche. The key thing is to find a niche where you can offer a better service than their incumbent suppliers. However, don’t go in hoping to replace rostered agencies or established suppliers, just look for the opportunity to complement them and enhance what they do.
3. Focus on their problems. Find out what your potential patron’s pain is. Are they spending too much time correcting agency copy? Is their website substandard? Do they need to reach a new audience? It’s not really selling, it’s more a branch of psychotherapy.
4. Pricing matters more than price. Generally big companies have big purses. If you can solve your patron’s problem within the budget they have, they aren’t going to negotiate over price. A freelancer or small agency is going to be cheaper than a big agency or, for the same money, they’ll work harder. I find that it helps to offer a pricing structure based on fixed project fees. Typically, I quote a number or days at a day rate or a number of words at a word rate. This means that my patrons can predict what they will get for their budget. It also short-circuits a lot of negotiation (which everybody finds awkward).
5. Avoid their purchasing department. Everbody finds negotiation awkward … except the purchasing department. They get paid to do it. Avoid at all costs. Better to turn down the deal than agree to a heavy discount that you will never walk back. In my experience, there’s always a way of doing a sensible deal with a client if they want what you are selling.
6. Expect to be paid late. Big companies are good for the money - you will get paid. But don’t expect to be paid quickly. 30 days is optimistic. 60 days is more typical. It’s the bureaucracy that delays payment, not bad will or cash flow problems. Get your invoices in quickly and make sure that they are approved. Understand how invoices are processed. If they have an online invoicing system, get on it as soon as possible - they work very well because you can plug straight into their ERP system and track the status of your invoice.
7. Market yourself, not your business. I like meeting people and finding out about them (it’s hard to be a writer if you don’t!). Although it is not deliberate or cynical in any way, I am sure that spending time with people, being friendly and being myself is the best way to market my business. I find that seminars and things like that are good opportunities to do this as well as being good karma.
8. Build a network. The best marketing is referrals. Doing a good job for one patron is the best way to get work from another patron in the same company. Big companies are like federations of small companies. Cross-selling within a client is much more efficient than trying to hook a new client.
9. Don’t over-promise. It’s easy to say ‘yes, yes, yes’ and raise people’s expectations. I find that it’s very important to agree specifications for everything I do. This avoids unecessary rework and also helps set expectations. Faced with a fixed budget and a fixed deadline, it’s also sometimes tempting to agree to do more work than you planned for the same money - just for goodwill. Best avoided.
10. Understand their weaknesses. Compared to small businesses, collective decision-making in big companies takes longer. Much longer. It’s all about budgets, bosses and butt-covering. Priorities change and people move on. They like meetings and conference calls. Try to understand how the organisation works and how it makes decisions. If you can help your patron, for example, by presenting information in a way that helps them get decisions made, that’s great.

Technorati Tags: Multinational, corporation, business, marketing, freelance

I just came across this phrase in an Intel case study:

[BMW's strategy was to] Support and compliment its newly installed Microsoft Server Management System (SMS)

They meant ‘complement.’ It’s a classic mistake and one I’m sure I have made.

Here are the definitions:

• Complement: contribute extra features to (someone or something) in such a way as to improve or emphasize their qualities. “SMS, we’re going to add Centrino Pro so that you can work better.”
• Compliment: politely congratulate or praise (someone) for something. “SMS you’re so pretty. I want to interface with you.”

Technorati Tags: Pedantry, Grammar Nazi, Smug

Jumptags is like a cross between del.icio.us and a DOS command line (or Windows Vista Search if you prefer your DOS searchified). You can use it to store RSS feeds, web pages, Skype contacts and access them with a few key strokes. You can also build up collections of things and share them with friends or everyone.

Technorati Tags: Jumptags, del.icio.us, social bookmarking

Check out this article in Slate. They interview a dozen writers and ask them what font they write in. Courier New is a surprisingly common choice. Personally, I’ve just switched to Word 2007 and tend to use its default, Calibri. What font do you use?

Guy Kawasaki, citing Margie Zable Fisher’s theprsite.com, has a good top ten list of Why PR doesn’t work. (Actually, it’s pretty pro-PR but explains the reasons in terms of poor relationship management.)

I think there are times when PR won’t work, even if the the client and the PR firm are communicating well. There are also times when PR doesn’t work because, frankly, the PR industry is inefficient, cynical and expensive. Worst of all, PR companies - whose job is communication - often do a really, really bad job of communicating.

Here are some examples.

• Failure to use blogs and other new media. See: Boeing vs. Airbus.
• Dreadful press releases. See: Press releases for human beings and The worst press release ever.
• Abuse of surveys.
• Treating bloggers like conventional journalists (i.e. not very well and without understanding the medium)
• Not understanding what a story is.
• Lying outrageously. See: the top ten lies of PR companies.
• Abusing case studies. See: the fall and rise of the case study.

Despite the tone of these comments, I’m not against PR firms per se. In fact, I collaborate with several good ones. But I do feel that there needs to be some kind of fundamental change in the way they function. I think writing has something to do with it. But then, I would, wouldn’t I.

