How cool is this? Click image for source.

Isn’t it strange how things come around?

About two days ago, after moving house (again – permanently, this time) I put my home studio back together again. It’s nothing to shout about, just a keyboard, mic and acoustic guitars plugged into a laptop, but I can honestly say I’m at my happiest sitting on the floor plugging bits of hardware together in cruel and unusual ways. It’s probably a hangover from my days as an only child (yes, it shows, doesn’t it?) spending hours engrossed in Lego Technic sets. The similarly minded among you may remember the fork lift truck, the motorbike with sidecar, and, the apogee of technic, the car chassis with differential steering, adjustable seats, gears and suspension.

I digress. So, after a few false starts the studio is back up and running. Press a key on the keyboard and you get a thunderous noise coming from the monitors. And once you stop the feedback, you get a nice noise coming from them.

It’s strange, then, that three music-related things happen over the next couple of days. To wit:

• I discover there’s a Last FM plugin for Media Portal, the open-source media centre software that my media PC is now running. This means I can access virtually any track I want online through my Media Portal-enabled media PC. It’s something I never knew was lurking there. It means I can play my own music back to myself if I want to totally trip out on my own ego (or you can listen to the FIR podcast where it made a cameo appearance under my old Friendly Ghost moniker a couple of years back).
• I take delivery of Philip Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, because I’ve heard about it recently and find insights into the minds of such people fascinating. One of these days I’ll get the Crumb documentary for the same reason.*
• I meet up with someone who might have a use for the music, if simply just for podcast duties. This is all part of what I’m trying to do right now as a freelancer – get out, meet people, have a chat and see whether we can do business together. It’s not all copywriting. I still ‘do’ social media as well. And, it seems, I’m about to ‘do’ music as well as well.

See what I mean? I feel a ‘musicy’ episode coming on.

Given that this blog really should be about copywriting with a smattering of social meeja thrown in (and, it seems, me tripping out on my own ego, in this post at least), I should add that I recently discovered I’m the top hit for social media copywriter on Google (I’ve set up a Google Adwords account for that term too, just so I can get to grips with Adwords a bit more).

This astonishes me, but moreover, gives me a way to find out truly how much this blog is now worth. I need to find out a) how many times that search term is used and b) how much it would cost for me to appear top every time it is used.

But, seeing as I’m still getting to grips with Adwords I’m not absolutely sure how I would find either of those things out.

Any ideas?

* In case you think I’m being a bit high-brow here, I also bought the entire Star Trek movie set.

It's a balancing act, not a sign of things to come. Click image for source.

It’s been a while since I last posted. This is because I’m in the happy position of having lots of work to get on with, and today, the even happier position of it being less sunny outside and therefore less temptation to roll around in my new garden like an excited child.

It’s been an even longer while since I sat down to intense, long periods of bringing together a lot of disparate information, structuring it according to a brief and then giving it that ‘draw’ of the story. Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end and if you can tell that story well, people will read it.

So it’s been interesting to see whether my new freelance modus operandi is different from how I worked in-house.

And it isn’t.

For me, writing encompasses two very different ways of thinking. One is the focused, zoned-in mode, in which you suddenly realise you’ve been at it for hours at a stretch, the sun is over the yard-arm, and you’ve missed Britain’s Got Talent yet again. This is when writers are in ‘impressive’ mode, where you just see them working, working, working and know that your money’s been well spent.

I once got so into something that I worked till 10pm then actually moved – and set off the burglar alarm. It had been activated about three hours previously because people thought the office was empty, but given that all I’d moved was my fingers for the next three hours, the highly calibrated alarm sensors hadn’t picked me up.

But there is another mode, equally as necessary, and for me that’s where I walk away and think about anything other than work. While working in-house that would often involve wandering around and causing mischief. Alternatively I would just disappear. I once played bass guitar for a company band, and I would go to the rehearsal room and work on that tricky bassline (for the record, “I Want You Back” by the Jackson Five is fairly tough as is, surprisingly enough, Bon Jovi’s “Living On A Prayer”).

When I came back I would be completely reset and raring to go. Whereas before I could be getting lost in objectives, strategies and tactics, when I came back it would suddenly be crystal clear. Cue impressive mode.

You can’t have one without the other. I think that’s where the top-down approach – that is, the brief you’re working towards – meets the bottom-up, where you introduce new angles and fashion the story.

