In the world of PR, we’re all quite used to seeing days or weeks celebrating every cause imaginable. Did you know that we’re currently in National Bed Month or that next week is dedicated to the great outdoors with National Outdoor Week? Probably not, but it’s likely that you’ve seen splashed all over the media this week that it’s the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s Day. Last Saturday saw Trafalgar Square filled with marching feminists armed with placards and the Beeb has an all-female audience on Question Time this week.

To be honest, as a child of the 80s, I’ve always felt myself to be on an even playing field with my male peers and so thought of feminism as an issue of yesteryear. After reading today’s papers I can see that we’ve actually got some way to go and there’s a serious male/female imbalance in certain industries. For example, only 8.1% of directors in FTSE 100 banks are women, yet PR is a profession where the ratio falls heavily in favour of the ladies – so could it be that we’re just better matched to certain types of jobs?

I’m inclined to believe so and am comfortable in saying that I’m an ‘equalist’. As long as industry leaders are recruiting the best talent for their business then we’re all chipping away at that glass ceiling and we’ve got feminism to thank for the opportunity.

Everyone at Peppermint is over the moon at having scooped three Fresh PR awards.  We knew our little Red Recession Dress worked wonders for our client, The Big Discount Store, and we were all really proud of what was a simple, yet highly effective idea.  Truth be told, though, we were more than a little surprised and deeply humbled by the hat trick of awards, given the quality of competing campaigns from around the country.

In the end, we nabbed Freshest PR stunt, Freshest Consumer Campaign and Freshest Low Budget Campaign. We were also one of two nominations for the Grand Prix award; where we were pipped to the post by SKV Communications for their brilliant J’aime la Tour, Visit Blackpool campaign.

It was lovely to chat to so many people at the dinner who remembered reading about our little campaign. The night was great fun, the host was irreverently hilarious, and we had some wildly supportive people on our table who cheered extremely loudly for us. So a big thank you to them, to the judges for their votes, and to our fabulous team for all their hard work.

As the BBC announces it’s to hack away at its multi-service broadcast offering, I’m left wondering whether the Beeb is hoping to drum-up protest from sympathetic fans in a bid to secure its future.

6 Music is probably the most controversial station to be axed. Although it has a relatively small audience of 700,000, its fan base is made up of dedicated music lovers who tune in for a unique sound that can’t be heard anywhere else on the UK’s airwaves. These are the same fans who Mark Thomson may well be hoping will set up a Facebook/social media protest to save the station’s future…

Taking into account that Thomson is pretty much cornered –  as he knows that whether the next election sees Labour or The Tory party in power, the BBC’s likely to have its license fee cut – I suspect Thomson is trying to make a rather clever PR statement.

We’ve seen it all before with Cadbury’s Whisper…  a company threatens to pull a brand and then sits back and watches as fans start huge Facebook/Twitter/blog campaigns to save it.

I’m sure the rebellious statements about the planned 2011 closure of 6 Music issued today by Jarvis Cocker and comedian Phil Jupitas will be music to Thomson’s ears.

A story that split opinion in the Peppermint office today was that of  Angie Jackson, a 27-year-old  American woman who made the decision to post the details of her abortion in a bid to ‘demystify’ the topic for other women.  I admit, my initial reaction was ‘how awful!’ and that Angie Jackson had taken things a step too far.

However, you can also argue that the whole point of Twitter is that it provides a way for people to express themselves without restrictions.  It’s possible that Angie Jackson’s tweets may have helped a confused young woman in making the difficult decision of whether or not to keep a baby, or perhaps the information she provided may make teenage girls think twice before having unprotected sex? The graphic tweets shocked many into vocally expressing their outrage, which led me to wonder, how many women were quietly thankful for this subject finally being brought to light, albeit by just another of Twitter’s millions of users?

Angie Jackson, who goes under the Twitter name ‘antitheist angie’, is providing millions of women with candid, first hand information on a subject that isn’t freely available anywhere else. The number of users ‘following’ Miss Jackson has more than doubled since she began posting her progress, showing that people are in fact interested in reading the details of the termination.  It may not be ‘comfortable’ reading, but can these tweets really be deemed wrong, or unacceptable?

