✅ Monday briefing: Audit reform, influencer culture, blogging benefit, Socially Mobile graduation, nowhere office, B2B PR ROI, football brands, GCS strategy, and more...

Media, industry, learning and development, new books, data and insights, best and bad practice, and social media and platforms

This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from my blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and public relations. It’s a hive mind, newsroom and source of information, help and support. You’d be welcome to join us.

Media

📰 REDEPLOYED JOURNALISTS: UK newspaper group Reach is moving 150 reporters from its local papers to its national and regionals. The transfer of staff comes as a quarterly trading update from Reach showed a small decline in group revenue and is the latest effort to hit 60 million daily page views across its network. Spotted Alan Morrison.

Industry

🤔 AUDIT REFORM: The proposed Audit Reform Bill is a limp response to corporate failures. There’s nothing in legislation proposed by the Government to robustly corporate reporting failures such as BHS, Carillion, and Thomas Cook, or tackle climate and social concerns. Source Stephen Waddington.

🤳 INFLUENCER CULTURE: Influencer culture is a rapidly expanding and professionalising subsection of the UK’s creative industries as social media continues to gain popularity. DCMS has published a report into a review of the sector that examines the benefits and challenges of the industry and identify regulatory gaps to be addressed. Spotted Stephen Waddington.

Learning and development

📝 BLOGGING BENEFIT: Cory Doctorow, one of the original Cluetrain Manifesto team, uses the Memex Method as a means of personal learning and development. It's a brilliant benefit of blogging that I highly recommend but you've got to be comfortable with thinking out loud and unfinished work. Spotted Stephen Waddington.

🎓 SOCIALLY MOBILE GRADUATION: The first Socially Mobile class of 2022 graduated last week. The programme’s ambition is to support and inspire practitioners across the UK to increase their earning potential. If you know anyone who would benefit from either funded or paid places, please point them towards the web site. Source Sarah Waddington.

New books

💻 OFFICE HOUSEWORK: The No Club suggests many working women are accepting too many necessary yet thankless tasks that are holding them back. It argues that “non-promotable work” is the invisible hurdle to gender equality in the workplace, with women’s time and energy being disproportionately expended on thankless tasks. Spotted Johanna Fawkes.

🏢 NOWHERE OFFICE: Julia Hobsbawm’s book Nowhere Office explores the historical relationship between the work and the office and embrace a radical approach for the future of work and management. It's a book very much of its time as the UK Prime Minister last week urged workers to get back to the office in a bid to boost productivity. Spotted Sarah Waddington.

Data and Insights

👤 MARKETING PERSONALISATION: Data-led personalisation is ineffective because third party data is unreliable. It should be replaced with creative that resonates with everyone according to two researchers from the B2B Institute. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith. 

📊 B2B PR ROI: Earned media content written by journalists achieves eight times more social media engagement and an additional 1.19 links compared with owned media. Buzzsumo attributed the finding the profile and reach of publications. Source Andrew Bruce Smith.

⚽ FOOTBALL BRANDS: 500 million people watched Liverpool beat Chelsea on penalties in the FA Cup. The match was exported around the world. Sensu Insights analysed the brand reach of the two teams and showed how they have nurtured their base of international supporters over decades. Source Steve Leigh.

Best and bad practice

🛬 BOEING DOWNFALL: A new Netflix documentary calls out public relations failures at Boeing including briefing against foreign pilots, shutting down internal communications, and a lack of transparency with regulators and governments. It’s a business case study of the tragic cost of prioritising shareholder value. Spotted Stephen Waddington.

💰 AD FRAUD: Public relations gets a hard time about proving its value and yet $68 billion is expected to be lost to ad fraud this year according to Juniper Research. 38% of web traffic is automated/bots according to Imperva. The issue is widely ignored by the marketing community. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.

📖 GCS STRATEGY: A new Government Communication Service strategy acknowledges that communication is a key lever of government to affect change. The plan sets out a new operating model for government communication, and three pillars of focus: collaboration; innovation and improvement; and people. Spotted Stephen Waddington.

Social media and platforms

🥱 LINKEDIN ALGORITHM: LinkedIn has updated its newsfeed algorithm despite reporting record levels of engagement growth for six quarters in a row. The update is an effort to crack down on engagement baiting polls and posts. Users can now also opt out of political content. Spotted Andrew Smith.

🐤 TWITTER DEAL: Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is temporarily on hold pending discovery on spam/fake accounts.  This may be the beginning of the end. The hiatus ahead of the Musk takeover leaves it without direction. Watching Musk develop community management rules out loud for the platform is painful. Spotted Stephen Waddington.