So now that I’m working from home, albeit in a completely separate annex, it surprises me that I do the same. There’s always the danger that, working on one’s own, you end up wandering around in your underpants making endless cups of tea. Or, alternatively, that you forget to eat and wind up covered in spider webs and snail tracks.

Fortunately it seems I’m maintaining that balance. I am neither in my underpants, nor taking root. I work, then pop out to the garden and read the paper, or stroke the cats, or stare at a bush. Then I go back, and become impressive. And the best thing is, I don’t have to commute. That’s smug mode, by the way.

Balance in all things. If I believed in such twaddle I’d say I’m a typical Libran.

• The Principles of Successful Freelancing [Get Started]
  This is great. If you want to go freelance, that is.
  (tags: freelancing copywriting)

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the PR Friendly Index recently. Given that I’m not working in social media exclusively any more, it’s a pain in the arse to maintain and other indexes do this better (and keep getting better too), I’ve been thinking of scrapping it.

However, before doing so, I thought I’d have a look at the blogs listed and see what they’re up to.

And get this: hardly anyone writes about PR any more.

I know, there are all sorts of definitions of what PR ‘is’. My friend Kerry Gaffney has summed it up well in the past: you don’t talk about ‘newspaper PR’ or ‘radio PR’, so instead of talking about ‘online PR’, you could argue that social media is just part of, well, PR. This is a fair argument, especially when PR backs up into marketing. You could argue that anyone talking about communicating a client’s benefit through word of mouth to appropriate audiences is doing PR.

But strangely, when I started my blog, I did it to find out mostly about PR, and a bit about blogging. Sounds perverse, it’s true, but I’d only comparatively recently started working in a PR agency and I thought it would be a good way to accelerate my learning. This is why I put together a blogroll of PR blogs. And the more I got into the blogging, the more I became aware that we needed ways in which to ‘measure’ blogs, so I put together my first index.

Since then I’ve had all sorts of comments, mostly complimentary, but some of them have told me that a lot of the blogs don’t really talk about PR.

And they were right.

I started at the top and worked my way down. This is how it went:

[Slightly out of breath after run]

Oh, of course this blogger talks about PR, let’s skip it, move to the next one.

[Skips down, clicks link]

Hmmmm. There’s no mention of PR on the first two pages that I can see. It’s out.

[Deletes. Skips down, clicks link. Coughs a bit.]

This one mentions PR. It’s in.

[Skips down, clicks link]

Hmmmm. There’s no mention of PR on the first two pages that I can see. It’s out.

[Deletes. Skips down, clicks link]

Hmmmm. There’s no mention of PR on the first two pages that I can see. It’s out.

[Deletes. Skips down, clicks link]

Hmmmm. There’s no mention of PR on the first two pages that I can see. It’s out.

[Deletes. Skips down, clicks link]

Hmmmm. There’s no mention of PR on the first two pages that I can see. It’s out.

[Deletes. Skips down, clicks link. Starts wheezing, goes to look for some pineapple juice.]

Etc

This continued most of the way down the list. The further down I got, the more people still occasionally mentioned PR. I suppose this makes sense: you get loads of social media juice by talking about social media. That reminds me, must get more pineapple juice in.

If you talk about fuddy-duddy old PR – you know, outreach, the media, organising events, talking to journalists and all that boring stuff – you wind up further down. That’s why I’ve been anticipating a drop in my readership since a became a fuddy-duddy old copywriter again.

I was so surprised/alarmed by the near-total obsession with social media and lack of PR that I returned to the top and went through the ones I’d skipped. And I had to take a fair few of them out too, because all I could see was Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, and maybe a few pictures of the nice holiday they’d recently had in the Seychelles.

With the result that we now have 367 blogs in the index. That’s about a third of the original set. And no, I don’t include myself in the new list. I’m sure that, about a year or so ago, they were waxing lyrical about PR, not almost exclusively socia media.

