Month: June 2014

World Cup Fever is in full flow at DTW and while we haven’t been laid low yet, even the non-football lovers in the office are definitely looking a bit peaky.

Early World Cup memories trend towards the iconic rather than the mundane – Account Manager Chris Sealey watching the acrobatic Hugo Sanchez scoring a trademark bicycle kick for Mexico in the 1986 competition; Director Pete Whelan remembers David Platt’s injury time swivel volley against Belgium in 1990 while MD Chris Taylor and Social Media Manager Guy Bailey had just opened their bottles of American cream soda when Bryan Robson put England ahead of France in 27 seconds in 1982.

Italia 90 looms large in our collective favourite tournament although the revisionist views says that unless you’re English, Irish or German, it wasn’t one for the ages although Pete Whelan now understands that this tournament was the exception not the rule for the boys in White or Red. Chris Sealey bravely stated that Brazil 2014 would top the lot but he did reply before Luis Suarez turned up.

Most impressive team seen at a championships tends to gravitate towards the winners with the French vintage of 1998, the current Spain team (again written before the Holland and Chile games) and the boys of ’66 although everyone’s favourite other team – Brazil 1982 gets a nod.

We like our ball-playing midfielders at DTW with Gazza, Steven Gerrard, Zico and Sergio Busquets getting votes for favourite players on the biggest stage and we thought the winners would come from a narrow field of Spain, Argentina, Brazil or Colombia – Guy Bailey enjoying the vicarious thrill of an outsider coming in on the rails.

Regardless of how the rest of the tournament turns out, we all hope that at the end of the day, football is the winner. Unless it’s Uruguay, in which case they can bloomin’ well stage the whole thing again.

Happy lunchtime – it’s been a cracking morning at the CIPR’s 2014 Northern Conference over in Manchester.

Joanna Halton from McCann has just kicked off by reminding the room of PR people that it is our job to create the content and tell the stories that engage and enthuse people.

Couldn’t agree more – the PR industry, ably being led by @wadds who delivered this morning’s intro session with a sterling vision for the future of the industry – Mr. Peston take note – is in a great position to lead the way for brands, organisations and communities when it comes to telling and sharing a compelling story about ourselves.

Joanna picked out content, social signals, online links and reognisable brands as being four key factors that all influence Google and guess what – us PR people should be standing up and grabbing that – we do it all, and we do it better than anyone else.

Starting at the end I’m moving back to the other focus of this morning – data, data and more data.

There’s loads of it, big, small, good, bad. It’s numbers, it’s scary. Us PR types are less good at that (which is why we invented inforgraphics – nice pictures to share!) but we can’t ignore it any longer.

That data should be informing everything we do – great PR is about being customer focused – that’s where the journey should start and end, not at the CEO’s in-tray.

Drew Bevine from Bellenden and James English from the BBC both built a compelling argument for why any PR team’s next hire should be a data analyst – at least – that’s what I took away from it.

Drew talked about a colleague whose career path went from good old fashioned PR to social media to becoming a data analyst.

She won’t be the last, and if data just makes you run away then just think about the added value that we as PR people should be bringing to our clients and projects and that you as an individual can bring to your employer.

PR will never secure a meaningful place around the boardroom table if we don’t embrace and take the lead on data.