The Heroes of Marketing Week Live





The Parker Wayne & Kent team giving a presentation on heroic public relations on the main stage at MarketingWeek Live.

Evil forces infiltrated Marketing Week Live and kept the Centaur staff imprisoned behind a Phantom Zone of glass. Parker Wayne & Kent got there just in the knick of time to save the day.

We got down to work with Ignition One who are global leaders in digital marketing solutions, which enable companies to integrate and centralise cross-channel marketing efforts within one platform.

The Apteco Fast Stats team welcomed us on to their stall to tell us about how passionately they feel about developing marketing data analysis and campaign automation software, enabling marketers to gain insight from their data.

 We met Digital & Wise; who are a leading digital agency specialising in creative online marketing.

We value creativity at PWKPR, so we went over to see Fusing Creativity who specialise in strategic marketing that inspires, challenges and cares about developing business.

 Parker Wayne & Kent dropped by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations clinic to do their bit and lend a hand.

We met the guys over at Neolane who told us about how they provide coversational marketing technology that empowers organisations to build and sustain one-to-one dialogues with their customers. Neolane's customers must remember: with great power comes great responsibility.

You could say that Batman looks 'angelic' over at the Agillic pitch. These guys provide marketing software that lets you trigger personalised communications across any digital channel.

We stopped by for a parlez-vous with French company Canalchat Grandialogue. They organise  interactive web events for international companies.

We were full of beans to meet The Beans Group on our travels, who own two of the UK's most popular youth websites studentbeans.com and graduate site morebean.com. They help brands connect with 18-24 year olds.

 Parker Wayne & Kent took a long hard look at Steely Eye in the eye. We were victorious in the staring competition, and  won a briefing from the design and development team's position as a production powerhouse for some of London's leading agencies.

We met Grass Roots ProjectLink who offer a range of services from project management to participant customer care for rewards schemes.

We raced over to the Eden Red team who gave us a speedy run down of their range retailers and redemption options.

Spiderman got thirsty, so felt he deserved a little reward of his own. The beer was certainly an incentive and motivation to stop at the Corporate Rewards stand - who provide incentive and motivation programmes.

The heroes cleaned themselves up for a meeting with the Software Bureau team who specialise in data processing and address cleansing software. 

Here we are with DLG: they provide of consumer lifestyle data for both solus and integrated multi channel direct marketing.

The hero's descended on Kxen, the company instilled with infinite insight super powers.

We met Infusionsoft who give small businesses a powerful all-in-one sales and marketing automation software. No kryptonite can beat it.

We made friends over at the SDL. They let us know how they enable marketers to understand their customers and engage with them in a relevant manner.

Didn't know Batman was descended from a fruit bat? Here's the proof as he chomps on a pineapple whilst we spoke to DMRI who own, manage and sell quality data and data capture solutions.

Always up for getting down to business, Pro-Active are an innovative marketing company that helps make the most of both online and offline database assets.

We get social with digital and social media experts The Dubs. They told us all about their work with brands, content producers and audiences to deliver commercial results.

Digital agency Glow Labs left us beaming after they told us about how they help their clients develop online opportunities and make the most of their web and media content.

And finally, Her Majesty stopped by the event to commend us for delivering heroic PR to her kingdom...
All in a days work for the PWKPR Team.

Who we met at Wireless World

We were at Total Telecom's Wireless World and met Jeremy George, the emerging market mobile industry expert. Jeremy told us about his mobile industry experience, how the phone market differs to other continents, how the mobile industry contributes to African economies, what he thinks of analyst predictions, and outlines the opportunity for investors in Africa.

