In the highly-regarded Insider‘s Heat poll, the region’s PR agencies mark their peers and competitors. This year, SKV Communications yet again won the admiration of other agencies, achieving a 52-point margin over the second placed agency.

As we are in the reputation business, it’s superb that our own reputation is so highly regarded by our fellow professionals.

Our clients can rest assured that SKV’s levels of service, professionalism and creativity are up there with the very best.

We would say that, of course. But it’s nice to know that the rest of the region’s PR and communications sector thinks so, too.

Take a popular and rapidly expanding sport/past-time, one that comes complete with a set of inbuilt and irrefutable positive messages (health, sustainability, economic prudence etc.), and one that is also largely embraced by a demographic traditionally resistant to your core offer – and look to simply take ownership of it.

Sporadic scandals about drugs use in professional riding aside, there’s nothing really not to like about the idea of responsible cycling. So by creating an annual event across UK cities – that involves tens of thousands of families, friends, serious cyclists and giddy bike enthusiasts happily pulling on a bright yellow Sky branded bib and all grinning from ear to ear at the sheer joyousness of the occasion – is a stroke of positioning genius.

But beyond the photo opps they’ve also been clever on the day. There’s no hard sell, you don’t have to fill a form to take part, or to get the aforementioned fluorescent Sky vest – and wearing it is not obligatory in any case.

There are no questionnaires about your current viewing, telephony or broadband arrangements; nor any stands or promo staff thrusting sales literature at you about HD, 3D or other Sky broadcast innovation that comes with a ‘D’ attached.

And bearing in mind the large ABC1 contingent taking part, the fact News International hadn’t gatecrashed the party with a special deal on a Sunday Times’ pay-wall subscription was another example of remarkable commercial restraint.

In fact in Manchester the only evidence that Sky was a media company and broadcaster at all was provided via a liberal scattering of Sky Arts promo folk serenading the Manc ‘peloton’ with extracts of operetta from Gilbert & Sullivan at various traffic light junctions.

The entire event was uncluttered, efficient and very effective – and also lacked any “charity-fun-run-will-you-sponsor-me-via-my-just-giving-page” awkwardness as a potential barrier to entry. There was live indie music, Olympians, cheerful stewards and an air of refreshing civility. There was free mineral water, British Cycling, Sustrans and free bike checks from Evans. And there was beer, burgers and a radiant Gemma Atkinson to boot.

In fact it was about as far away from David Mitchell’s Sky-inspired footy-rant as you could get – and anyone who thinks cycling is, fundamentally, a power for good in society would struggle to find fault in the preparation, presentation and execution of the Sky Ride concept.

You can, of course, cynically debate Sky’s motives till Mark Cavendish finishes the Col du Tourmalet stage on a BMX. But in the long, bitter and bruising battle that lies ahead to be the nation’s preferred digital entertainment and comms supplier it’s a great opening gambit from Sky to be shouting from our satellite-dish festooned rooftops that they’re as much a purveyor of “Planet Cycling” as they are “Planet Football”.

It’s a shame that the event got little coverage or support from rival broadcasters – even if it was branded-up to the eyeballs with a rival’s logo -  but maybe that will play into Sky’s hands as well in the long term. Having said that GMG bought into it with a Real Radio partnership and decent pre and post event coverage within the MEN and on MEN online.

Either way the the overall impression left on many who took part is that Grandpa Murdoch might be a bit brash at times, but by golly he knows how to throw a  party – and one to which everyone is invited.

]]> http://www.skvcommunications.co.uk/skv-conversation/how-sky-cleverly-peddles-its-wares-to-the-anti-murdoch-massive/feed/ 0 http://www.skvcommunications.co.uk/skv-conversation/myamusingcompanyblogpostnot/ http://www.skvcommunications.co.uk/skv-conversation/myamusingcompanyblogpostnot/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:22:24 +0000 Richard Bond http://www.skvcommunications.co.uk/?p=2681 If you are active on twitter you may have noticed people increasingly adding hash tags to tweets that upon investigation turn out to be nothing more than a humorous attempt to contextualise their preceding message.

Or in other words they make…

Peter Hook has given me a mention in his How Not To Run a Club, quoting from my 1989 piece in The Face about the Hacienda’s slow death-by-gangland, which also got re-printed in the Jon Savage-edited The Hacienda Must Be Built.

And going back even further in shared histories, there’s Mark Kermode’s It’s Only A Movie, his highly readable biog, an entertaining speed-read through the career of the Radio 5 Live, Culture Show and Observer film critic.

