No doubt, there were many people that needed to be picked up off of the floor when I announced that I joined (and, more importantly, completed) Berkeley PR’s first running club session last week. Let’s just say, I’m hardly an athlete.

Having announced the fact I lived to tell the tale on Twitter, a couple of journalist followers responded and directed my attention to their blog, which features various gadgets to help make running less painful more enjoyable. I then went on to have a good read through recent posts, and passed it round to the more sporty-types in the office.

Aside from being a good chance to get even more gadgets on the wish list, I thought it served as a good, everyday example of how social media tools can increase awareness of a product or service. Even though this was on a small scale, it still meant that I took time out to check out a site I wouldn’t have ordinarily visited.

I’ve always been a fan of the overnight fix – hopefully I can now rely on fitness gadgets to turn me into Paula Radcliffe in no time!

Lauren Wood

In essence they have adopted a relatively low-cost, high value approach to managing editorial content. Instead of sponsoring articles within a magazine with advertorial, it has recruited journalists from eWeek, The 451 Group and ZDNet who have a strong record in the anti-virus space to produce content for Kaspersky Lab. All three do this under the banner of Threatpost, it’s security news site, which hasn’t been designed to compete with security titles but it has been written, in a non-salesy fashion that is proving popular. From a PR perspective, Kaspersky Lab have a very powerful tool which ensures that a load of thought leadership and the SEO savvy content benefits the company and a tool that their sales team are always happy to point potential customers towards.

Vikki’s article was based upon a post by the ever influential Todd Defren of PR Squared fame which is well worth a read. In fact, scrolling through the comments on his original post it was interesting to see that this is a phenomenon that is fast becoming popular in the US. According to a comment from Lou Hoffman the Business Week alumni can be found now working on similar projects for other blue chip organisations (Steve Hamm – IBM and Stephen Wildstrom – Nvidia).

At a time when we are increasingly seeing UK journalists moving to the dark side are we about to see another option. One where journalists can find the job security that they crave while still have the opportunity to remain a hack at heart. We are in an age when every person is a mouth piece for a company and so much thought and opinion is put into the public domain via blogs and Twitter, surely the approach of bringing an editorial expert into the mix improves the quality and thus makes it more interesting for the end user. I can’t believe any journalist worth their weight would agree to put their name to content that is basically advertorial, but if it is handled appropriately, with the right people and clear boundaries, I’m sure we will see more companies adopting this approach.

Paul Stallard

Career Path

Following a meeting yesterday I offered our client a lift to Reading train station rather than have her wait around for a taxis to take her. While we were working our way through Reading’s wonderful one way systems she was telling me about how her son is at university and isn’t too sure about what he wants to do. I agreed that it is hard to make a decision about what career path you want to pursue without having had the opportunity to actually see what that job is like.

I’m sure that a number of people have undertaken PR or Comms degrees under the pretence that the job is just like Absolutely Fabulous. My suggestion to anyone is to try and secure at least a week’s work experience in your chosen industry to check that it is as you expected and get a feel for what the job actually entails.

For the past week and a half we have been lucky enough to have been joined by Natalie Turner, a second year English student who approached us to see if she could take part in some work experience to see what the wonderful world of PR was actually like. Below is her guest post about choosing the right career:

During the last two years of university I’ve considered the usual careers associated with English degrees: journalism and teaching, but after doing some research of my own I approached Berkeley PR to see if I could join them for a few weeks work experience.

I think I’ve reached a happy medium – after a week with the Berkeley PR team I feel like I’m not just choosing a career for the sake of choosing a career but rather looking forward to something I’m really excited about.

Although I have really enjoyed my time at university I’ve also felt a lot of pressure to decide on a career, which to me feels strange when we’re still so young. We’re constantly exposed to career fairs, employability training and always notified when alumni have obtained noteworthy positions. The thought of just taking up a job for money rather than forming a life-long career is not even whispered!

Yet in PR I think I’ve found something which will constantly challenge me and will always be exciting. It’s a chance to be always working with new people and an opportunity to constantly exercise your creativity. Now, rather than dreading what will happen after I graduate I look forward to it.

