February 26th, 2010 by Wadds

Welcoming @danhowe

I am delighted to welcome Canadian Dan Howe (@danhowe) to the Speed crew. He joined the tech team this week to bring his digital comms prowess to bear for Symantec and Virgin Media Business, among others.

Here’s a Q&A and dodgy snap that has just done the rounds of our internal newsletter. I thought it worthy of a wider audience.

Welcome Dan. Its really great to have you on board.

Q. Why isn’t Canada part of America, wouldn’t that be simpler?

A. It couldn’t happen. There are too many distinct cultural differences like poutine, beaver tail, touques and the metric system. Besides, Canada plays an important role as America’s hat.

Q. Who has most caught your eye at Speed so far?

A. John Brown (@brownbare) and his warm, welcoming smile.

Q. If you bumped into Ashley Cole in a pub tonight, what would you say to him?

A. I’m a bit ignorant when it comes to British celebs, I had to Google him. Perhaps I could ask for some mobile phone photography tips.

Q. What has been your biggest career embarrassment to date?

A. A dodgy webmail error caused journalists and bloggers to receive the same press release numerous times. It resulted in a lot of funny email exchanges and a #danhowe tag in my name, but I managed to turn it around and even secure a few briefings. The client thought the whole event was hilarious. No really.

Q. What, in your humble opinion, is the weirdest thing about British people?

A. Umbrellas and wellies when it snows. Do you know how silly you look?

Posted in PR
Tags: ,
3 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 25th, 2010 by Wadds

PR Week FourSquare podcast: addressing personal privacy issues, brand promotion and protection

33 Digital’s Drew Benvie and I participated in this week’s PR Week podcast. During the conversation we discussed how brands can promote their business on FourSquare, protect their reputation and privacy issues.

The podcast resulted from personal privacy concerns that have had FourSquare on the offensive in the last week following the launch of PleaseRobMe.com a mash-up that tracks the movement of individuals on FourSquare and overlays images and Google Maps.

Issues of personal privacy have arisen with almost every new generation of personal technology: voicemail advertises that you aren’t at home; away-from-email auto-messages advertise that you’re on holiday. If a criminal wants to rob you there are very easy ways of tracking down whether or you’re at home.

FourSquare is currently a niche social network (300 brands and 300,000 users worldwide). It’s the first generation of a platform that combines a mechanism for brand promotion with physical location and social networking. Whether it succeeds or fails alternatives will almost certain arise.

Here are the five the promotion and reputation opportunities that we spotlighted during the podcast for brands on FourSquare:

  • Presence – if you have a physical presence (retail premise, office location etc) share it with FourSquare to ensure that you are correctly represented on the network
  • Reputation – Monitor your locations on FourSquare for tips left by visitors (good and bad reviews) and your Mayor
  • Engagement – If you’re a retail operator that uses price promotion or loyalty schemes as a means of marketing consider extending your offers to FourSquare
  • Promotion – If one your brand values is innovation consider the PR benefits of being one of the first brands to use FourSquare as a marketing platform for bespoke campaign
  • Measurement – track usage to determine return on investment and determine the value of engagement and promotion
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted in Media, Social media
Tags: , ,
2 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 24th, 2010 by Wadds

The Speed school reunion

Speed celebrates its first anniversary in March.

We’re organising a reunion party on Tuesday 23 March – think of it as a school reunion for the BMA, Custard, Lighthouse, Mantra, Rainier PR alumni. A chance for you to laugh at how old everyone looks now.

The format will be after work at the office in Leicester Square from 6.30pm. We’ll fix-up drink, food and music. We’d love you to come – please drop me an email or leave a comment if you can make it – and pass this on to those to any of the old gang.

Posted in PR
Tags: ,
22 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 24th, 2010 by Wadds

Speed launches fast growth technology team led by Ruth Jones

Please shout, clap and cheer as we announce that Speed’s Ruth Jones has taken up a new role leading a team focused on Fast Growth Technology markets. We’re also delighted to make room at the boardroom table for her straight talking brand of Yorkshire comment.

Ruth’s five-person team will be focused on developing communication strategies for companies moving into the next hot technology cycle, including areas such as virtualisation, cloud computing and unified communications.

