My friend and former Hill & Knowlton colleague Rod Cartwright has recently jumped ship to Ketchum, where he’s heading up their Public Affairs offering. Nice career move and, given some of Ketchum’s client list, I hope we’ll see each other in Moscow before too long.

Rod needs to blog.

Rod’s an experienced PR / Public Affairs practitioner whose experience is well worth tapping into. He’s also one of those people who’s often talking and, when he is, it’s generally worth listening. Would have been an excellent teacher in another life, one of those ones you could sidetrack onto pretty much any topic, but who still managed to instill knowledge without your even realising. Scarcely a day would go by at H&K without Rod uttering the phrase “Jimmy B, tell me what you think about this …” – and then we were off.

An industry stalwart and vocal advocate for the Public Affairs profession, Rod was on telly the other week giving evidence before the House of Commons Public Administration Committee as part of their lobbying enquiry – and did alright, too. He’s written all manner of articles, reviews and so on for various exalted organs of the mass (and not-so-mass) media. Get him in a pitch and you can light the blue touch-paper, sit back and watch Rod impress your potential client. We can all learn from Rod.

But that’s not why I want him to blog. Or at least not the whole reason.

Rod-isms.

Rod is blessed with a particularly eloquent turn of phrase and, every now and then (and generally several times a day by tea-time) he’s come out with one of those pearls of wisdom that you just have to file away and keep for future reference. Think Saint and Greavesie rolled into one, or perhaps Murray Walker. Maybe Jeremy Paxman when he’s really on form. Even Donald Rumsfeld.

Sadly most of the Rod-isms I can remember, involving, as they do, clients named Richard or Marcus’s expert mastery of the Cox Review, aren’t fit for printing in what is, after all, a U-rated blog. So I’ll content myself with just one:

Well that was an interesting pitch. We’ve either definitely won it, or we definitely haven’t …

… which doesn’t really illustrate the full breadth of wisdom, innuendo and sarcasm which Rod is capable of cramming into one short phrase or sentence.

Rod, if you’re reading this, please start blogging. If you do, I’ll change that picture.

Neon Tango – reinterpretation of a classic

The ‘Splinter’ wooden supercar – and no, it’s not an April Fool

onepolitics – Puffbox’s new political blog aggregator

So I come from Moscock? – classic ad from the 80s, any Russian with a sense of humour will love it

My Week: Heather Mills – according to Hugo Rifkind.

From The Times, 16 February:

I’ve had enough! I’m going to sack Paul and divorce myself. I’m only thinking of my daughter. Ninety per cent of global warming comes from cows! I left home before I was born. You people make me sick.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Read the rest.

Giveaway of the day – free stuff to help make your PC still not as good as a mac.

Hypersonic hydrogen airliner – could be just the catalyst we need to start electrolysing hydrogen fuel on a massive scale.

London RIP – all the things you liked about London that aren’t there any more.

Streetcar – low-cost car non-ownership in London. Hope thy can make it work.

Adam Boulton on Hillary’s campaign funds

Meet the World – via FP Passport and The Monkey Cage, this is one of those simple but powerful reflections on the world that has to be shared.

There are seven more.

I mentioned the Blogoir of Charles Crawford, unconventional former Ambassador to Warsaw, Belgrade and Sarajevo, in ‘Links of the Week’ a couple of Fridays ago. It really is essential reading for, well, pretty much anyone who can read. And anyone who’s learning.

I’m mentioning it again here because he’s now added an RSS feed.

Like a large chunk of the blog-reading world my material comes sanitised, organised and collated thanks to a third-party aggregator – in my case Google Reader. I’ll happily admit that I got it wrong about RSS. When I first heard of it, back in 2001, I couldn’t quite see the point – but that was before I started reading blogs. Must have been a bad year for me; I thought the same about the first iPods, too.

Nowadays, though, RSS is essential if you want to keep up with a large number of newsfeeds. Which is why it’s great news that Charles has adopted it.

Don’t just subscribe to the feed, though – you’ll miss out on the first three weeks (and varaious other bits). Take a look at the site itself, and enjoy.

Two-Zero wonders whether we could recreate the recent Grand Central static flash-mob could be repeated in Moscow.

Why not? It happens on the Garden Ring several times a day …

Seriously, though, if it happens, I’m in. It wouldn’t be my first time.

The latest entry in Paul Staines’ “Guido Fawkes” blog must smart a little for Matthew Burchell.

I don’t know Matthew, I’ve never met Paul – although I like his blog, and we’ve spoken by ‘phone / email on occasion. Perhaps there’s some bad blood between the two, or perhaps Paul’s branding of Matthew as a Sad ex-SpAd Slacker on account of his Facebook status is just one of the former’s attempts to “create a more fun, gossipy and acerbic “anti-politics” form of commentary”.

Regardless, there’s a lesson to be learned here. Don’t put something on your Facebook page if you don’t want it to become public. And if, as many have, you’ve been through that phase of adding everyone you’ve ever met / swapped emails with / bumped into on Oxford Street as a ‘Friend’, perhaps you’d better have a rethink.

Richard Millington raised some interesting questions on Friday about what happens when a media outlet implodes, and the impact on client relationships for PR agencies who had recommended said outlet. The case in question is (was) New Woman. I’ve never read it, but the front cover shot on Richard’s blog looks pretty standard; sex, fashion, dieting, celebs … the formula espoused by a whole raft of similar titles.

Reminded me of a time, many years ago when, on my ‘gap year’, I found myself dabbling in marketing and PR (along with landlord/tenant law, design, food tasting and who knows what else) for a now sadly defunct restaurant in Mayfair.

It was the run-up to Christmas. The make-or-break period for so many restaurants, when you can compensate for an entire year’s mediocre turnover with six chaotic weeks of office parties. The year was 1992, which sets an interesting context. There was no internet, of course, and cellphones were in their infancy. So our pre-Christmas marketing blitz took two main forms: direct mail (and fax) shots to likely corporate targets, and quarter- or half-page ads in a clutch of magazines.

One major recipient of our marketing budget was City Limits – a hip, happening competitor to Time Out but with far more reasonable advertising rates. I can still visualise the monochrome, line-drawn ads we placed, complete with robins on branches, Santa, that sort of thing.

Anyway. One afternoon in October, I got a call from one of the ad sales people at City Limits. “We’re closed,” she said. “They’ve pulled the plug.” Which was a shame. I’d stuck my neck out, placed ads (with advance payment) in this publication – ads which had brought in some business, too – and now they’d gone under.

But did I get fired? Did we lose our expected surge of pre-Christmas bookings? Nope. We diverted our spend to the competition – Nine to Five, Ms London, Midweek and the like – and life went on.

Which brings me, in a very roundabout and nostalgic way, to my point.

Publications come and go. So do websites, radio stations, TV channels, and any other form of media outlet you care to mention. But, unless you can point me in the direction of an outlet which genuinely does define its market sector to the exclusion of all others, we’d all be mad to place our eggs in one basket – or to advise clients to do so.

I’m sure whoever’s been schmoozing (or devoting ad spend to) New Woman on the advice of their PR consultants has been doing the same with any number of competitor publications. And if they haven’t? They really should look for a new agency.