adesays.so

Well I’m posting again. You wait two years for a blogpost and two come along at once – isn’t it always the way.

On Thursday 8 November I went to see Blood Brothers at the West End for one last time before the show’s final curtain this Saturday. Here’s my Audioboo review…

As always, comments and feedback are very welcome. I feel it only fair to warn you I’m seeing a LOT of theatre in November, so you’re going to be hearing a lot from me.

Sadly, as many people predicted, I haven’t updated this blog nearly often enough.

I feel very proud that so many new viewers read my Greencoat Boy blog thanks to a tweet from Ben Goldacre (The power that man has is quite incredible, and has inspired a blog post that will come this weekend). This has shamed me into posting more.

So – i’m promising the posts here so you can hold me to account if they don’t come. I will post on:

• the Tuition Fees riots and trust in politicians;
• influencers and how to choose the right one to help your campaign; and
• more exciting news stories from the world of PR.

Watch this space – and if they don’t turn up, please shame me in public; there’s no point doing a blog if you don’t post often enough.

There was me thinking I was going to have a quiet weekend – and I end up involved in a media whirlwind. Here’s how I used my press office experience to  turn an outrageous incident into an international trending topic and a national news story with a positive outcome.

Greencoat Boy Pub

It started tamely enough – LGBT Labour held its annual AGM in a sweltering room in Victoria. After it finished the group decamped to a local pub, where we’d booked some space for a small social.

For an hour or so everything was fine – the pub was happily taking our money and we enjoyed a quiet drink. Then, apparently a lone drinker complained about the group to the manager, who asked us to take down our small innocuous banner with the name of our group in the area we’d reserved.

The Manager then explained to us that had he known we were a gay group he’d never have taken our booking and refused to serve us.

Now as you can imagine – we were appalled. And we were a group who knew our rights; proud of the 2006 legislation that made it illegal to discriminate in the provision of goods and services based on sexual orientation.

Get the story out there

Being appalled is one thing – but I’m a press officer, and when I see an injustice I do what I do best: get the story out there.

First I needed to do a bit of research, we knew the pub had a parent company – and they were the people we needed to complain too. A quick search on my phone confirmed the pub was owned by Punch Taverns.

So now to spread the word: 140 characters forces you to be succinct, and people need to be able retweet just the one tweet – so i quickly put this together and posted it to twitter:

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Traditional skills

I knew that tweeting this wasn’t enough – I needed to use my experience to make this into a real story. I got straight on to the phone to my contacts at ITN to spread the word about what was going on.

Within minutes a journalist from Attitude Magazine, who follows my feed, saw my tweet and retweeted it from their twitter feed – and this got the storm really going. After telling people to follow me for more details my iPhone was buzzing with a new follower every few seconds.

This was an amazing start – but we needed to get some momentum going. I used my contacts on twitter in the gay press (Pink News and SoSoGay) to let them know what was going on.

Stories started to appear quickly and my follower count continued to grow. I knew i needed to keep people updated about what was going on – and give them a means to get involved. A friend got hold of the CEO’s email address – so i quickly retweeted it.

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Top Trending Topic

By this point the story was taking on a life of its own. High profile Labour tweeters including Sarah Brown and John Prescott got involved:

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By now we were the Biggest trending topic in the UK (despite the Britain’s Got Talent final being on the TV) and the outpouring of support online was phenomenal. Someone had set up a Facebook group (over 1000 fans at the latest count) and a twitterer with a wonderful sense of humour set up the spoof twitter account PunchTavernsPR.

Keeping the story going

Overnight – mainstream journalists began to get in touch with me via my website and I put together a slightly more detailed summary that I could use with journalists. Again, my press officer skills kicked in – I set up the journalists with people from LGBT Labour who had spoken to the manager and to the police so that the story would include the strongest interview possible (turning down interview requests for myself).

Soon we were the most read story in the UK on BBC Online, which also revealed the other fantastic use of twitter. John Prescott’s short tweet was a perfect soundbite to put into the story – without needing to chase him down for an interview.

My contact on twitter at BBC London got in touch and I set up them up to interview LGBT Labour committee member Richard Angell – soon ITV’s London Tonight had emailed me and I knew we had a real story going.