The sin of social media cynicism

The last few weeks have seen social media platforms criticised for their profitability, their privacy and their popularity. These are all important areas of concern for social media marketers – yet the contemporary marketing community responds with ire when anyone questions social media, as if doing so is sacrilegious. But in a JS Mill sense, the industry needs to question social media’s effectiveness to know the truth of its value. Particularly in the current climate, marketers that aren’t approaching these relatively new platforms with an air of cynicism may not be as focused on the return on investment of their activities as they should be. In particular those marketers that are exclusively executing social media campaigns – naturally the greatest proponents of social media marketing –should be the most cynical, as they’re the ones being given the budget. Being cynical is responsible, not reprehensible. So let’s be responsibly sinful, and indulge in some social media cynicism.

We’ll just start with a flag wave: when Twitter takes to TV advertising and running its own events, and LinkedIn exhibits at trade shows – both promoting their advertising services – it says something about social media marketing.

The figures for social media adoption are impressive: the UK alone has more than 30 million Facebook users and 10 million Twitter users. But realistically, this means the best reach UK marketers can hope for through social media marketing is half the British public – compared to the 96 per cent of UK households which have a TV and the 46.7 million British adults who listen to the radio every week. Further, many people have set up social media accounts, but don’t use them.  In October 2011, only a quarter of Twitter accounts were active. Let’s face it, if the stats showed that 75 per cent of people with a TV never watched it, the cost of advertising via that medium would plummet. Add this to another problem with social media marketing – and something that’s actually counter intuitive – there’s effectively a lack of popular content channels compared to the hundreds of popular channels, programmes and sections available on mediums like TV, radio, and online news and print. When you think about it, non-social media represents a greater diversity of ways to influence people. The average number of “friends” a user has on Facebook is only 170 – and these “friends” are often derived from a similar social group to the user, so the user’s Facebook profile actually reflects a uniformity rather than a diversity of influencers. Thus the opportunity to communicate new ideas, products and services can be quite limited.

More cynicism came from CNBC and Associated Press in May 2010 where over-zealous marketers who choose to push all their money into social media advertising were challenged by survey results revealing that nearly six in ten Facebook users (57 per cent) never click on ads or other sponsored content on the site, while another quarter of Facebook users (26 per cent) rarely engage with such commercially generated content on the site. Granted, CNBC and AP have an interest in denigrating the advertising potential of Facebook, so consider their survey with the balanced level cynicism it deserves. Moreover those stats don’t really seem so bad when considering people’s personal opinion of online advertising in general. Most people don’t think that they are influenced by banners, skyscrapers and MPU ad units. But they are. People generally believe they ‘find’ stuff they want to buy on the ‘net. The concept that they have responded to a form of marketing doesn’t seem to enter their minds. They’re just wrong. Even when conducting searches through Google, Bing and Yahoo, it’s the search engine optimisation conducted by a marketer that brings up the product or service that the person decides to buy. What’s more, new ways of targeting people through social networks are delivering ads that are hyper relevant and hyper local to users. Such services are showing that Facebook advertising has to be done in the right way, by the right advertiser to the right user.

Also consider a strange result from a 2012 Chartered Institute of Marketing study that revealed that only 23 per cent of marketers believe that social media marketing can help brands to accrue new customers. The report, which looked at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, also found that a third of the 1,500 marketers polled (34.5 per cent) said that their social media activity in 2011 was “not at all effective,” with only one in seven (13.7 per cent) reporting it was “extremely effective.” In spite of this, three quarters of marketers (74.5 per cent) plan to increase investment in the channel in 2012. Hopefully this isn’t a demonstration of irresponsible marketers throwing good budget after bad at the new, “cool” social media channels regardless of the results. It may be that these marketers have played around with social media over the past few years, realized what works and what doesn’t, and are investing in the activities that deliver results. It’s inarguable that the British public is increasingly embracing social media as an essential part of their everyday lifestyle, and social media’s incorporation into traditional media channels’ activities is driving adoption – however marketers must keep the absolute numbers of potential audience in mind.

