Don’t say anything at all- it’s easier!

By Charlotte

After an interesting meeting with a client recently, we were handed the draft of a brochure to re-write. I was a tad frustrated that by the eighth and final page of jargon, I still had absolutely no idea what the document was trying to say. In that spirit, I found this interesting blog online – enjoy.

But you’re not saying anything 

And this is the problem with just about every lame speech, every overlooked memo, every worthless bit of boilerplate foisted on the world: you write and write and talk and talk and bullet and bullet but no, you’re not really saying anything.

 It took me two minutes to find a million examples. Here’s one, “The firm will remain competitive in the constantly changing market for defence legal services by creating and implementing innovative and effective methods of providing cost-effective, quality representation and services for our clients.”

 Write nothing instead. It’s shorter.

Most people work hard to find artful ways to say very little. Instead of polishing that turd, why not work harder to think of something remarkable or important to say in the first place?

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Cartwright in the Cathedral City

Liz Cartwright was in her home town on Friday when she helped with the PR for the Diana Awards which were held at Lincoln Cathedral. Together with an impressive posse of media, the great and the good of Lincoln gathered to honour more than 60 amazing young people who have done great things – from combating bullying to setting up fair trade initiatives at school. Princess Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, High Sherriff of Lincolnshire, attended the event.

Central TV come along to watch Olympic hopefuls at Castle Donington Community College

I went along to the launch of a new school lunch menu yesterday at Castle Donington Community College. This was for a client of ours – Leicestershire County Council School Food Support Service. This was a launch with a difference however with top Olympic hopefuls Henrietta Paxton and Robbie Grabarz in attendance.

The two were on hand to help promote healthy eating and exercise in schools by launching a new lunch menu. Henrietta and Robbie – both in the top three in Great Britain for pole vault and high jump respectively, were on hand to take a PE session and taste the new menu with a selection of excited pupils.

The new menus which have been created by the County Council have also had great input from the Food Group at Castle Donington – a group of elected pupils who get together to create ideas and discuss the design of the menu. The menus are set to be rolled out across Leicestershire after Easter.

The food looked fantastic and included lamb tagine and vegetable cous cous, salmon and broccoli tagliatelli, loaded vegetable pizza and summer fruit pudding – what a treat!

The children loved the food and Henrietta and Robbie seemed to enjoy tucking in as well. It was a great day and Central Television came along too which was fabulous for the school and the School Food Support Service – check out the clip on Central over the weekend.

Birthday celebrations with Sven

By Charlotte

It has been an interesting couple of weeks at Cartwright. After going to a Notts County match last Saturday and meeting the legend that is Sven Goran Eriksson, I was then invited to join the Notts County management team at Tom Brown’s in Gunthorpe to celebrate Sven’s birthday!

It was a fantastic evening. The food and drink was flowing, as were the many stories from Sven about his amazing life. We were also treated to a musical delight from Sven’s right hand man – Tord Grip, who is a dab hand on the accordion.

It was definitely a night I won’t forget in a hurry, and I had to sneak away with a picture as a little memento….

Our client’s got talent!

Forget about SuBo… we’ve got JoBi – none other than Jonathan Bishop, the “talented one” at Nottingham property firm heb.
Jonathan, who has the voice of an angel, went to the auditions of Britain’s Got Talent in Birmingham. He took along his mate Alan Hardy, MD of Paragon Interiors in Nottingham – who kindly banged away on the tambourine for our super singer.
Alas, they find out today their audition was not successful for this year and that their hopes of fame are dashed. They will not be following Susan Boyle after all. But, when it came to it, both of them were quite relieved…they never fancied her anyway.

So, does size really matter?

By Katherine

When it comes to evaluating PR most people think that size of coverage is a good indicator of the success of the project. A large clipping in the desired newspaper or magazine certainly seems to keep the clients happy.
But according to research from Hot to Trot Marketing Group, size is not the only factor when it comes to the success of a project. The research looked at how readers assimilate information from printed and online media coverage.
Many factors influenced the impact the coverage had on the reader, including the relevance of the media to the reader, the editorial authority of the piece, the position of the article, the use of images and illustrations and the tone and nature of the content – interestingly the size of the article was the last thing that influenced readers.
This is interesting research for PROs who often use EAV as their preferred method of evaluation. These findings now suggest that a wider range of factors – including those listed above, should be considered when evaluating campaigns.

