Media spotlight on Jamie

Jamie Oliver is back on our screens with his latest mission ‘Jamie’s Ministry of Food’ which demonstrates his use of public relations tactics. A clever stunt was to set it in Rotherham where plain-speaking Julie Critchlow was last filmed supplying children with junk food whilst Jamie was fighting for healthy school dinners. However, when faced with a football stadium full this idea backfires and only a few are tempted to try his steak sandwich, and more importantly his ‘pass it on’ experiment. You have to admire his tenacity when he returns to the stadium and inspires the men who came forward, with his visual display of the philosophy. His programme has been slated in the media for “stereotyping the northern working classes as intellectually challenged junk-munchers” and John Gilding, leader of the Conservative group of Rotherham council defended his town amid the concerns of stereotyping. Yet it's Julie, who seems intent on Jamie failing, that led him to the town in the first place. However, one thing he has certainly achieved is media coverage and the start of a debate around this important life skill, which has to be a good thing.

Battling into the blogosphere

In the midst of the current economic crisis, both the Labour and Tory parties are turning their crisis management techniques to their own reputations first. It was reported in PR Week that they are applying tactics to the blogosphere – that risky ground where anyone can rise up as an influential voice, damaging the reputation of an organization. However, if harnessed well it can be another powerful tool in the armory of public relations strategies. The Conservative party is using a local blogger charm offensive at its annual conference this week for example, having identified the key influencers.

This increasing reliance on social media provides a challenge for those involved in media content analysis and we have a range of solutions which we can discuss with our clients. The blogosphere is a vast arena to get to grips with, making evaluation all the more important for assessing the impact your public relations programs are having. This challenge facing public relations firms was succinctly put by Ashely Friedlein at e-consultancy.com:

“Traditional PR was mostly about focusing lots of effort on a smaller number of key influencers, for example journalists at a national or trade press, whereas online PR is now more about the intelligent and efficient distribution of content, management of conversations, monitoring of hundreds if not thousands of media outlets, and measurement. A good online PR would be like a spider at the centre of a web sensing and reacting to the slightest reverberations across its network and moving fast to capitalise on opportunities as they arose.”