The attributes of the social media audience must also be considered. Of course the younger generations have been faster to adopt social media – whether out of peer pressure, a carefree attitude to their personal data, a way of feeling popular, or just to keep watch on whether the person they fancied in school is single yet. More than 88 per cent of 18-34 year olds now have social media profiles, so huge amounts of marketers feel they must tap into this market. Yet much of this core target audience have either recently graduated, are out of work or, most importantly, have little money available to spend in the current economic climate.

A much larger problem is that there’s still something of a blind spot around social media. The medium is still very new and, while it’s difficult for marketers to ignore international networks of over 800 million potential customers, social media’s measurement metrics are notoriously woolly. Evaluation is a problem for many traditional marketing disciplines, including public relations, but such issues don’t affect other sections of the online marketing mix. There’re fewer problems discovering the return on investment for straight-up online ad campaigns or email marketing campaigns for example.

In tough economic times marketers need to be able to be held accountable, and need to be able to prove the ROI of any activity. The PR industry has struggled with this very issue, but with the right client or product and the right systems in place, it can be done. The best example is when working for the mobile apps industry. When Parker, Wayne & Kent provides media relations to raise awareness of new mobile apps, as we did for Skycom’s 0800 Wizard, we’ve seen app downloads being directly boosted by media coverage – in Skycom’s case multiplying their downloads ten-fold overnight. What’s more, the online news coverage has a long linger time, so the fact that those articles can been seen when users conduct searches through Google means that the PR activity lasts long into the future. As such we’re able to provide clients with demonstrable success and ROI from their relatively minor expenditure on PR.

This raises another issue for social media campaigns – the results can be fleeting. Whist the adage of “Today’s news is tomorrow’s chips,” hardly applies now as online media articles last pretty much forever, for social media there needs to be a new adage. Maybe “A hashtag at one, by two will be gone.” Ideally something better. You get the point.

Take 20th Century Fox’s recent innovative approach to social media marketing when it advertised its new sci-fi movie Prometheus during an episode of Channel 4 show Homeland. The ad, which was screened simultaneously on TV, online and on Zeebox, accrued a positive reaction, but the praise didn’t last very long. An Econsultancy blog revealed activity peaked at around 4,000 tweets on the night of the broadcast and #areyouseeingthis was trending briefly on the social networking site, but the number of tweets quickly fell back down to zero. Tweets broadcast during the show’s second ad break were all positive, but as you should expect when using social media channels, some more troll-like users poured scorn on the experiment for being “an advert for Twitter” and labelled it “boring” and “lame.” (You have to be prepared for public criticism with social media campaigns.)

Twitter’s appeal is its immediacy, but for such a large investment in technology, time and manpower – not to mention the cost of an entire 3 minute ad break in a primetime show – most businesses would expect a much longer lasting effect. Granted the campaign gained a bit more longevity by the pre-event coverage that the experiment was going to happen in traditional media such as the Radio Times, Digital Spy, the Metro and the spots on Channel 4 itself promoting the sponsored ad break. However that’s the interesting part. This social media campaign was reliant on traditional media to get it started and it was the media coverage that gave the campaign much of its value.

For most companies these sorts of ostentatious social media campaigns are well beyond budget limitations. It does, however, highlight the amount of investment that can be poured into social media without really considering the ROI.

The 20th Century Fox case study also challenges the dangerous perception that social media marketing is cheap, or even free. It’s not. Common costs for marketers implementing social media plans include content creation, training, measurement and monitoring systems. The major cost however is labour, and it’s often the most overlooked. To produce the amount of content that will keep people constantly engaged requires an enormous amount of man hours, and squeezes margins for smaller businesses.

A lack of clear measurement means that marketers are still unsure as to what those margins even are. Many companies now outsource their social media activity to agencies, use software to tweet for them – effectively setting up “bots” – while others employ staff members or even unpaid interns solely to handle it. While these costs are easily measured, the rewards still aren’t. Still less measurable is getting one or more employees working on the social activity in addition to their other duties. Social media marketing is a considerable investment, and unfortunately for marketers the ‘likes’ ‘shares’ and ‘retweets’ gained by their social activity isn’t often measured in sales, it’s measured in terms of influence, reach and volume.

