The media can come in for some stick. But actually it’s companies I’ve seen on my LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter getting it wrong this week.

It’s absolutely right to highlight innovation supporting the front line; to recognise manufacturers sharing IP for inventions which save lives and for professionals with knowledge to share with others for the greater good.

It’s also amazing to see posts and events helping those working from home to combat loneliness and isolation. And only yesterday I posted about posting more at times like this.

But the message and tone has to be right. This week I’ve been stunned to see businesses ‘celebrating’ (yes really) successes, tone deaf to the wider situation.

Thousands are dying. A third of SMEs will go to the wall. Hundreds of Shropshire businesses are on their knees.

Your clients and your customers know of families now incomplete, staff who have lost their jobs and mortgages not able to be paid.

So it might be worth holding back on the celebratory news until this is over. Then you’ll still have the customers and clients who will want to celebrate with you.

If we’re #allinthistogether, put the bubbly on ice. Meanwhile, here’s ITV News getting the tone just right last night

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

Reputations of businesses and their owners are being made and broken as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds.

It has long been said that you can tell the character of a person by how they react when the chips are down, something that is now proving true of firms faced with the stresses of the times we find ourselves in. How they act now will be their legacy.

Organisations seem to be falling into four main categories right now:

• Those who have no control of their destiny due to cashflow or other factors
• Those who are determined to do right by as many people as they can, for as long as they can
• Those who are willing to jettison workers and suppliers without a second thought to protect their balance sheet
• Those who are just hunkering down to survive

A number of high profile instances have been highlighted in the media, such as Sports Direct trying to class itself as an essential service, pub chain JD Wetherspoon laying off its entire 43,000 workers unpaid – until an outcry forced a change, in both cases.

At the smaller business end of the scale are those instantly blocking off all payments to (often smaller) suppliers while they put their staff onto the Government furlough scheme and protect their dividends. Sometimes this is understandable, though harder to accept when some of those same businesses were only a week or two ago boasting of expensive corporate entertainment they were hosting…

What legacy for profiteers?

Then there are the profiteers, adding hundreds of percent to bottles of hand sanitiser or Calpol. Hopefully their regular customers will hold a special place in business hell for them when this is over.

Of course this situation brings out the best in more people and businesses than it does the worst. Entire operations are pivoting from their normal activity into doing something that has far more social value, often entirely at their own cost. Alcohol producers are making and giving away huge quantities of desperately needed hand gel, retailers are making surgical gowns instead of designer clothes or churning out critical visors, masks and goggles.

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been around a long time, starting with the world’s biggest brands and, in recent years, trickling down through the business community at all levels. The kind of corporate ‘citizen’ you are matters.

Right now it matters more than ever. Thousands of businesses and their leaders will be judged on how they behaved during this time. That legacy thing again. “What did you do in the war, daddy?”, as the wartime advertising campaign went…

The reputation of your business for decades to come could ride on how you act now. If it takes a bit soul searching or a sense check from a critical friend to reassure you, take the time to do those things. Opportunities missed now won’t come again, but they could haunt you for the rest of your career.

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

Watching our team leave one by one, with a monitor under one arm and a laptop under the other, I’m not going to fib, I was really quite sad.

If the country in the last week has moved to a war footing, there’s no doubt that Be Bold moved to a daily newsroom footing too. Our journalist contacts, often our former colleagues, remarked that it was a bit like the ‘old days’, as we filed running copy to their pages with important comment from our clients.

Website and social media content has needed updating at all hours as businesses clamoured for more information and more detail about what help would be available during this pandemic crisis. We’re engaging thousands of times a day on their behalf.

Many of us have worked big stories before. This is different.

And in the midst of all the right and proper activity on LinkedIn as businesses communicate their resilience to changing circumstance; I just wanted to put it out there:

This is not business as usual and it’s okay to say so.

Yes, our team has moved to working remotely, taking not just monitors (we like lots of screens here!) but in one case at least, their office chair and a supply of loo roll too.

Yes, our office lines all still work the same thanks to softphone technology on our laptops. And we use Zoom, Google hangouts, Slack and Asana to make sure we’re all on the same page with all our systems secure and in the cloud.

As a distributed team working from Newport, Shrewsbury and London, we’ve always had that capability.

But yet it is still different. It’s okay to acknowledge that the noise on the conference call is the three year old singing Paw Patrol from the other room; that we need to mute the microphone as we wipe chocolate fingers off the handset and that we’re going to be away from our desk for an hour because we’ve now become home-educators as well as home-workers.

Despite not one case of COVID-19 to date being reported in Telford & Wrekin, where we are based, it is still worrying as we watch today’s shocking footage from Bergamo, in Italy, and know this is coming our way. It’s concerning for businesses, but also for our clients, our people and their families. And it’s okay to acknowledge that too.