Congratulations Ruth. Bring it on.

Posted in Business, PR
Tags: , ,
4 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 23rd, 2010 by Wadds

Investor communication improving in response to shareholder activism

Shareholder activism is forcing the senior management of public companies to become more open and better skilled at communicating with their institutional shareholders. This is the view of Co-operative Asset Management’s Abigail Herron, speaking last week at the CIPR Reputation Management conference in Manchester.

Herron, who is herself no stranger to calling the boards of public companies to account, cited the recent case whereby investors have successfully tabled questions at the forthcoming Shell Annual General Meeting in May about its approach to Canada’s tar sands.

In the past 12 months protests from vocal shareholders have resulted in the remuneration proposals for senior executives to be rejected at Provident Financial, Bellway, Shell, Punch and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted in Business, Media, PR
5 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 23rd, 2010 by Wadds

Show support for Bullying UK in case of mistaken identity

Bullying UK got unintentionally caught up in yesterday’s No 10 bullying row in a case of mistaken identity. Vikki Chowney and David Cushman have the full story.

“This genuine and effective charity has been tarred with a very nasty and impactful brush. Some of its would-be clients – many of them vulnerable school kids – have been put off by the fear that their confidentiality will be breached,” says David.

I hope that the media and political organisations that are jumping on the anti-bullying bandwagon will see their way to making a donation to Bullying UK. It’s got a big job to do to restore confidence.

Bullying UK has very deliberately avoided soliciting donations to the extent that it posted a message to this effect on Twitter last night. Fair enough – the last thing it wants is to be accused of opportunism.

But like David I’m a firm believer in its work (I’ve worked through its really excellent guidelines with my older kids) and recognise the reputational issues that its faces and so have pitched in a few quid to help out.

It would be great if you could too.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted in Media, Social media
Tags: , , , ,
6 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 22nd, 2010 by Wadds

Reputation Online: ‘Blogging is broken’

Here’s an article that I’ve written for Reputation Online based on the content from the corporate blogging workshop that I ran last week at the CIPR Reputation Management conference.

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: , ,
7 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 20th, 2010 by Wadds

Show me the money: PR salaries

Never one to shy away from straight talking my oppo Steve Earl spotlighted yesterday how you can improve your chances of a salary rise if you work for a PR agency.

“There are […] three levers in a PR agency: staff costs, overheads and profit. That is it. These aren’t complex businesses,” says Earl.

  • The money must be there – growing businesses have more room to flex their staffing costs; demonstrate your ability to win and grow business
  • Benchmark salary levels – seek out your agency’s salary scales versus roles and skills – and build your skills. If this data doesn’t exist within your business you’ll get it from any industry recruiter
  • If you’re a specialist your earning potential will erode over time as your specialism becomes a mainstream skill – enjoy the wave but in the short-to-medium terms agencies must skill-up across the board

Check out Steve’s post in full. Its well worth a read and could even make you some money.

Posted in Business, PR
Tags: , , , , , ,
2 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 18th, 2010 by Wadds

CIPR Corporate Reputation blogging workshop

Here’s my presentation from the CIPR Reputation Management conference which took place at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester today.

I led a workshop on corporate blogging that examined why blogging was broken amongst UK corporate organisations, looked at examples of good corporate UK blogs, examined how to generate authentic content and the process required to kick start a corporate blog.

Many thanks to Ged Carroll, Stephen Davies and Rob Fenwick for their help in putting the session together. And to Speed’s Caroline Allen and Clare English.

Stephen Waddington Corporate Blogging
Posted in Business, PR, Social media
Tags: , , , , , , ,
13 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 16th, 2010 by Wadds

Earl on Trolley Dolly duty as Speed named Best UK Consultancy to Work For

Posted in Business
Tags: , ,
2 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 16th, 2010 by Wadds

Speed Named Best U.K. Consultancy to Work For

The Holmes Report has named Speed the Best U.K. Consultancy to Work For. Here’s what the Holmes Report has to say.

One of Speed’s predecessor firms, Rainier PR, won our Best U.K. Consultancy to Work For Award in 2005 and 2006 and managing directors Stephen Waddington and Steve Earl have clearly brought their magic touch to Speed, which beat out more than 40 firms to be named number one in the U.K. this year.