ROI isn’t the only factor to consider when talking about social media, but it’s an extremely important one that all too often gets overlooked in the excitement it has sparked. In tough economic times every penny counts, margins are being squeezed and efficiencies have to be made. Social media can be an excellent customer service tool, and it’s getting to be that any company without a social media presence is regarded in the same manner as a company which doesn’t have a website. But this doesn’t mean that marketers need to throw half their budget into it.

Social media and the tools of social media marketing need to be integrated into every marketing communications activity so it no longer remains a separate discipline but is part of every marketing communications practice area: advertising, brand management, events, public relations, direct mail, promotional merchandise, point-of-sale, loyalty and rewards programmes – every marcomms channel. Moreover, to be efficient, social media marketing activities must be considered strategically, researched, defined and tested before committing to the activity. The best and most efficient social media campaigns are the ones that inspire the social community to engage with the brand, rather than force feeding users messages. Building a participatory social media community which encourages friends, fans and followers to create their own content takes the effort, resources and time away from the marketer and provides users with a much more involved, personal and engaging brand experience. In tough economic times like these, companies need to ask themselves why they should be investing in staff, content and agency costs when there is a massive community out there that will do all the work for them for free, if encouraged by the right social media strategy.

New Flexible Capped Pay-As-You-Go Public Relations Service

Budgets, budgets, budgets - you set them to spend them. Or at least many organisations did. Many still do.

But come on - setting a budget doesn't mean you have to spend it. In fact good budget management and business sense means setting a budget of what you can spend, but ideally limiting your spending to what you need to spend within that budget whilst still getting the value you require. The cash savings you make by not spending your entire budget go to profit, or are allocated to something else to achieve profit.

It’s a simple comparison, but many parents are opting for the flexible, capped and pay-as-you-go mobile phone contracts for their children precisely to manage their household budgets. A few mobile network operators are offering such tariffs. So as not to teach you to suck eggs, but to help make my point, have a look at this article about T-Mobile or the video below from Tesco Mobile.

It's very simple, responsible budget management.

That's how it should be, shouldn't it? And if you can apply the concept to your business's service suppliers, that probably makes good business sense too. Get the results you need but only for the money you need to spend.

Before the recession prospective clients often said, "I want to be able to manage my budgets, so I just want to define an amount of money I'll be committing to you each month for public relations, and you do a good job." We said, "No problem. But we'll still time every minute of work we do for transparent time sheets and show you what we're doing so you know you're getting value for money."

However, these leaner times are showing us that businesses want help to manage their budgets differently using innovative billing options. Their imperative demands are flexibility, control and value. We're finding businesses want a billing system like the pay-as-you-go mobile phone services, where they don't have to commit to spending the budget they set, have greater control on what they spend, and only get surprise bills of the good kind at the end of the month - where the figure in red at the bottom of the invoice might even say, "£0.00".

That's why Parker, Wayne & Kent is launching this new flexible, capped, pay-as-you-go public relations service. We agree monthly public relations priorities and an associated capped budget for activities with the client. We don't bill over the monthly budget without client approval. If they don't want any activity in any given month, they don't get billed. We use technology to time every minute of our work so we can bill clients by the minute and deliver totally transparent time sheets. (Some of us here have worked at PR agencies where time sheets were filled in at the end of the month, relying on PR execs' memory or a 'finger in the air' estimate of hours worked for clients - neither accurate nor ethical in our opinion.)

Unlike the mobile network examples above, we don't tie clients into fixed term contracts, there's no minimum spend, and there's no minimum cap / budget limit. We're even working with one client on a cap of just 450 minutes per month. To reiterate: that's not a minimum spend, that's the monthly capped budget. If we don't work for them, they don't pay anything at all. If they task us with some activity, and it's approaching their 450 minutes cap, we merely alert the client and they decide whether they'd like to approve more budget in that month to get maximum value out of the project, take time from the following month's capped budget, or halt the activity.

