Or

How to make journalists love you.

NESTA is committed to supporting small and medium enterprises and recognises innovation as the key to success in the current economic climate:
“Innovation is the single most important condition for transforming the current economic crisis into an opportunity. Never before has innovation been so critical to the UK’s economy and society.”

Media Skills Masterclass was the event held by Creative Republic in Fazeley Studios, Digbeth on Tuesday 21st April.
This short piece constitutes the 2nd part of “Attacking the recession” series which presents useful skills needed in your media organisation.

The appointed guests from the West Midlands region shared their ideas with their colleague journalists, pr and digital media personalities and other entrepreneurs.

Anna Blackaby, small business journalist for Birmingham Post answered the following questions: How to get yourself in a newspaper? and How can you better your own PR? Having taken a look at creative industries sector she emphasised the importance of the role of press releases and how the businesses can communicate better through them with the target audience. These short pieces of writing should be as concise as possible, catching eye and containing new current ‘stuff’ (the recession subject would always be on top and definitely catching reader’s eye!). Journalists will love you for that especially if you save them long-hour-coffee-after-coffee researching of what you want to say! Secondly, try to avoid adjectives (facts only!) and get the habit of including quotations. Thirdly, use your own creativity (“The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself”, Alan Alda); send the picture over etc. Fourthly, establish yourself as a commentator – if you have an opinion share it with others. Finally, if you have any stories, opinions etc, send them over through e-mail to the press office and therefore you will maintain a great relationship with them.

Now you will not only be loved but absolutely adored by a journalists’ team for your perfection at press release writing!

Another key point is Birmingham itself, the city of numerous opportunities, the creativity hub and economy city. If we pick up key segments and try to develop the mentality of the key sectors that drive the Birmingham economy we will be able to beat the recession. Targeting and attracting journalists should become catchphrases for each entrepreneur in the WM region. Why not target travel journalists (nota bene, probably most influential journalists among all); get them to the city and let them experience it? Why not using the hooks (case studies, extraordinary people in the heart of the real story etc.) they are absolutely mad about?

Finally, don’t be afraid to put your ‘stuff’ on the website, be noticed by your target audience and keep this relationship closely. Inform them through RSS feeds, tweets, direct mail etc. Social media is the answer.

Seth Godin, Author of the Purple Cow, The Dip, Meatball Sundae and he’s latest book Tribes. Some points and thoughts from the article in ‘the marketer’ (12.08/01.09)
Godin describes how marketing has changed; it’s no longer thrusting marketing to the masses but being leaders of tribes. “The new marketing is leadership”.

There are two routes you could go if as a marketer you find yourself in a company your values don’t align too, either quit or lead a change of culture from within. Seth Godin states that organisations need people who are the later.
What struck me is that Godin says that conservative people do not follow tribes. People who do not join tribes do not want to improve life and want to keep everything the same, so they aren’t looking for a new product or service therefore not looking at your ads. Your audience are the ones who want change, who gather like tribes and connect with each other. Adding to this most people want to follow and to be lead by someone. The new leader according to Godin is the marketer.
‘What people are waiting for is someone to say, “here’s an idea or here’s a service or a product or a candidate that will take us somehere new, let’s go.”

He goes on to say that tribe building is easy, as long as your customer/member is delighted in what you do and not feeling ripped off, they will help build your tribe by recommendation. Spreading your ideas freely also attracts interest, membership and sales.
“Once you have it, a tribe makes money all by itself. If you go into it saying, ‘I want to make money from this’ you fail.“
Personally, what I’ve got from this, is that I want to create that kind of feeling in my business, becoming very tribal!!!! This is how I see the business culture at IE Design and the customer relationship and philosophy with keepandshare.co.uk.
Godin ends this article on advice to marketers with the recession in mind.
• That this is the biggest opportunity any of us will ever have.
• He believes that great companies and brands are built in this environment.
• To create real value and real change.
• And to hire amazing people who can’t get ordinary jobs because there aren’t any.
“This is what you’ve been waiting for and I hope you don’t miss it.”

I’m going to take this on, that he is right and see what I can create in the world!

See Seth Godin really cool blog! http://sethgodin.typepad.com
Look you, if you are a Seth Godin tribe member you can get a doll to!

Ollie Leggett is the director and founder of IE Design, based in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, West Midlands. IE Designs main focus and strengths are web, interactive media, design and brand identity. Currently IE Design employ 14 people and have a client list of mainly high value based companies with a concentration on education and charity based organisations.

