Speed celebrates its first anniversary today.
To commemorate this milestone we’re organising a ‘school reunion’-style party on Tuesday 23 March for all the people that have ever worked for any of the businesses that make-up Speed.
The format will be after work at our office in Leicester Square from 6.30pm. We’ll provide the food, drinks and music.
We’d really love you to come along – please drop us an email if you can make it.
As you might have spotted in PR Week, Speed recently launched a new five-person team, headed up by Ruth Jones.
The Fast Growth Technology Markets team is focused on developing communication strategies for companies that are moving into the next hot technology cycle, including areas such as virtualisation, cloud computing and unified communications.
If you’d like to find out more, feel free to drop Ruth an email.
There aren’t many agencies that have got the audacity to launch in a recession, merge five teams together and enter an award searching for the best consultancy to work for in the UK. Speed did it and was last month named as the Best U.K. Consultancy to Work For by The Holmes Report.
Here’s what they had to say:
Over the past year, lots of people have asked us about the inspiration behind our branding and the ink that splashes across our website. Thevisual identity of our site was developed with the help of Jason Tozer, aphotographer based in London who specialises in shooting objects in motion.
The ink splashes on our home page are influenced by the work of Japanese contemporary artist Shinichi Maruyama. In commissioning this original work our intention was to capture the tradition of print and the modernity of modern communication.
The result was a dynamic, fluid response to the brief and is used throughout the website, marketing materials and branding.
Stick Speed into Google. Go on. I dare you.
If you’re in the UK you’ll find us ranked in the top three. If you’re in the US you’ll find us ranked in the top six. The results speak for themselves.
Speed ranks ahead of the amphetamine of the same name and the 90’s movie staring Keanu Reeves. We think that’s incredible for such a common generic word.
Speed is a modern communications consultancy that has cracked the management of reputation in traditional media, online and in social networks.
We can create powerful content that will drive engagement and we’ve built the planning and measurement tools needed to identify the channels that will generate the best results for our clients and enhance their reputation.
Our network of blogs updated daily by Speed staff has proven to be particularly popular inthe last year. Here’s a round up of the posts that have generated the biggest buzz. Enjoy!
Well you have to change occasionally don’t you?
Speed Briefs has been upgraded for 2010. A literary lick of paint. More accessible, more welcoming, a more comfortable and pleasing experience all round. Not that it was bad, but we can always do better.
Why would you want to know what’s going on at a PR agency? Well you may prefer it to us pestering you with calls. And you always say you need to keep on top of things in the PR world but never have the time. So consider it a bit of public service, a moral duty if you will. You might even enjoy it.
Social Media Week takes place around the world next week. Governments are behind it. It’s about stroking the soft underbelly of our creative and media industries for financial gain. We’re hosting a show-and-tell breakfast on Thursday at our office on Leicester Square as part of the London effort.
This is quite an honour, as only really progressive agencies get to host it (providing they lay on good muffins). We’ll be talking about cutting through the hot air surrounding the PR potential of social media and telling how it really is, within the bigger picture of how conventional and social media co-exist. But you didn’t expect us to sit on the fence did you?
The inconvenient truth about PR spam: exposed
Speed is backing an industry initiative to address the issue of PR spam. We’re all aware of the issue but this proactive effort is a bid to tackle the 1.7 billion irrelevant press releases sent each year. We did think about spamming a press release about our commitment out to 1.7 billion people, but instead click here to find out more.
We launched our first Christmas Quiz last month and the response was overwhelming, so we’ve brought it back as a weekly feature. Follow @speedcomms and every Friday at midday we’ll tweet a question. To take part simply send an @ reply with your answer. The winner will be randomly chosen at the end of the day and will be announced on the Speed Blogs and on Twitter on the following Monday morning. When we say randomly chosen, we don’t mean this is a fix. All’s fair.
We’ve got a whole host of prizes in the pipeline – from packets of Skittles to swanky nights out on the town. So far lucky winners @maxicom and @ashswindells have won a zorbing experience and a case of wine.
Praxis is a specialist in critical system engineering. Part of the global Altran group and headquartered in Bath, its skills are in demand where safety and security are paramount. Clients include Renault F1, UK National Air Traffic Services (NATS), London Underground and US National Security Agency. Speed has been working with Praxis for over a year, raising its profile across the engineering and vertical markets.
As part of its global expansion, Praxis merged in January 2010 with fellow Altran company and French embedded software innovator, SC2. Combining the skillset of both organisations creates a strong player in the embedded and critical systems sector, spanning markets from aerospace to nuclear and automotive.
Speed was tasked with launching the new organisation – Altran Praxis to the press through a targeted campaign. By creating stories that showed the importance of the merger for the engineering market and highlighting prominent customers the team successfully arranged a full day of press briefings, with company Managing Director, Keith Williams speaking to 11 journalists. Coverage from local to international press has been flooding in, demonstrating that the UK press still has an appetite for good news stories.
