Getting Ink

It ain't over till it's over

Blogs are funny things. When you start them they’re all exciting and you spend ages thinking of desperately relevant things you can write about. Then you go through a bit of a phase where they’re an obligation, and you have to force yourself to update them, although you’d rather be hanging out on Facebook or Twitter.

Then there comes a point where you suddenly realise the blog is where you turn to make sense of things. It’s where you solicit advice on whether your instincts are right or wildly off the mark, or where you go to vent because your Mum’s great but she doesn’t really understand about the potential conflict between good writing and SEO guidelines. 

So I haven’t blogged for a little while. And the reason is there’s an issue I really, really want to blog about, but I’m not sure it’s wise (yeah, I know, like that’s ever stopped me before).

While I still feel it wouldn’t be appropriate to blog about this specific situation, I thought I’d blog about some general lessons that I’ve learned about ending a client relationship. Here goes:

• Always keep emails. Use Outlook/Entourage over webmail so you have a local copy of emails on your computer, which you can regularly back-up to an archive. One day, when you can’t agree on what was agreed, you’ll be glad you’ve got an archive. Especially if they haven’t got one.
• Submit detailed invoices. Often my invoices used to just say things like “news - £400”. I’ve learned now when it comes to invoices, more is more. Make sure your invoice spells out which news stories, how long they were, when they were published or submitted. If you’re charging day rate, make sure your email with the invoice says “This covers X, Y and Z projects”. Or use timesheets.
• Don’t do favours for free. The moment a client says, “Would you do it for free as a friend?” they’re not your client. (And if they say it a lot, they're not really a friend, either. They're just cheap) So either do a friend a favour, in which case you’re never getting paid, or be their supplier, in which case you charge for everything. Anything in between is just a recipe for disaster.
• If you agree something over the phone, send an email afterwards saying “just to confirm what we agreed…”
• Be very clear about what is your intellectual property and what you’re selling. Are these First British Rights?  Online rights? Can the client sell on your work? Who owns the words, the design, the website?
• Finally, just a tip. Back up everything. Think about what information and access you need to do business – and protect it. A disgruntled client could potentially have a website, online account or blog shut down for days or even weeks by disputing its contents so it’s always as well to have a Plan B.

The reality is that in business, most people don’t want to screw anyone over. I remember reading once that most people consider their actions are completely rational and I sometimes have to remind myself of that – no matter how stupidly you think someone is behaving, their actions probably make perfect sense to them. You just don't have the benefit of their perspective.

Given that most people aren’t morons, it stands to reason that most disagreements at the end of a contract come from people having different recollections, different perspectives or just old-fashioned miscommunication. So a little clarity and preparation? Goes a long way.

Top UK parent bloggers for July 09.

I've put together another index of the UK's top 100 parent bloggers, which I thought those of you interested in pursuing bloggers might find useful, as well as those of you who possibly just like reading them!

I spoke with a PR exec last week who told me he finds it incredibly difficult to get coverage on consumer facing blogs. For anyone facing the same dilemma, can I make a suggestion? Don't treat this as a yellow pages for you to spam with pitches.

Read the blogs. Understand who's writing them - where they are in the country, how old their kids are, whether they already run reviews and competitions. Then think about what you can offer them that will make a compelling post for their readers - it's unlikely to be a transcript of your latest lovely press release. Check out A Modern Mother for good advice on pitching blogs. 

I've tweaked the index to incorporate statistics on social bookmarking and Twitter, as well as reflecting engagement - so some big moves up and down the table this month. For the full 100 blogs, check out my own Mummy blog (everyone's got one, right?) over here.

Right, let’s dive in!

The Top100 British Parent Blogs and Bloggers:

Rank	Blog	Score	Change
1	Petite Anglaise	825	+3
2	Molly Chicken	821	-1
3	Alpha Mummy	815	+4
4	Jo Beaufoix	808	+13
5	Crystal Jigsaw	797	+3
6	A Modern Mother	774	-3
7	All That Comes With It	718	NEW
8	The Potty Diaries	666	=
9	Single Parent Dad	664	+2
10	Flower Fairies and Fairy Cakes	661	+13

So You Want to be a Journalist? Read This First.

Apparently, more people than ever are applying for university in the recession – and media studies and journalism are among the most popular courses. Apparently, people think being a journalist is pretty cool.

