PR Studies

Community conversations: a case study

We took a look at the conversations surrounding a brand in class today - but I did not get to choose the case study.

ASOS sounds to me like a Taiwanese laptop manufacturer - but it's a brand that means a lot to my students.

We started with the website, and took a look at news reports, then moved onto blogs.

With Twitter it became really interesting. An appeal for photos of customers wearing leather garments was responded to within minutes. These photos became potential content for the ASOS Life Community site.

Customers were raving about the brand and its offers - and so were doing the marketing for the company. I could barely find a critical voice on the social web.

People are clearly happy to share their love of fashion and I can envisage this being true of music or sports fans - but it's not so easy to see how other organisations can so easily recruit customers to become fans.

Righting wrongs

Do we judge an organisation on its ability to get things right first time, or on its ability to make things right quickly and creatively? I suspect the latter, because we give no credit to those who merely do what is expected of them.

I've taken up the cases of several students concerned about their results and their resits. In two cases, those results were simply wrong and - despite this being the holiday season - my colleagues have quickly corrected these mistakes. (Nobody's perfect: this includes individuals, organisations and systems; but everyone should be striving to improve.) The relief has been palpable.

The lesson from this is that organisations need to empower those in customer- (or student-) facing roles to apply commonsense, think creatively and take decisions. This is harder than it sounds.

The cynical thought is that organisations can gain credit by making deliberate mistakes in order to quickly and publicly correct them. Is this why there are so many product recalls?

Sexed up stories

From yesterday's Observer, the tale of two former tabloid reporters who now provide a hybrid news agency / PR consultancy service. It's Specialist News Services, run by Simon Worthington and Mark Solomons.

'Papers are bogged down with dull press releases, so all too often even the interesting ones go straight into the bin,' says Solomons. 'Instead of putting out PR releases direct to the press, a growing number of agencies began sending them to us and letting us sex them up, so to speak.'

Dumping makes news

The Body Shop has found that almost three quarters of a million mobile phone handsets have been dumped since Christmas. The company wants us to recycle them for charity instead.

It's a timely seasonal campaign, and gains a news report on the BBC.

Shop - and save the world

The Co-operative Bank claims that consumers are making shopping decisions based on ethical judgements (BBC reports).

Clearly it's a problematic and paradoxical area, but the Co-op figures suggest that ethical consumerism is already big business.

Eau de vie

This is yesterday's news, but it's a strong story. Research from Brita has shown that drinking more water can help protect us from flu. It was picked up in the Telegraph, The Guardian and The Mirror.

How to lose friends and forget people

Research by MSN shows that we're careless about keeping friends. It's clever, creative PR and it's reported in The Mirror and The Times.

Not at all coy

What is it with Yorkshirewomen? Hard on the heels of Calendar Girls comes this story in the Sunday Telegraph.

It tells how Yorkshire businesswoman Liz Paul persuaded venture capitalists and high street retailer Boots to back a sex aid for women, Vielle.

Paul is a graduate of Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University).

Good to gossip

Gossip is the talking point of a tea brand, Quickbrew. So, we've been surveyed on our attitudes to gossip with predictable results (reported by Ananova).

The argument from evolutionary psychology runs like this. Just as we need to learn the news so that we can judge where a threat to our survival (eg war, flood, famine) is coming from, so we use gossip as a form of community bonding. It really is good to moan about the boss around the coffee machine. Here's the Quickbrew feature article.

Addicted to text

My delegates today were unimpressed when I cited Segway as a case study demonstrating that brilliant PR may not be enough (see entry on October 3).

But they had all heard news reports arising from this timely and well-targeted release from the Priory clinic. (Note the release date of Sunday). The resulting news coverage was widespread (eg The Sun, The Independent, The Telegraph, The BBC).

Why does this news release work? It's timely (Sunday for Monday); it's surprising (coming from people we would assume to be discreet); and it's always healthy to feel sorry for celebrities (some of whom are treated for their addictions at the Priory).