The internet has always been a place where freedom of speech is championed and censorship is near impossible. However, many might argue that Angie, who says “I have people calling me a killer”, has broken unwritten social networking boundaries. If it becomes acceptable to tweet about a subject as serious and controversial as abortion, what comes next?

Google finds itself in hot water today as an Italian court has convicted three of its execs in a trial over a video showing an autistic teenager being bullied. As keen social media-moguls, the Peppermints have been in lively debate about the case – there’s no denying that this type of content can be deemed offensive but should it be censored or should we be able to access the good, the bad and the ugly?

Some media coverage has argued that the employees in question should be held accountable for their actions, and are responsible for the quality of content uploaded. But social media sites have reached such popularity because of their user-generated content – for this to be subject to strict controls would go against the very essence of the medium. We use social media as a communication platform and user-generated content should also be user-moderated. Most sites have adopted this policy and if users see something they disapprove of, they can report it and request that it be removed.

In some coverage, the case has been compared to prosecuting the postman for delivering hate mail. How can individual Google employees be accountable for an upload of content onto the site?  Surely it should be the user that takes the rap for it? This is not to mention the logistical nightmare this would present for YouTube. Imagine the manpower that would be needed to trawl through all the videos on submission, ensuring each one conforms with guidelines – this would be nigh on impossible.

We relish the free speech that social media brings and we work tirelessly to harness the benefits it can bring to our clients – now we need to take on (and be allowed to take on) the responsibility that comes with it.

I’ve been an avid fan of Google and its products over the years.  I installed their web browser and toolbar and also set up Google Calendar and Docs on my wife’s new Netbook.  Even so, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the company, to the point where I’ve decided to make the big switch over to Bing.

It wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m still getting used to it.  It’s tough breaking a habit formed over years of internet use.  However, I’ve become fed up with them for a number of reasons.

I haven’t been overly impressed by Google’s recent product releases.  Does anyone actually think Google Sidewiki is a good idea?  Giving people the chance to write anything about your site for all to see was always going to be open to abuse.   I also hated the little icon floating on the left hand side of my browser!

And don’t get me started on Google Buzz.  This product made public a list of people who you emailed most frequently from your Gmail account.  Google has openly admitted that this product didn’t go through their thorough testing procedure and apologised.  This will do little to appease those users who will have been caught out for one reason or another!

Google Wave was also a huge disappointment.  I highlighted a number of issues in a previous blog post and haven’t been back to wave at anyone since.

Finally, the big one, privacy. I don’t want to share my location with Google. I don’t want you to read my emails and display adverts you think I’ll like. I don’t want you to store all my searches and I certainly don’t want you to drive past my house and take a picture of my front room!

So, it’s time to say Goodbye to Google and hello to Bing.  From looking at recent usage stats, I don’t think I’m the only one either. In October last year, Bing held only 9.9% of the market share but this is rising.  I also read recently that Bing is in talks with Apple to become the default search provider for the iPhone.  Since Google developed the Nexus One mobile, it seems like a logical move for Apple to distance themselves from their latest rival.

I’d be interested to hear your experiences and thoughts on Google and whether you’ve made the switch over.  I’ll check back soon and let you know how I’m getting on.

As a predominately female team, the Peppermints were horrified to see headlines in one national paper suggesting that Denise Van Outen had been stripped of her presenting role on ‘Over the Rainbow’, simply for being pregnant. A stream of angry comments ensued, but our frustrations were redirected as we continued to read.

Further through the paper’s analysis, it emerged that none of the five judges from the previous series are being asked to return, and that the show is, in fact, undergoing a complete revamp. As is done with many long-running programmes, Lord Lloyd Webber has decided to spruce up the show and replace all the judges and presenters, including John Barrowman. We can only imagine the coin toss to choose the headline – “Denise Van Outen axed for being pregnant!” or “John Barrowman axed for being gay!”

Matters went from bad to worse as the journalist changed tactic, and began to emphasise the age differential between Denise and her successor, Charlotte Church. This inevitably rolled into a resurrection of the Arlene-Phillips-replaced-by-Alesha-Dixon debate, and culminated in the portrayal of a BBC institution riddled with ageism and sexism.

Clearly, discrimination on the basis of age or sex is wrong, and it is certainly not something we would like to see inherent in our public media corporation. But surely, creating a story out of nothing and branding it as sexism in order to sell newspapers is just as damaging.