I’m not going to disagree – personally, I love my job and can’t imagine changing it – but journalism isn’t a career to go into with your eyes closed. Be aware of the potential issues you’ll face, the key skills that employers might need from you; think about how you’ll survive freelance if a job can’t be found; and how will you pay the bills – because as any journalist will tell you, the actual doing of journalism only accounts for half your time – the rest of it is book-keeping and chasing invoices, usually over and over again.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been bookmarking posts that I think are particularly useful for anyone coming into journalism, and here are 10 that I think are most worth reading:

1. Survival Tactics for Dinosaurs. Dave Lee has made some interesting arguments over the last couple of years about journalists being unable to survive without good, strong multimedia skills. I’d disagree to an extent – I think there’s always a place for a small proportion of the media to remain strong specialists in one discipline, and I also think diversification needn’t just be across different technologies – lots of print journalists will survive by diversifying into PR, copywriting and consulting, for example. But the post is still well worth a read and makes some great points. (Note: Dave’s original article is no longer linked to, but he might be able to dig it out – Dave?)
2. If freelancing is your career for any period of time, you too will experience the very special joy that is trying to get paid. It’s tempting as a freelancer to see that juicy £1,000 commission as money in the bank almost. Many’s the time I’ve thought, “Oh brilliant, that’s covered next month’s mortgage” only to kick myself the next month when I haven’t been paid and the accounts department has gone AWOL. Wordsmith, a marvellously stroppy freelancer who doesn’t stand for any nonsense on this front, has some of the best advice I’ve ever read here.
3. If you’re new to the media, one of the greatest things you can do to further your career is get a work experience placement. Here are Joanne Mallon's 10 Commandments for making the most of it once you’re there. Joanne is an experienced journalist and coach, and has some great advice on her blog for anyone moving into a media career - have a browse while you're there.
4. Charles Arthur, who works on the Guardian’s Technology beat, has some fantastic advice here on how journalism newbies can uncover stories and investigate hidden trends if they learn how to exploit the mountain of data that’s available to them. I wasn’t completely convinced when I first read this post, but these days, I think I’m a total convert – every bit of code I’ve learned has paid dividends.
5. Don’t under-estimate how much journalists work. Sure, State of Play is all about being out and about meeting bad guys, and Carrie in Sex and the City seems to just faff around on her laptop every couple of days, but in the real world? Bit different. Check out this post from experienced journalist Kim Thomas on the reality of being a jobbing journalist
6. Most of the writing we do these days will end up online – even if it’s also appearing elsewhere. With SEO guidelines at the top of many publisher’s wish-lists, writers who understand how to use SEO effectively without turning their copy into gibberish will have a head start. I really like these guidelines from Jakob Nielsen on web headlines – he reckons the BBC gets this completely right.
7. What you think is important doesn’t matter. It’s what the reader thinks is important that matters. So often ignored in journalism where ego can blind people to the readers’ wishes, and the media pool so often ends up only listening to its own point of view. A point beautifully made by A Recovering Journalist in this post.
8. You’re never that good a writer that you can’t improve. Unless, presumably, you’re Giles Coren, but that’s another story. I really enjoy Matthew Stibbe’s blog, which mostly looks at copywriting but much of his advice also applies to journalism. I was particularly inspired by this post on writing tools available online, and have tried the concentration timer to pretty good effect myself. More here.
9. Copyright still exists on the web. Now we’re all working in a multimedia world, NOTHING annoys professional hacks more than people assuming that because it’s online, it must be free. No, it’s not. If you use someone’s words or images without attribution and consent, that’s theft. Luckily, there are LOADS of ways to get great images online, handily listed by Nick Saalfeld here. 
10. Think about what sort of journalism world you’re graduating into. It’s not going to the the journalism world of 10 years ago; maybe not even the journalism world of one year ago. If you want some great insights into what the future might look like, I recommend tracking Tom Foremski, starting with this post on reinventing reporters.

A New Blog Venture: Who's the Mummy?

Regular readers will know that I've been working a lot this year with parenting companies and Mummy bloggers on various projects - and that I've created the tots100 index of UK parenting blogs.

I've now decided it's time to set up a new blog covering my work in that sector, as well as providing me with a place to share some of my own experiences and trials in the parenting arena. So today I've launched Who's the Mummy? It's still a bit bare and new, but I'd be delighted if you'd pop over and say hello, add us to your blogrolls and that sort of thing.

Thanks

Sally

Breaking up is hard to do.