Agent Matt is acting up

Matt Dillon

Matt Hilton

 

Our client Matt Hilton of heb became a Hollywood legend this week – when a Nottingham Evening Post journalist wrongly referred to him as Matt Dillon in her article!
Cartwright respectfully pointed out the error – but the journalist was sadly too young to know who Crash star Dillon was. Matt Hillton didn’t seem too perturbed, however…

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/news/River-Trent-stretch-hammer/article-1656496-detail/article.html

http://www.heb.co.uk/

It’s all in the search

 

by Charlotte

In recent months you’ll probably have heard a lot of people talking about SEO, well if you’re not sure what it means and are too afraid to ask, it stands for search engine optimisation. SEO basically tries to make sure that whenever someone searches for words related to your business on sites such as Google, you appear nice and high up in the search engine listings.
Anyone looking for something on Google will tell you that they are only really interested in the first few links that come up on the search, so it’s really important that you can keep your company as high as possible so that you don’t get lost.
In theory this sounds quite straight forward, but unfortunately it can get tricky. Search engines use complicated methods to decide where sites come in their listings.
Don’t fret though – because over the years experts have worked out what is and isn’t important when it comes to search engines and how you can use simple tricks to get yourself noticed. A key point to remember is that SEO is not a precise science and what works once, might not work again.

 You can follow these simple steps that can increase your optimisation and make your site more user friendly:
1. Create or build a site map – a site map is a page on your website that links to all the pages on the site in a clear orderly fashion. Search engines use links to find new pages and having the all in one place makes it easy for them to index every part of your site.
2. Make your page titles and meta descriptions stand out – the title and description of your site that you see when you come up in web searches is actually taken from the HTML code that makes up your site, specifically, the title and meta description tags. It’s important to really sell your site here to convince searchers to click through. Remember to use all your important keywords too
3. Get some links – this is a slightly tricky one, but it is pretty much accepted that the number of links you have from other websites to your site will help your SEO, especially if the links come from very well ‘respected’ sites. Getting links is tricky though and the process of ‘reciprocal’ links (i.e. I’ll link to you if you link to me) is now frowned upon by the search engines. Creating a blog or news section and filling it with lots of interesting content is a great way to get other people linking to your site for example
4. Use ‘alt’ tags on images – if you have a site that has lots of images, check that your web designer has used alt tags to description what the image is. The search engine spiders aren’t able to tell what images are, but in HTML you can use the ‘alt’ text to describe the image. Remember to include your keywords where possible
5. Write good SEO-friendly copy – in the past, it was easy to write copy that was crammed full of keywords and then do quite well in SEO. Times have changed however and this is now not the case. It is still important to include keywords, but they should be used sparingly – only a few times on each page for example. At the end of the day, your copy should always be written for your users first and the search engines second

Making it count in 2010

 
by Katherine

How to make the most of the changes to the industry…

PR and communications has certainly taken a knock in the last year, as companies look to cut budgets, and newspaper pages appear thinner than ever.
With advertising dwindling it seems print media may become a thing of the past and so if you haven’t already, its time to embrace social media…
Social media has rapidly become a prominent part of everyone’s lives and certainly a more important part of the PR package. Online audiences are growing rapidly with over 35 million regularly logging on.
Twitter is already a playing field for journalists and PROs, as some of the biggest publications have thousands of followers, and journalists increasingly turn to Twittering and other social media to help them meet deadlines.

PR agencies are best placed to take advantages of these new challenges in communications. An agency should be able to implement exciting and innovative ideas to help raise the profile of your business.

As we move forward into the somewhat unknown world of social media, make sure communications is at the top of your list of priorities. Now must go and Tweet…

We have gone blogging mad!

We have gone blogging mad!
Take a look at this on the New Mummy’s blog – our first success…

http://newmummystips.blogspot.com/2009/12/flat-stanley.html