As we all met around the kettle yesterday morning, on our first day back in the office after the holidays, discussion inevitably turned to New Year’s resolutions. This is a conversation that never fails to depress me. I can only look back in abject horror at the mockery 2011 made of my perfectly reasonable resolutions. While I’m tempted by the idea that my resolution this year should be to not make any more, that would be taking the coward’s way out. No. This year I’m going to face the issue head on, (wo)man-up, and properly repent of last year’s dismal effort.

Here are a few of the promises I, and other Peppermints, have resolved upon for 2012:

Andrew: Engage in the real world, instead of emailing the guy next to me asking if he wants a brew.
Rachel: Stop eating the sweeties in reception – not that I do!
Owen: Find a way to double my Twitter followers without having to resort to buying them on eBay.
Emma: Spring clean the Peppermint archive computer drive.
Aimee: Start cooking more. Ready-meals are not a substitute for a fresh home-cooked dinner.
Haydn: Learn something new every day; even if it’s just a little thing or something silly.
Jess: Maintain my 5 a day – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Four Square and Path.
Jane: Integrate my phone with my dock, dongle, tablet, and desktop. Oh, and don’t forget the deck…
Lucy: File everything in plastic wallets. They’re my BFF for 2012!
Eliza: Stop eating at Gastronomy everyday – lunchtime economising will boost next year’s Christmas fund.
Alice: Use a pen and paper – just to remember the old days.
Alex: Speak normally; it’s amazing how many times I catch myself using jargon in meetings.
Liz: Take advantage of working in an office with a gym. Late nights at the office can take on a whole new meaning in 2012…
Ben: Skate board to work; it’s green, it’s good for you and gets you some fresh air. Might be tricky with my commute of 13 miles in the winter but if I set off early enough…Michael J Fox had it nailed.
Me: ‘Managed information flow’ will be my new mantra. Being able to tune out all that online white noise will mean I can use my social network more effectively.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to be welcomed by Peppermint PR to undertake a week of work experience.

As a 15-year-old about to take my GCSEs, it was an experience that far exceeded my expectations. After a week spent updating reports, helping to brainstorm campaigns and filing that all important coverage, there were two things that struck me.

Firstly, at a time when one in five 18 to 24-year-olds is unemployed, it’s never too early to gain experience.

Secondly, the world of PR is absolutely fascinating. PR consultants are responsible for everything that goes on ‘backstage’, providing an invaluable link between businesses, the public and the media. Sifting through the papers every morning made me realise that PR has the power to effect real change. Without PR how would many of the stories make the media? Without the media, how would those stories generate national awareness?

After my week at Peppermint PR, there is one statement I can make with absolute certainty: PR is extremely fast-paced! I have so much respect for the whole team. They work intensely, quickly and – having listened to them on the phone – with style.

Above all, they radiate fun and laughter at all times. I’ve felt exceptionally lucky to have worked with such impressive people and feel that I can safely say – work experience is the best possible way to learn!

Are middle-class women losing their intellectual edge by wallowing in celeb news rather than current affairs? That’s the question that continued to rumble in the weekend papers following the recent publication of  Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World by American lawyer and television commentator Lisa Bloom.

Her argument is this: well educated, highly capable women are dumbing down by increasingly investing their  time, money and effort in reading about and trying to emulate their favourite celebrities.

While many might reject her book as elitist and strident in its views, I think this is a debate that needs airing.  Much of the PR industry is driven by formidably bright women who are as happy holding forth about the ramifications of super-injunctions as they are about the latest fake tan mousse. And yet my internal alarm bell sounds quite regularly when I’m interviewing potential recruits, a sizeable proportion of whom cheerfully admit to reading nothing but the likes of Grazia.  

Grazia and their ilk are, of-course, invaluable to us.  Celeb culture is here to stay and  we need to be right on top of it to best use it to our clients’ advantage. Besides which, I’ll be the first to concede that it’s fun to look at the glossy pics, discuss the inevitable dramas with your mates, and laugh at the daffy quotes (Nancy Dell’Olio’s unintentionally hilarious eulogy to her own beauty and brilliance in last week’s Sunday Times magazine being a case in point). 

As with most things in life, it’s a matter of balance.  There’s no harm in zoning out with eye-candy reading…as long as the brain gets fed more substantial fare alongside it. All well and good knowing your TOWIE from your Made in Chelsea.  Not so good if you can’t name the Education Secretary.

As a PR consultancy which handles both business-to-business and consumer clients, we often find ourselves teasing news hooks out of Cheryl Cole’s hair extensions and George Osborne’s fiscal policy on the very same day.  It certainly makes for a varied and stimulating workplace.

Having a functioning brain doesn’t mean we have to be po-faced snobs, so let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

News that an LA-based PR agency was unceremoniously dumped this week after it sent a thoughtless tweet comes as no surprise. The company in question – Redner Group – got sacked by its biggest client, a video game publisher, after its MD tweeted it would punish bad reviews of its latest release by withholding future copies from reviewers.