There’s an old gag in freelance journalism circles, about what does a  lifestyle freelancer say if he’s asked to write about nuclear fission. The answer: “Sure, when do you need it by?”

Turning down work is a counter-intuitive thing for most freelancers – so it’s hardly surprising that after 10 years, I’ve never resigned a client or turned down a commission.

But this month, I resigned a client for the first time. It felt like a real watershed moment. I had good reasons for walking away: the client’s expectations sadly didn’t match the available budget, and there were internal conflicts in the company that made my job unnecessarily difficult. It was a great job and a reasonable client, but it just reached the point where the cons outweighed the pros.

However, it’d be fair to say the ending of the client relationship didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped. I used all my best “wish you the very best in future” and “it’s been a pleasure” lines that I used to stick in resignation letters, but to no avail: I have a strong suspicion that the now ex-client is probably sticking pins in a plasticine model of me about now.

So, here’s what I ask of those people with more experience than me in such matters – how do you walk away from a client without creating a nuclear detonation? Have you ever inadvertently got it wrong?

Acronyms: not big OR clever.

One of the subjects I cover as a hack is technology. And not fun, "oh, look at my new iPhone" technology, either. I write about enterprise technology, covering very big, expensive, complicated computer systems. 

One of the worst things about enterprise IT is the acronyms – it’s like alphabet soup. There are acronyms for hardware, software, standards, job titles – you name it, there’s probably an acronym. Or two. Tech hacks quickly learn the golden rule – always spell out an acronym first time you use it in copy – even if you think everyone knows what it stands for.

So I was a bit surprised to get a press release today from a major tech company with an acronym that wasn’t spelled out. I had no clue what the acronym stood for - in 10 years covering tech, I'd never seen it before. I asked my news editor – she didn’t know what it stood for either. So I called the PR. And here’s where it gets good. They didn’t know what it stood for, either. She was apologetic and tried Googling for me but came up with nothing. She promised to get in touch with the client ASAP and get back to me.

Now, that's all very helpful but seriously? Don't put out a press release unless you understand what it means. If you don't understand a technical term, what makes you think I will?

So this is interesting.... a new PR blog ranking

I might be a bit late to this, but I noticed today that Cision, the media database company, is now providing PR agencies with handy "top 10" lists of blogs in various sectors including PR, finance and parenting.

Nothing new about a new "top 10" list, I know - but what's interesting about this list is the lack of details about how exactly Cision came up with the rankings. A quick dig around reveals that Cision bases its index - which is updated every week or two - using what Cision describes as a combination of "in-house expertise" and...:

"...an algorithm to reflect two key measures of web popularity, inbound links and traffic measured in monthly unique users. For each blog these elements were weighted to achieve a balance between measurable impact to date (traffic) and likelihood of future impact (links as a proxy for search visibility). The longlist was then reduced down to a Top 50, with each entry re-evaluated according to additional metrics, notably update frequency and total number of posts."

Obviously, I'm not opposed to a good index, particularly given that this blog is in a couple and I write one myself. But I have a few questions about this particular set of indexes, not least how is Cision accurately measuring unique users on third party sites? And what the devil is "in-house expertise?" Doesn't sound very - well - rigorous.

In my experience, the indexes that have most credibility and longevity are those with hte greatest transparency - look at the About page of the AdAge Power 150 for a superb example of how they've opened up the metrics to scrutiny and debate.

Why isn't Cision doing something similar? In my experience, Cision has always been a pretty open company to deal with, and very open to debate, so I was a bit surprised by this.

While it's nice to see the media database companies starting to look creatively at how they can capture the blog sector, and package it for their customers (FeaturesExec seems to be building a blog database, for example) surely we're used to being able to see the strings these days, aren't we?

Show me the money, Mummy

I've been tracking the UK parent blogging scene for a few months now, and one thing that really strikes me is how quickly the sector is commercialising – paid advertising, sponsorship deals, giveaways and competitions are now par for the course on many of the parenting blogs I’ve been tracking in the Tots100 index.

I’m starting to wonder whether the speed of this change means there hasn’t been time to agree on what is and isn’t acceptable when accepting goods, services or payment from third parties.

Following recent debate on whether Mummy bloggers should accept advertising, or receive payment for running competitions, I noticed this page on Violet Posy, one of my personal favourite Mummy blogs in the UK. What I found particularly interesting is the part where the blogger says:

“… compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content…. This blog does contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified.”