The word ‘unprecedented’ has been used a lot lately. And the irony of this isn’t lost on us.

Usually, we end a blog post with a call to action. We’re not professional communicators for nothing. We ask you to spend time reading something, we give you something of value, we encourage you to take action with a pay off at the end. Our content needs to have value for the person investing their time in it, whether we’re posting for ourselves or our clients

But not today. These are, after all, unprecedented times.

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

We’re going to go through many stages of dealing with coronavirus in the coming weeks and perhaps months, but one thing business needs to get right is communication around it.

There are still many unknowns, but that shouldn’t prevent anyone from having a plan and what might not yet have made it to the top of the agenda is how and when to communicate those plans. This is almost more important than the content of the strategy itself.

A vacuum is a terrible thing when it comes to information and it will always get filled, usually with rumour, gossip and the resulting discontent if you don’t get a grip.

Today my hairdresser stated as fact that coronavirus is a man-made disease made in a Wuhan lab to distract from 5G & my mum said her Hull neighbours told her it’s US biowarfare. This is what happens when viral conspiracies reach people that the news doesn’t and it’s terrifying.

— Jane Bradley (@jane__bradley) March 8, 2020

Here are the steps we believe organisations should be taking now in order to manage their way through this experience with everyone who’s important to them on-side and playing their part:

Identify your audiences

There will be distinct groups you need to talk to and each will need different messages – staff, customers, suppliers, perhaps also shareholders. Each needs to know where they stand if they are to be sympathetic to your particular challenges or even be part of the solution.

Choose your triggers

What will be the points at which you have to act? Don’t prevaricate. Make any tough choices now about how things will play out if, for example, the schools are closed or transport is restricted.  The options might not be palatable, but it’s crucial that you know which points will cause you to enact a certain approach to coronavirus, which then needs to be communicated in a timely way. Certainly, the last thing you want is to find the landscape shifting quickly and you scrabbling to keep up.

Be clear on your messages

Streamline those messages so that you can say very clearly what you are doing or will do. Flexibility of response will have to be factored in depending on how things go, but leave people in no doubt that you will be decisive when choices have to be made.

Pick your communication channels

What’s the best way to reach each group? Should customers be getting information in their orders, or a briefing from an account manager? Are staff best reached by email or a flyer in their pay slip if the timing works (you might very quickly lose the chance to gather them in one place)? What’s your tone on social media? Are you communicating business as usual or preparing people to adapt to some necessary changes? Do you need to make a statement on camera and share it as a video?

Be vigilant for – and actively counter – misinformation

Social media has changed the landscape for communicating in a crisis and the nature of that change keeps evolving. Now it’s not enough to share your factual information, you have to be wary of people spreading rubbish and disinformation as well. It’s like a sport for some and it does harm. Ensure you have access to the main sources of official coronavirus information and share them through your channels so that people know where to turn instead of reading what ‘Sharon on Facebook’ said she heard from her sister’s postman.

This is a very human problem that feeds into and from people’s fears and insecurities. The welfare and co-operation of the people who matter to your organisation is the prime concern. After that we all have a responsibility to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, so have clear communication that counters hysteria and doesn’t allow that vacuum to fill with dangerous fake news.

Keep up with the Government coronavirus response here

Find official NHS guidance on coronavirus here

If you don’t have the expertise or resource in-house to get on top of communications around your Covid-19 response, feel free to drop us a line at Be Bold Media for anything from consultation to creating a plan and putting it into action (contact form below).

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

Your IT security might seem to be a million miles away from your reputational concerns.

It’s all passwords and servers and the daily doses of user error (and the printers never doing what they should, obviously).

What recent days have shown us yet again is that data breaches make headlines. Today alone we’ve got a £500,000 fine handed down to Cathay Pacific for letting hackers at their customer data, as well as Tesco issuing replacement Clubcards to 620,000 customers for the same reason.

Yes, they’re giant global companies who are always going to make headlines. Consider though how it would be received if you had to admit to your suppliers and customers or clients that someone had got into your sytems… They might not take data, they might just vandalise everything because they’re 12 years old and think that’s funny. Or they could lock it up in ransomware and demand thousands from you.

It does happen at all scales and, quite apart from the obvious operational damage, there is a huge downside for your reputation. People will think twice before dealing with you again, competitors might try to capitalise on your woes.

At a human level it will be stress and trauma you and your staff can very well do without.

Quick IT security fixes

We’re not an IT firm, but we’ve worked in and around the sector long enough to have learned the importance of at least getting the basics right so that it’s not your hard-won reputation that goes up in smoke when your data disappears into the Dark Web.

