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October 15th, 2010 by Gerry Grewal

‘Bobby on the tweet’ social media campaign hits the right note

The Greater Manchester Police 24-hour tweeting experiment is getting a lot of attention for very good reasons. It’s tapped into the nationwide annoyance about the ineffectiveness of the UK’s public sector services. And then flipped it on its head. The Greater Manchester Police Service have suddenly become national heroes of sorts (at the moment, at least).

Yes, it was clearly a public relations exercise first and foremost, with even the chief constable using words like perception and reality in his remarks. However, what makes it interesting from a social media/PR perspective is that

the campaign has been created from the outset to use the internet to get mass awareness in tandem with conventional, geographically-targeted media like the Manchester Evening News to communicate locally?

It’s a very clever move. The story, for its ingenuity, has gone national – on social networks and offline. At this very moment, Manchester Police is the top trending topic on Twitter (11.30am 15 October), closely followed by Sir Cliff Richard who turns 70 this week.

Interestingly, few of the post analytical comments on Twitter/Facebook have been from people in Manchester. And if the objective of the campaign were to shift the needle in terms of local perceptions of the police service – has it really met its aims?

I’d argue that engaging the ‘wrong’ audience is just a necessary by-product of this sort of campaign. Particularly, at a time when emergency services are getting a lot of stick. By elevating it to a national level, Manchester Police have not only highlighted the sheer variety and number of incidents they have to deal with on a daily basis, but it’s made us as citizens think more carefully about how all the emergency services are under extreme pressure in the face of impending budget cuts. A smart social media experiment, with a clear message at its heart.

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October 8th, 2010 by Gerry Grewal

Death knells for the traditional hub-and-spoke model?

At the PRCA’s annual conference on 4th of November, one of the panel discussions will focus on the challenges of global communications in today’s socially connected, digitally savvy world. It may not be a topic to set people’s hearts on fire, but it is an interesting debate nonetheless.

One of the industry’s major problems is that the way PR agencies manage their international PR campaigns hasn’t changed for more than 20 years. The traditional hub-and-spoke model was originally designed to align PR activity around a client’s global reporting processes and sales and marketing functions. But it’s not effective today when agility and flexibility are critical.

For example, in this old model, the lead agency creates the plan, talks through it with the local countries and creates different flavours dependent on what might work best regionally. The hub agency then goes away and develops content and materials centrally for local distribution and then starts the process of collating reports on progress and results. In this scenario, the hub agency requires two or three weeks to make the plan watertight, and considerably more time to report back. In the social media world, there simply isn’t the luxury of time. Every agency within the network needs to be on the same page, at the same time.

Even more apparent, is that where network management may have previously been divided based on geographical and cultural boundaries, today, audiences are now much more aligned to common interests. So perhaps global PR campaigns might be better aligned by customer segmentation than by geography? It would be a new and interesting model, and perhaps far more fruitful.

So does this mean the days of big international PR agencies running the global show are over? Maybe. What’s certainly clear is that there’s no longer a need to be hampered by geography. A campaign, in theory, can be run effectively from any locality – from Spain or Italy, for example, other than out of the UK, providing the right skills and expertise are available locally.

There’s certainly no need to be tied to a rigid reporting structure anymore.

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September 17th, 2010 by Gerry Grewal

What's your experience of Facebook Places today?

 

As my good colleague Dan Howe has just pointed out in his previous post, Facebook Places today launched in the UK. This is BIG news for facebook users as you’ll be able to share your location and what you’re doing with your friends, family, colleagues (and other assorted connections you’ve acquired through the years) , via an iPhone app. Unlike, FourSquare, there is no incentive for users to ‘check-in’, places is simply a tool for sharing your location with your friends – in theory, you’ll find out about the latest bars, get good recommendations for local retaurants, and things to do, be able to have impromtu drinks with friends etc. So far so good.

How useful this will be to PR campaigns remains to be seen. When I logged into Places this morning, just four people from my network of about 250 had ‘checked in’. Two of those were ‘checked in at random roads (probably on their way to work) and one logged on at High Barnet Station. It’s highly rivetting stuff. Yes, yes, it’s early days, but I’d be intrgued to find out what other people’s experience of it has been so far.

Have you ‘checked in’ to Places today?

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May 10th, 2010 by Gerry Grewal

Why don’t staff love workplace collaboration tools?

Stuart Roberts in a recent Silicon.com article asks why so many organisations fail to translate people’s love for social networking into the widespread use of workplace collaboration tools.

He makes a great point. One of the biggest reasons is that IT departments rarely, if ever, first ask employees what tools would be useful and secure buy in before something gets deployed.

At Speed Towers over the past month or so, we’ve tested a number of online collaboration tools, both free and paid for, with clients and for internal projects. Overall, we think they can be highly useful depending on the project and there are some fantastic tools out there, but equally there were some which left us feeling flat and frustrated. (Contact me directly if you want to know what we REALLY thought of them!).

We’ve outlined some likes and dislikes below based on our collective thoughts.

Likes:

• Some of the tools are excellent at helping you communicate with clients, suppliers and colleagues who can’t access the same shared server; They could bring significant productivity savings for companies who regularly work with partners or suppliers outside of their IT network. We think that makes them particularly useful for PR and marketing people who can be working with multiple parties on various projects

• Most are relatively quick and easy to set up, and many offer free packages so you can trial them on smaller projects first – which we’d certainly encourage!