When I’m not writing press releases, speaking with the media or putting together coverage boards, I can be found playing jazz guitar.  As everyone in the office says, I am far too old for my actual age. 

Anyway, I recently bought a book called Jazz Insights to teach me a bit of theory.  What separates this from all the other music books I’ve got is how well it takes advantage of a plethora of web 2.0 tools to add value to the book itself.  Firstly, I got the book for half price because I bought the eBook version, letting me do much more with it than if I’d just bought the printed version.  The author of the book, John Elliot, has created a series of podcasts explaining the theory in the book, a Google Group allowing people to discuss the topics of the book, and he is also on Twitter, allowing people to questions him directly.  All of this is available on his website, and while it could do with some SEO around its main keywords, it is regularly updated.

What I think this shows it is possible to provide additional value to any product, even a simple book, through the use of freely available web tools.  Around the launch of any product or service, you can use things like Google Groups or podcasts to create a buzz.  Anything that allows people to discuss a launch in greater depth, and which provides them with something over and above the standard product, is always going to improve the public’s perception of a product.  For a technology PR campaign, this can be a great way to get closer to the end-audience, and provide an incentive to them for visiting the website and buying the product.

 Luke Davies

Looking out of the window, I’m jolly glad I picked last week to take some annual leave, rather than this one: near gale-force winds and heavy showers are not conducive to a camping trip in the New Forest. As it was, I enjoyed an idyllic week away in the sunshine, with nothing more pressing to worry about that what to put on the next barbeque and how to keep the resident squirrels’ paws off my peanut butter. (It turns out the pesky little blighters can get through fabric bags and plastic jars).

I barely turned on my mobile, and didn’t open an email the whole time I was away.

As the summer holidays approach, I imagine many a family vacation will be interrupted by the sound of a bleeping Blackberry. And I’m the first to admit that it can be difficult to switch off in the highly “connected” world that we live in, both physically and metaphorically.

But personal downtime is good. It allows the individual to recharge the batteries and gain some perspective, rediscover enthusiasm and come up with one or two ideas for solving problems that seemed impossible before you went away.

When I returned on Monday, everything was ticking along nicely with no big dramas. The team ensured that there was no need for me to be in touch when I was chasing squirrels. Though I hope that the little sign on my computer that read "Welcome back Jo, x" meant they missed me a tiny little bit.

Now, I wonder if I can convince the boss to let me take off one week in every four, so I can work on my squirrel-proof peanut butter jar invention for Dragons’ Den…?

Jo Jamieson

As some of you may know I head up Berkeley PR’s in-house team. As we would for any client, we plan campaigns around key business objectives, use the most appropriate PR tools to target our key media and generate results in top tier publications – we even have quarterly coverage KPIs to hit.

To demonstrate what a great job we have done we decided to pull together a coverage board in much the same way that we do for our clients. As you can see from the picture, it included a vast array of national, regional, trade and business coverage. 

I think that coverage boards work for a few reasons. From a PR perspective, a coverage board can be a great way to highlight the work and resulting coverage which you have generated for a client. We obviously send coverage over email as and when it comes through, but it can look very different when you see it all in one place. For a client, coverage boards can be used to demonstrate to their own board how the PR campaign is going to ensure their continued buy-in. They can also be positioned in staff areas to motivate them that the time and effort they put into support PR is paying off.

In a digital age when everything revolves around the internet, you still can’t beat the humble coverage board. Sometimes it still pays to go old-school.

Hannah Humphreys

We’re currently recruiting for a range of positions at Berkeley PR.   We’ve been holding interviews this week to try and find new PR talent to help support our ongoing drive for excellent results for our clients. 

I asked a potential new recruit how she liked to work.  She answered that she liked to plan ahead for her whole week.  She liked structure, clear deadlines, a routine.  I agreed with her at the time.  I always classified myself as a creature of routine.  Then I realised that since returning to work at Berkeley PR my ‘routine’ has become far from planned.

We plan quarterly PR objectives for all our clients of course.  We report our weekly activity without fail.  We have career objectives agreed with our managers.  Sometimes we even plan a drink after work.