With winning self-deprecation, Dr K (as fans of his Simon Mayo R5 Live spots call him), devotes a chapter to his Manchester years, brimming with radical student politics, busking on his double bass outside the Royal Exchange, and working for peanuts at the wing-and-a-prayer City Life magazine which I founded and edited with two other ex-Manchester University students.

We are talking 1984-85 here, so when Mark took the stage at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Hall recently, his speech (accepting an Outstanding Alumnus Award) took me right back to the days before blogs and the Net.

Now anyone can publish their views online, but back then DIY publishing meant a xeroxed fanzine or printed fortnightly magazine like ours, selling ads to theatres, nightclubs, bookshops and vegetarian wholefood co-ops as means of funding our own view, for our own readership, on this city. Even the cheapest fanzine could not give content for free; it was the means of publishing the content which cost, and that had to covered.

The City Life worldview meant a default and often aggressive opposition to the mainstream view of Manchester, crysallised for us in the all-powerful MEN.

Mark really does capture the atmos back then in the old City Life offices at 1-3 Stephenson Square, a colourful cast of odd characters inspired by punk ‘n’ hippy radicals, and aspiring journalists just passing through – like Liz McKean, (now on Newsnight), Kathryn Holliday (Telegraph magazine), John Naughton, (The Word/Empire) and Aidan McGurran (saddled with The Sun’s Lenny Lotto persona for a while, before he escaped to The Mirror).

Also hanging out  were music biz media folk who have gone to be even better known for their illustrious and variegated careers – front cover genius photographer Kevin Cummins, the Happy Mondays designers Matt, Pat and Karen Carroll, designer Mick Peek (who later did the MCFC crest), and writers Jon Ronson, Sarah Champion and John Robb. The late artist Ray Lowry used to come in and deliver a fistful of scratchy cartoons, and if we published one we’d send him £7.50.

Mark Kermode’s book details his thrill at getting a review published in a magazine sold on the news stands. Getting each issue out seemed a titanic struggle yet the end product was worth our 60 hour working weeks, because publication felt like power.

Seeing each issue on sale down Oxford Road and Deansgate pegged up alongside ‘proper’ magazines was a rush which even now lives with me. I did a double take when I dug these covers out – yes, we really did sell for just 30p.

City Life was a magazine by, about and for ‘us’, the 20-40s with left-leaning cultural interests.  Something you could hold in your hand, pass around, take to the pub and refer to, and collect. Yet these days no end of online gurus could write yards of WordPress on ‘communities of interest” about the most niche online forum with a handful of devotees.

Ultimately, ‘us’ turned out to be no more than a few thousand readers, which is why it failed as a business and was bought out of administration by the MEN in 1988. It published the title as a mag until a few years ago, but closed it down. But its brand lives on in the paper’s features pages.

As I heard Mark’s eulogy to mid-80s Manchester to the assembled throng of post-grads and their parents – “whatever you wanted to do, you could make happen in Manchester” – I was reminded of the part we alternative publishers played not only in the life of Mark Kermode and I, but in the life of the city.

When the MEN bought City Life out of administration in 1988, they inherited a collection of City Life mags. I have no idea if that collection is still with them, but I have a pretty intact collection of the first 300 or so issues. They provide a unique picture of a social, cultural and political view of the city from 1983 onwards that you won’t find in the MEN’s own cuttings, or anywhere else.

Can anyone suggest a home for them where they might be useful to those wanting to study a period of the city’s life? It’s an archive of a crucial period of Manchester life, reporting with rough energy and scathing wit on the birth of the alternative Manchester which turned out to be so influential – the Hacienda and Cornerhouse, the rise of the Stringer/Leese/Bernstein council, Madchester, the city centre living and leisure boom, the city’s comedy stars and the growth of the city’s contemporary art scene, etc etc.

Mark Kermode’s award was made at a post-graduate degree ceremony, and was hosted by imposing-looking academic figures in gowns and a range of outlandish headgear. He had to wear one too. There was much chuckling at how unlikely it all seemed that we’ve gone all establishment.

Except, really, what was establishment and alternative has disappeared. The young rebels of the 80s media scene would have boggled at today’s melding of the old battle lines.

The city fathers promote ‘innovation’ and ‘cultural industries.’ Manchester sells itself on its history of rabble-rousing musical roughnecks. And the Prime Minister loves The Smiths.

