Rob Ashwell 2.0

Can I be the first PR to hold his hands up and apologise. Having lived in London for a very large part of my life I’m very happy I no longer do. I won’t have to put up with a four year joke.

The BBC has Johnson ahead in the Mayoral race. Yup, PR and the ability to promote a funny guy has won over a more stern figure. Sod the manifestos. Sod the free pig up the trousers for all of Boris’ voters. PR and personality is winning it.

The ability to portray a nice, comical buffoon will make one popular apparently but for him to be running one of the largest cities in the world. Oh dear. Um, ah, yes, that will be the, um, cities transport budget I just blew then. Ah. Bicycles anyone?

Don’t get me wrong. I dislike people who want power.  Lock them up and throw away the key. I don’t like Ken. I don’t like Brian- I ran because my party said we had to-Paddick. But I at least have an ounce of confidence that they could run something more than just a piss up in a brewery.

I do at least think Boris is funny. But I want a capable man not a funny guy running my capital. As the comedian David Mitchell said:

“Boris as mayor? Lovely to see other comedians getting work, but four years is a bit long for a comedy routine.”

Being the elitist snob that I am I try to deny watching populist, puerile, pugnacious pap. I do genuinely loathe Celebrity Insert Title Here. Big Brother sends chills down my spine. I have only reluctantly watched any of the Apprentice - is it me or does Kevin look like Matt Lucas?

However, I do like the car crash element only normally seen in the early stages of X Factor. But I am also torn by the knowledge that there is something not quite right with the contestants and, more importantly, their families for putting themselves on such a show. I, with my tone deaf voice that fluctuates between falsetto and baritone uncontrolably, can sing better. I also know that if you look like the cross between a naked mole rate and an aye aye then you maybe missing the missing X Factor.

So I was delighted to see car crash TV that didn’t leave my conscience screaming at me for being cruel. The Inbetweeners. So wonderful. Reaching the David Brent-esque level without going too far. I loved it.

In one episode alone it smacked a frisbee into a disabled girl’s face and (without being offensive) managed to have a homophobic scene culminating in a ‘he touched me there’ moment.

Comic talent. I squirmed. Pure brilliance

I come from a scientific family. My dad’s a professor in chemistry with three doctorates to his name (and that’s no exaggeration). My mother is a pharmacist and director in the NHS. My uncle is a doctor.

So I’m the black sheep (bunny) of the family. I went into PR - albeit with a BSc in genetics and a year or two of a PhD to my name.

But I am slightly worrying about us as an industry. We seem to be writing and distributing pap purely because we’re being paid to do it.

Now I’m fine with helping company V sell more of a me too product than company W. I’m delighted to help promote the real benefits of product X. And better still, to put CEO Y on stage or at a round table to debate problem Z. It just seems that, as an industry, we take a view that we’re being paid to sell one side of the story, so we will not research the other side and then engage our own ethics.

Fans of the film Thank You For Smoking, will know the paraphrased line “I’m not trying to prove I’m right, just that you’re wrong.” And when it comes to science that people are quite happy to ignore there is more than just one industry jumping on the bandwagon.

I’ve steered clear of the ethical minefield that is healthcare PR. Yet for business technology I was once asked to put out a release that loosely stated ‘this CRM technology will help you flog your drug, rather than the best drug, to the doctor.’

I don’t want that. I want a drug to be prescribed because it is right for me. If there are two identical drugs then I want the one that will not cripple the NHS.

So, it was with slight alarm that I read a recent release put out by the Health Food Manufacturer’s Association (HFMA). The HFMA has got scared about a report by an independent body and so enlisted Cliff Richard and Gloria Hunniford to help its campaign.

How is that helpful? How is that adding to the debate? For the love of God, what can they say that isn’t just ‘I’ve used supplements’ followed by a playboy girl giggle.

A better depiction of what’s happened has been given by Ben Goldacre in his Bad Science blog / the Guardian.

I do still think PR is a great industry. But, for Christ’s sake, we need to start asking more questions about why something is relevant and be willing to walk out on morally questionable clients.

I know that user generated content has become the holy grail for programme makers.  If nothing else it’s passable and dirt cheap.  News programmes love to feature viewer’s photos.  ITN even reads out the texts during the bulletins.  BBC three got rid of its fantastic blobs to replace them with true pap.

There is one upside to the user generated content however.  People have a great sense of humour and Photoshop is a wonderful tool.

Yes, once again a major news network has been caught napping when determining which photos to allow onto its site.  This time, according to Popbitch, Maddie McCann has appeared in the crowds watching the Olympic Torch.

Popbitch has been nice and not named the organisation.  But it is a little reminiscent of the recent snow storms that hit the UK.  Another network similarly asked for photos.  And got… stills from ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ and pictures of polar bears.

Seriously though.  The news is there to be informative and give expert opinion.  Yes there is new technology and the web means that we can  simply go to the Guardian / BBC / Times web pages but by giving a voice to the lowest common denominator you will be losing long term credibility.

Three things are currently occupying my thoughts. First and foremost, a picture that has magically changed on my blog. It was on page four so I hope no one searched back that far. It appears that the link had remained the same but the picture it linked to had changed from the Monty Python crew to one of very elderly men doing rather bizarre acts on each other.

