We’re delighted to announce that Alastair Gornall has joined the board of Finn PR as Non-Executive Chairman. Alastair, who was CEO of Reed Exhibitions and before that founder and CEO of Consolidated Communications, will work with our management team to provide strategic consultancy and mentoring.

Richard Rawlins, founder and MD of Finn worked for Alastair Gornall at Consolidated Communications in the late 1990’s.

As Alastair says, “I am really excited to join Richard and the team at Finn at this exciting time in the agency’s growth story. Finn is one of the few PR agencies I’ve encountered with genuine digital and social media expertise. They have an exciting vision and I’m sure will become recognised as one of the pioneers in this space.”

Richard Rawlins, MD of Finn adds, “Having Alastair on board provides invaluable knowledge and advice, helping to accelerate our growth plans and focus the board on a winning strategy. Alastair also brings infectious energy and enthusiasm, which has already facilitated some great successes for the agency.”

Posted by Richard on June 15th, 2012

Mark Ritson writes an excellent regular op-ed column in Marketing Week. Except this week, in my opinion.

His argument is  that Apple’s success  proves that the ‘modern’ measures of success for a brand (reputational factors like diversity in the boardroom, a robust CSR strategy, engagement through social media and the use of customer data and insight to create great products) are wrong.

Apple has a white, middle class, male board and no CSR strategy.  Mark, it is fair to say, is not a fan of social media for brands. That Apple famously does not engage with its fans through this channel is manner from heaven for him.  Indeed, the brand has little regard for research or insight, believing that it knows what its customers will need before they realise it.  Steve Jobs often quoted Henry Ford: “If I’d have asked what my customers wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse’.”

Ritson argues that Apple’s performance based on the modern indices of brand strength is poor, yet it scores brilliantly on the most traditional rule “To thine own self be true”, on in Apple’s case “Think Different”.

Does this prove that CSR, social media and diversity are defunct as measures of strength? Of course not. For some brands having a diverse board and a strong CSR strategy is being true to themselves.  So long as a brand understands clearly its role in its customers lives, then modern reputational tools like CSR could be very applicable.

It’s easy to use Apple as a prove point that modern marketing theory is hocum.  It doesn’t make it right though.

Posted by Richard on June 6th, 2012

This week’s Marketing Week has a great piece by Nicola Smith demonstrating how social media comment has a direct impact on search results.  She quotes research by iProspect  which shows that most brands aren’t thinking about the link between search and reputation.

The article lists a number of topic areas to help brands to leverage the social space to optimise search: make content king, make content social and shareable, leverage news and rich media and where possible enable and activate a community around your brand.  In other words, create content which consumers genuinely want to engage with.

No huge surprises there.  Even less surprising is my opinion, which is that proper  PR (not SEO content blah-PR) is the discipline which strategically drives these areas.

Smith’s  final tip is interesting though: focus on Google+.  Why?  Because as Gareth Jones, head of online marketing at Carphone Warehouse explains: “It is not because we expect to get 250,000 [Facebook] fans but because we know that Google, through its natural listings, disproportionately rewards social signals if they come from Google+.  Out thinking is that if we have lots of fresh content going into Google+, that content will be beneficial for us in terms of search listings”.

Yet as Smith’s article explains, “a comScore study in February found that users spent on average just three minutes on Google+during January”.

What a delicious irony that for all our efforts to create content which is genuinely useful to people, what Google really wants is to force us all to use a platform which for the moment, nobody uses.  Who said the web was democratic.

Posted by Richard on May 22nd, 2012

A perfect encapsulation of why the channel should never be the idea.

For us the order of play is consumer, brand, insight, idea…then channel

Why we're about content then channel

Posted by Richard on May 4th, 2012

We’ve recently hired the truly brilliant Asha Stuttard.

Asha’s first engagement with the agency was inspired: she baked us a cake and dropped it by personally. Attached to the package was a note to Google her name.  She’d set up and paid for her own PPC link to a Finn specific landing page with  a perfectly tailored pitch explaining why we had to hire her.  We called her in a day later and she started shortly after that.

My good friend and colleague Matt Button at DS.Emotion just sent me this link, which takes proactive job searching to the next level.

I hope these offer some inspiration to folks looking for a role or work experience.  I get five spammy e-mails a day from students explaining that they ‘have to do work experience as part of your course’ (i.e. ‘it’s a ball ache, but I’ll pinch my nose and get it over and done with’)  and explaining the Finn  ’seems the ideal place for me to do it’ (i.e. ‘I haven’t bothered to check you out, but reply to my e-mail and I’ll decide if I want to work with you’).

A bit of time and effort go a long way.

Posted by Richard on March 8th, 2012

Goodness knows how much thinking goes into viral marketing.  These pictures were shared by a couple of my Facebook friends today and no doubt by yours dear reader.

This is a great example of a company allowing its staff to be themselves in communicating directly with consumers.  Goodness knows what the letter would have been like if it had been submitted to head office for approval.

Proof if ever it was needed that the modern brand needs to loosen up and let staff be expressive.  You don’t need to provide guidelines and structures necessarily.  Nor do you need to try and force a viral – just share stuff like this and hope it inspires your people to do the same.

