Who's your father, referee?

Internal communication is all the rage and some, although not enough, very smart people work in the field. They struggle to get people singing from the same hymn sheet and embedding silly corporate mission statements in their work. Done well, however, this is powerful voodoo.

Football (ie soccer) clubs should take heed. Unlike in normal business, where you don’t expect 75,000 fans cheering you on as you wrestle with next year’s budget, football clubs like to play before big crowds of their own supporters. Why? Because they figure their fans give them uplift. Home advantage is not to do with the slope or viscosity of the pitch, the light, or the idiosyncratic wind - it’s about the crowd.

The crowd sings its particular anthems (there’s not a huge repertoire and many are shared among all fans), they boo the opposition and the officials and they cheer their own team – unless they’re playing badly in which case they’ll boo them as well. Booing is what crowds do best. Racial insults are outlawed, but otherwise, football crowds are rightly praised for their irreverent sense of humour.

This is all very well, but a smart team would understand that this could be taken further.

Imagine, as you lead your visiting team onto the field where the home crowd have been roped in to my scheme, that you are greeted by a crowd chanting the name of each of your players followed by a searing indictment of their ability and probity.

Each player’s weak points will have been researched, chants passed around on the club intranet, and rehearsed during the hour before the match.

How good is a visiting player going to feel if, every time he gets the ball, 50,000 people in unison refer to his recent adultery, warts, operation to enlarge his penis, unwise property investments, and so on?

Your own team’s goals are celebrated with a rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus, while an opposition score gets the kind of low hissing which so disoriented Eve in the Garden of Eden.

A decent crowd, with a few weeks’ practice ought to be able to add two goals to their side every match until the opposition fans catch on. As the project slips into gear it will be interesting to find out, among other things, if all crowds currently sing in the same key. If they do, then why? And if they don’t, then, well, why?

When Manchester United and Chelsea learn of this development, there will be excellent business for the internal communication arm of Campaignteam but bad news for sanity. So it’s a definite go-er.

Nine tips for people writing "ten tips" articles

Apart from having people set fire to your house or force you to watch talent shows on TV, nothing is more irritating than articles offering you tips about how to do things.

These grim pieces, of which there are millions, masquerade as a service but are entirely focused on the superior knowledge of the writer. They are part of the stock in trade of the media relations business at its low-rent end, and too often appear in free magazines. They should normally be torn from the publication, shredded and offered to your hamsters or rare-breed ducks as part of their en suite bathroom paraphernalia.

However, if you insist on proceeding with your tips, here are mine:

1. Work out if you’ve actually got ten tips. Ten is the most popular number by far – presumably thanks to God, whose commandments managed to convey an entire way of life. My research shows that the lowest number of tips people are prepared to offer is two (for Creating Academic Documents). While you can get 27 tips for Wrapping, Storing, and Thawing All the Foods you Freeze, the real inflation is in the corporate world of course – witness 44 Tips for Using Bullets and Numbering, no fewer than 46 Tips for Flip-chart Users and, ludicrously, 57 Tips for Delivering Dynamic Presentations. I gave up at this point and had some whisky. My second tip is therefore:

2. Have some whisky

3. If you feel you haven’t really got as many tips as you think your audience would like, then simply say the same thing in different words a few times – like most people, once they get above half a dozen

4. Treat your audience as if they had been born yesterday

5. Adopt a patronising tone (this is essentially the same as point four, but – you see what I pulled off there? – an extra tip with no work at all)

6. Accept that no-one will learn anything from your tips and that they will see them for what they are – an excuse to get your name into print

7. Don’t give any really useful tips – your readers aren’t expecting them and won’t be able to distinguish them from the ballast

8. Be sanctimonious at all times, particularly about research. Don’t bother doing any research yourself

9. Include your contact details and a photo of you looking sober.

Giving tips is an easy, rigour-lite approach to communication – you can abandon structure and argument in favour of a list, so, when you run out of things to say, just count them up and put the number in the title. Like I did.

Older, Wiser and Crazier

When I was a child, old people seemed like aliens. With their white hair, colossal bosoms and war wounds they would have a lavatory in the backyard and a tin bath in front of the coal fire.

They made their own clothes, skinned rabbits, grew vegetables, saved up pieces of string and ate all food put before them.

They seemed to have had a hard time of things (the war wounds were a give-away) but they didn’t whine about it and indeed seemed pleased that life was simpler for us. The general consensus was that, while they were a bit out of touch with the new technology (eg telephones) and evolving social mores of the later 20th century, they had survived a different, more brutal, world and therefore knew a thing or two.

However, while the onset of British Lite Culture (prop. T Blair) has made it impossible to criticise children any more, it’s de rigeur, for politicians at least, to patronise older people, and their PR advisers egg them on.

