What’s the biggest office waste of time? This survey.

It started with the headline every Gen Y or Net Generation office worker wanted to read – “Why your employer shouldn’t ban Facebook”.
That really set the tone. Basically ‘Why your boss is an out-of-touch old meanie who doesn’t understand how important it is to be in touch with your friends 24/7, even in the time they’re paying you for.’
So what was the good news? Well, an internet company had done a survey of 300 office workers to find out what they felt wasted their time most. And the good news was that it wasn’t social media. Hallelujah!
The real culprit, it turned out, was water cooler chats with colleagues. And meetings.
Then the next bit of good news — social media actually increase your productivity by give you some downtime at work. Wow! Amazeballs! Get this to the fuddy duddy old boss now!
It would be pretty amazing if it were true. But it most likely isn’t.
How do I know this? Because a cursory look at the methodology of this “survey” shows that it’s the biggest waste of time. Why?

1.     This is all self-reported data — no independent observation or data from qualified survey workers. So it’s all opinion and very little, if any, fact.

2.     That water cooler time that the kids clearly hate so much has been shown by multiple rigorous surveys over decades to be a useful way for ideas to cross-fertilise between co-workers and departments in organisations. So much so that some companies have designed their office spaces to encourage such meetings in order to promote innovation. It’s also a useful social lubricant, helping build teams, which in turn enhances productivity.

The biggest lesson here? As all good journalists have been told for a number of years, treat all survey results with scepticism and hold back on reporting their findings until you’ve checked out the methodology and the interpretation of the data.
P.S. Am I arguing for a Facebook ban? No - some break time on Facebook should be allowed, but allowing it subsume the normal, human face-to-face relationships in offices is unhealthy for the workplace and the people in it.

The typeface is part of the message, so choose wisely

I was interested to read Suzanne Labarre’s Fast Company piece about filmmaker Errol Morris’s covert experiment with nytimes.com readers into the subconscious effect on believability that the use of certain typefaces made to a statement.
Essentially, different readers saw the same words but in different typefaces. The result was that Baskerville (a serif font not dissimilar to the classic Times) convinced readers more than four others, three of which were sans serif. Not by much, but it worked.
Labarre pronounces herself surprised, but to anyone used to working with fonts, as I did for more than 13 years as a newspaper sub-editor, it’s no surprise at all — some fonts have more authority than others.
Serif fonts, through their use by authoritative organisations and media in countries using Western script are associated with those bodies and the formality, reliability and authority of their messages. So their mood is formal, official, starchy.
Conversely, fonts like Helvetica, Arial and Trebuchet (without the formal serifs) look more relaxed, informal and approachable. So they’ve predominantly been used for less formal communications and stories.
Over time then, by association, we have come to associate each face with a degree of formality.
So how can you use this in your marcomms?
Simple – abandon the notion of having a standard font your company uses in all marcomms like press releases and choose one for each client which matches the level of formality in their brand essence, factoring in the need for a greater or lesser degree of believability based on its existing level of credibility with its target audience or the media through which the message/s will be communicated.
So for a bank you’ll want the solidity of a serif font, but for a fun, challenger, lifestyle brand like a theme park, a more relaxed sans serif font should be right, unless the message is formal, as with crisis comms.
But not Comic Sans. Except perhaps in a fun heading relating to children, or something childlike. No release will ever be readable, let alone taken seriously, in that font.

‘Sticking to the knitting’ and other things the local banks can teach the big boys…and other organisations

The second part of Michael Robinson’s BBC Radio 4 documentary series Fixing Broken Banking features the Cumberland Building Society and the German local bank Handelsbanken, which has branches in the UK.
Robinson’s persuasive thesis is that these comparatively small, locally-based banks have thrived while the big boys have floundered because they’ve stuck to the old-fashioned model of local, relationship-based banking. And when you listen to the programme you can hear why.
Here are some of the reasons why:

• They embrace proper relationship marketing by only accepting savings from and offering products to local people, only selling their products directly, not being driven by selling the most profitable products, quarterly targets or bonuses and by being “embedded with community”, in the words of the Cumberland’s chief executive. They demonstrated that after the floods in Cockermouth, when they were the only financial institution to contribute to the post-event flood defence fund.
  Their reward has been bad debt and repossession stats far lower than their rivals, partly because they know their customers better than simply from the data analysis tools used by the big banks.
• A key part of that is delegating decision-making to the level with the greatest knowledge of the customer, so managers aren’t just implementing top-down policies or sending data to head office decision-makers. This makes sense as the person meeting the customer will usually have far more relevant information than HQ e.g. local reputation of a business, NVCs from a customer talking about their financial situation.
• They “stick to the knitting” (in the phrase coined by Peters & Waterman in their classic In Search Of Excellence) by keeping their core business in the local banking they know (no leap off into backfiring risky sub-prime mortgages in search of continued high growth), being 98% funded from local savings (in the case of the Cumberland), staying at the scale they understand.
• They take managing their reputation seriously — by sticking to a low-risk strategy and walking their talk every day with their policies…which leads to stability and sustainable organic growth, which are, in mutually reinforcing.

Relationship marketing isn’t new or sexy, but its truths and benefits have never been more valuable in the uncertain times we all face.

