• Bad branding
• Competitiveness and the City
• New look legal marketing in the UK
• Cloud needn't be a marketing nightmare
• Up, up and away
• Putting a value on corporate reputation
• Policing Bloggers
• I know my customers – perception or reality?
• Does the US media need a bailout?
• Online Annual Reports – a review of current activity among FTSE100 companies
• The Content Generation
• Typing out a change of personality
• Companies caught in the commission of journalism
• Reputation Rehab
• Cut out the jargon
• Sibos viewpoint - Thursday 17 September
• Regaining our seat at the table
• Sibos viewpoint - Wednesday 16 September
• Sibos viewpoint - Tuesday 15 September
• Sibos viewpoint - Monday 14 September
• Thought leadership is not for the risk averse or misaligned
• David Byrne - An impetus for change
• The Great Escape
• Frightening MBA advertising?
• The curse of the Were-Designer
• Banking on effective communication
• The corporate newsroom amid a web of excited utterance
• It’s not what you say it’s the way that you do it
• Slow down and think
• Spreading the word
• Silver linings?
• Design and Technology
• Papercut: How Companies Can Combat A Weakening Mass Media
• CNBC and Jim Cramer Underestimate the Influence and Reach of Social Media

It must be the silly season. Last week, no less than three broadsheets – The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Times – ran as their front page story the fact that the Met Office has had to apologise for its comment earlier this year that we were in for a “barbeque summer”.  As we can see, the grim reality is that each new ‘summer’ day is bringing more and more rain and less and less sunshine.  The story received widespread coverage across print and broadcast media.

The Met Office is blaming the media for misinterpreting their “probability forecasts” (which Michael Fish, writing in The Guardian, says “are not really designed for the general public”), while commentators are blaming the Met Office for using too much spin with such a media-friendly phrase.

Now, I know we Brits are obsessed with talking about the weather, and can’t hold a conversation without mentioning it, but surely this is going too far!

The real question is – would this story have got quite so much front page coverage if it wasn’t summer, with ‘real’ news so thin on the ground?  Does the onset of the silly season mean that fairly flimsy stories get more air time?  Well no, not necessarily.

In the financial services space I think it would be more appropriate to call this time The Great Escape.  Commuters might very well be able to get seats on buses, tubes and trains, but the exodus out of London means that key journalist contacts have also disappeared, sometimes for as long as three weeks, and it really isn’t that easy to guarantee coverage.

If you have spent the year building up an important press contact, labouring over an education process about a particularly technical product in the capital markets, and your client has an important announcement to make in August, you could be faced with trying to place that story with a nervous junior reporter holding the fort, or in some cases, no-one looking after that beat at all.  And if the story is subsequently not reported quite correctly, or the nuance of the message isn’t quite understood, the client/media contact programme you so carefully worked on could well be damaged.

Perhaps it’s better for all of us to make like the French and down tools for the whole of August, and start again once everyone is back at their desks in September.

Now please excuse me while I go off for my two week break!

Anna Watson
anna.watson@greentarget.net