With the Western world’s financial system seemingly disintegrating around us, it’s no surprise that the magic formula for business buoyancy - confidence - evaporates.

In tough times it’s natural for businesses to take immediate action . But is it right to shave PR, marketing and communications from the budget? Along with the allocation for training and Belgian chocolate biscuits, marcomms is an easy target. If the late, great Bill Hicks had anything to do with it, we’d all be six feet under.

But in such uncertain times, there is a need for clear and open dialogue. Insightful comments on the topic have been shared on LinkedIn.

How would you justify the marcomms team and budget not being chucked overboard?

They say that politics is showbusiness for ugly people, well step forward Lembit Opik. Former beau of both weather girl, Sian Lloyd and one of the Cheeky Girls, has enlisted the services of Bell Pottinger in Liverpool to try and buff his image sufficient to get him elected as Lib Dem President.

Bell Pottinger have plenty of form in moulding the profile of unpopular politicians but why choose the Liverpool office? I guess as a Lib Dem, the head of BP Liverpool, Richard Clein, has a personal relationship with Lembit.

This is definitely part of a trend in our media obsessed world. Disgraced former Lib dem front bencher, Mark Oaten, has been using the services of a former Lib Dem spin doctor to try and repair his public image. There’s nothing wrong in this. I’ve done a fair bit of this kind of work myself and its extremely interesting. No word on whether Lembit is paying Bell Pottinger but Guido has a way of finding these things out:)

The next thing you know, we’ll be seeing fading politicians staging a comeback by appearing on reality shows.

A few titbits;

•  DJ Collins, Google’s Head of Comms, has recently been outed, firstly here and then in PR Week,  as David Miliband’s ‘media man’. He’s the guy guiding Joe 90 on a road to media adulation to match his mentor, Tony Blair’s rise in the mid 90s.  So why was DJ part of Gordon’s speechwriting team? My source says it was a clever move to get Miliband’s top spin-meister into the tent and focus Miliband’s camp on the common aim. May be that’s why Miliband was so careful in his speech not to be seen as throwing too much red meat to Gordon-baiters?

• In those three weeks while Gordon was on holiday Southwold District Council got more coverage than the Labour government. Team Gordon seemed to forget that just because the PM is ‘out of office’ doesn’t mean that political journalists switch to become sports journalists. They still have space to fill so why did they let the Tories fill it for them? Andy Coulson is clearly more aware of how to fill a newspaper than Brown’s spindoctor, Damien McBride. I understand that McBride was berated in the bar of the Midland Hotel at 3am this morning and just ‘didn’t get it’.

• There’s increasing talk that the Mirror’s Political Editor, Kevin Maguire, may finally relent and take up the media role at Number 10. The Party wants an attack dog, who understands the issues, understands the press, understands the Party and will agressively go after the Tories. Kevin has Labour stamped through him like a stick of rock. He’s a Party member and his Mum plays an active role up in the north east I believe. He’s also extremely bright and a brilliant journalist. He’s always said he couldn’t do it as he would never want to lie to a journalist. He’s thinking if he doesn’t do it now he might never do it. And he wouldn’t need to lie!

• And finally well done John Prescott. He’s the nearest that Labour’s got to the ‘Straight Talk Express’ and now he’s no longer in Cabinet he’s even more direct. He talks like the people or at least a huge proportion of them who otherwise just switch off when they hear Estuary English and a pre-programmed soundbite. His interview with Paxman was a corker. No official messaging, no buzzwords, no dancing round the issues. He put Paxo in his place. Look forward to more of that as Gordon uses him to say the things that Cabinet Minsiters can’t say.

Why do I feel like someone’s trying to put me on the street?

Now, anyone can cut and paste their press release into the press release grader and get an instantaneous report on its quality and effectiveness.

Frankly, I’m not overly worried (yet) and I think it’s a bit of fun for PR practitioners to play with. I also think that Robin Wilson is a terribly polite  about it on his blog.

While I don’t agree the press release is dead (not many national journalists will say “press release? Nah? Let’s talk about it over coffee”) the press release grader doesn’t help those getting a bad score to really understand how they need to put it right. Done well - usually by professionals - the press release can be a powerful tool to spread a (operative word) good story far and wide. In fact, magazine staffs are so pressurised that a well-written release can sometimes be cut and pasted wholesale, particularly online.

Nice toy, but no substitute for real experience and good old-fashioned news sense.

Nick Faldo, golf’s iceman, was more than a little shaky in the opening ceremony speeches of this year’s Ryder Cup. And the media doesn’t miss a trick. In fact, the trick becomes the news.

Radio 5 Live this morning took great pleasure in lampooning European team captain Faldo for getting one of his team’s name wrong, for asking another whether he hailed from “Ireland or Northern Ireland” and for a sub-Muhammed Ali gag involving butterflies and bees. By contrast, the American captain, Paul Azinger, came across as “assured” and ultimately winning the PR battle.

Of course, the winning or losing will be on the green. But if the top man, in any role, is seen to be a communications liability, the media will leap on it like dingos. Often, the problem is everyone’s too scared to suggest the top guy needs to work to a brief or at least some well-rehearsed and clear messages.

Bosses have been responsible for damaging their company’s reputation and even sinking their own businesses with ill-judged comments (stand up Gerald Ratner). Politicians, who should know better, can be just as bad. Our media training friends at Perris-Myatt this week highlighted deputy leader, Harriet Harman’s response to the Times when asked if she would want Gordon Brown’s job if ousted: “I cannot remember the answer to that”, she allegedly replied.