Spec application replies policy: a PR litmus test

Roy Greenslade’s post on a blogger’s delight at actually getting a rejection letter after applying for a journalism job brings to mind an important point about managing an organisation’s reputation — it’s not just down to its PRs, whether in-house or outsourced.
Most organisations get spec applications or enquiries all the time. But how they deal with them makes a difference to what PR is about — how stakeholders feel about the brand.
Many, for reasons of time, cost or process efficiency reply only to those they’re interested in and don’t bother replying to the rest. But what impression of the organization does that give to the sender and all those he or she will tell of their disappointment? Not a good one. Probably of being faceless and uncaring. And not likely to give good service.
So the short-term expediency of cost/time advantage inherent in the transactional marketing approach will have the opportunity cost of potential future referral value to friends, family and colleagues who may have a significant customer value to the organization.
Also, who knows where or what that applicant may go on to. The potentially beneficial relationship with the brand will possibly be lost for good. All for the cost of a quick, even standard, reply.
Ok, you’re busy. We’re all busy, but how long does it take to create a standard “thanks, but” reply and save it as a signature in your email program to insert after clicking the Reply button? Or if you’re REALLY busy, delegate replying to a colleague or subordinate? Not as long as you may think.
Why bother? Because brands’ reputations are being judged 24/7 and in this age of Internet-enabled complainers, Jeff Jarvis’s Dell Hell story tells us that every communication has to be taken seriously and dealt with properly or the brand will suffer the consequences.
The benefit is the referral value of simply courtesy. Manners, sadly, aren’t universal, so there’s a competitive advantage to those brands who can ensure really good, polite service is something everyone experiences when interacting with it. Look at John Lewis.
On a personal note, while contacting leading PR firms over the last year I’ve been saddened at how many don’t reply at all.
If you’re a PR, ask yourself what does that say about how well you’re managing your own reputation. Those that take the time to reply, even just to say ‘sorry’, show themselves to be better than those who don’t. And they’re the ones I want to work with.

#London2012: #thegreatestBritishPR because it was and wasn’t about PR

After all the years of doubt, rows about the site, the budget and, more recently, security, who can now reasonably argue that the London 2012 Olympics have been anything other than a massive triumph for Britain on the international stage?
Aside from deliverables they couldn’t control down to the finest detail (like contractors failing to deliver on oversold promises), my experience of the organisation (shared by most commentators, including IOC President Jacques Rogge) was that it was excellent.
From the Get Ahead Of The Games transport website managing expectations about transport delays to nudge commuters to use alternate routes or not travel…in order to minimize problems (which worked in my experience), the Game venues signage on the Tube and the controversial Olympic Road Network to simple things like having more female spectator toilets than male and their excellent maintenance, the Games were a great example of how well Britain can deliver project-managed services — something we’ve always been good at but which the Games will have given a great taste of to top-level decision-makers from around the world. As Lord Coe & David Cameron have said, we showed the world we can earn the gold medal for delivering “right” on world-class projects.
A key part of that was harnessing the best of Britain in the energy and motivation of the volunteers, the rightly-named ‘Games makers’. It seems unanimous that, without exception, they smiled, welcomed and helped in the spirit of generosity that is a key part of what makes Britain great.
Would paid staff have delivered that as well? I’m not sure — research on what drives people suggests the altruism they were fired by is more powerful than simple pay. That said, the paid staff I met (from police and Armed Forces members to Tube staff) were just as polite, happy and helpful too. The ‘spirit of the Games’ infected them too and put a smile on the faces of everyone contributing. It was a contagious smile.
Some of that came from a key part of the British character — support for things that are good and right. That’s what made the crowd in the Olympic stadium applaud Saudi runner Sarah Attar for simply being there and other crowds for supporting the athletes who came to do their best though they had little chance of medalling.
Though none of the volunteers or staff provided their friendly service with future benefit in mind, this experience for overseas visitors to the Games (all round the UK, not just to London) is sure to benefit the country in terms of future tourism and inward investment. The ‘feelgood factor’ in London was amazing and anyone visiting will surely want to come back. If the other cities hosting events matched that, they’ll also benefit.
That intangible feature of the Games brought most of the nation together in joy at the performances of Team GB and admiration of the dedication, hard work and achievement of individual athletes. Just like the Diamond Jubilee (but without the political element that alienates the anti-Monarchists), the ‘feelgood factor’ put a spring in our step, a smile on our faces and helped us, at least for a while, focus on the good things happening rather than the economic gloom we’ll all have to face up to today. Which? found 10% felt better about life in general during the Games.
If brands can create initiatives to reproduce something even close to that, the PR and brand value to them will be huge. But to do so they must firstly be about genuinely helping people. Just like the Games, the PR value comes from something created for its own sake and not just a PR stunt purely about looking good. The PR value follows. People see straight through token gestures like G4S’s £2.5m Forces charity donation. It was good, but reactive and defensive and will largely be written-off unless they show deeper commitment to help those in need.
For me one of the biggest PR lessons from London 2012 is that the best PR events are truly authentic — things with intrinsic social value which have PR value as a secondary benefit. Only once brands can get that, as some have already done, will they be able to create truly great CSR programmes which deliver long-lasting PR value. Yes, we probably bid for the Games entirely for national PR reasons, but by making sure we did it right, the return has been way beyond a simple box-ticking exercise that would have been found out fast (compare with Delhi’s Commonwealth Games).
My favourite bit of the Games legacy? That it reminded us (and the world) that Britain can still be Great. That’s invaluable. If brands can do that they’ll reap huge rewards.