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Postrank’s top blogs of 2009 has just placed PR Media Blog at number 15 among our peers, based on a level of engagement and influence.

Aside from creating regular content (our job), the engagement factor is down to you, the reader; so, we must thank you heartily for that.

To receive such an accolade makes one wonder whether we have, in a small way, created a brand of our own. If a brand is something that has built trust and influence among a group of people, then PR Media Blog might just be that. But if it possesses any semblance of brand values, these have not been created in isolation. Though we do the legwork in creating something for you to read, it has been the comments on posts, the feedback and retweets on Twitter and the trackbacks from other blogs that have helped us to refine and shape the blog. Equally, our guest bloggers are entitled to part-ownership of our micro-brand.

So, is our humble example emblematic of a shift in the evolution of a brand and who owns it?

Naomi Klein’s seminal book and examination of brand power, No Logo, is 10 years old and gets an update to be published later this month. The author’s latest article describes how, at the height of her fame, “megabrands and advertising agencies…wanted me to give them seminars on why they were so hated…a kind of anti-corporate dominatrix making overpaid executives feel good by telling them what bad, bad brands they were.”

To her credit, Klein never donned the metaphorical leather and whips. But, today, organisations don’t need to call upon Klein for such flagellation. Social media has amassed an army of brand critics only too happy to share their disappointment with the performance of companies. However, happy customers share their praise too.

In providing positive and negative sentiment online, they are giving organisations the opportunity to improve on their failings while interacting with a community of - well - fans. But to harness this wealth of management information, there has, first, to be a willingness to listen.

Listening to and acting on customer feedback is the essential precursor to worrying about brand. Klein illustrates this with the example of Price Floyd, erstwhile media relations direction at the US State Department. When, during the reviled Bush presidency, his colleagues urged more media activity and more messaging in an attempt to turn around “brand America”, Floyd nailed the problem: “It’s not the packaging, it’s the substance that’s giving us trouble”.

If organisations believe they can create a brand in isolation and simply tell the world what it stands for, they may be disappointed. As Tamsen McMahon says in a recent guest post on the Conversation Agent blog: “A brand is the collective impression people gain not only from you and your marketing efforts, but from all of their interactions with you-and the interactions others have as well (newly amplified through social media).”

An interesting piece of research by broadband provider Talk Talk has revealed that due to high speed internet access, we’ve become a highly impatient nation with 70% of us “losing it” if we have to wait any longer than one minute for a page to load.

And this somewhat inflated level of impatience is also apparent in the offline world where in a restaurant, we’ll demand our meal after just eight minutes and 38 seconds, we’ll wait only 10 minutes and 43 seconds for a tradesman to show up and we’ll allow 10 minutes and 1 second for a friend before we burst with annoyance.

It’s clear that patience, once a Great British trait, is slowly wearing away as we embrace an era of high speed internet activity and that’s not just down to the advent of broadband. Twitter, for example, offers a unique feed of real-time conversation and sentiment with news being delivered faster than any other medium, providing us with an immediate global sense of events.

And gone are the days when journalists conducted a quick vox pop to gauge opinion, now they simply use the Twitter crowd as a source of immediate information and push out headlines and blogposts to Twitter via RSS and TwitterFeed.com.

A recent fault with Virgin Media which left many customers without TV and broadband, displayed not only consumer impatience (understandably) but infuriation at the fact that Virgin had not considered using Twitter to inform their customers of the problem, regardless of the fact that a number of people were tweeting about Virgin’s service issues which suggested a major outrage was brewing.

Clearly a massive oversight from Virgin and one which other service providers should take note of. Twitter is a critical vehicle for communicating information, instantly, and could quite easily have dampened the fire that was raging amongst its tweeting customers.

It’s clear we want speed. We thrive on being the first to know and unsurprisingly, it’s the 18-24 year olds who are least prepared to wait, which questions just how impatient future generations will be.

Public transport operators, call centre workers…. you have been warned.

Update: Tiger breaks his silence - is he right in what he says? 

Until now, Tiger Woods, the world’s number one golfer, highest paid sportsman and global icon, has built himself a wholesome, clean-living reputation.

