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December 2nd, 2010 by Abbie Waller

England 2018: What would you do?

#england2018 has been on tenterhooks all day awaiting FIFA’s decision on where the 2018 World Cup tournament will be held. At Speed Towers, we’re obviously all keeping our fingers crossed for an England victory but the question on everybody’s lips is how our esteemed MD’s would have handled the process.

Lucky for us, they were able to take a few seconds out of their hectic schedules to share their pearls of wisdom with us. View the comment for yourself below and have your say on the subject too (#ifiwasincharge)

NB. We had some technical difficulties uploading the videos to the site – @DavidBell76 Productions plc needs some more training – but you can view them on our YouTube channel (here is Wadds and here is Steve), or we’ve summarised for you below:

@mynameisearl said: if I was in charge, I wouldn’t have had gone at it like a bunch of lily-lizard left-wingers. I would have gone straight for the kneecaps like a good old fashioned Spanish centre-half

@wadds said: bid team did a fantastic job getting the Prince, Boris Johnson and the Prime Minister involved and choosing Newcastle as a host city. FIFA is looking a gift horse in the mouth

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October 21st, 2010 by Abbie Waller

If Venice did advertising…

This summer I took myself off to Italy for a couple of weeks of relaxation and spent the first few days of my stay in Venice. An absolutely stunning city which quite rightly attracts a considerable number of visitors each year – seven million according to a quick Google search. Unfortunately one of the problems with Venice being the ancient city it is, there is always lots of restoration work being done on its famous monuments meaning that views of famous sights such as St Mark’s Basilica and the Bridge of Sighs are clad in scaffolding. However, what does an enterprising Venetian do when faced with the problem of having to cover the famous sights that millions of people have travelled across the world to see?

Sell it to the highest bidder that’s what.

Not only is the advertiser exposing its brand to the millions of visitors in the city, but also ensuring that it has a presence in the hundreds of millions of holiday snaps taken each day.

After all, I’ll never think of the Bridge of Sighs again without a fond memory of Coca-Cola.

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September 22nd, 2010 by Abbie Waller

Reality made the Notting Hill star?

Do you enjoy a good documentary? Look forward to a bit of reality TV? Obsessively check into social media channels? Well then Seven Days could be just the thing you’ve been waiting for.

Seven Days launches tonight and is Channel 4’s new documentary series which is claims will break down the old rules of reality TV and which it no doubts hopes will do for the next decade what Big Brother did for the last. There are 25 ‘contributors’ to the documentary/reality show who represent the ‘ordinary’ people living and working in Notting Hill. The contributors will be filmed over the course of seven days and on the final day an hour long show airing the preceding week’s activities will broadcast on Wednesday night.

So far, so what right? Well, here comes the social media bit…

Members of the public will be encouraged to interact with all the stars using an online service called ChatNav. ChatNav will collate social media conversations about the show (Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels are already up and running) to determine which characters the producers will focus on over the next seven days – popularity will be represented by the increasing (or decreasing) size of the characters image on the screen. For those with the smallest images, being eliminated from future filming is a very real possibility. In addition to determining the focus over the show, viewers will also have the power to comment on decisions the characters need to make in relation to their personal, social and work lives. According to Channel 4, this makes the viewer not just an editor, but an active participant.

Sounds like an interesting proposition and if it can mirror even a tenth of the popularity of Big Brother, it will do very well indeed. Let the experiment commence…

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August 19th, 2010 by Abbie Waller

Are you ashamed of your ‘cyber-self’?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been widely quoted in the media for some comments he made during an interview with the Wall Street Journal recently. Talking about the amount of information people freely share about themselves online without a second though, Mr. Schmidt stated that in the future people should be entitled to change their identity in order to escape their misspent youth – often recorded in excruciating detail online on sites such as Facebook.

This got me thinking – just how dangerous could that decade old photo showing me dancing on a table with a bottle of vodka and few inhibitions be to my future self? Will prospective employers overlook me? Will my possible future husband dump me? And if I suddenly become political and decide to run for Mayor, will I be laughed out of the voting booth?!

Image courtesy of nasrulekram

I can’t help thinking that just by taking a few small precautions – ticking the relevant privacy box and not accepting friendship requests from strangers – I’ll actually be alright in another decade’s time. A lot of scare stories are written up in the media at the moment but rather than telling people they should avoid social networks at all costs, shouldn’t we really just be focusing on how to use them sensibly? After all, I’m quite attached to my name and don’t really want to go through the hassle of adopting a whole new identity. If I change my mind though, marriage should allow me to hide a few misdemeanours at least…

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May 6th, 2010 by Abbie Waller

Free coffee and a little bit of vote rigging

I love Tossed – lots of delicious salads, soups, wraps and stews that have at one point or another helped most of the Speed contingent through a bleak lunchtime when another Pret sandwich simply won’t cut it.

