Man Bites Dog

Multi award-winning B2B PR consultancy Man Bites Dog has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2011 PRWeek Awards.

Man Bites Dog is a finalist in the Specialist Consultancy of the Year category at the annual awards which recognise excellence in UK public relations.

The consultancy has previously won PRWeek’s New Consultancy of the Year award and has been named one of the magazine’s Best Places to Work for the last two years running as well as taking home awards for client campaigns.

Claire Mason, Founder and Managing Director of Man Bites Dog, said: “I set up Man Bites Dog because there was a clear gap in the market for a consultancy specialising in PR for the service economy.

“Six years on and we are still true to our founding specialism in communications for professional and IT services companies. We are very proud to be shortlisted for this award as it is testament to the strength of our unique proposition and the outstanding work of the Man Bites Dog team.”

The winners of this year’s 2011 PRWeek Awards will be announced on 25th October in a ceremony at Grosvenor House on London’s Park Lane.

One of the biggest challenges facing any professional services firm is cutting through the marketplace clutter to stand out from your competitors. As professional service providers our main asset is our expertise. But this is knowledge that we often share with the competition and standing out from an increasingly congested crowd can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle.

So how do you demonstrate leadership when you’re doing the same thing as your competitors?

Unlike in other industries, uniqueness isn’t as important to potential clients as expertise. So when it comes to professional services it’s the currency of ideas, rather than the individuality of your brand, that’s the main differentiator between companies.

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This is where thought leadership can help. Thought leadership is an invaluable tool that can demonstrate insight by highlighting a problem that your potential client hasn’t even considered, or help to find solutions to a headache they are currently facing. This doesn’t mean that you have to give away the farm, far from it in fact; you merely have to whet their appetite on the issue and demonstrate your expertise along the way.

A good data hook can also transform these ideas into a direct call to action, creating a need for your services by highlighting the extent of a problem that they can solve. For example, at Man Bites Dog we launched global management consultancy Hay Group’s post merger human capital integration practice by proving that 91% of mergers fail due to culture shock. The campaign delivered 8 million euros of business into the practice in a matter of weeks; proving the problem highlighted by the research resonated with a market need.

Taking ownership of these issues from a PR and marketing perspective can help you to set the news agenda and stimulate debate, demonstrating a need for your services as well as your ability to deliver them. It might be a change of tack for companies used to a traditional approach involving advertising or direct marketing; but wouldn’t it better to embrace the currency of ideas and show potential customers what you do rather than simply telling them about it? We certainly think so.

For the last few years the PR industry has been embroiled in a seemingly interminable argument with other marketing disciplines over who ‘owns’ social media. But debates over ownership are not helpful – the industry should refocus its attentions on what good PR brings to the party.

Whilst the media landscape is irrevocably changing, big ideas and great content still dominate. Mass interaction, especially via twitter, is based on and fueled by, the sharing of useful and compelling content. And quality content is, of course, the basis of good PR.

At the same time the increase in the volume of information vying for our attention and the burden this places on individuals, is fueling the need for bite-size, and increasingly, non-text based content. People simply can’t cope with the sea of business, career and life-critical information they need to digest, so communicators need to make it easy for them.

But, while ideas are still making the world go round, PR needs to catch-up with the new (and newly accessible) tools and formats for bringing their clients’ ideas to life and making them easily digestible and shareable with the widest possible audience.

This clearly presents a huge opportunity for PR to create rich content in the form of videos, images, infographics and audio that help convey client ideas easily and rapidly. By doing so they can increase the opportunities to engage audiences, both by working with the media in new ways, and by encouraging content sharing through blogging and social media.

It’s easy for B2B brands to feel left behind with such comms innovations, but this trend actually holds more promise for engaging B2B decision-makers than consumers. The often dry approach taken by some in disseminating B2B content will benefit greatly from a fresh approach. Professional services companies, for example, have a sizeable opportunity to demonstrate its expertise – the only thing it really sells – in many more engaging and compelling ways.