However, it's important to be upfront about the drawbacks of this system. Just as with mobile phone tariffs, the price per minute is higher than if we were working on our monthly fee or project-by-project contract basis. Also this method of working is largely client led, so any activity is responsive to client requests. This means we don't get to be as proactive as we'd like to be in generating news for clients to seize the media agenda or to creatively take advantage of the editorial opportunities we may become aware of within our network of journalists.

Both established companies and start-ups are taking advantage of this new form of relationship with us. They want to get their companies into media articles - thus avoiding the high prices of advertising - and manage their PR budgets as effectively as possible, rather than just committing to spending them.

It can work for your company. You just need to find out more by emailing us.

PR RANGERS - ENTER THE BUNNY VIDEO

The era of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century saw the public relations industry invaded by fluffy bunnies. This is the story of one small team of PR Rangers that refused to submit to the advancing hoards of hares. It happened in spring, in the year of the dragon. The bunny entered - and was entered. Enter the bunny

Social Media’s Not Enough for LinkedIn

It was odd. All these people waffling on about how great social media is, and they’re all at a trade show, meeting together - actually talking. If you listened to the enthusiasm enunciated in their words, you’d have thought that social media was the be-all-and-end-all of marketing, news, and social interaction in general. Nothing else mattered. But I was meeting them face-to-face at a trade show. The irony was lost on most, but Social Media World Forum showed that whilst social media is a go-go, the reality is that the trade show still has an imperative role in effective engagement.

Yet a study conducted by Altimeter Group shows the level of hype continues unrestrained. A third of the 140 social-media strategists interviewed spend between $100,000 to $500,000 a year on social media marketing. This suggests that social media is worthy of a high budget, but not as cost effective as you might think. The ROI of social media campaigns is largely unknown.

Like most companies, LinkedIn, the fast growing professional network, employs a clear social media marketing strategy in line with its well established online reputation. One of LinkedIn’s successful social media channels is its blog where employees at LinkedIn post specific information they've spent time developing, but which failed to make the cut of the company's PR campaign. It has become an unexpected success turning into a resource hub not only for LinkedIn users, but also journalists and other bloggers to discuss current issues making conversations and feedback more immediate. LinkedIn has used its blog to implement a more simple and effective communications strategy than traditional media outreach allows by creating an online forum accessible to a number of different stakeholders.

However, in its work up to IPO the online network’s membership base has grown over 160 percent in the last two years to 150 million users , with the number of corporate customers increasing by 450 percent in the same period through investment across marketing disciplines. The decision to use a variety of channels indicates the company’s recognition that relying on social media alone cannot achieve the level of success desired.

LinkedIn's marketing campaign has to maintain current users whilst enticing potential new customers – or “product”  – to become part of the ever growing online social media boom. That oft quoted “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product,” is most clearly demonstrated by LinkedIn. Unlike other social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn has cleverly defined users who are true customers – those that spend money with LinkedIn on premium profiles and advertising – from those who are “product”, merely signing-up to benefit from the free services that LinkedIn offers. One of the most valuable customers for LinkedIn are recruitment consultants. These customers want to benefit from LinkedIn’s “product” – all those people who put all that CV information up online. Hence why LinkedIn exhibited at Recruitment Agency Expo in February 2012. (See the pic.)

By exhibiting at the Recruitment Agency Expo trade show LinkedIn’s marketing team demonstrated that traditional marketing cannot be ignored in spite of the hype around social media. Contrary to the array of extravagant, eye catching and expensive stands at trade shows, LinkedIn’s presence was simple, honest and understated. Consisting of just a couple of white pop-up stands scattered with the company logo – costing no more than £200 each - a camera, a laptop and a stool, the multi million pound company’s minimalist stand intrigued passers by. It didn’t have fancy banners, flat screen TVs and an extensive floor space as you might expect of such a large and innovative company, but what it did have was a clear, effective and extremely simple stand that did exactly what it was supposed to do – generate sales leads for LinkedIn.