His brand, the success of which is the result of his apparent honesty and integrity, has earned him a massive income from sponsorship deals with the likes of Nike, Gatorade and Gillette.

But unlike the bad boys of sport, whose antics are a regular fixture in the pages of the Sunday tabloids, the actions of a clean cut sporting hero seemingly brought low have far more mileage for the media.

With the recent car-to-hydrant incident, the world is becoming incredibly suspicious and wants answers. Perhaps a little unfair, and some may think his private life should be respected, but there’s a price to pay for being the world’s biggest sportsman.

What’s more, the entire situation has become almost embarrassing with not a trace of crisis management about it.

He appears, to his detriment, to be saying nothing, no explanation whatsoever, despite the rumours of an affair with a New York showclub hostess and his Swedish model wife who allegedly rescued him from his Cadillac SUV by smashing a window with a golf club.

Not only that but the opportunity to clear the air once and for all was laid on a plate at his very own golf tournament in California this week which he declined to attend, with no real explanation.

Tiger needs to be very wary, the Gillette curse is taking its hold. First Thierry Henry handballs in a World Cup play-off, Roger Federer crashes out of the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals and Tiger’s 2am dalliance with a fire hydrant remains a mystery.

US celebrity PR crisis expert, Gene Grabowski, recommends that those who find themselves in the eye of a media storm should take a leaf out of talk show host, David Letterman’s book and come clean early in a supposed scandal and take control of the information flow.

As the American’s would say; “Tiger, take a Mulligan.”

At the risk of turning this into booze week on PR Media Blog, it’s hard to find a better example of “heritage marketing” than Jack Daniels.

Its sepia-photo-laden advertising, depicting a tradition of distilling going back more than a century imbues the brand with an authenticity and sense of quality that has stood the test of time. And, importantly for the brand maintaining its backstory, its founder was a real person called Jack Daniel. So far, so good, if you conveniently set aside its reputation as rock stars’ ruin for a moment.

But how crucial for a brand is having a genuine history? Or, conversely, how damaging is a hokey heritage?

A recent BBC story , investigated by its consumer affairs programme, “You and Yours”, revealed that the US fashion brand, Hollister - currently expanding its UK presence and which claims a history stretching back to 1922 - was in fact founded only in the Noughties.

If not suspicious enough, add to that a character called John Hollister - “adventurous traveller” and supposed company founder - branded “fictitious” by the BBC and a curt comment from the company itself when approached to explain its claims: “Due to our policies regarding press, we choose not to provide any comment on your questions.”

Despite the stubborn secrecy of the company and the aura of exposé in the BBC’s story, its vox pop of “teenage shoppers” found they really didn’t give a damn about Hollister’s historical fabrication.

Friend of PR Media Blog and marketing consultant at Goldsbrough Consulting, Matthew Goldsbrough, is phlegmatic about the issue: “When establishing a brand, it’s more about what it does and what it delivers rather than whether you can take it back through a lineage. Do you really care if there was, or wasn’t a “Mr.Volvo”?

He adds: “Any brand that underestimates the buyer is a fool. But I don’t think that a fake history matters greatly as the brand is not making a promise which it then breaks. At the younger end of the customer spectrum, people are much less reliant on complete provenance with a brand. Overall, the real test is ‘does it deliver?’”

Orson Welles once put together a film about the nature of authenticity called “F for Fake”. But for the modern shopper, is it more “C for couldn’t care less”?

Retro is big, there is certainly no denying that. Whether it is aviator sunglasses, leg warmers or a Casio digital watch, you don’t need Gok-Wan to tell you that the latest fashion was probably the latest fashion at some point in the past as well. This trend has also moved to food with the return of the likes of Monster Munch and Wispa.

Now ad execs have caught the bug with recent examples including Persil, Milky Way chocolate bars and Toys ‘R’ Us. It seems that in adland, retro is now, but why the resurgence?

Stephen Foley talked of this trend on American television earlier in the year on the Independent’s website. With regards to a McDonalds’ retro ad campaign, he comments: ‘It is meant to raise a familiar smile, a warm glow inside, the perfect antidote to the sub-prime nightmares and job-shearing chaos of the modern world’.