But, by nature, an element of the job is reactive.  By default, as an agency we are responsive to our key audiences; the media, our clients and our teams.  Then of course there’s national and industry news.  Unplanned.  Occasionally we have to cover for colleagues who are either held up or unwell.  Also unplanned.

I realised that actually, if I had to work in a job or industry that was the same every day I would feel frustrated and stifled that I couldn’t think creatively.  Part of the challenge of the role is managing the unpredictability into a format that can be productive, if not predicted.

If I viewed a diary for the month that had fixed appointments it would fill me with a sense of dread rather than relief.  I relish the challenge and unpredictability that technology PR brings. 

Routine is for wimps.

Kate Jones

Working for a PR agency isn’t always about the quick gains and fast responses. Sometimes there can be a lot of planning, background research and preparation to achieve coverage for a client.

Take my recent jaunt into the world of women’s lifestyle magazines for example for one of our B2C clients. This is a rare excursion for someone working in technology PR, but after weeks of arranging interviews and liaising with the journalists I was able to achieve a great piece of coverage in Take a Break, one of the leading women’s lifestyle magazines.

Dealing with a title such as this is obviously different in approach to a B2B title, but when you package the opportunity to a journalist the basics are the same. You still have to build bad news, topicality and human interest into the story.

Knowing that these publications are notoriously a tough nut to crack I am particularly proud of the result as it took a lot of organization, tenacity, determination and crossing fingers to achieve the coverage. When you see the fruits of your labour it always helps make life in a busy PR agency that bit sweeter.

Liam Sherry

I saw an interesting article on The Guardian website recently, looking at the most popular websites in the world.  It was based on analysis by Royal Pingdom of Google's list of the top 1000 websites according to the number of monthly unique users (the number of individual people that have visited the site that month) that the websites get.  One of the interesting things about the results was the massive difference in visitor numbers between the top 100 sites and the other 900.  To put it into perspective:

"the top 100 together get as many visitors as the following 900 websites counted together"

Its no surprise which site has managed to get the top spot – Facebook, with 540 million monthly unique users.  This is followed by Yahoo.com (490 million) and live.com (370 million) and Wikipedia (340 million) (it's worth pointing out that Google doesn't include its own sites, like Google.com and YouTube on the list).

For me at least, I find these to be absolutely staggering figures, and it goes someway to explain the power of Facebook, and why some people consider it to be such a powerful technology PR tool.  At 14 on the list, Twitter has 97,000,000 monthly unique users.  While this is just over a quarter of Facebook's total, it is still an incredibly big figure, and shows why news and trends can travel so quickly though Twitter.  I think all these figures show the power of the internet, and for any businesses doubting the power of social media, they should definitely take a look at the number of people using Twitter and Facebook, especially in comparison to other sites.

Luke Davies

Every quarter all of our staff come together to meet, exchange ideas and take part in a company update. They are invaluable, as it offers you the chance to come out of your bubble and hear how the other business units are doing, how they are doing it and what they have in the pipeline. It is also great fun.

We all met this week and once the formalities were out of the way we took part in a team building treasure hunt. Sounds a bit rubbish doesn’t it…until you hear that the transport between each of the destinations dotted around the Solent was a high powered Rib (Rigid Inflatable Boat).

With safety talks out of the way and life jackets donned the Berkeley PR teams were split into three and took to their ribs. Unbelievable. On several occasions my colleague Jo Jamieson asked if I was OK because for once I was pretty quiet but to be honest I was so busy having fun, laughing and holding on for dear life that chatting was pushed to the back of my agenda.

Starting at Lymington we bombed off in formation to Hamble for the first phase of the treasure hunt. Each phase was against the clock so who knows what the locals thought when they looked up and saw three teams of PR professionals running around looking for clues, taking photos and collecting prizes.

Next stop was Cowes for more of the same. It also conveniently gave the team a chance to venue check a private room it was thinking of hiring for a forthcoming press event being held during Cowes Week. Our final destination was Yarmouth before we headed back to Lymington screaming and whooping as we bounced off waves at high speed.

Who ever said that working in PR was dull, obviously hasn’t worked at Berkeley PR!

Paul Stallard