Punch Taverns had quickly discovered something was going on, being contacted by BBC News and London Tonight certainly must have sparked them into action, as they got in touch with LGBT Labour.

After an initially disappointing non-apology, by the end of Sunday they had published an unreserved apology, suspended the manager and began an investigation.

The morning after – a real result

The Guardian made the story the page 5 lead on the Monday morning, and it also appeared in the Independent and many other mainstream news outlets online. BBC London News and ITV London Tonight both ran the story and interviews on Monday evening.

This was a fantastic result – brought about by a combination of old-fashioned press office skills, new media, and the heartwarming reaction of the great british public. It’s quite clear that this kind of behaviour has no place in 21st century Britain, and the public won’t stand for it.

At last count, my initial tweet had over 1000 retweets and I’d received 100s of messages of support. My only regret is that i couldn’t thank them all individually.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought over the last few days and wanted to write them down and debate them.

Nightjack was the police blogger who’s anonymity was broken by The Times – for a quick summary of the story, here’s a link to The Guardian

There are two issues – 1, was The Times right to publish and 2, Should the courts (Justice Eady in this case) have protected the blogger’s identity.

I’m not going to spend much time on issue number 1 – i’m not sure there’s a strong case for publication at all, however the view that Nightjack was simply providing a public service doesn’t quite hold for me. If the rumours were true that there were book deals on the table then that goes beyond purely putting important information into the public domain for the public good.

On the whole i don’t think The Times story was a good story.

For the rights and wrongs of it, here is Danny Finkelstein’s argument as to why he thinks they were right to publish.

However – Number 2 is far more important, and the real point of my debate. I really do not think the court should protect bloggers anonymity, and I think that a comparison to a journalist protecting his sources is wrong.

Anonymity can help people do good and provide a safe haven to put in the public domain information that is in the public interest. However it can also do much harm, for if it isn’t true it can be incredibly hard to defend yourself against an anonymous source.

When a publisher or a newspaper uses and anonymous source, they are taking the risk and the accountability – they are verifying to you that the source is credible, and put their assets at risk if it isn’t.  You can sue a newspaper or a publisher for defamation.

Somebody public and accountable needs to take responsibility and vouch for the quality of the anonymous information – otherwise it is impossible to assess whether it is true, and to defend yourself against.

I’m not saying that anonymous blogging should be outlawed or that ISPs should be forced to give out confidential information, but just as it’s your right not to tell me who you are, it’s my right to try and find out who you are.

I hope that in future The Times will think carefully before revealing someones true identity, Zoe Margolis should never have been outed (although it was clear that the more publicity she was going to get the more the press would try to find out who she was). But injunctions are not the solution to this.

So, it’s a Bank Holiday. I’m bored and a bit of a geek. I see the Ariel gel ad on TV talking about how good it is at low temperatures and I want to try it for myself.

So I take an ordinary white t-shirt (A freebie I won at a Davis Cup match at Wimbledon).

The before shot.

I add to this the traditional laundry detergent ad stains: Red Wine, Tea, Mustard, Ketchup and Blackberry Smoothie.

Freshly stained

I leave to stain for a couple of hours.

Letting the stains set.

Here’s the t-shirt, ready for a wash.

Ready for a wash

I now put it in the washing machine with a full dose of the gel (as recommended for heavy soiling).

Loading the machine

The lowest we can get the machine to is 20, 5 degrees hotter than the adverts, but I go for it anyway.

As near to 15 degrees as we could get it

After a standard wash I have my results -

The results - FAIL

and I’m sorry Ariel, but I’m not impressed. The only stain that seems to have gone is the ketchup – and that had hardly made a mark in the first place. The tea is almost gone, but still there. The wine and smoothie have left horrid dark stains and the mustard is still bright yellow.

Now I should give a disclaimer – this was as scientific as I could get it in my kitchen – but this probably wasn’t a perfect experiment. I had no control group to compare it to, for example.

But i’m not impressed. To be honest, I was never convinced that washing things at 15 degrees would ever get them clean, and this test has confirmed it for me.

Perhaps I should complain to the ASA.