In fact, I love it so much that I went online and joined its email newsletter database – and perhaps more to the point, I’ve actually stuck with it. Its humorous tone and snappy content means it’s a welcome arrival in my inbox and more to the point, its quite good at giving away free stuff. Not that I’m cheap or anything.

It seems that others share my love of Tossed as it has been nominated as a finalist in the food and drink category of Metro’s Venture Candy Awards. To help the company clinch the title, they have emailed their database offering a free coffee for anyone who can prove they’ve voted for them.

I’m slightly dubious about the morality behind essentially bribing your way to first place but I guess if Gordon Brown et al have taught us anything, it’s that sometimes you’ve got to whatever it takes to win.

Now, where’s my free coffee…

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February 3rd, 2010 by Abbie Waller

Twitter – what’s the f***ing point?

Sometimes those of us working in the communications industry can get a bit carried away with our own hype – shocking revelation I know. However, for me Twitter is an absolutely perfect example of this in action. A day does not go by when I’m not talking on or about Twitter and the media is always full of articles talking about how fast it is growing and how popular it is becoming. However, when I meet my friends outside the office, not a single one is on Twitter and I’m constantly being asked just what the point of it all is. Have we all become so carried away with our own hype that we’ve forgotten Twitter is still pretty much a niche tool whose column inches have allowed it to punch some way above its weight?

If Twitter is to achieve mainstream adoption, it still has one very important challenge to overcome – explaining to consumers just what exactly it is there for. Is it just a way to stalk celebrities and tell the world what you had for lunch or is there actually a valuable purpose lurking behind the hype? I’ll admit that it’s taken me some time to uncover what I believe the purpose to be (and I’ll happily admit this might not be the same for everyone) and move past my cynical beginnings.

For me, Twitter is all about knowledge. I can spend 10 minutes on Twitter in the morning and be completely up to date with all the news from around the world. I’ll often find out about breaking stories through Twitter and invariably I am the first one to share this with my friends. So, if you still don’t really understand why you should be on Twitter – just think about how intelligent you can look down the pub.

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January 28th, 2010 by Abbie Waller

Could targeted advertising save the media?

The Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger delivered his Cudlipp lecture this week in which he argued that putting editorial content behind paywalls would not deliver the golden bullet solution the media longs for. In fact, he argued that by setting up the firewalls, newspapers could risk losing up to 90% of their audience – an audience it seems he already has his eye on.

A bit of digging around on the internet and I came across an interesting article by NMA’s editor-in-chief Mike Nutley that got me thinking about how The Guardian could actually survive without a paywall. Could their saviour come in the form of sophisticated online advertising? Nutley has spent much time speaking with online publishers who argue that with even a slight increase in response rates, the value of online advertising would increase considerably and provide the revenue needed to keep newspapers afloat.

In theory it all sounds like a good idea. However, as Nutley rightly points out, consumer reaction to targeted advertising has in the past been somewhat sceptical to say the least. As a result, now more than ever, is the time for the targeting industry to step up and prove their critics wrong? If they can get the public on their side, maybe, just maybe, they could be the ones to save the online publishing industry.

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August 17th, 2009 by Abbie Waller

Social Workers bring in PR support to overcome media ignorance

Community Care's Stand Up Now for social work campaign

Community Care's Stand Up Now for social work campaign

The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) is soon to appoint its first ever public relation manager which is good news for both the social work profession and the media. A recent survey conducted by Community Care as part of their Stand Up Now for Social Work campaign, exposed some serious misunderstandings about the profession by leading journalists. Fewer than half of journalists realised a social worker needed a degree to practice and 68% failed to understand the difference between a social worker and a care worker. If this is the level of misunderstanding about the profession by journalists who are responsible for communicating news to the wider community, it is not surprising that the public reputation of social workers is so low.

However the lack of balanced coverage of the profession in the media is by no means just the result of media misunderstanding. Social workers simply do not have the time to speak with the press and when they are dealing with several serious cases at any one time, do not prioritise doing so. If they stop talking to the press, pretty soon the press will stop asking them and their voice will be lost. With the appointment of a dedicated press liaison officer, social workers will have the opportunity to regain this voice. Offering positive stories and access to the views of social workers, will hopefully lead to a much more balanced and accurate media profile for this much undervalued public sector service. The best of luck to whoever takes on this new role.

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