For example, our Foreign Office, which must have sorted everything else in the world out while I wasn’t looking, has spent our money surveying what people over the age of 55 get up on their holidays. Now the results are in, they’re not happy:

• More than half eat and drink more while on holiday than at home (surely the point of most holidays)
• Sometimes this makes them drown or get thrown in jail (hey ho)
• 20% have the effrontery to engage in activities they wouldn’t consider at home. Bungee jumping is cited, but one of the main ones is probably voluntary euthanasia, which is illegal here but available in more enlightened places like Switzerland. The rules about assisted dying are made, of course, by people who aren’t old yet and thus have no idea what they’re talking about. Funnily enough old people seem to have a firm grasp of the issues.

The ridiculous Foreign Office Minister Meg Munn (age 48 and a Methodist, a sect not known for its bungee jumping) says that the Foreign Office is “all for over-55s having fun on holiday”. This is generous of them, although whether we enjoy our holidays or not is none of her department’s damn business.

She has much more to say, of course, but she will not be keeping a scrapbook of the media coverage, and she has hopefully fired her PR people (as if).

The reason for this goofy media play was that the Foreign Office gets irritated when their people on the ground have to spring old people from distant jails, but that’s part of what we pay them for.

In any sane society the PR wonks, before coming up with their fatuous communication strategies, would first have wondered why so many older people would have as their role model a truly great man who died not so long ago aged only 67 – Hunter S Thompson. I’ll tell you why when you’re older.

Bare Sterns

Every so often our bankers are caught with their trousers down and their naked backsides on grisly public display. We are tempted to seize the opportunity to give them a good kicking, but hell – they know where we live (until they repossess our home). What a bummer.

In the past we’ve seen our banks brought low by dodgy loans to South American governments, institutionalised money laundering, rogue traders and most recently sub-prime mortgages.

The sleight of hand which has taken this latest chunk of risk and spread it like mycelium throughout the world’s financial system is impressive, but right now all banks assume that every other bank is in the same mess as they are, so – impasse. No-one’s lending to anyone and as far as liquidity is concerned they’ve gone from snake oil to embalming fluid in a matter of weeks.

In good times (ie between banking meltdowns) our financial services companies treat punters with contempt and you only have to watch commercial TV for an evening to see this. Advertising for financial products in the UK starts from the premise that the product range is sufficiently complicated to rule out the possibility of just telling us about them.

So, adopting and adapting David Ogilvy’s insight that “when you've got nothing to say, sing it”, they hit us with 30-second commercials featuring crooning bank tellers, cartoon newlyweds or half-baked comedy sketches.

They must see our chain of reasoning as something like “Hey, these people can really sing – let’s give them all our money to look after.”

My own bank, some years ago, closed my branch down during a multi-zillion pound TV campaign focusing entirely on how they weren‘t closing any branches down. Oh how we laughed.

I kept my account with them of course since chutzpah of this quality only shows up infrequently.

However, we don’t need banks to make us laugh or gnash our teeth – we’ve already got politicians for that. From our banks we prefer clarity, although we’re never going to get it.

And yet, despite it all, complex financial instruments and products are here to stay. Lots of smart and rapacious people depend on this and, although they screw up badly now and again, the industry would go nowhere if we didn’t let them test the envelope.

So, as we consider just how far up shit creek these people have hauled the rest of us we should resist the temptation to kick ass, but we’ll certainly remember that, when we use the term “merchant banker”, it has a secondary meaning.

As rhyming slang.

Kosovo - an early to-do list

So, hello Kosovo. It must be nice to be a new country with everything to play for. There’s obviously plenty to do – there’s a new currency to design, tax collectors and tourism ministers to recruit, an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest to pen, a national drink to, well, drink.

On top of all that you need a national anthem – not your usual dirge, but something more likely to scare the shit out of anyone hearing it. In fact something like the hakka, performed by the New Zealand Rugby Union team before each match. This seems to say “We are mighty. You are feeble and have the gonads of mice. We are going to kill you.”

It’s important to get all the cultural sensitivities right and I think that strikes the right note.

Of course it’s a relatively civilised business setting up your country these days. In colonial times we never used to worry about other people's cultural sensitivity. Or their religions, laws, land rights, customs, women, dignity, reserves of spices/gold/slaves/opiates/diamonds/uranium etc.

Our civil servants have sat round many a mahogany table with our allies, carving up continents more or less at random. They've got out protractors, rulers, dividers and all those other geometry instruments that no-one has seen since 1970.

They've drawn nice neat lines round colossal swathes of territory and said OK let's call it Rhodesia. No matter that the new borders slice straight through ancient tribal homelands, bisect your royal palace at the billiard room, give you a piece of lake measuring four feet by 1,500 miles, put the source of your main water supply in the hands of your deadliest enemies and place your bauxite reserves in the Spanish enclave next door.

It’s tough that we couldn't find anywhere for the Palestinians, Kurds, Tamils, Karen, Welsh, Basques, etc but look, we've DRAWN it now.

These fellows played their cartography to win. If you were so rude as to disagree with their arbitrary geometry, then we'd simply pile in a couple of hundred crack troops and have you swinging from your palace balcony in no time.

These days we can't get away with such whimsical behaviour as you have probably noticed. By and large people can do what they like inside their own borders. Our governments concentrate instead on telling us what we can do in our own homes - individually we're easier to subdue than United Nations delegations, hedge fund billionaires and the Taleban.