Give your staff the freedom to be themselves

Posted by Richard on January 25th, 2012

Ever since the dawn of time (well ok, since Mad Men was real-life), marketeers have been fixated by big numbers.  Even better, big numbers that get bigger over time. Even better than that, big numbers that get even bigger more quickly than the last time you measured them.  You get the gist. But in social media measurement, the opposite could be true.

Big number fixation has been predicated quite rightly on the principles of leverage and efficiency. Targeting the highest volume of reach, frequency, impressions, clicks or links per marketing £ investment.  We would never argue for a second that that principle no longer stands for measuring the success of traditional advertising, but it is potentially dangerous if it’s applied to social media.  We’re seeing this particularly in the context of Facebook and Twitter where big number fixation can skew folks’ view of success.

Put simplistically, the absolute number of followers and likers is not a flat-out measure of success.  Many Facebook fans could easily have liked a page, never to be seen again. The simplistic evaluation principle of big number getting bigger would provide an unrealistic read.

So, what should good look like?  Guess what – that depends. Every proper campaign should begin with the end in mind.  Set-out an objective, and agree a target for success which can be measured and is achievable.

That’s where channel selection is so important.  Social media like PR is not ‘free advertising’, it’s not a chance to broadcast your sell message to as many people as possible for as little money as possible.  It’s a chance to engage, persuade and converse.  If your objective is, for example to understand consumers’ perceptions of your brand, or to change an entrenched opinion, then social media is bang-on.  Your objective could be linked to traffic driving and SEO, which are also predicated on quality over quantity these days.

That’s why the real measure of success in Facebook, is the ‘Talking About’ metric.  This is the number of people who have created stories around your brand, whether that’s posting on your wall, commenting on your posts, or sharing links and content with their friends. Simplistically, it means they really like you, rather than pretending to do that to get something out of you.

The key word here is stories.  Most brands have thousands of stories to tell, but what most people forget is that to a consumer, a story worth sharing is not about your product and price.  Keep that message to your advertising, and make sure the numbers you use to measure that are big and getting bigger.

Posted by Richard on January 12th, 2012

Rock god Pete Townsend told the audience at this week’s BBC 6 Music John Peel lecture that Apple’s iTunes is a ‘digital vampire’ which should do more to support musicians.

It’s not the first time he’s taken a pop at Apple, but what was interesting was a subsequent interview on Radio 4’s PM programme with music industry experts.  The contributors were unanimous in their agreement that Apple is not the cute and cuddly consumer champion it purports to be.  iTunes, they argue, sells music too cheaply in order to drive higher margin hardware sales.

I wonder whether we will start to see a turn against Apple now the great man has passed?  It’s no secret that they launch unfinished products to early adopters to recuperate R&D investment earlier in the cycle.  Safari is a rubbish browser.  My iPad won’t run Flash and that drives me nuts.  Why only Quick Time?  And don’t get me started on iPhone’s inability to be an actual phone…

Clearly the fact that I own these devices brands me as much an Apple sucker as the next man.  But why do we forgive Apple its patent failings?  It’s all a bit ‘emperor’s new clothes’ if you ask me.  And regrettably, the Emperor is dead.

Apple has lost the criticism-deflecting force-field that was Steve Jobs.  His demise is the defining tipping point that will make it have to behave like a normal business.  Isn’t it amazing how one man can hold so much power?

Posted by Richard on November 4th, 2011

I’ve attended two events over the last two days, both with stellar business luminaries, including Dr Andrew Sentance, formerly of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, Sir Stuart Rose and Sir Eric Peacock.

Whilst the two events were very different: one quite a dry analysis of economics and the other a more exciting look at how UKTI can help us to develop our international business, the under lying message from both was clear. Stop worrying abut what you can’t control and get on with it. The economy may not be great and the headlines worse, but the truth is, there is lots to go at.

At the Business of the Economy Event, Dennis Turner, Chief Economist at HSBC made the oft repeated claim that it’s all the media’s fault (Robert Peston to be specific). Sir Stuart Rose repeated that sentiment the next day. His argument is that life’s too short to spend it worrying about what might be, and crack on making what could be happen. Opportunities exist from foreign trade, particularly in the developing economies and also from growth sectors in the UK economy. Manufacturing for example.

It all comes down to confidence of course, and confidence is directly correlated with communications…perception is reality and all that. Which is our reason to be cheerful at Finn. The future’s bright in the world of PR…we hope!

Posted by Richard on October 20th, 2011

Every meeting seems to start with that immortal line.  As does pretty much every social occasion these days.  Who’d have thought that collateralised debt obligations would be common knowledge and that the intricacies of currency trading and sovereign debt would be lead news items?  The state of the economy is not surprisingly, the main topic of conversation.

So what does it mean for us mere PR people?  Demand for our services remains strong and there are lots of new business briefs in the offing (and hopefully dear reader, that is why you are looking at this blog!)  What it does mean, is that more than ever PR has got to work harder to deliver commercial messaging.  Coverage for its own sake won’t cut-it and waffly awareness campaigns will be a thing of the past.

We’ve just concluded a campaign for a client which saw product sell-out in Tesco.  The campaign combined shopper marketing with social media and demonstrates how PR can deliver commercial results in these straightened times.

As the multiple retailers go to war over price, and the Prime Minister encourages the nation to pay-off its credit card debts, it’s clear that we’re in for the long haul.  Brand owners want to protect the value of their equity and ensure they’re turning over the cash, and we believe PR is the tool to achieve that.

Posted by Richard on October 5th, 2011