Here’s the list, in the order they appear in the last index. They’re blogs that either talk about PR, or just about mention PR enough to make me think they talk about PR. Note I haven’t added links because I don’t believe in link love any more either. If you think it’s interesting enough to share, then please share (POST EDIT – Thanks to Judy Gombita for noticing I hadn’t updated my PR Blogs list – you can see these blogs to the right of this page now):

• PR Watch
• The Bad Pitch Blog
• PR Blogger
• The Buzz Bin
• Pop! PR Jots
• A PR Guy’s Musings
• Strategic Public Relations
• Wadds’ tech pr blog
• Spinwatch
• sixtysecondview
• PR Newser
• Murphy’s Law
• Heather Yaxley
• PR Conversations
• PR Studies
• Flack Life
• Piaras Kelly PR
• ToughSledding
• Corporate PR
• Strumpette
• Post Edit: Getting Ink (happy now Sally?)
• PR Meets the WWW
• Sir Robert Bond Papers
• PR Disasters
• In Front of Your Nose
• Simonsays
• All Things PR
• PR Voice
• DummySpit
• Teaching PR
• Ron Torossian
• Paul Stallard
• Fusion PR Forum
• First Person PR
• Flacks Revenge
• Public Relations Rogue
• Final Spin

PR people, social media may be part of PR but it’s not all of it. You do other stuff too, right? Or are you all trying to strike the same pose to attract new business? Isn’t PR sexy enough to be talked about any more? Don’t you have any challenges? Have you all sussed it out so much that it’s not worth discussing? Or is PR actually just about social meeja now?

Because if I were on the lookout for a PR agency I’d be hard-pressed to find one that isn’t obsessed by whether or not I have a social media policy, or how to get along with Twitter, or describing how great blogging is.

I’d sum it up thusly:

I don’t know whether this is good or bad. What do you think? Is this a problem of definition? Do you still talk about PR, just not online?

I’d imagine if you’re not on the list any more, you think bad, right?

Me in my tight leather copywriting pants. Click image for source.

So I’m one month into freelance copywriting now. I know this still makes me a little lamb in the lion cage of freelance copywriting but I’ve learned a lot in the past 30 days or so, mostly good.

Desk guilt

I said mostly good. I suffer desk guilt. That is, the guilt one feels when one leaves one’s desk for a minute. I get up at the same time as my partner, she leaves to go to work, I go to the study and work till 1pm. Then I have lunch, read the Guardian, do the crossword (the quick one, I’m not clever enough for the hard one), then continue again from 2pm till 5.30pm. So I have a good, disciplined approach to what I’m doing.

But even though I know I deserve – and need – that hour, I feel bad about it. I take occasional breaks between times, sometimes just to wander off and make a cup of tea while thinking about the best way to sell a client’s web services or word an award entry, sometimes just to stroke the cat absent-mindedly, but every second I’m away I’m thinking I should be at the desk. Because time is money. I’m sure I’ll get over it. The guilt that is, not the bit about time being money because…

Time is money

I’ve worked in agencies long enough to know this. I must have documented my every working moment on timesheets for the past four years. But it’s not until you sit down with the client and talk about how you can make them money, then go home and work out a quote for that money, then do some work – for money – that you realise, very tangibly indeed, that it’s all about the money. I think sometimes the chain of command in agencies distances you from this. And when I’ve seen agency screens a-buzz with Instant Messenger, Twitter and Google Chat, I know it.

Discipline

I thought I would find this difficult. I know I’ve said I wander off and stroke the cat, but really these are necessary distractions for a copywriter. I’ve written before about the copywriting process: you cannot just sit down and reel it off. You need some time out to let the ideas come back. But I’m finding I can sit down and just work, without the office distractions. OK, so office chat can be productive – not in the ‘hey, let’s talk communications’ kind of productive, more the cross-seeding, synergistic, getting-along-with-people-and-having-new-insights-into-your-work productive – but I prefer being in the zone.

Productivity

I’m being really productive. I can work several hours at a stretch and it feels like several minutes. I’m getting far more done than I did working in an office environment. And the best thing about this is that, when I need to work longer hours, I know I’m being paid for it. The 10, 11, 12+ hour days I’ve worked at companies past have been largely down to personal commitment but it’s nicer to be paid for that commitment. People who work outside these hours are actually working for free. Worse than that, in agencies, they’re over-servicing. Time is money – unless you’re not being paid.