The story comes just days after the MOD launched its ‘Careless Tweets Cost Lives’ campaign, which begs the question: why are so many PR professionals, the ‘reputation experts’, continuing to tweet before they think?

In recent months, Twitter has brought the English justice system to its knees thanks to Giggs-gate; we’ve had hash-tag spam from Habitat, while Kenneth Cole felt the wrath of the web following his now-infamous Egypt Twitter gaffe.

When users, and particularly PR practitioners, cock up via social media, it never fails to cause a storm. That social media is embedded in traditional PR is a given, but it’s still a relatively new tool with no steadfast rules of engagement.

That said, threatening to blacklist reviewers, à la Redner Group, is not big or clever. It showed not just a lack of foresight, but a complete lack of respect and understanding of the medium at hand. Although an apology was offered, it was too late. The tweet was out there, the agency sacked. End of!

Twitter breaks boundaries like never before. It gives PR consultants the opportunity to engage with journalists, react to breaking news and spot trends before they go viral. However, while it extends the conversation, careless tweets really do cost.

The message is simple: every tweet puts the reputation of you and your business on the line. If you wouldn’t want it on the front page of the Daily Mail, keep it under-wraps. Simple advice? Yes. Adhered to? Worryingly not!

As PR consultants, we’re a creative bunch of people who enjoy developing ideas that will grab attention. We’re also self-confessed word geeks who have lots of fun playing around with syntax and grammar. My name’s Lucy and I’m a word geek. There – I’ve said it.

We love coining a new phrase and generating excitement around a totally new and previously unheard-of concept. With that in mind, you can probably imagine our excitement when we read in today’s papers that over a thousand ‘new’ terms have recently been added to Oxford Dictionaries Online. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the PR industry would like to claim some of the credit for this, as many of these new words are likely to have been created as part of a PR campaign.

The new additions include ‘tanorexia’, meaning an addiction to fake-tanning, and ‘scareware’, the name given to programmes that’ll harm your computer. One of our favourite new words is ‘bloggable’ – the term for a subject that’s worth writing a blog about.

I can’t wait to log on to my laptop and look again at the latest version of the dictionary. I’m up to ‘S’ already and my favourite new word so far has to be ‘starchitect’, meaning a famous and well-known architect.

What’s your favourite new word?

This Friday, I’ll hit 40. As we know from countless weekend supplements, the big four zero is one of those milestones when people traditionally reassess their life.  Very often, they see the light, ditch their job and plump to do something entirely different. And so, as I bid farewell to my 30s, I find myself pondering the question:  given the chance to rewind the clock, would I still follow the same route?

It’s 18 years since, as a deeply clueless graduate, I stumbled across PR quite randomly, thanks to my Mum clocking an ad in the Manchester Evening News for a “trilingual word processor operator”. After an initial stint of bin emptying, I evolved into an ingénue account exec, referred to as “Poppet” by clients.  A fair indication of the depth of my authority at the time. 

Although the intervening years have had an abundance of lows along with the highs, I can honestly say that I’ve never once regretted my Mum spotting the little ad in the MEN that set me off on this path.  Sure there’s lots to gripe about in our industry, as with any other. For now, though, it’s a time to make note of those things I actually love about my job.

Why does PR still do it for me? Let me count the ways…

• We can take a product that no one’s ever heard of – and transform it into a national talking point.
• We get to sit in a boardroom with the most pan-faced, hard-nosed, sceptical and intimidating of CEOs – and get them excited about PR.
• Our expertise gives us the ability to turn around a struggling business’s fortunes – and we can achieve that more cheaply than any other method.
• There aren’t very many professions that allow you to come up with a crazy idea while brushing your teeth in the morning and see it brought to life by lunchtime.
• Those lovely moments when we overhear people admiring our client’s product that they’ve just read about in a piece we placed.
• Our heart skips a beat as we flick urgently through a national paper and – yeeeessssss!!! –  land on a page spread about our client.

Those are some of my top reasons for loving PR. What are yours?

Hot on the heels of a recent exposé into unpaid PR internships, it appears the Conservatives have now stepped in to fuel the debate.

At a sensitive time for the PR industry, the Tories have come under fire for auctioning internships to privileged supporters. According to the Mail, a one-week internship at a top London PR agency went for £2,000 at a recent fundraiser. 

While perhaps distasteful, this practice is nothing new. The moral of this particular tale seems quite simple: want to work in PR? Have parents that can buy you a placement, sweetie darling.

Now we’re not misguided enough to think that work experience doesn’t have a valuable place in PR. It’s an industry where grads are expected to learn by doing rather than theorising.

However, long-term, unpaid placements are exploitative – plain and simple. As a fledgling journalist in London, there were two routes to employment: live within the M25 or have parents who could support you financially. If you didn’t meet the right geographical or financial criteria, access was resolutely denied.