Here are some starters:
– Enforce strong passwords for all systems, even the logon for everyone’s desktop (you are making them log on aren’t you..?)
– Consider investing in an enterprise password management service (take a look at Lastpass, Dashlane, 1Password, etc*)
– Check you have backups of everything, preferably off-site, into a secure cloud
– When people leave, change their passwords (if you’re not removing their accounts) and any shared ones
– Ensure you have endpoint (computer level) security on all of your hardware and that it’s kept up to date (virus protection, link scanning, etc)

Our favourite tip on passwords (aside from a good password manager) is to create nonsensical word combinations that only you would remember. Take three, maybe four words that would never be found in the same sentence normally and put them together:

lizardploughnitrogencuddle

Hackers use powerful CPUs to crack passwords, sometimes by the brute force of trying millions of combinations a second. How likely do you think they are to arrive at a single word dealing with nitrogenous lizards cuddling a plough…?

Make that the one password you need to access the rest which are stored in a password manager and you have just taken a quantum leap in security quality. The ones in the password manager can be random and might be uncrackable 32-character long strings of letters, numbers and symbols. It doesn’t matter – you don’t have to know or remember them anymore.

Simple systems security is one of those things it’s easy to forget or leave until tomorrow, but it’s quite simply not worth the PR risk.

* If you’re interested, we use Lastpass and have happily done so for many years now

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

As journalists with the Shropshire Star, at least five of us here at Be Bold Media have been involved in reporting on flooding and the devastation it causes communities.

As a former deputy editor of the Shropshire Star, my colleague Jon Simcock would have been directing the troops, sending reporters and photographers out to different locations to capture the human stories behind the images of fast flowing rivers and submerged homes.

As chief reporter on the same newspaper, I would have had the phone tucked under one ear while I brought together all of the copy from different journalists across the patch in a lead story to sit on the front page.

Now, some years on, the ways flooding is reported on is very different. In a digital world, Facebook updates us via the phone in our hands and reporters are tweeting live – no longer phoning the story over to the office. One of the best doing it is our former colleague Sue Austin, who this week marked the 40th anniversary of becoming a reporter – from the banks of the River Severn in Ironbridge!

Change of tactics for flood comms

As journalists have needed to change the tactics used to reach the public, so have public sector communicators. Telford & Wrekin Council has been rightly recognised for doing it so well, here in Dan Slee’s latest blog.

We’ve spent quite a lot of this week working on flooding stories – albeit not on the front line like our journalist colleagues. We’ve been making sure that businesses affected directly and indirectly by flooding know about what help is available.

We’ve worked with the Marches LEP and its local authority partners to share important information about road closures and emergency help available.

And we’ve had the pleasure of writing about the generous offer from our client PaveAways to help businesses and communities clean-up and rebuild.

What this week has shown is that communication is king. When a threat to life warning is issued, when the barriers start to fail, it is only by communicating these facts that lives are saved.

The job now for communicators, both in the private and public sector, is to rally communities to support each other. Whether that’s through the digital parish pump of Facebook, the Insta-worthy photos of our beautiful county or via the new Shropshire Star Back to Business campaign.

If you’ve been affected by flooding, financial and practical help is available. You can find out more here.

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

Over the last 12 months we’ve taken some big steps in the Be Bold office to become more environmentally sustainable and as a result we have now been recognised for our efforts.

We’ve been awarded Plastic Free Champion status for reducing the amount of necessary plastic we use on a day-to-basis and have had our name added to the growing list of businesses here in Newport which are collectively driving the fight against plastic pollution and have helped the town earn recognition as a Plastic Free Community.

Our efforts have focused largely on plastic reduction, recycling and reusing items where possible. We feel it’s something we can all do with a relatively small amount of effort.

Managing director, Amy Bould, said: “The Plastic Free Champion scheme is a brilliant way to encourage and reward businesses who are actively reducing plastic waste and we are proud to be a part of this positive movement in the town.

“We have made lots of small changes over the last few months but we are constantly reviewing what other steps we can take to make a difference and be as environmentally sustainable as possible.”

To date we have ditched plastic soap bottles in favour of soap bars or refillable liquid soap; exchanged plastic milk bottles for recyclable glass ones; swapped promotional plastic pens for pencils; switched to plastic-free tea bags and ditched single-use plastic bottles in favour of refillable ones.

We’re also trying to reduces our carbon footprint by walking or cycling to the office when possible, growing our own vegetables and using more sustainable products.

At home, some of us are also continuing efforts to reduce plastic and increase our sustainability.

Our new certificate and plaque from marine conservation charity, Surfers against Sewage (SAS), was awarded to us by Simone Whitfield, who leads the Sustainable Newport team, and it takes pride of place here in the office.

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

No matter what field you operate in, it’s always worth spending time at the start of a new year analysing what will be in store for your profession over the next 12 months or so.

Industry forecasts made in January/February time can help you evaluate and realign operations for the coming year, help you stay ahead of the competition and make sure you’re responding to demand as effectively as possible.