Sell-in

One unexpected thing I’m discovering is that I’m good at selling. Perhaps I should have been a salesman. It’s half down to just being able to sit down and have a chat, but also learning the art of figuring out, quickly, what the client wants and needs, and tailoring your pitch to that on the fly. Maybe this is part of what makes a copywriter: putting yourself in your audience’s shoes. Saying to yourself “What would I do if I were you?” Sometimes you find yourself asking “What would I do if I were me?” which is usually the right time to go and stroke the cat. Thing is, because you’re going in to do the sell-in you tend to get nice people smiling at you, offering you coffee and biscuits. This is a change for someone used to working in the engine room, eating dead mice and beetles that have fallen behind the radiators and drinking antifreeze.

Doing everything

A freelance copywriter does everything. I look after my own sales, with a set of Google docs listing potential sales value, actual sales, to invoice, to pursue, hot leads, cold leads, big ones, small ones, some the size of your head. My marketing, I’ve decided, is my blog. Twitter’s my advertising. I’m considering setting up a Facebook group for people who want to be copywriters. That’s my community (if I find time to do it). All my social media presences are my networking. And there’s good old fashioned email to ex-colleagues and acquaintances too. I’m doing my own accounting. I’m doing my own pitches (see above). I’m multi-tasking, and I think I need to be especially proud of this, being a man and consequently owning a brain whose hemispheres barely connect.

For some strange reason I’ve recently noticed more people subscribing to my Friendfeed, um, feed.

I can’t figure out why this should be. Let’s look at Google Insights, which shows us how many searches are done for a search term and therefore gives an idea of interest around a particular subject:

Hmmm, looks like it’s on an upward curve but then again most things social media are nowadays.

Let’s do some qual – what are people saying about Friendfeed? Fortunately Techcrunch has very recently written about Friendfeed. Under the heading ‘FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses’, Michael Arrington says:

FriendFeed has less* users today than it did last October, according to Comscore. Cofounder Paul Buchheit says that isn’t accurate (and I believe him), but it’s clear that the service hasn’t grown much in the last few months. Twitter is adding more users every week than FriendFeed has in total.

* He means fewer, obviously.

Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr says something similar:

The problem I have is that FriendFeed now appears to be the master of none. What was clearly a social aggregator and base level social network is now trying hard to be like Facebook and Twitter combined (and as someone suggested on FriendFeed, IRC as well.) To note this though is to not dislike it, but instead appreciate the why… FriendFeed is taking the last throw of the dice to greatness.

He mentions a recent revamp. Could this be why there’s a temporary increase in activity?

At the beginning of the year Brian Solis offered a nice analysis of Friendfeed, pointing out how its trajectory could be Twitter-like. I must admit, over the past few months I’ve been telling people the same thing. Who could have predicted how Twitter would take off? Only last year its Interest chart looked like this:

I wouldn’t have predicted the explosive growth we’ve just seen from that chart. So perhaps there’s hope for Friendfeed yet?

I’m undecided. Friendfeed’s real problem seems to be that everything Friendfeed does, Twitter and Facebook can do too. I’ve seen companies that are full of great ideas that just don’t quite make it. When I really think about Friendfeed, I hardly ever use it myself now. I do hope they think of something to get them across the chasm.

Easy as cake. Click image for source.

Running a blog about social media and PR is a piece of pie. Just start it up and make the right noises, eventually you wind up with several hundred subscribers.

Same with Twitter. What is everyone talking about on Twitter? Mostly social media, it seems to me.

So it’s with a sense of satisfaction that I notice my subscription rate is going down.

Did I say down? Yes, I meant down. Not up.

Because it means the people who were reading me because they thought I was going to wax lyrical about social media are all disappointed now I’m copywriting for a living. It means my audience is changing to copywriting, which is less popular right now. And this is what I want because I need my audience to change. I don’t care if it’s smaller.

I mean, I’ll still occasionally post about social media – and in fact I’m still doing it in a limited capacity for a couple of clients – but it’s not my primary profession any more.

Piece of pie. Click image for source.

Some people think I’m mad. They say I should have continued with it. I’m certainly (or at least probably) going to earn quite a lot less as a fusty old freelance copywriter than a rockstar social media dude, but while I’d rather be rich and happy, if I can’t have both, I’ll take happy any day.

So it might sound like the most bizarre communications strategy to tell people to go away, but I’ve never done things in the Normal Way. If you don’t like what I write, then go away. If you do, then subscribe.

It’s easy as cake.

• Three Steps That Guarantee Every Word of Your Copy Gets Read — Copyblogger
  Copyblogger is the Jeremiah Owyang of copywriting. Just do everything this blog says and you'll be fine.
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• 50 Thoughful, Funny and Polemic Blogging Quotes
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• Mark Horrell – Keyword density analyser
  Useful because you can test your copy before it goes online. I like.
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We're all in it together. Click image for source.