• Some of the online collaboration tools we tried are pretty intuitive to use. However, some are a little bit clunky. Again, trialing some of the free tools will help you get a better understanding for what’s likely to work best for you

Dislikes:

• Our biggest bugbear was with one collaboration tool which routinely failed to save changes to the documents which had been inputted by different users. This created confusion and made the process more time consuming than it needed to be. We’d suggest trialling a few different collaboration tools on a test run first, before choosing one for an important project

• Some are tools are worryingly user unfriendly. We were actually surprised that vendors haven’t created templates for workspaces to make the process easier for people who might think of trialling them. For example, for a PR or marketing consultant, an events template could be highly useful.

If you any contributions of your own please let us know.

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April 23rd, 2010 by Gerry Grewal

Digital PR demands discipline

There can’t be a PR agency in the UK that doesn’t have clients who remain snow blinded by social media. They know the internet offers a world of new opportunities for the creation and sustenance of positive influence and engagement, yet they don’t know where to start or where the best routes to value lie.

Social media doesn’t change the way in which human beings communicate. If anything it offers the potential to simplify communication by cutting out ‘the middle man.’ You can see social networks in action around the bar in a pub every day. And in this context the person with the most influence and the greatest reputation is not a Facebook geek, but landlady stood behind the bar.

The conventional approach of media relations no longer works alone. The media required to engage with an audience is now diverse: print media, social media, all kinds of media. And all of this is not only confusing, it’s bloody difficult.

We’ve seen the rise of specialist social media or word-of-mouth agencies to address this emerging opportunity. They have a role, but it is just one piece of the new jigsaw. More traditional firms have attempted to drag their antiquated techniques into online environment creating confusion in their wake.

PR agencies have taken three distinct approaches to social media:

- The creation of a team to focus exclusively on social media programmes. Potentially short term, not inclusive and creates a silo of expertise

- Hiring a high profile individual or small team to handle digital assignments. Likewise not inclusive and silos expertise

- Building skills throughout the organisation and integrating digital into a client’s campaign where it’s appropriate – Speed’s gig

The PR industry is undergoing a radical modernisation. If you work in the PR industry and want to continue working in the industry you need to equip yourself with digital skills in order to help clients integrate digital PR into their broader communication effort.

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March 11th, 2010 by Gerry Grewal

Who should pick up the Nobel prize on behalf of the 'Internet'?

The internet is among a record 237 individuals and organisations nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, championed by the Italian version of Wired magazine. PR stunt? Probably. But given Barak Obama was awarded the prize last year, anything is possible…

If it does indeed win it will be the first time an inanimate object has been awarded the prestigious prize. But who would pick up the award? Whilst no one person can truly be credited, here are some possible suggestions:

– Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee seems an obvious choice. A British engineer, computer scientist and MIT professor credited with inventing the world wide web

– Leonard Kleinrock was the first person to write a paper on the idea of packet switching which is essential for the Internet to work

– Larry G. Roberts created the first functioning long-distance computer networks in 1965 and designed the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the seed from which the modern Internet grew, in 1966

– Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which moves data on the modern Internet, in 1972 and 1973. If any two people “invented the Internet,” it was Kahn and Cerf – but they have publically stated that “no one person or group of people” invented the Internet

Who do you think should pick up the prize?

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March 10th, 2010 by Gerry Grewal

It's a (wo)man's world

We had a bit of a desk shuffle at Speed towers this week, and suddenly I find I’m the only woman on my pod, surrounded by a team of testosterone filled men.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love it. I love the blokish banter (in fact, the niche dating web site blog from earlier this week was as a direct output of it), there are no occasional emotional outbursts (unless they’re originating from me) and they’re not that bad at making tea either.  To make it all the more interesting, I’m the boss (okay, joint head of the technology team here at Speed).  Now what I wondered is, is it really that unusual for a woman to be the boss of a team of men in today’s tech PR industry? I’d like to think things have moved on, but I suspect that in far too many PR agencies it’s men who land the top jobs – for whatever reason.

I really do hope things are changing, as it’s quite good fun from where I’m sitting…

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February 1st, 2010 by Gerry Grewal

My wings are a shield of steel…

You can only imagine my horror when my talk of Batfink in a brainstorm this morning was met by blank faces from the younger Speedsters.

However, after some careful research I have now educated the team and am pleased to announce that due to a revival on CBBC this need not be a problem in the future. PHEW

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December 8th, 2009 by Gerry Grewal

Thank you very much

After the Royal Parks Half MarathonIt’d be fair to say I’m a bit tired as the end of 2009 draws in.  On Sunday 6th December I completed a 4k run – the last in my year of running.

For some strange and unusual reason at the start of this year I set out to run as many 5orgnaised runs as I could fit in. At first I was aiming for 5k or 10k distnaces…then Sophie Hodgson convinced me to chuck a half marathon in there.

As extra motivation I opted to do it all in the name of “charidee”. Supporting my local residential cancer hospice, Isabel Hospice who do an amazing job, which I have unfortunately seen up close and personal, and Cancer Research UK.

Despite times being tough everyone has been very generous and I’m delighted to say I’ve raised some pretty good funds this year for my local hospice, and Cancer Research.

Here are my vital stats for 2009:

- Officially ran 55.6 miles 

- Officially walked 10 miles
 
- Longest run – 13.1 miles
 
- Did a whole lot more in the name of training
 
- Raised £1,135 for Isabel Hospice
 
- Raised £500 for Cancer Research
 
- Gave up alcohol for 4 months in total!! (poss the biggest achievement of all)
 
Thanks again to EVERYONE who supported me.
 
Now what to do in 2010?
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