I find this a bit alarming, really. Which is no reflection on Violet Posy - I applaud her for thinking about a disclosure policy, and I think more bloggers could follow her lead. 

The problem is that, for journalists, our professional code of conduct (and many contracts of employment) states that any commercial relationship that might influence content should be declared, and journalists shouldn’t endorse any commercial product or service, except their own work. Many media organisations explicitly forbid reporters from accepting any freebies over a nominal value. 

Now I accept that blogging and journalism aren’t the same thing – bloggers couldn’t cover many of the products and services they do without the benefit of freebies. What’s more, most bloggers aren’t journalists – UK parent bloggers have a wide variety of backgrounds and professions, and I wouldn’t expect them to come to blogging with an understanding of the ethics of balancing editorial and commercial content.

But I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of a blogger accepting payment for posts without declaring that commercial relationship. Aren’t you risking your credibility? If you’re openly admitting that you might write about something because you’re being paid to do so, but you won’t necessarily tell me, how do I trust your content?

But the risks, surely, are even greater for PR agencies and their clients. Imagine being exposed as having paid for a series of “independent” positive posts on a major blog. Or if a competing PR agency discovered your agency had provided freebies to certain bloggers in return for coverage of your client. Can’t be good, can it? Perhaps it’s naïve, but I wonder if it’s not time for PR agencies themselves to start considering the issue of ethics and blogger outreach.

Props to the PR: all pitches should be *this* good

Further to yesterday's rant about PRs who send generic email pitches to hundreds of journalists, I got an email from Phil Corfan at Octopus that made me laugh a lot, especially the postscript. Genius. 

Hi Sally,

So you know this is an individually tailored pitch, not just some spam we send to everyone, your name is spelt down the side.

An announcement today by Cisco revealed Smart Connected Buildings, the company’s latest emerging technology. Smart+Connected Communities addresses the growing need for sustainable energy to meet the demand of increasingly urbanised populations by providing a network-enabled blueprint for successful smart cities of the future that run on networked information. 

Like other components of the Smart+Connected Communities vision, Cisco’s Smart Connected Buildings solution provides the intelligence to interconnect and enable building systems such as heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC), lighting, electrical, security, and renewables over the IP network to build smart and energy-efficient buildings of the future.

Linked to this sentence is the full release, complete with images, video and supporting quotes. <http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_070109b.html>

You may be interested in discussing this news with a Cisco spokesperson. If so, please do get in touch on the details below.

Kind regards,
Phil

(Apologies for the slightly wooden prose. This was harder than I expected it to be.)

Oi, enough with the spam, already!

I posted on Twitter this morning, one of my semi-regular rants about the ills that the world of public relations inflicts on us poor, innocent journalists.

My Tweet (I know, get me with my 2.0 lingo!) said that sending identical emails to 150 hacks isn't pitching - it's spam.

Of course, most people immediately agreed with me, but some inconvenient types thought I was insisting on personalised press releases, and said it wasn’t practical to tailor pitches to journalists if you’ve got limited time and resources.

Hmm. Not so, friends, not so. Next, time, try the Sally Whittle recipe for pitching (tequila chaser optional):

As a PR, you’ve got limited time to invest in getting a client's story out to the press. 9 times out of 10, you're not working with the market leader and the news isn’t exactly “Hold the front page” stuff.

In this scenario, a blanket press release broadcast to everyone in your Cision database is never going to be the most effective tool at your disposal. What is? Your knowledge of a) the client and b) the media.

Using this knowledge, you can identify perhaps 10 media outlets that you know SHOULD cover your client because their audience will want to know this information.

Again, using your skills and knowledge, you identify the relevant contacts at those outlets and the best way to contact them - perhaps email, phone or even Twitter DM.

Next, think for each outlet: what’s the story? (clue: your client is almost never the story). Consumer publications will be interested in how the news affects real people in the street, while trade publications might be more interested in how it drives business improvement or changes a competitive landscape.

On that basis, you can create 10 pitches that are personalised to different media. You’re not writing a novel for each person – just a brief intro and a few bullet points outlining the assets you’ve got that will help them put together that story – perhaps pictures, case studies, review kit, interview opps etc.

Sending these pitches will almost always generate better results than a generic press release sent to all and sundry, and has the added advantage of helping you to build real working relationships with key media contacts – at the very least, you’ll be showing that you’re someone who takes the time to understand who their audience is, and what they’re interested in.

Besides, you can always spam out the release the next week, if you really feel the urge, can’t you?