Ollie displays characteristics of a cultural entrepreneur by having an individual, collaborative and holistic approach to work, motivated by solving problems and being a servant leader. He has learnt new skills in producing and managing creativity throughout his career, mainly project based work for clients and has managed risk by concentrating on a 20% profit margin dropping clients who do not produce that kind of margin. Ollie’s company is involved in the majority of time, in producing and distribution of his client’s commissions especially around web based projects. IE Design developed a management system for themselves which they then marketed as periscope, an online creative management system for creative enterprises becoming producer and consumer or rather in this case consumer-producer, a trait of a cultural entrepreneur. Ollie foresaw 7 years ago, that interactive and online services would be the way to go and so brought on board Oliver Westmancote, as a company director. Seeing and predicting market needs is a distinct trait of an entrepreneur. (Southam et al, 2005)

Ollie Leggett is a cultural entrepreneur because he inspires artistic leadership in those that work for him in small teams and understands the creative process so managing it effectively to create an economically viable, high culture and value based company that produces visual media in print, interactive or web based output. ‘Forming such a business is not only an economic but also a creative act, for it involves shaping a complex cultural web of identity, relationships, communication, language and technology.’ (Rae, 2007: 194) It could be said from the previous quote, that Ollie Leggett demonstrates this with his management and business leadership service to his customer and employees.

Hope you enjoyed and please comment:

Rai Jenkins

This week I chaired a conference at Birmingham City University on Creative Enterprise.

It was largely aimed at educators but it did have a few students and some business support people amongst its delegates.  First thing to say is that a way more reflective and thoughtful digest of the conference is being put together by Charlotte Carey. Go read it. I thought it might be worth pulling together links to some of the participants as that doesn’t seem to have been done anywhere else.

Here goes:

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What is an Entrepreneur? What is a Cultural Entrepreneur? Am I an Entrepreneur or could I be considered a Cultural Entrepreneur? Well let’s start with just the entrepreneur as oppose to the cultural entrepreneur. The dictionary definition of an entrepreneur is a person who organises and manages any enterprise, esp. a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk. So then what is a cultural entrepreneur, what makes a cultural entrepreneur different from a ‘normal’ entrepreneur?

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Cultural Entrepreneurship Introduction

‘Cultural entrepreneurs’ have made significant contributions to not only the creative and cultural sector but in the main also to the current vitality and health of the
UK’s economic growth, thus gaining an increased amount of recognition in recent years (Wilson and Stokes 2002:37). Not only do ‘cultural entrepreneurs’  according to Leadbeater and Oakley assist in new job creation and the promotion of  social cohesion they provide a new model of creative production which has been made possible through advances in technology mainly concerning the internet and the use of I.T. (Wilson  and Stokes 2002:37). This sounds great but we need to grasp the concept of a cultural entrepreneur, therefore we must first understand the term entrepreneurship. 

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What makes a cultural entrepreneur? First, we should clarify the characteristics of entrepreneurship. The popular press and television programmes such as Dragon’s Den usually define it as starting new business ventures. Fillis and Rentschler portray it as “creating value…by bringing together unique combinations of public and private resources to exploit economic, social or cultural opportunities”¹ According to them, the essential capabilities of entrepreneurship are:

• innovation
• risk-taking
• pro-activeness

Cultural entrepreneurs are people who work in the creative and cultural industries and establish an enterprise focusing on media, design, music, film, fashion or other related sectors. But what distinguishes cultural entrepreneurs from the classic entrepreneurial model?
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1. Fillis, I. and Rentschler, R. (2006) Creative Marketing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p10 [↩]

In this blog I will look at  

• What is entrepreneurship?
• What is an entrepreneur?
• What is a cultural entrepreneur?
• In what way can an entrepreneurial approach lead to success?
• Case Study on David-Louis – Product Designer.
• Case study on James Dyson
• Summary of investigation and conclusion.

    Read more »

You’ll find plenty of blogs listed throughout this site but a colleague of mine at Birmingham City University has a particularly useful one charting her progress as she goes about her job researching in this area.

Her ‘main’ blog, Creative Enterprise is worth a read as is her ‘personal’ blog.

There’s plenty of research out there about the role of enterprise in education but not too much that is specifically about the role of Art, Design and Media education. A study by the Art, Design, Media Subject Centre fills that gap. It’s written in conjunction with NESTA and is full of useful insights into how creative students learn and why that may well make them just that bit more enterprising than many other students.

You can read the whole report here or there’s a summary of it on another blog I write for called Strategy Digested.