Its been a great week for Carve in Australia - I thought Tuesday was a good day - today’s even better.

We’ve made it to the finals of the 2010 PRIA (Public Relations Institute of Australia) Golden Target Awards - the first award we’ve ever entered down under.

Our entry, ‘At the cutting edge for 125 years’, for the work we did with Adelaide’s oldest girls’ school, Wilderness School, last year when they celebrated their 125th anniversary, has made it to the finals in the Special Event / Observance category.

The PR strategy focussed on maximising the success and exposure of the school’s 125th anniversary celebrations, using the opportunity of the significant milestone to ‘tell the Wilderness story’ to articulate its values and education philosophies, reinforce its strong sense of community, reconnect with old scholars and past parents and raise awareness of its position as one of Australia’s leading girls schools.

It was a busy year (although this year seems almost as busy!) but we loved (and continue to) working with Briony and the hard-working team at Wilderness.

The Australian, February 18, 2009

One of the most common questions that comes up when I’m speaking with people about introducing social media in the workplace is how to manage it.

The below top tips are from Michael Specht who’s an HR and technology expert and owner of Inspecht.

There’s also a podcast you can view from Michael’s website but I thought I’d share the tips (basic but very important) here:

1. Have people stop and think before posting, both professionally and personally.

2. Focus people on thinking about what they are doing and the implications.

3. Highlight that while disclaimers are good, you cannot hide behind them.

4. Remind people to keep their online interactions real and authentic.

5. Ensure people respect the culture of the tools and services you are using.

Since we rarely / never practice what we preach when it comes to telling the, ahem,  “Carve story“,  we thought we’d break with tradition with a quick snap from our Christmas party on Friday, held in soho’s Floridita, which is where Mezzo used to be. So it was Mojitos all round, followed by dinner and lots and lots of.. shouting. Clearly being unable to hear a word anyone says is a major draw for a fair proportion of the Friday-soir clientele.

Thank you Maddi for organising an amazing night.

Btw, for the fashion-watchers out there, I can exclusively report that Animal prints and 4-inch heels were resoundingly in. As the picture below illustrates however, attempting to smoulder an ill-fitting DJ that you forgot you owned, that is most definitely out.

xoxo Gossip Guy

By Hamed Saber

In a recent post I questioned if a survey’s credibility was damaged if its results supported those who have paid for it. It generated some interesting comments like this one:

It does boil down to how the survey results are presented and the prupose behind this. And that’s coming from some one who surveys for a living. You can easily judge how much credence to give by the willingness to set out the parameters of the survey and openness to scrutiny of the methodology used. Media outlets also have a lot to answer for in reporting especially if they do so without investigating those fundamentals or should we blame the need to fill column inches? Frank

The Sun Herald (as well as The Age and The Australian) ran this story which covered the results of some research commissioned by the Vic Government revealing:

Melbourne is Australia’s most liveable city

Now I’m not disputing the results - Roy Morgan ran it and I also LOVE Melbourne (the fact my small children adore their four grandparents who are within 10 minutes drive of our home, means for right now I’m very happy in Adelaide) but I’m just shining a light on how often these surveys, generally done purely to generate good headlines for those commissioning them, are so often picked up by the media.

There are more and more survey’s being used as a PR tool and some make really interesting reading but most of them have such obvious results I’m often surprised they get the coverage they do.

Anyone else feel the same way?

As someone with a PR background, I have to say I thought this survey that showed PR people leading social media engagement in most companies in the US was pretty interesting but I did have a little giggle when I saw it was carried out by the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) and ipressroom (an online PR tool). The headline result was unlikely to ever be, “IT department leads social media use in companies”. Does a survey lose credibility when it clearly supports the proposition of the people who paid for it?

Congratulations to Mitchell and the team over at The Internet Group who are finalists for IT Consultancy of the Year in the prestigious British Computer Society awards.

As their strategic marketing agency we co-authored the award entry but the real reason for this nomination is TIGs outstanding work with fashion house Lipsy. Roll on the awards evening…

A bit of light reading on a Sunday morning… PR Week just published an article on how 75% of job applications received by one agency contained errors. Just a shame the word ‘incompetance’ wasn’t spelt correctly in the opening sentence

Tech sector faces influx of nutcases
PR Week
13 Apr 2007

More tales of incompetance over 75 per cent of the 245 direct applications received by Lighthouse PR in the past three months contained basic errors including spelling and grammatical mistakes, formatting blunders and even applications addressed to competitors.