What used to be called ‘alternative’ media – like the so-called ‘alternative comedians’ – have ceased to exist. Tribal media is vanishing along with tribal politics, with the decline of national newspapers part of that trend.

There is no alternative anything, because there is no need for an alternative when the Net hosts a myriad of communities and possibilities, and the instant means to express them.

Maybe the Facebook generation has no interest in those who came before them. But perhaps when our collective synapses have blown in some mass social meejah TMI overload, people may have the time and space to wonder at just how the city that we take for granted today, actually came to be.

Then some dusty old journals might help the curious, the amnesiac or the scholarly shed some light on what, even now, seems like ancient Manchester history.

Any takers  for my collection of old mags?

Such is the position of Facebook – the social media application we love to hate but can’t seem to live without.

It’s impossible to deny that it is a powerful tool and compared to the eye-melting chaos of Myspace pages (I deleted mine with a certain sense of satisfaction last month) it’s elegant blue and white aesthetic is both easy-to-use and intuitive. That is if you discount the obscene amount of applications, add-ons and other confusing extras.

However somehow we have come to accept things in the virtual world we would seriously question if they were mirrored in the physical – check out these truly shocking stats (or watch them on a video on socialnomics):

• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
• Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
• 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook
• 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily

No one company should have such a stranglehold, but social media is dependent on connections, and each platform is, essentially, an island – useless without the critical mass of fellow users. With this in mind it looks as if we’re moving towards a situation where it will be almost impossible to establish an alternative system and therefore very difficult to hold Facebook to account for its future decisions regarding privacy, data and advertising.

With the recent furore surrounding Facebook’s recent decision to allow non-Facebook websites to post personal views of Facebook users without consent this should be something we are beginning to worry about.

At SKV I’m regularly engaging via many different social media platforms, but – the rise of Twitter and LinkedIn aside – it has been noticeable that the playing field has been narrowing. I can’t deny that this makes it easier to talk to larger amounts of people in one place but the thought of all that power in the hands of one organisation makes me nervous.

The Diaspora Boys

In the light of all this it’s heartening to hear that communities of programmers are trying to create something which puts users back in control of their data. Four N.Y.U students recently made news when they raised more than $100,000 to create Facebook alternative ‘Diaspora‘ operating under the principle that the user owns everything uploaded to their ‘seed’ (profile).

I for one am looking forward to seeing what they create.

(Statistics acquired from http://www.wirefresh.com/Facebook-accounts-for-50-of-uk-mobile-internet-traffic/)

Although there are other similar platforms (Dolphin immediately springs to mind) Ning is a fantastic tool – really easy to use and deceptively powerful. I currently run several Nings including the Da Vinci – The Genius microsite for Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry and have nothing but good things to say about what the platform lets you do.

I predict a massive exodus as current users, many of whom were operating out of the education, not-for-profit or charity sector, find somewhere else to connect with their communities.

What sparked the company’s philosophical shift? Well, the recent departure of co-founder Gina Bianchini may have something to do with it – a leaked internal memo was forwarded to industry blog TechCrunch explaining their plans (which also include cutting 40% of staff).

A paid-for Ning was one of those things people always talked about but it still comes as something of a shock – albeit one informed (and softened) by the recent talk of paywalls on major on-line news sites – it seems the next stage in the evolution of the internet is going to be defined by this struggle between free and paid for content.

In this case the real losers are going to be those who have invested massive amounts of time creating content and building communities on a platform they are not going to be able to afford to pay for.

We all need to remember when creating on-line presences using pre-existing tools that although we are uploading our own content we could easily lose it at any time.

Do these companies owe us anything or is this just a risk we take and a price we pay when we don’t create our own sites from scratch? Thoughts welcome.

So it feels like a refreshing change to be at events which live in the memory only – in fact, maybe it feels a more valuable experience for being live,  personal and not available for posterity.

Stephen Bayley‘s talk at the BDP studio for the first pro-Manchester lecture was a rare pleasure, because he has total command of his subject and also because he knows a bit about the human theatre of giving a talk.

The check suit, the flowery shirt and horizontal striped tie did rather hint that this man could be interesting. Not a lecture, more of a performance. He ripped each finished page of notes from his book, then crumpled and dropped them on the floor behind his lectern. Class.

I dare say many people would have gone online to check out his heartfelt, learned views about the British loss of traditional skills and why politicians are responsible. But they can’t. No one filmed it, and I for one am glad I was in the 70 or so people in the room to hear why ‘Design is more important than politics.’