It is true that cultural progress is made by highlighting debates such as anti-discrimination and ensuring they are discussed at dinner tables across the country – this is exactly how change is ushered in. But this should be reserved for honest cases of genuine wrong-doing, and not tagged onto every non-story to give it added “juice”.

Suffice to say, we wish both Denise and Charlotte the best of luck with their new challenges, and we wait with bated breath for the next over-the-rainbow, pie-in-the-sky headline.

We were all thrilled to see the Love Hearts IT bag (a product innovation of Team Peppermint no less), take pride of place on the Valentine’s pages of OK! last week. It seems our fabulous take on the celeb must-have Birkin shopper, also caught the eye of a certain Mr Katie Price…

The excitement around Peppermint HQ was even higher than normal last Tuesday morning, when the Love Hearts’ account team received a phone call from the Price/Reid publicity machine: “Alex has seen the Love Hearts IT bag in OK! and would like to get one for Katie for Valentine’s Day.” 

The replica designer IT bag clearly works as a fabulous pressie not just for us mere mortals, but also for the Katie Prices of the world – who I’m sure already own one or two of the real thing. Mrs Reid is now the proud owner of her own bling bag of sweet treats personalised with the message ‘Sweet kisses Katie. Love Alex. X’.

We were told that Alex was putting together three huge packages for Katie, containing personal mementoes, framed photos, chocolates and a certain bit of ‘arm candy’! No subtleties for our favourite newlyweds then? I guess that’s hardly surprising given her on-going tabloid war with Peter Andre – publicising her marital bliss with Alex is clearly of paramount priority at the moment, whether it be through tweets or tabloids.

But we’re not complaining – a wonderful bit of celebrity endorsement for the Love Hearts brand as a result of a fabulous bit of coverage.

I’ve recently undergone a bout of psychometric profiling to decipher my personality! The behavioural analyst – who explained what make up people’s characters – warned me: ‘you’ll start to watch everyone now to try and work out their personalities’; how right she was!

There’s no greater profiling target than an MP… and the Tory leader at that. As I sat and watched David Cameron flex his political muscles after being invited by a client to a West Midlands business leaders’ lunch, I marvelled at his ultra polished performance and tried to rank him on the ‘1-9 vector scale’ for assertiveness, sociability, calmness and conformity.

What quickly became apparent – from my brief lesson in psychometrics and years of watching MPs on the public stage – is that it’s difficult to tell whether his performance was his actual ‘self’ or the ‘role’ he takes on.

My own scoring in both circumstances is apparently rather similar; I’m not sure the same can be said for Mr Cameron. I imagine his communications team, scattered around the room, looked on with approval as he remained on message, whilst dropping in a dash of humour and self-mocking at perfectly timed intervals.

The art of communication is a difficult one to master, particularly in front of a crowded room of businesspeople with an axe to grind. While staunch Labour and Lib Dem supporters were probably less than convinced by his performance, as a public relations professional I thought he delivered it with real aplomb. I’m still trying to figure out where he ranks on the psychometric scale. But, like many MPs, his ability to promote the Tory brand is definitely one to admire.

It seems the PR penny has finally dropped in the Jones household. While watching Something for the Weekend, my fiancé (an English teacher) turned to me and said: ‘I bet the PR company’s not happy with that’. He was referring to the rather lackadaisical performance by a young actor, who seemed nonplussed about where he was, where he’d been, and why he was on the show.

While we’re not in the game of managing people, per se, we are in the business of building brands and the people who sit behind them. Each has similar challenges. Stick a young twentysomething on live TV and you have to hope and pray that he says all the right things. Send out a highly manicured release, set up an interview and arrange a picture and again, it’s in the lap of the gods as to what a journalist chooses to do with it.

As PRs our fate often lies in the hands of others. We can prep, research and write the greatest of releases, but if the news agenda conspires against us, or the person chooses not to perform, then even the mighty is likely to fail. Think of all those hardworking executives who had their fantastic stories lined up last week for a rigorous sell-in, only to be scuppered by a certain Mr Terry whose love life even managed to shift Haiti and MPs’ expenses from the front pages.

We’re constantly battling with forces beyond our control, but I guess what doesn’t kill us makes us more persistent and creative (oh and stronger).