In the article Barnardo Revello, an editor at New York based post-production house Cosmo Street, comments: ‘It normally happens in times of economic trouble, when people reach for unifying values and marketers adopt an attitude of pulling together…when the economic difficulties give way to something better, then this style will no doubt give way to something with a bit more energy.”

Rune Gustafson, Chief Exec of Interbrand endorses these views and believes they hold just as true on this side of the pond: “In changing times people fall back on the brands they consumed earlier in their lives, when times were less uncertain. You could argue that the Seventies were hardly a golden age of security. But if you remember feeling secure and protected within the family from what was going on in the world, the past will certainly seem easier, more secure, safe. There’s certainly an element of escapism in all of this.”

So rather than there simply being a chronic lack of cash to develop new advertising creatives, ad execs are pandering to consumers desire to take comfort in something that is certain – the past. It is also rather convenient that retro ads cost nothing develop.

But in an age when the likes of Honda have been concentrating on producing technically astonishing and painfully cool ad campaigns, it is nice that something as simple as a cartoon with a catchy jingle can generate just as much buzz.

Of course there is a saturation point where people will begin to tire of the recycling of classic adverts, but until that point, we can all enjoy a bit of nostalgia and who knows, perhaps in 20 years we will see a Honda ad from the ‘noughties’ and revel in its simplicity and purity of approach.

In today’s guest blog post Staniforth Manchester intern, Andrew Doyle, checks the scores of UK football clubs when it comes to the Facebook league.

With the season just under a third of the way through, English football’s most successful clubs are battling against each other for domestic dominance. But it is not only within the Premier League that England’s footballing giants are competing for success. Research conducted by Revolution magazine indicates that the country’s top teams are also competing with each other in terms of their popularity on Facebook.

Leading the pack with over one million fans signed up to the club’s official Facebook group is Liverpool, while Manchester United are just behind their studded heels with 955,377 followers. Also making it into the top ten, although trailing some way behind are Arsenal and Chelsea, with Stoke

The growing presence of football clubs within the social media network is not, perhaps, something to be surprised by.

Before the investment of wealth through the BSkyB revolution, it was easy to see how football clubs regarded their fans as one of the main reason for their existence. Compare that to the initial changes stimulated by BSkyB’s involvement and the subsequent affluence it generated, it is possible to see how football clubs came to see fans less in this way and more as customers, each of whom is a potential stakeholder in a commercial transaction.

Thus it comes as no shock to me that football clubs are using sites such as Facebook in an attempt to ‘get back in touch’ and communicate with fans and the community in an effort to bridge the divide that has been created. However could this be regarded as something of a two-edged sword? This leads to the question: what are the motives for clubs having a presence on such sites? Is this altruism and benevolence or a shrewd and cynical attempt to raise the profile of clubs across the world in a business still dominated by global markets and financial opportunism?

The World Wide Web has radically shaped the way we do business, in particular that of the fashion retail sector.

Estimated to be worth over £4.1bn by the end of 2009*, the sector is booming, with no self respecting high street retailer now without a transactional website. 

The savvy aren’t, however, solely using the web as a sales platform.

Responding to the rise in popularity of social media, a new culture is emerging, labelled by industry leaders as “democratic consumerism”.

Pioneering the move towards the new culture is Asda Chief Executive, Andy Bond, who recently announced plans to open up the workings of the business to scrutiny from customers in a move to build greater trust and long-term loyalty amongst shoppers. 

Among the range of initiatives to be introduced by the retailer is Asda’s new blog, http://www.aislespyblog.com/, which invites customers to participate in the buying process - voting on their favourite styles and colour ways.

Still in its infancy, the blog is already enjoying a positive response.  Speaking on it its launch Beth Somi, George Marketing and PR Manager, said: “http://www.aislespyblog.com/ is a great way for our customers to understand more about what goes on behind the scenes at Asda and to know more about our colleagues who work here.

“I enjoy talking to people about my job, so this is a great opportunity to do it while I’m at work. There is so much to talk about, we have new ranges launching in store every week so there is always something going on. The tough decision is knowing what to blog about so that I don’t bore everyone!