Even the top people need a helping hand with their communications skills at times.

Don Bartholomew’s blog offers a refreshing take on the measurement and evaluation of PR, both for the old and new media worlds. He offers terminology and techniques that could be grasped by, well, anyone - which should be the sign of good public relations, right?

Forget your two litres of water a day. Cancel your colonical irrigation appointment. It’s time for the marketing industry to undergo a detox.

Steve Young, director at Winning Pitch, a business which assists individuals and companies to achieve profitable breakthroughs in revenue performance, has spoken out to put sales and marketing under the cost-cutting spotlight:
“While companies have ‘streamlined’ their factory floors and operations as the credit crunch continues to hit hard, few have dared to put sales and marketing under the same scrutiny – usually for fear of what they might find. However, in the vast majority of sectors, there is a huge amount of waste in marketing, which few companies have even noticed, let alone tried to address.”

With the recent conversations in the blogosphere about the death of PR, perhaps it’s not just this field of marketing that needs to refine the ‘usual way’ of doing things.

“It seems that half of what marketing professionals do is hugely wasteful. For example, a paltry two to three per cent response on a direct mail campaign is seen as successful and a one in twenty conversion rate in telesales is seen as phenomenal. Many advertising campaigns are based on the ‘drip effect’, and, despite an enthusiastic launch, most websites are rarely updated and often under-promoted. To compound the issue, most marketing and salespeople are driven, measured and even incentivised by sales volume – not profit volume.”

Steve goes on to state the seven ways in which most marketing is wasteful:

1. Waiting
This could be waiting for returns from a customer questionnaire or leaflet, waiting for another person to complete some other work, waiting for someone to make a decision or waiting for a call or meeting with a customer.

2. Wasted effort
Too many people make appointments with people who will never buy, spend time checking others’ work, do a mailshot of 500 when they can only follow up 50, retype proposals that you have on file, and many other duplications that could so easily be avoided.

3. Making mistakes
This could be as simple and careless as making spelling errors in a leaflet, or as costly as recruiting a salesman who, it turns out, can’t sell.

4. Poor admin and communications
Jargon puts people off, as does inviting prospects to an event taking place the same evening or not responding to enquiries quickly enough.

5. Inconsistent ways of working
Not having standard ways of doing things can lead to unpredictable timings and performance levels, trial and error and difficulty in training staff.

6. Unnecessary inventory
It’s no use being a jack of all trades – don’t hold an extra wide product range just in case, don’t print an extra thousand copies of a leaflet just in case, and don’t hold on to too many qualified prospects.

7. Untapped human potential
Not taking advantage of an individual’s latent talent or listening to new ideas from staff is a critical mistake for too many businesses.

So how can companies and agencies eliminate these waste by-products of the marketing industry?

“The surprisingly simple answer is to cut all the marketing mumbo-jumbo down to three key processes: finding customers, winning customers and growing customers. It’s then a matter of finding out how each process is performing currently, how it’s being measured, at which steps it goes wrong, where and how improvements can be made, and how to make these improvements a way of life.

“In the vast majority of cases, sales and marketing processes are both ineffective and inefficient. To maximise results, however, the detox exercise is much more than simple cost-cutting. You must be skilled in mapping and re-engineering techniques, and have the people skills to ensure that the team buys into the new approach, owns the new approach and continues to improve the new approach. But when you get it right, you will be stunned by the results.”

I don’t know about you but I’m feeling better already.

There are those times - thankfully rare - when the PR practitioner looks at the day’s task and thinks “could this get any worse?”

From a cursory look at today’s news I have picked my top 5, in no particular order, of thankless PR tasks. Can anybody add to this litany of PR horror?

 1. Anything to do with the Spanish Olympic team.

2. Selling Basra as a tourist destination.

3. Explaining those pesky - and very late - kids’ test results.

4. Putting the odd caveat on press freedom in China.

5. Getting anyone to shout “come on you blues”.

The internet is open. Just don’t tell those incomprehensible fools desperate to regulate this series of tubes!

Paris has said ‘yes’, or more accurately, ‘oui’ to a complete overhaul of the net which will allow the net’s regulator, Icann, to open up strict rules on top-level domain names.

Later this year, we could see the introduction city specific domain names such as .london or . nyc. Following that we could see .movie, .food, .xxx, .kids or .justaboutanything!

For businesses, this means a costly revamp of web strategy when they’re already wrestling with competitors popping up on searches of trademarks.

For consumers, it offers clarity for services with each website having to establish exactly what it does and what service it provides. No doubt we’ll see industries crowding around particular domain names such as the entertainment industry around .film or newspapers around .news.

For years, .com has been the reigning champion of domain names with .co.uk and .net just feeling a bit cheap. However, now I forsee a time when .com is seen as ’soooo web 1.0′.

I’m off to register every .pr, .media, .blog and .marketing sites I can think of and finally make my fortune as a .com millionaire. I mean .pr millionaire. No, I mean .media or is that .blog? .cotton?? Oh forget it!

Sally Whittle over at journalism and PR blog, Getting Ink, tells it as it is when it comes to receiving junk (i.e. irrelevant or badly targeted) PR material from so-called PR professionals.

But how many companies buying in PR support are aware that the antics of their agencies might be getting their stories - and hence their reputations - blacklisted by journalists?

Asking who and why agencies are talking to on your behalf (and how) is too important a question not to ask.