The firm’s pursuit of workplace excellence begins with its recruitment process, which makes use of a mixture of digital (Twitter, LinkedIn and the blogosphere) and traditional recruitment methods to find people who fit the culture. The firm offers a structured mentoring programme, with all new employees paired with a company director, and a training programme that draws on the broad expertise of parent company Loewy Group, with the company CEO providing personal one-on-one coaching as well as larger group training on anything from review processes to line management. Employees also enjoy a high degree of autonomy when it comes to achieving their client and professional development objectives, and are trusted to do so whether working at home or in the office. The firm is open about all management and financial decisions, and conducts a bi-annual staff Satisfaction Survey to solicit feedback, sharing findings with employees.

“Since re-launching as Speed in March, we have come such as long way and achieved so much, without any of the negative issues that I imagine might face merging companies,” says one respondents. Others share that enthusiasm: “Speed has launched with a passion and it is a strong and growing agency. It has developed a good work ethic and has a genuinely good set of employees who bring a range of skills to the workplace.” The bottom line: “I feel we have a real identity, common objectives and a hard working but relaxed environment in which to work to achieve our goals.”

Posted in PR
Tags: , ,
12 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 15th, 2010 by Wadds

Experiment: using Google Insight to predict company revenues

How good are your planning skills? Would you be prepared to put your money where your mouse is and buy shares in a company that you identified as a good investment prospect?

I doubt that many people would. But this could be the outcome of a project driven by Google Insight. Wikinut founder Andy Walton posted a comment about his experiment after I blogged about the application of Google Insight to identify the likely success of a campaign.

Walton’s contention is that Google Insights can be used to link search volumes to product usage and revenue for brands that [are] unique enough to avoid cross over with unrelated searches.

“The ability to query Google’s massive store of historical search query information offers many possibilities, one of which is accurate prediction of online company revenues,” he says.

Walton has compared the historical revenues for Bwin against search volumes since 2004 and with the exception of one year has found a correlation. He has used this match to predict the likely outcome for 2009.

“The 2009 prediction is showing -7%, indicating a tough year for Bwin, which is a bold prediction given at the third quarter mark they were 3.5% ahead of 2008,” said Walton.

We’ll have to wait until Bwin announces its results in April to find out if his methodology stacks.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted in Social media
Tags: , ,
5 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 15th, 2010 by Wadds

Discovering the Monument

Richmond Park, the Natural History Museum and its bedfellow the Science Museum, and the Columbia Road Flower Market are all among my family’s favourite places in London where a trip out needn’t cost a fortune.

We added another to the list this weekend: The Monument to the Great Fire of London in the City at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street. The haul up the 311 steps makes for hard work but the panoramic views of landmarks such as the BT Tower, the Gherkin, the London Eye and Tower Bridge are breathtaking.

Only the views from the top of the dome at the nearby St Paul’s Cathedral come close but that’ll cost you an admission fee of £12.50 for adults and £4.50 for children – compared to £3 and £1 respectively to climb the Monument.

The simple Doric column is topped by a flaming urn of copper symbolising the Great Fire. It is 202 ft high which by design is exactly the distance from the base of the Monument to where Great Fire of London started on Pudding Lane in 1666.

The Monument has given its name to the nearby tube station (Central, Circle, District, Northern, Waterloo and City and Docklands Light Railway) and was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke and built in 1671. It reopened almost 12 months ago after a £4.5 million refurbishment.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted in Interesting
Tags: , ,
2 Comments »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 14th, 2010 by Wadds

Haiti Flickr filter one month on

Donate to the rescue effort via the Disasters Emergency Committee Earthquake appeal.

Posted in Social media
Tags: , ,
1 Comment »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
February 14th, 2010 by Wadds

Anti-Valentine’s Day Yo! Sushi poster

Smooching couples were banned at Yo! Sushi in St Pauls, London, on Valentine’s Day.

Posted in Business, Interesting
Tags: , , , ,
1 Comment »
emailAdd to del.icio.usDigg This!Share on FacebookStumble It!
« Older Entries