“I love the fact that I can ask for feedback on my blog and that the readers respond in such a positive way. It’s a great way for us to get instant ideas on our new ranges. As I speak to the teams here at George House, they are excited about what we can ask for comments on in the future.”

An example of an entirely web-based retailer epitomising democratic fashion is http://www.styleshake.com/.  Possibly one of the most ingenious fashion websites to launch in recent years, StyleShake.com puts the customer at the heart of the proposition, allowing the user to design a garment from scratch choosing fabric, colour style and trim.

The site goes against the typical nature of the fashion industry with trends that ‘trickle-down’ from the catwalk to the high street, asking the user to vote and design exactly what they want to wear.

It is also a fashion community with users rating and commenting on one another’s designs. Recent celebrity fans include Duffy and Holly Branson.

Not only good news for fashion addicts looking to create an individual look, StyleShake.com is a pretty good business model.  The retailer only produces what its users order so there is never over-supply; good for the environment and for the businesses overheads.

Chief Executive Officer of StyleShake.com, Iris Ben-David, comments: “StyleShake is all about empowering the user, providing them with the means to express themselves and celebrate their creativity. We are delighted to offer new ways of collaboration”.

The retailer’s vision is to become a leading online resource that revolutionises the way we consume fashion by making it much more personal and individual. 

A design obsessive from a tender age and regularly frustrated shopper, I personally, am delighted by what looks to be a customer-empowered future.  But what does democratic consumerism mean for the future of retail?

Its potential to impact on the overall business model is huge.  Armed with increased customer insight, the risk of costly, unpopular bulk buys will undoubtedly be lessened, reducing retailers’ need to discount and perhaps marking the beginning of the end of the January sale.  The retailer/supplier relationship will also inevitably see a change.   The potential for collections to be further tailored by store in response to regional demand an increasing reality.

Democratic consumerism, it’s an interesting one to watch, one I will certainly be following with a close eye.  

* Taken from Mintel’s Fashion Online report, August 2009

Today’s PR Media Blog guest blog post is from Richard Baker, General Manager for Virgin Trains, and his take on Tw-etiquette (our terrible, made-up word, not his!) 

When Rob asked me if I wanted to write a bit about what I do on Twitter for this blog I was very flattered. These days I get a number of requests to write or speak about my approach to Twitter and customer service. It is always very humbling to be asked.

Then I normally have a little panic. I mean, there are a lot of good writers who do great stuff on Twitter; what on earth do I bring to the table that

a) hasn’t already been said, or

b) isn’t going to be boring?

With that in mind I did a bit of thinking and then decided to do an experiment. My experiments, (or ‘innovative approaches’ if you want it to sound well thought out) either do really well or bomb in a dramatic style. I will leave it to you to decide whether I achieved my objective!

I decided to ask the Twitterverse what they wanted me to write about. I asked one question online using a simple custom form and then asked my followers to answer and RT to their followers to answer. I have had some experience of this a few years ago when I developed a web-based service feedback system for Virgin Trains. Then I had to do some dodgy (I am no ubergeek) coding using different platforms.

Today it takes ten minutes with a Google Docs account;

I let this run for around four or five days.

One of the great things about trying something new is that you never know how it will turn out. You aren’t really in control of where it will go - particularly if it involves other people.

Incidentally, that’s how I describe what do on Twitter.

Which brings me to the responses to my question, and what this blog post is ultimately about. I have included a few of the responses and paraphrased them as they went into some detail. A huge thank-you to all those who responded; it was fascinating!

A few of the Responses

a)      Use of Twitter as a marketing tool and any barriers I face internally (Two questions)

b)      How I balance ‘corporate’ with ‘personal’ (Two questions)

c)      How I monitor and evaluate Social Media and the benefits I have seen (Two questions)

d)      Human Interest Stories ‘like someone losing a parrot on board a train’

Now, I don’t have the space to list and answer all the responses here, so instead I will make a few important points and if you want to read my answers to all responses  you can at my blog at Rich Baker over the coming weeks.

