B is for brand mentions

A little obvious, this one, but over-use of brand mentions in press releases, tweets, interviews, etc, is never a good thing. Far better to make your brand the essence of the story. A few thoughts on this:

The survey industry that has grown up over the last decade (spurious stories based on research) is a direct result of a frantic chase to get a brand mention in papers on on the TV. The trouble is (a) that this is really an irrelevance for big brands (which don't need the mentions as much) and (b) the tortuous lengths that some agencies go to to get a brand mention take the storytelling miles away for anything approaching strategic relevance for the client.

For example, I saw a story a few years ago along the lines of "76% of us see Terry Wogan as the nation's favourite uncle says XYZ building society". How this advances the cause of XYZ building society defies belief, unless it catalyses an agency review.

Another big mistake with brand mentions comes when an inexperienced interviewee goes on the radio or TV to plug something. One contextual mention is OK, or maybe two, but I have heard people use their brand as a verb, rattling it off three times in a sentence. This is a bad thing. The viewer / listener hates it, the interviewer gets frustrated and the interviewee enters the "never again" database of the broadcaster.

No, the best approach with brand mentions is to construct a strong story which has your brand at the heart of it. By doing so, you make it impossible for journalists to avoid referencing your brand and you create a real sense of depth and relevance to the storytelling. It isn't that hard to do - it just takes a bit of imagination.

Interview with Rory Cellan-Jones

Old PR formula: X + Y = maybe. Our formula: X + Y = likely.

I recently set up a PR and reputation consultancy, following twenty years in-house as a director comms for a range of retail, technology and professional services businesses.

I've taken the view that the worlds of media, PR and business are all changing at such a dramatic pace that it is time to tackle the way that businesses communicate with the media, and through it their customers, in a new and more effective way.

All our senior are either former in-house communicators or former national journalists, from broadcast and print. We're well connected and our reputation and effectiveness rest on our ability to place interesting, brand-enhancing stories under the gaze of millions of eyeballs.

So far, so good. Every one of our clients is the regular recipient of substantial levels of national press and broadcast coverage - and our reputation is growing, both as a source of great stories and as expert counsel to our clients.

A senior editor at the BBC recently described to me the emergence of "ambient news", supplied by fewer journalists, challenged to deliver their content across multiple media. An editor at the Daily Telegraph recently told me that he no longer sees the Telegraph as a newspaper - today it is a multimedia organisation.

The old methodologies that were used by businesses and PR advisors - what some would describe as old-fashioned warfare - lobbing a press release out of your trench and hoping for the best - no longer apply. If the media is changing, so too must the PR advisor. For us, relationships are everything, and judging by the reaction to date, we may be on to something....