Media brands have also recognised the ‘bite-size’ opportunity and are rapidly experimenting with short-form and multimedia content. The Guardian with its mass of podcasts and evolving data journalism can scarcely be called just a newspaper anymore.

To seize this opportunity however, communicators need to up-skill rapidly. The necessary transferable skills are well-established in areas of PR such as broadcast and radio specialists, but they need to become part of any PR’s toolkit.

PRs now need to be as au fait recording and editing a quick talking-head video or audio snippet as they are writing a press release. Likewise, they must consider how research can escape the comforting walls of the PDF whitepaper, via data mashups and visualisation and how they can work with media outlets to bring their data to life.

The above trends present some important considerations for professional communicators:

• The skim reader – Think about how you can earn and keep audience attention using different channels and new, text-light, ways of presenting ideas.
• Visualising data – Think about how data and client messages can be conveyed in more engaging and visually appealing ways via infographics and visualisation.
• The changing media – Consider how newspapers and other media outlets use data and work with them in the most appropriate manner. The Times, for example, has its own data team for its business dashboard whilst The Guardian uses open APIs to create and encourage data mashups.
• Escaping the page – Think about how accompanying multimedia content can support PR activity. Also, explore the opportunities presented by evolving media outlets, such as podcast interviews.
• Good to share – People don’t want to share everything but it should be made easy for them wherever possible. Explore open copyright such as Creative Commons for data and images and make videos and audio easily ‘embeddable’ using YouTube or Vimeo.

Essential viewing/reading on this topic:

Man Bites Dog’s favourite infographic sites:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
http://www.gapminder.org/

The Guardian and FT’s dedicated data and visualisation pages:
http://www.ft.com/uk/interactive
http://www.guardian.co.uk/data

The Guardian’s podcasting operation:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/audio

The Telegraph and FT’s nascent video operations:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraphtv/
http://video.ft.com/

Examples of combining data, graphics and video:
The cost of the Iraq war to the US by Good Magazine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OT5uw1Fb_0

Apple iPhone stats in an infographic video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyOv8wZcNfI&feature=related

The Holmes Report’s 2007 European Consultancy Report Card has recognised Man Bites Dog as one of Europe’s best PR consultancies.

The report explains: “The first remarkable thing about Man Bites Dog is that when Claire Mason established the firm in May of 2005, the name was still free. The second remarkable thing is that in a UK market that could very well be the most competitive in the world, Man Bites Dog was able to find a niche that was not already overrun with rival agencies: providing public relations counsel to professional services firms that may lack concrete products and hard news but can offer vast resources of knowledge £ at a time when the knowledge economy is big news. The third remarkable thing is how much the firm has achieved in such a short time: it has added a host of blue-chip clients including BT, Adobe and Hay Group and it celebrated its second birthday in May of this year by picking up a European Sabre award for corporate media relations for its work on behalf of architecture and design firm Gensler, to add to two PRWeek Awards and a CIPR Excellence Award.

Professional services specialist Man Bites Dog has scooped a hat-trick of new financial services accounts.

The consultancy has been appointed by tax technology solutions company, Vertex; and broker software provider, Insurecom.

In addition, Managing Director Claire Mason has been appointed in an advisory capacity by the Global Manufacturing & Services Division of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.

Leading US tax automation specialist Vertex Inc. has selected Man Bites Dog to handle the pan- European launch of the company and its Vertex Value Added Tax O Series product to tax professionals in multi-national organisations across Europe.

Insurecom Ltd, the insurance broker technology company, has chosen the consultancy for a series of thought leadership campaigns to build brand and promote the company to the UK’s insurance brokerage industry.

Ayes Amewudah, Director of Business Development, Insurecom Ltd, said: “Right from our very first meeting, Man Bites Dog demonstrated a fresh, innovative and flexible approach to working with us. They really know how to achieve tangible results that deliver real value to our business.”

Man Bites Dog’s Managing Director, Claire Mason said: “Our specialist knowledge of the professional services industry and our track record in board level thought leadership campaigns is proving a winning combination.