Visitors could have their photo taken against a backdrop of the LinkedIn logo and set up an account there and then. The LinkedIn logo is then in clear view on the person’s profile image for all to see. However the person who looks at their profile picture most frequently is the person whose profile it is. This reminds that person that LinkedIn offers services to recruiters whenever they check their profile. LinkedIn’s decision to exhibit at the Recruitment Agency Expo enabled paying-customer lead generation from the range of attendees from recruitment firms, rather than just gaining individuals that simply benefit from the free services that LinkedIn offers. They acquired customers, not just product.

Trade shows provide exhibitors with the opportunity to network, promote products and services and learn more about their target audience’s needs. A study outlining the value of trade shows claims that 75% of attendees have a personal agenda with a good idea of the companies they want to see, whilst 46% of executive decision makers make purchase decisions whilst at a show. Equally trade shows enable exhibitors who attend to extend their promotional reach beyond the footfall of the event by liaising with the journalists. This enables a business to share information about its products and services, increase its standing in the media and raising its profile amongst consumers or relevant publications who didn’t attend the event.

Cynicism about the value of trade shows is rife and online networking through social media is often touted as a replacement for industry events. But social media isn’t replacing other marketing channels; rather it provides an additional communication avenue that is most successful when used in conjunction with more conventional methods. Kay Luo, director of corporate communications at LinkedIn, says its outreach strategy includes both traditional and social media including PR, advertising and trade shows.

Interaction with customers remains key and it’s important that marketers remember that their advertising must be effective rather than expensive – a mantra effectively demonstrated by LinkedIn’s modest but effective stand at Recruitment Agency Expo. Strong effective offline marketing is just as vital as newer techniques when engaging with audiences, building brands and strengthening the level of trust between company and customer. Companies will always seek to employ the most contemporary marketing methods to grow their business but sometimes its best to take a responsible step back. Effective marketing doesn’t necessarily mean expensive marketing. LinkedIn, the largest professional network has demonstrated the value of offline marketing tactics better than anyone by employing simple, cost effective strategies that have increased its client base and allow it to continuously grow and dominate the professional online world.

News International falls flat by blowing its own trumpet

Amid the ongoing phone hacking scandal News Corp has been desperately clambering for the public’s confidence through stories published in their own media titles. News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch, his son James and News International chief Rebekah Brooks have relied entirely on their own organisation’s media platforms rather than venturing outside the walls of News International for third party endorsements. Transparently biased cries for leniency and gentle support from News Corp titles have fallen on deaf ears with the anti-News International rally continuing to gain momentum, appearing in national and international publications, and especially social media.

News Corp is stubbornly continuing with its current strategy that still fails to deliver any PR success. The most recent failure to appreciate that people don’t trust their editorial can be seen in Trevor Kavanagh’s article in The Sun. Kavanagh paints a picture of a harassed and victimized organisation suffering a human rights abuse when all they were doing was standing-up for the public and putting a pair of tits on page 3.

Any PR Executive can tell you about the importance of encouraging media titles that your target audience trusts to carry your messages. Neutrality and non-biased stories are extremely important for news reporting. The public expects media titles to offer accurate stories on current affairs. One can even say that the public have romanticised journalism, expecting their news sources to be modest and integral members of society. Endorsements in mediums such as these that have the support from the public are extremely important to swaying general opinions.

The reputation of News Corp is tarnished following the scandal and the numerous arrests. The public’s trust has been lost and it is extremely difficult to gain back through a medium that they don’t believe in. The general public is disgusted with their behaviour and are now wise to the use of News Corp’s various content outlets across the world that pathetically pledge support and defend its UK titles.