For us in the PR world, it’s essential we STOP and take a look around our constantly evolving industry.

With new technologies, merging disciplines and a multitude of available mechanisms by which to tell our clients’ stories – we have to be on the ball.

And this year will be no different.

There will be new emerging social media platforms demanding attention; new and adapted innovative technology to get to grips with; new tools to measure reach and influence; an abundance of suggested ways to be more creative, etcetera, etcetera.

But the clear stand-out prediction being shared by PR pros, for us, is the vital role in which PRs will have throughout 2020 in guiding and advising businesses on their moral, social and environmental messaging.

PR pro Alex Myers, founder and CEO of Manifest, says in 2020: “Brands will not just stand for something but stand up for it, as brand purpose makes way for brand activism.”

Exciting times and although not exactly a new thing for the Be Bold team – we’ve been working with clients for years to make sure their social and environmental messages are conveyed responsibly but moving forward – there will be challenges.

The biggest will be making sure we cut through all the noise. With brands and businesses of all shapes and sizes stepping it up, making promises and SHOUTING about how they are going to inflict positive change, it’s going to get a bit noisy and crowded in 2020.

That said, in the PR game, it isn’t all about being loud and boisterous with one-off gimmicks and stunts. These days, it’s much more about strategy. In the words of PR industry leader Molly Aldridge, co-founder and global CEO of M&C Saathchi PR, the key to success is for PRs to:

“Stay audacious, purposeful, innovative and creative – helping brands change the world for the better.”

And here at Be Bold this is absolutely what we are good at. We work, work, work to build credible reputations for our clients by using our skills to create meaningful, purposeful, genuine, powerful and lasting PR campaigns which influence, engage and build trust. This, in turn, wins business.

If you’re interested to find out more about how we can work with your organisation or brand to get your business, social and environmental messages heard, do get in touch by emailing hello@beboldpr.com (or fill in the form below…).

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

Hey, you. Yes, you. Are you talking to me?

I think you might be. You’ve clicked follow on all our social media accounts, hit ‘go’ on the scheduled tweets, planned the content within an inch of your life and even ‘virtually’ turned up where we’re hanging out.

But you must be a bit frustrated as your message clearly isn’t getting through.

No-one is ‘liking’ the updates, no-one is RT-ing the post and worst still, no-one appears to want to ‘talk’ back.

I’m going to let you into a not-so-secret secret. Social media is not a sales tool to win new business. It’s not a backdoor to a sustainable business relationship – although it could absolutely be an initial ring of the bell.

So here’s a quick tip (and it is really just a quick tip as it’s a Friday afternoon and I’ve the annual Posh Frocks dinner tonight!) for any companies looking to build their network, contacts and ultimately business through digital means.

• Learn about your target audience before you try to engage them.
• Talk the same language and find the common thread.
• Use social to be social.
• Chat, add value to their own social feeds.
• Share the links and the content which they might find interesting.
• Tag your contacts who might appreciate the same.

And yes, I was talking to you.

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️

We celebrated something of a first here at Be Bold Media this week.

News from one of our clients was published here in the Moose Gazette.

Now, I don’t know about you but I’d never heard of this fabulously-titled journalistic organ before. Naively, and with the sort of lazy jumping-to-conclusions thinking my first editor would have drummed me out of the classroom for, I assumed it was a publication for some far-flung Canadian outpost.

In fact, Moose Gazette has, in its own words, been a voice for the USA for nearly two years.

Its splendidly modest self-appraisal on moosegazette.net reads: “Our daily online content provides visitors with the latest news coverage important to (the) USA. We’re dedicated to publishing lively, informative news and views, not dumbed down fluff.”

Certainly the news release we issued was anything but dumbed down fluff. That really isn’t our cup of tea here at Be Bold. As a team with getting on for a century of news room experience between us, hard news is very much our bread and butter.

This release told the story of Samantha Jones, a West Midlands policewoman who is taking legal action after being struck on the head at a garden centre by a piece of flying shelving.

Samantha, who has been off work for six months as a result of her injuries, wanted the world to know her story and what had happened to her. Luckily for her, she is being represented by top Midlands law firm FBC Manby Bowdler, who we are delighted to count amongst our roster of fabulous clients.

As a result, you’ll probably have read Samantha’s story somewhere or other this week. We secured coverage on the BBC, the national daily UK press, regional and trade media and around the globe as well.

We’re not going to throw a party to celebrate. Getting our clients the brilliant coverage they deserve is, after all, what we do.

But we might just keep the cutting from the Moose Gazette framed on the office wall.

After all, you can’t beat having a bit of moose in the hoose…

‘Skill fade’ – is it a risk to your business?

Microsoft Exchange hack – should you be worried?

Pass the Cuisenaire rod… 🤷‍♀️