Brendan Cooper, your Friendly Digital Social Media PR, ummm, Thingy

OK, so I know I’m taking a blogging sabbatical but I’ve been asked to put this up:

Enjoy. I’m not in it.

In case noone’s noticed, I haven’t posted for nigh on three weeks now. I’m not sure why this is - I just seem to have stopped.

I started the blog around last Christmas as part of a ‘Things I Must Learn About’ list, which also included stuff like RSS, aggregators, wikis and the like. Since then I have indeed found out a lot about them, and much more such as Yahoo Pipes and Google Docs, although I haven’t really been able to put much of this knowledge to practice in my professional life. I’ve also been very lax with updating the Social Media Resource, which never really took off anyway, and especially the PowerPR index which was fun at first but is now quite a bind.

So I’m wondering whether I’ve learned enough now, and whether this blog has come to its natural end. Since stopping posting my readership has plummeted, although curiously my subscriptions have climbed! As with so much in the blogosphere, this makes no sense. I’ll let it continue in its current form because at least the feeds churn out content, which some people have found useful, and the Social Media Resource might find a home some time.

So, this is just by way of explanation. I might get the bug again soon, but in the meantime this is Friendly Ghost signing off for a while. I might concentrate on the music again, or turn my attention to something completely different.

Oh, and I may as well come clean - my real name is Brendan Cooper, not Friendly Ghost. I really am a copywriter (for the time being) and I really do work in PR (ditto), but I can’t tell you who I work for because my company’s policy on personal blogs forbids association. How uncool is that?

Regards
Brendan aka Friendly Ghost

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… check this out (first seen over the weekend):

Here’s some background to it:

“A team of 40 animators spent three weeks choreographing the models to create the 100,000 still images required to produce the 60-second ad.”

Yes, that really is clay-mation. It’s by Fallon, they of the other Sony Bravia ads, Cake Skoda and Cadbury’s Gorilla. The Sony ads are particularly interesting from a PR point of view because they are totally open to the public during filming and in fact that is integral to this advert. People take photos, show interest, and blog about the ad’s creation before it even hits the screens (which means I’m probably dreadfully late to this). Then the video that comes out of this process is perfect for viral YouTube-type treatments.

So is this PR, or advertising, or both? 

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It’s been a while since I last posted - the longest hiatus bar holidays in fact. This is quite simply because I haven’t been able to think of anything interesting to say. Or it could be a worrying sign that I’ve learned all I needed to learn from blogging. My blogging is flagging. My posting is lagging. My blog-fu is sagging.

Which brings us in a pararhyme-about way to the Flackenhacks. I won’t be able to make it because I stupidly double-booked myself to see Russell Howard tomorrow (he of the cheeky schoolboy humour from Mock the Week). So, if anyone’s reading this, say hello to TWL from Friendly Ghost for me.

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A perennial problem in copywriting is trying to convey sizes, lengths or weights. So something is 348 metres long. Great. Try making it real in the reader’s mind. How about we say it’s the equivalent of nearly 42 double decker buses?

The marvellous chrico Double Decker Bus Calculator is your key to unlocking this particular problem. Simply type in your amount, your ‘convert from’ units and your ‘convert into’ units, and you’re off.

So, suddenly, I know that it takes 178.954903 double decker buses to make a km; that the distance from Lands End to John O’Groats is 0.00252 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon; and that you would have to line up nearly 170 Friendly Ghosts end-to-end to make a blue whale.

It also has the fantastic footnote on the ‘about‘ page:

If at any time you get a message similar to the following: 1 square inch is equivalent to 0 Australias (to six decimal places).; an error has not occured - this has happened because the amount of Australias in a square inch is sooooooo small that it won’t register with only six decimal places.

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It’s easy to overlook the search terms people use to find your blog. But instead of discarding the ’weird’ entries, take another look: you might pick up on an emerging trend. 

Often, when looking through the search engine terms that have been used to find this blog, I’m confused. Why are so many people looking for information on ears? What is it with Eric Sykes? And crack babies?

Today however, two entries made sense, and one of them in particular revealed an interesting use for these terms.

Firstly, and unsurprisingly, Marion Jones. I posted about her yesterday. I would have expected some people to be looking for her.

But the other stood out, not least because it was the second highest term both today and yesterday: Doc Martens. I wrote about the beleagured boot brand some time ago, reacting to its tasteless advertising campaign and media backlash, so there is one post on this blog about it. Why should people be searching for it though?

Google News reveals all: looks like Doc Martens is making a comeback. This tells me two things:

• Tasteless though the campaign may have been, it worked. Goes to show that perhaps any publicity really is good publicity.
• You can discover trends by examining the search terms people use to find your blog. If, by definition, people are looking for it, then there must be some buzz about it. In this case Google Trends doesn’t back up the Doc Martens finding (there’s a slight upturn but nothing major). It could still be too early to plot and in any case is just a sanity check. Don’t discount it: you never know, you might get in on a developing trend at the beginning.

I predict a surge in Doc Martens sales. But then again, I was wrong about the ad campaign…

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So Marion Jones is using the same platform she achieved by cheating, to admit to cheating. In so doing, is she just making it harder for the rest of us to apologise? Or is there just not enough money in it for ordinary folk?

On watching the widely publicised video of her ‘confession’ I must admit I found it convincing, as did Web Ink Now, where I got the link. She does show sincere contrition, and touches all the bases: no one to blame but myself; I hurt the people around me; I’ve let you down; you have every right to me annoyed with me.

But on mentioning this to my partner the reaction was “Pah. It’s a PR stunt. Give her a few months and she’ll be onto a lucrative deal.”

There is some truth in there, plus an element of the automatic eye-rolling cynicism towards PR generally. If there’s a smell, it’s generally attributed to PR. What I find interesting is the automatic dismissal of a public apology.

There has been a spate of these of late. JetBlue in the US is a high-profile example, albeit a while back, in which the CEO apologised for people effectively being held captive on its planes (you can still see it online - now that’s a very long-lived apology!). In the UK, the cricketer Freddie Flintoff was very apologetic for being caught either clambering onto, or falling off, a pedalo in a state of inebriation, and slightly backward Big Brother cartoon character Jade Goody was profuse in her apologies after bullying Bollywood star Shilpa Shett on-screen. Only four days ago Pandora apologised for being unable to pursue a coherent business plan.

Are we becoming apology-resistant? Is there really a statute of limitation on apologies? Is the erosion of public faith extending from corporate regret to heartfelt public self-disapprobation?

If so, what room is PR allowing itself for manoeuvre? Perhaps a dignified silence would be more powerful. Oh, but then, of course… it might harm future book sales.

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