Grads should have access to work experience to get a taste of the workplace, but they should also have access to long-term placements that offer a structured training programme and remuneration for their time. With university fees potentially ruling out a whole generation of prospective students, on-the-job learning is going to be more important than ever.

If internships are to be sold off to the highest bidder, PR runs the risk of becoming synonymous with wealth and connections rather than skill and talent. And when searching for the next generation of PR consultants, we know who we’d rather choose.

A couple of weeks ago, PR consultant Adam Clyne, a Mancunian who has relocated to London, posted a provocative blog questioning whether we in Manchester can ever really compete with our southern counterparts.

At the time, my take on the matter – cited in the blog – was that the whole Manchester vs London debate is irrelevant, as there are world-class consultancies in both cities.

Today, I take more than a little pride in the fact that our ‘provincial’ consultancy (not even – horror – based in Manchester city centre, but in leafy Cheshire) has proved that point.

You see, the Peppermint team is in an extra sparky mood as we toast our best ‘Consumer’ award at last night’s Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) Awards at the Park Lane Hilton. The win was for our ‘Rooney is England’s Best Snorer’  campaign for Sound Asleep. The company saw unit sales of its Sound Asleep Pillow increase by 3,300 per cent in one week, thanks to blanket national coverage of Wayne Rooney pictured with the pillow.

As the only independent Northern agency to receive any nominations at the awards, we were up against London’s biggest and best. And we won. Yes, we did.

When push comes to shove, it’s not your postcode or number of employees that count. Sky-high energy, super-sized thinking and a steely determination to secure the very best results are what truly matter.

Peppermint is proud to be one of a number of Manchester consultancies which have these qualities in spades – true, many of the southern-based big brand clients may not yet have woken up to that fact. However, with MediaCityUK  about to cement Manchester’s place as a cutting-edge media and creative hub, the view that Manchester’s PR sector is London’s poor relation might well start to look a little past its sell-by-date.

This week, alarmed bosses at the Leeds Building Society drafted in the services of a former English teacher to give their staff grammar lessons. Senior staff at the building society were so appalled at their employees’ low standard of written English that they decided to take staff back to school.

An admirable move and – coincidentally – one that mirrors a recent appointment at Peppermint. Our team now includes David Williams, former English teacher and language expert extraordinaire, who’s been elucidating (yes, elucidating) the finer points of grammar in a series of workshops at the office. David has also taken up the mantle of quality control manager to ensure that every piece of copy leaving the office is perfect. I don’t believe that our clients – or the journalists we work with – deserve anything less.

We’ve even introduced a marking system – the top grade’s an A* and all of our team members are eager to be the star pupil.

Why all this fuss? Words are the currency of PR consultants and our clients trust us to handle their communications with skill, accuracy and attention to detail. A sloppily written piece of copy tarnishes their reputation along with our own.

Many journalists will agree that a depressingly large number of press releases sent to them are littered with basic grammatical and punctuation errors. This does our industry no justice at all. If we can’t get the little things right, how can we be trusted with the big things?

It’s time for the PR industry to insist on exacting standards of grammar and punctuation. We are, after all, the experts in communications. There are no excuses for not doing that job correctly.

I won’t lie.  Despite our best laid plans, the award entries were a bloody nightmare to get off in the post.  The whole hoopla culminated in our lovely office manager, Rachel, having a meltdown moment in Hale post office and being comforted by total strangers.  Anyway, all merrily forgotten today as we toast our fab four nominations. 

OK, we don’t often use this blog to blow our own trumpet…but we’re more than a little proud – and we’re more than happy for everyone to know that. The two campaigns we’ve been nominated for could not be more wildly different. One (nominated for Best Campaign £10K and Under, and Best Use of Media Relations) resulted in blanket coverage of Wayne Rooney and fellow England players holding the Sound Asleep pillow, leading to a 3,300% spike in overall sales and Tesco agreeing to stock the pillows in store for the first time. 

The second (nominated for Best Corporate and Business Communication) is a rather more weighty affair – the repositioning of an exceptional company, Styles & Wood Plc. The company, a leading retail specialist in property design, fit-out, refurbishment and maintenance, had been knocked for six by the recession, its once shining reputation left bruised and roundly battered by media and industry figures alike.  Happily, thanks to an avalanche of positive coverage, its reputation is now firmly back on course.  As delighted as we are to be nominated for an award for our efforts, I think the most gratifying moment came when Styles & Wood’s CEO surprised us with a certificate for ‘Exceeding Expectations’. 

And the icing on the cake? We also find ourselves amongst some extremely illustrious company in the Most Outstanding Consultancy award category.

We’re looking forward to a memorable evening of posh frocks, peacock feathers and a whole lot of cheering. A big congrats to all our brilliant fellow finalists. What an amazingly talented bunch of people the PR community is in Manchester.  See you all there!