Hi and welcome to my first ever personal blog post, I have decided to start writing this to release my demons and tell the world how I feel about certain things and subjects.
I work in the crazy world of public relations and I have always been the man behind the client, company, microphone and camera but I now I suppose it’s time to pull myself out of the darkness, smile and enter the blogosphere officially.
I have to admit, it feels kind of strange putting your thoughts onto a screen knowing that anyone, anywhere can read them but I have actually found it really enjoyable recently after writing blogs for my new employer.
I plan to use my personal blog to highlight all the things that I love, obviously family comes first with my wife and two-month baby son Jacob but I also want to highlight things that make me think and feel.
I have a huge passion for gadgets and anything consumer technology wise, so you may well catch me doing reviews of gadgets as and when I use them – we use quite a few at work so beware! That said, I don’t like gadgets that make my life harder – at the moment I am currently wrestling a Windows phone to try and make it synchronise with my outlook contacts but I won’t bore you with that saga.So here is my skewed view of the world.
So where to start – well for my first blog, I would like to say what an absolute shambles England’s Euro 2008 football campaign was as that has had a big impact on me. As an avid football fan, I watch, read, live and breathe it and I feel that I give any England manager a fair chance.
However, the whole appointment process of our last manager with Big Phil and others turned into what can only be called a total FA PR disgrace! How the fat cats in the FA can take their £100k+ salaries for that utter shambles is unbelievable but now that will be resigned to history.So the English FA appointed Steve McClaren, or should I call him, the guy the ‘Rabbit in the Headlights’. Bless him, I am sure he is a really nice guy but he just didn’t seem to have a clue when it came to playing football and organising the team. He recruited El Tel and that was a good move for me but unfortunately that never worked either.In fact, in truth the only decent performances England actually put together during this campaign seemed to be completely by chance when Gareth Barry was drafted in to fill in for the injured Frank Lampard and Heskey for Rooney.
Fair play to young Gareth as he played really well when called upon and I expect we will see him back in the team when the next manager finally arrives.All in all England, just were not good enough, and Mr McClaren paid with his job and we paid with £2.5million worth of compensation.
If we are to move forward from here my recommendations to the FA would be, firstly sort yourselves out and have an independent enquiry into the state of the game – not one by yourselves as that will go nowhere to answering your critics. Secondly, try and sort out a limit on foreigners in our game as its becoming obvious as each year goes by that our team is starting to be affected. Finally, interview candidates properly and decide who you want as manager and make sure they are interested too before you actually officially offer them the job.
As a PR professional with more than eight years experience, I certainly feel I could help the FA with their communications because over the last five years they seem to have got it badly wrong. One thing is for sure, it can’t get any worse for English football.. Or can it??????
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