I’ve just listened to a piece on the radio 4 Today programme about the swine flu rapidly spreading across continents. The speaker is a professor with a kindly, reassuring delivery. He sounds like my local postman. But he’s just coined the phrase ‘Armageddon virus’ while considering the impact a combination of swine flu and the HN51 H5N1 (thanks Steve, numbers were never my strong point) virus might have in Asia.

The presenter, Ed Stourton, repeated this a couple of times. He must have been rubbing his hands with glee. It could sit alongside Frankenstein foods as a phrase for our times, and it originated on Today. It could spread, much like the virus itself (and unlike the Today ‘viral’).

Armageddon outta here

However, if I were in any way associated with that professor in a PR capacity I would right now be burying my head in my hands and weeping. It didn’t seem to register with the professor in any way that he shouldn’t have said what he did. I just wonder whether the phrase will be picked up, and what effect it will have on an already slightly nervous public.

Frankenstein foods

He isn’t the first to be ever so slightly irresponsible in his delivery. I’ve already mentioned Frankenstein foods, the label used in the UK to describe GM crops. I’ve tried finding who was ‘patient zero’ for that particular phrase and cannot. However the Frankenstein foods hysteria has been credited with seriously damaging the UK biotech industry.

Curried eggs

Then, again in the UK, there was the junior health minister Edwina Currie who, in 1988, declared that most of Britain’s egg production was infected with salmonella. Egg sales plummeted. She tried to make amends in 1990 with the National Egg Awareness campaign but no one remembers that so it can’t have been too impactful. I remember waiting for someone to coin the phrase ‘Curried eggs’ at the time, but no one did.

Idiots

Finally, this time across the pond, we have a truly breathtaking example of someone not saying, but doing something without thinking of the media consequences. I refer to the idiotic, cretinous, moronic decision to fly Airforce 1 on a long, low flightpath across Manhattan, causing panic among its citizens. What were they thinking? I mean, really?

The job of a copywriter is to put oneself into the audience’s minds, to think like they do, and tell them a story in the way they want to hear it. We think about the effect our words will have on people. I totally understand that a live radio situation can be stressful and people might say the wrong thing, but it only makes it more imperative that those people receive decent media training, to stop them saying or doing daft things that might cause panic.

Because the Armageddon virus may never happen. Curried eggs never killed any one. But the Manhattan flyby – I can only imagine the very genuine fear it provoked.

We're not talking. Click image for source.

There’s a link to the left of this page – or at least, there is at the time of writing – saying “Chat with me now.” It’s a good link. It fires up the Google Chat thingy which means I can have a good, live chat with anyone, providing I’m online.

Problem is, it stopped working.

Now, I’m online a lot of the time, mostly from 9am to 5:30pm while working as a copywriter, and I’ve found this link really useful. I’ve helped people with random queries, passed links on to them, or just said ‘hello’, as you do.

It even helped Steve Waddington a while back. The notification came through that someone wanted to chat, and blow me darn wiv a fevver, if it wasn’t Wadds himself. Turned out he liked the chat link too, so I showed him my secret sauce and he included the feature on his newly revamped blog.

So I was a little dismayed to find out, purely by accident, that it doesn’t work any more. It says I’m offline when I’m online. If/when it does say I’m online, clicking the link gives a 404 Page Not Found error. This is Bad.

I’ve tried fixing it by disabling the old button and creating a new one, but no joy. I’ve done some searching around and it seems other people have the same problem, but there’s not a peep from Google support that I can see.

So I pinged – yes, pinged, that’s the new catch-all phrase for emailing, so I’ve heard – Wadds to ask if he was having the same problem. Yes, he is. And he also thinks this is Bad.

What is going on? It surely can’t be that something has borked – yes, borked, that’s what technical things do – without Google knowing?

So now I’m on Skype, as cooperbrendan, if you want to chat. I’ll put a nice button on the blog so you can click that instead. But it’s not as good as Google Chat because you need to be on Skype. And while a lot of people are on Skype, it’s not the same as being able to chat to anyone.

It just goes to show, you really can have everything set up just so but someone, somewhere, will screw things up. Yes, screw things up.