In another attempt to rescue its reputation The Sun tried to remind people of all the good it has done, with the claim that: “News International's record as a friend of the armed services and of our servicemen and servicewomen, is impeccable”. Unfortunately for the UK’s most popular paper this was published in the midst of the revelation that servicemen and women’s families’ phones had been hacked by their colleagues over at the News of the World. This left their readership outraged, seething with anger and baying for blood in concert with other news organisations who were more than happy to puncture the chink in the News Corp armour. The public are enjoying reading about the destruction of the News of the World more than about any attempt to defend it - as most journalists at both The Sun and The Times know all too well.

News Corp media titles also received widespread criticism from American media. American magazine, The Atlantic, criticised TV Network, Fox News for down scaling its reporting on Murdoch dropping his bid for 100% control of BSkyB. The Atlantic said: “An hour after everyone else, the Fox site now has a small above-the-fold mention of Murdoch dropping the BSkyB bid. This is like the way the Soviet press covered Chernobyl: ‘small problem in the Ukraine’.”

Murdoch’s power in the media industry has not been enough to pull him out of this scandal. The media mogul has had to face up to his faltering public profile and bit the bullet last year to bring in the help of PR agency, Edelman. Edelman’s approach was to take a leaf out of The Evening Standard’s Ad campaign in 2009, encouraging the Murdochs to apologise to everyone who had been victims of the scandal. Apoplectic readers, however, didn’t care for the apology and saw through this latest PR ploy as a shallow, transparent and particularly crass exercise in spin.

The News of the World was never going to survive the controversy it had embroiled itself in, but elements of the scandal could have been avoided. The immediate resignation of Murdoch’s long time protégé Brooks would have saved the company from cultivating the perception that it was forcing an entire newspaper staff out of work to save the career of one executive. After resisting many calls for her to quit, Brooks eventually fell on her sword in an undignified manner. Hacking revelations, the collapse of the News of the World, her arrest and, of course, some fitting harassment from the media –all had to take place before she finally gave in to public pressure. Brooks has become nationally despised, perhaps even more so than Andy Coulson, as people reveal various ugly stories about her practices.

Funnily enough the strongest boon to News Corp’s PR was when Rupert Murdoch got hit in the face with a foam pie. What followed is the impassioned third party endorsement from this wife, Wendi Deng, who landed a right hook on the perpetrator Jonnie Marbles, that gained her and her husband widespread support. The Daily Mail claimed that the general opinion on her had changed from being an opportunist to someone who genuinely cared for her husband. Murdoch’s profile was also given a boost as the foam helped to wipe away some of the egg on his face, tackling the public’s perception of him as cold and difficult to warm to. Public sentiment to the scandal momentarily softened – but only momentarily.

Media companies can’t just rely on their own pages for effective PR. Third-party endorsement is extremely important when it comes to rallying support in the face of a crisis as seen in the case of News Corp. This is why political parties are so desperate to get a third party declaring their support for them, and why senior figures such as Tony Blair and David Cameron have always been so happy to form an alliance with News Corp. Politicians have looked to these publications for support in times of crisis, to gain that all important third party endorsement, because nothing better cements credibility than an outsider weighing in on your behalf.

When the hacking scandal broke with full force last summer News Corp was left floundering, drowning under its own weight. Without any third parties willing to throw it a lifeline, it will face a long and arduous uphill struggle to repair its severely tarnished reputation.

But last week, one might finally feel that News Corp was getting that third party endorsement it so desperately needs – and from a Government minister, no less. Education Secretary Michael Gove honoured the media mogul saying that Rupert Murdoch “should be applauded and not criticised” for setting up new – although looking very much like the old – Sunday newspaper, the Sun on Sunday. However, Michael Gove was an ex-News International employee, having previously worked with The Times, so can’t really be called a third party. Moreover one questions Gove’s motives in fawning over a media title and its proprietors. For the public to be persuaded, third party endorsements must come from true third parties.