Not pretty.

Secondly, and thankfully less pornographic. A piece that I’m researching on network security. In just 30 minutes this morning I’ve learned that there are 15 unsecured networks within five minutes walk of my flat, all of which have the admin password set to the default. It’s not the best security in the world.

A less scrupulous person could change the internet settings, change the admin password, use the now secure network to view, well anything, and leave the poor mug with the network to prove it wasn’t him.

Whilst there is a reset button on most routers, what person that leaves their router unsecured knows about this? What would they do? What would be the consequences if the IP address had been used for illegal activity? All curious questions?

Lastly, this weekend sees my old alma mater races on the Bristol Docks against UWE. If the Eights Head and Women’s Eights Head is anything to go by then Bristol should have the men’s races, UWE the women’s. Lets see if Peter Reed makes another return to the UWE alumni boat this year. Here’s hoping.

I used to work for a company called Cambridge Consultants.  It’s a design house that comes up with some quite ingenious devices.  My personal favourite was a pair of sunglasses that took wireless data and projected it onto the lens - heart rate, stroke rate etc.

Working with the company really made me appreciate beautiful design that actually had a function.  I was never a fan of taking a device and adding a clock, for example.

I’ve seen several items since working with the firm, but none so poignant as a jacket that uses simple electronics to give cyclists break lights and indicators.

Whilst I don’t cycle quite as much as I used to, I do race through the city as often as I can.  Drivers never quite expect a road bike to go as fast as it does.  Or break as quickly as it does.  So having break lights would mean I changed my cycling shorts slightly less often.

I love it.  It’s simple.  It should have been invented years ago.

Has it really been two weeks since I last blogged. Apparently so. It’s been hectic and there’s been very little time.

Still, the weeks I’ve missed have seen some great new media news.

The ever lovely new media expert at the Guardian, Jeff Jarvis, has written a piece on the true value of blogging.

The Sunday Times has a nice op piece on PR’d surveys and their lack of point - the survey says those aged 25-34 have sex 3-4 times per week. Yet, the Durex web site simultaneously suggests that as a nation we only have sex 55 times a year - you do the maths. I think people lie on surveys.

On that note - apparently the optimum time for sex is 3-13 minutes (of sex, not fore / afterplay). Thanks to my absolute favourite writer for that.

Fake blogging laws have changed. Oh and my personal favourite, Rick Rolling is coming our way.

It’s not the most in depth blog I’ve written but it has my favourite stories around right now. The survey one in particular is interesting me as I’m writing a pitch for an online survey company. I think it might appear.

I’m loving some of the kerfuffle that is growing about blogging. Radio 4, yesterday, had a great piece on the need for trusted sources and trusted opinion leaders with bloggers all too frequently missing the mark. Add into this PR Week’s (yes, for a second time I’ve admitted to reading something in it - sorry) piece on targeting them and we have a great debate forming.

To summarise PR Week:

Bite, my old agency’s new director of digital says ‘yes bloggers are commenting on issues and should be approached’

Meanwhile Stephen Pritchard highlights that ‘targeting bloggers will only stretch resources and make contact with other journalists weaker’.

I have to admit, I’m still stuck with Stephen on this one. PR is about generating influential coverage. Whilst there are blogs out there that are truly well informed opinion leaders (Jon Schwartzer of Sun for one) I still feel that bloggers are best reached through the press.

Is it me or does this next bit sound a bit Jerry Macguire?

PR execs can be great protagonists of spam, like the term or not, and if we are to avoid this getting worse we should be concentrating on a handful of contacts relevant to our clients not going for the scattergun approach.

That said, if a blogger is one of those truly important contacts then definitely, build the relationship and get to know them, don’t just be on of Sally Whittle’s Katies.

I can say it now.  I’ve just come back from one of the best skiing trips ever.  It involved 20 good people, countless anecdotes, a ridge of death, an hour of struggling through a pass that was too deep in snow to move and too complex to board, lots of wine and lots of sun.

I wanted to use Twitter updates from my mobile.  I wanted to update my Facebook page.  But I didn’t.  Not because I thought I’d get robbed - it would be a brave man who’d climb all the stairs in my place.  But because I’d stopped my ever lovely fiancee from doing it when I took her to Paris and she would have killed me for doing the same.

So - nowt to do with PR, nowt to do with tech - just a thanks to Team Dude and the Big Laplagneski.

I have to say thanks to Danny Bradbury on this tip. For the past few days I’ve been finding out that the Flock browser makes social networking, well work.

It has the bar at the top for friends and other photos from Flikr. It has a really good RSS feed, much better than the one I’ve been using on Thunderbird. It uses this for anything you want be it a blog, newspaper column or your Facebook and Twitter updates.

The only thing missing is Firefox’s canny ability to direct you to the page you want by typing just a company name or similar into the main address bar. Actually, it also uses Yahoo rather than Google for its search from the main address bar.

But aside from that it’s fantastic. I’m now a fully signed up member of the Twitter brigade. And best of all, it’s given me the excuse to check out a hundred blogs that I might be interested in. Do checkout Greenbang.