Then I was at the opening of a very unusual art show – Night and Day, the splendid exhibition by Jan Chlebik of photos of Manchester music venues past and present, organised and with text by Phil Griffin. It’s on Piccadilly rail station platform 12, which means it must have the highest footfall of any art show outside the Tate in London.

About 50 brave souls donned woolly hats to gather to wish the protagonists well, and to forgo the wee dram which is the traditional salutation to an art launch (drink is banned on the platforms). Griffin bellowed a few words at his guests, during which the station tannoy announced an arriving train, which disgorged bemused commuters into the art throng. A priceless moment.

I will value it more for having a picture in my head, than on a video. I did, however, take a photo. Hats off to Network Rail, by the way, this project makes them no money and logistically is probably a pain, so here’s to them/it.

There’s no website for it – just 22 photos of places in which you’ve probably spent some of the most exciting and memorable times of your life. So you’ll have just have to get yourself down there. It’s free. You don’t even have to buy a platform ticket.

Earlier that same day, at the launch of Innovation Manchester Boardroom, veteran sooth-sayer Dave Haslam was telling me why he was not videoing his one-to-one chats with music figures he admires – Mark E Smith and Dexy’s Kevin Rowland are first up.

The events are fast selling out, he says, and if people can’t get in and then can’t see it later, that drives up the value of being there.

He’s right. It may be that a digital record will be immortal and forever inhabit the Internet. But being at an event boasting super art and stimulating people can give you a buzz which a video would only spoil the memory of.

That it came on the day when the BBC opened a potential Pandora’s Box of proposed cutbacks to its output was merely coincidental.  But in such a tense political atmosphere there was definitely a public relations sense of making the most out of an out-of-London opportunity .

I was invited by the BBC’s Economics and Business Editor Jeremy Hillman and met him and a number of London-based BBC journalists and production people who’ll work from Salford Quays when the BBC moves five departments  including 5 Live up next year. The excellent Tony Livesey R5 Live show is already coming from the city four nights a week.

Some of the people we met are currently house hunting up here, which makes them a rare breed in the current market. They pointed out that, while they were moving happily, there were huge logistic and emotional difficulties for many – not only moving house, but uprooting their children, as well as the responsibilities they have for elderly parents.

The number of relocators is nearly 50%, I believe, which is higher than the usual. Manchester sentiment has been scathing towards those who have opted not to move or have spoken out about their doubts over it, but perhaps Northern opinion-formers should not be too quick to criticise without knowing the personal circumstances of individuals.

The Green Room was full of media people – including Nick Jaspan of How Do and editor of Northwest Tonight Cerys Griffiths, and I was chuffed to be chatting to a presenter who I identified clearly just by his voice to be Mark Pougatch. He excused himself from our chat – because he had to go off and present the show.

There is always a buzz about being at an event broadcast live, with the floor manager whipping up applause and counting down to being on-air.

The debate itself was enlightening and a bit more civil than I expected, with fan passion from the floor generally good-humoured.  There was a general consensus around the notion of the ‘specialness’ of football and the need for better regulation, but whether that should be self-administered or the role of an independent body, there was no agreement.

If nothing else, the discussion showed for the umpteenth time the silky skills of PFA boss Gordon Taylor, who dips and swerves his way round would-be crunching tackles about player pay with the verve of a Cesc Fabregas and occasionally delivering an incisive thrust worthy of classic Ian Rush. You’d expect nothing less from the best-paid union boss in the UK, and very possibly in the world…

Everything from hidden messages to the decline of educational standards, to the wit of unknown graffiti scribblers.

For example, the Conservative Party have spent a few bob saying ‘ta’ to the people of Manchester – the ‘thank you for having us’ posters adorn a few key sites, including a key city centre gateway on Great Ancoats Street.

Carry on just 500 yards into town, however, and you’ll encounter this.

Political point-making? There was no room for the ‘f”, obviously, at the end of ‘con.’

My drive into work takes me past that inadvertent piece of political commentary and past The Lighthouse opposite the MEN Arena – and what a spelling shocker: ‘formally’  instead of ‘formerly’. And it’s not the kind of sign which looks to cheap to change.

Occasionally you get a piece of graffiti which eschews (look it up) the abusive and brings a wee smile – step forward the Northern Quarter wit who amended the roadworks notice.

As for the Whitworth Art Gallery noticeboard, in the absence of anything official, people simply WILL fill the frame with ‘art’ of their own….