1. People want (and get) very different things from you and I on Twitter
2. Until we ask our followers what they get from our tweets we can only guess at the answer. Of course, sometimes it may not matter to you or I what our followers think..
3. ‘Fail to plan and you plan to fail’ goes the old adage. However, if you didn’t have a plan in the first place then it can’t fail; don’t be afraid to let things grow organically. There is always an element of risk when doing something new
4. I make mistakes quite often. I apologise when I do.
5. Most people are smart enough to understand that I am a person who works for a company. I am not the company. So please don’t quote me without checking what I meant. Or even worse, misquote me.
6. If you walked up to me at work, swore at me and then launched a shouty tirade about how crap I/we/Virgin am/are it might affect our relationship. I would probably wait until you calmed down and then ask if I could help. However, it would be nicer for both of us (and everyone listening) if you didn’t do a shouty rude tirade in the first place. The same applies on Twitter.

And finally

And forgive me for getting all ‘fluffy’ on this one; we have a great opportunity to create the rules on how we use Twitter and other social media; we can use all this amazing technology, enthusiasm, generosity, creativity and innovation to do great things for each other. I don’t intent to waste that opportunity, what about you?

@richard_baker    @VirginTrains

The nation’s sweetheart, Cheryl Cole, has landed a global advertising deal with L’Oreal Paris making her the first British woman to be signed by the company since Kate Moss in 1998.

The Girls Aloud singer and X Factor judge will appear in a major TV campaign this month following the launch of a new range, Elvive Full Restore 5, in the UK.

It’s reported that L’Oreal tested a number of UK celebrities and unsurprisingly, Cheryl was the clear favourite, held in great affection by the British public.

But what is it that makes this Geordie lass a national treasure? From humble beginnings on a Newcastle council estate to gracing the cover of UK Vogue, Cheryl Cole has well and truly been through the public mill (remember the incident with the toilet attendant?). But since winning public sympathy when husband Ashley Cole allegedly cheated on her, and replacing Sharon Osbourne as a judge on X Factor, she has been the crush of many girls, boys, men and women.

In fact, over the last couple of years there appears to be a distinct lack of criticism for Cheryl generally. The press love her, girls want to be her and we know what boys want to do…

In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, she talks candidly about her life in the media glare, often referencing her Geordie roots and admitting that she “doesn’t trust anyone except her mother and her dogs”.

The interview also reports how, on set of the L’Oreal TV ad, she humbly admits that she can’t quite believe she’s been given the opportunity to say those iconic words “because you’re worth it” and, in other recent press interviews, when asked how she feels about being involved in the campaign, she’s a PR dream: “I have always loved the brand, to be given this opportunity is amazing.”

Cheryl Cole has cleverly managed to position herself as a fashionista, a songstress and a TV favourite whilst retaining an air of openness, accessibility and honesty unseen in the likes of Victoria Beckham and Kate Moss.

Love or loath her (unlikely the latter) with a deal rumoured to be worth half a million pounds, L’Oreal clearly think she’s worth it….

With a hefty £60m marketing budget being dangled by Disney like a diamond encrusted carrot, it’s clear why Boris Johnson has taken the unprecedented decision to turn on London’s West End Christmas lights earlier than ever.

Traditionalists, I’m sure, will be up in arms about the early switch on - up to nine days earlier than previous years - but if this means London’s economy gets a much needed boost by playing host to the world premiere of A Christmas Carol, surely Johnson can be excused.

Opinion however, appears to be torn with certain commentators suggesting it’s a rather sad state of affairs when a “venerable city becomes a marketing tool.”

The problem is, the West End lights are famous and have always featured their own distinct theme. This year though, they will follow the theme of A Christmas Carol, boasting Disney’s Scrooge related decorations from Leicester Square to Oxford Street, Regent Street and the city.

From a PR perspective this is an incredible coup; a total dream to dress a city head to toe in branding but this is Disney after all, who apparently gave London little choice as to when they switched the lights on saying: “It has to be the 3^rd November as that is when the cast are going to be in London.”

With Jim Carrey and Colin Firth in town, at least this year, London won’t be stumping up public appearance fees for the likes of Kelly Brook.