We were recently retained by Associated Newspapers (Evening Standard, Metro, LondonJobs) to raise awareness of the RecruitLondon advertising package. Specifically, one of the aims of the project was to position their multi-platform, multi-brand RecruitLondon solution as best practice for engaging London’s diverse communities.

One of the issues raised by the Standard’s Mike Rowley is the suggestion that some ad agencies don’t always base their decisions on what might work best, but rather on what they’ve always done before. As our press release puts it, Mike “…issued a rallying cry for championing best practice, and challenged traditional buying decisions. Rowley highlighted the need to start working with audited audiences rather than the customary marketplace-driven approach.”

This is an interesting point: beyond whether RecruitLondon or The Guardian is going to generate the best outreach for a public sector role in the capital (the answer is RecruitLondon, for those not paying attention at the back), are ad agencies stuck in a habit-buying cycle? And does that extend to the degree that agencies have (or haven’t) genuinely adopted online, and innovated outside of traditional classified advertising routes?

More contentiously, could you argue that it’s not habit buying that’s the problem - but lazinness fuelled by cynicism and media rebates?

I think one challenge facing agencies is that they can ultimately only innovate as far as their clients - and their clients’ budgets - allow them. But should they push harder against convention? Are they actually interested in shaking the status quo?

What do you think?

PR for HR
Carve Consulting

OK, so it’s late, but I’ve just had an idea. We help organisations manage their brands and shape opinion via the social media: the blogs, podcasts, wikis, RSS feeds and social networking sites that make up the conversational, as-it-happens internet.

In a nutshell, if anyone anywhere on the world live web talks about ‘PR for HR’, says anything about one of our clients (say JGP) or talks about any of our incredibly talented people (Annaliese Tuke-Hastings being an easy example!) we know about it. In fact, not only do we know about it, we can act on it - comment, make an intervention, engage the blogger with up to date information, and so on.

So, if we are doing it - who else is? And how?

The best way to test this out should be as simple as featuring some brands right here on our blog… and seeing what happens.

First up: Journalists / PR agencies / Brand owners / Lawyers - are you reading this because you’ve tracked the brand / story here? Great! Please make sure you leave a comment to let us know. We’ll be publicly applauding you right here - and there’s always Veuve Clicquot Champagne on offer for the best contributors…

Second: Who to choose for this fascinating experiment? Well, I’d like some suggestions from anyone reading this. As soon as you publish of course, the test begins! I’ll start the ball rolling with:

Conservative Leader David Cameron. I’ve thought that politicians could really benefit from great BR, so I’d be interested if anyone tracks mentions of his name. Or is he talked about / reported upon too often to make it feasible? I guess we’ll see.

The Guardian is by far the most switched-on trad med in my mind. Check out the superb Comment is free, and the excellent writing of Editor in Chief of Guardian Unlimited, Emily Bell (Don’t let me down Emily!)

Finally from me, if I write about Theo Walcott or Paul McCartney Heather Mills split rumours will some lazy journo find this piece? Or if I write Naomi Campbell is stupid / Naomi Campbell beats maid ( for research purposes only, your honour ) are her lawyers plugged into the blogosphere?

A couple of others for reasons that will become clear: is anyone tracking what’s said about Fleming Family & Partners in regard to investment opportunities, or Charcol, widely regarded as the UK’s leading independent mortgage advisers?

We’re closely following the excellent LG Chocolate phone blog relations programme located here: http://chocolate.lgbloggers.com If any of the H+K team pick this up, let us know by leaving a comment.

Let’s watch this space..

Social Media Relations
Blog Relations

This is a great pickup from searchengineguide.com. Our Blog Relations (BR) solution allows us to track online occurrences of your brand “as it happens”. We can then intervene and shape opinion accordingly.

Blogs are Essential to Online Reputation Management
Posted by Jennifer April 19, 2006

CNET news reported yesterday on JupiterResearch’s warning to keep a close eye on blogs. I’ve written before about the need to keep an eye on who is talking about your company and what they are saying, but it’s always good to have that backed up.

Analyst house JupiterResearch tells marketing professionals to keep their eye on blogs, where opinions that can harm brands can be easily and quickly circulated.

JupiterResearch also notes that because so few of us actually make our opinions known online, those who do-typically, young men-are exerting a disproportionate influence across the blogosphere.

It’s an important point to remember. Things can blow up at an astoundingly fast rate in the blog world, as best demonstrated by the Thomas Hawk/PriceRitePhoto incident. In a matter of weeks a simple blog posting about a bad buying experience escalated into a giant news story that was covered by major news outlets and that ultimately resulted in a pretty much completely destroyed business.

Social Media Relations
Blog Relations