Technorati Tags: PR, Guy Kawasaki

I am often asked by clients to write things in the style of The Economist. Sometimes, when I deliver the work, they give me feedback saying that it isn’t formal enough. A couple of times, they have actually come back and said that it isn’t in the style of The Economist because of some turn of phrase that I’ve used.

When you actually read The Economist it is surprisingly playful and often uses informal, arresting language to make its point. In fact, this is exactly what makes it distinctive.

Here is an example from last week’s issue, gleaned at random:

“One reason … [is that] … subspecies just do not carry as much political clout. The other is that upgrading subspecies into species simultaneously increases the number of rare species and … augments the biodiversity of a piece of habitat”

Most of my clients wouldn’t let me get away with using ‘clout’ or ‘upgrade’ in this sense. Too informal. Here’s another example.

“Along with his recent schmoozing of Algeria and Quatar, this threatens to exacerbate Europe’s energy insecurity, kyboshing the hope of importing large quantities of Central Asian gas without Russian involvement.”

Schmooze and kybosh are words you never see in case studies but they’re perfectly good for an Economist editorial about President Putin.

Obviously, there’s more to The Economist’s style than the odd bit of fizz and ginger (see my review of their style guide, for example), but these examples show that there is room in serious, formal writing for the right word, even if it is colloquial. In fact, it is better for it.

Technorati Tags: The Economist, style, writing

Should historians play counterfactual games?  Are computer strategy games good tools for would-be politicians, generals and diplomats?  These are some of the questions that Clive Thompson asks in an interesting article on his Wired blog today.

Niall Ferguson, a TV historian of some repute, has been playing Making History, a historical simulation of WWII.  And loving it.  Thompson asks:

Is it possible that when today’s teenagers enter the workforce — and become tomorrow’s historians, politicians and Pentagon war fighters — that they’ll have reclaimed the ability to think counterfactually? Will all those years of gaming have trained them to imagine the many different ways a crisis can evolve?

Certainly, the military play wargames all the time. It was a wargame that determined Von Schlieffen’s plan for conquering France in the First World War.  Oddly, history turned out different from the game.  I suspect that the whole neocon project is founded on a kind of counterfactual future history.  Similarly, I’m sure that the Pentagon wargamed the latest gulf war.  The battle more or less went to plan but did anyone run a peacegame about the post-war situation?  I doubt it.

I feel pretty well-qualified to discuss this, having trained at Oxford as a historian and, at the same time, programming a counterfactual wargame about the Vietnam war. If you’re feeling brave and bored, you can download it. ‘Nam 1965-1975.  As a game it’s not that great and it’s nearly 20 years old now, but hey!  I also designed, SimIsle which is an ecological simulation.  Also available online. Again, not a great game but kinda fun and interesting.

The big problem with counterfactual games is they are very sensitive to starting conditions and the rules built into the model. It comes back to assumptions. For example, if you assume that tanks are only efficient in combination with infantry (the British assumption before WWII) then your wargame rules will be very different than if you assume they should be used independently as spearheads (the German assumption).  Or perhaps you assume you will be hailed as liberators rather than occupiers when you invade a country.

Writing counterfactual history is entertaining.  As a kid, I enjoyed Gen. Hackett’s books about a hypothetical Third World War.  But the real joy in history, for me, lies in the imaginative reconstruction of what actually happened, the people involved and the causes that drove them.  I’m just reading NAM Rodger’s The Safeguard of the Sea and the chapter on the Spanish Armada is inspiring.  He takes apart the traditional analysis and gives a compelling new explanation of what happened and why.  The Reason Why did the same job on the charge of the Light Brigade. 

The practice of history is full of contradictions.  Individuals are vital (Churchill’s war memoirs) and yet irrelevant (Overy’s “Why the Allies won”).  My tutor once said, I think in earnest, that battles don’t matter - everything is decided before they armies arrive in the field.  But where does that leave victories against the odds such as Agincourt or pyrrhic victories like The Tet Offensive?  Then there are the battles that didn’t happen - read The Kennedy Tapes for the inside story on the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Some say that history starts from the evidence and builds a theory. Others, for example Marxist or Whig historians, start with the theory and then look for the evidence.

All of this is to say that history is a subtle and marvelous training for the mind.  What history teaches is the intricacy of cause and effect and the power of chance. Good history depends on judicious handling of data, clear writing and a sympathetic imagination.  These skills may be useful in the creation of strategy games but they aren’t important when playing them.

Much as I love strategy games, I’m not convinced that playing them will make better historians.  Equally, I’m not convinced that politicians, diplomats and generals would be better off playing them either.  I have a much better suggestion. I read in the New Yorker that only 2% of American undergraduates study history.  My proposal is simple and good for the planet: double the number of historians in America.

Technorati Tags: History, Niall Ferguson, Clive Thompson, Wired

Just after I wrote my last post, I saw this one on 37signals about the Home and End keys which makes a similar point.

The more I watch people use computers the more I start to think that “Home” and “End” should be bigger, given new positions on the keyboard, or renamed “Top” and “Bottom”.

Yes, rename them ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ - that’s what they do.  Or make the home key take you to your website home page and the end key … I don’t know … perhaps it should autho-euthenise your computer or programs with bad user interfaces.