Steve and myself are out and about speaking at the following events in the next month or so:
14 April – Social media and the media
Strategic Social Media London, Westminster
21 May – Anti-social media
Social Media in Business, Richmond/London
20 and 24 May – The great print debates
PIRA, Birmingham
Do give us a shout if you’re attending any of these events. It would be great to catch-up for a coffee or a beer.
Here’s a quick review of some of the content from across the Speed blog network this week.
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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?
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.
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.
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.”
Spokespeople don’t come much bigger than Sir Richard Branson, who last night fronted the launch of Virgin Media Business, speaking to customers, media and staff at the launch event at The Collection, South Kensington, London.
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Here’s a write up from Mark Kobayashi-Hillary who attended the Speed Social Media Week breakfast this morning.
Thanks Mark.
Social Media Week has generated some criticism in recent days, unfairly in my view, for the saturation of events.
Undoubtedly the market is overhyped and is approaching bubble-like proportions. An element of the industry is taking on the hallmarks of a cult with self-proclaimed gurus ranking their prowess by follower numbers on Facebook and Twitter.
But a series of events that shines a spotlight on the market and its emerging potential can only be a good thing. And for the 120-odd people that attended events at 33 Digital, Porter Novelli and Speed this morning I hope it was worthwhile. I’ve never known a time when the PR industry has been so open and willing to share ideas.
We called our breakfast event this morning ‘No More Hot Air’ because social media is characterised by lots of talk and little action. We used it as an opportunity to showcase work across the agency on behalf of clients such as The Economist, Interoute and Tesco.
Social media doesn’t change the way in which human beings communicate. You can see social networks in action 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 the landlady.
It’s not a fundamental change in how people communicate but it is a fundamental change for business.
The conventional approach of media relations no longer works alone – the media for communicating with the audience are 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. For their part PR agencies have taken three distinct approaches to social media:
12-months ago we embarked on a ruthless training camp across the business covering monitoring, planning, content development, networks and measurement.
It’s a process that will be ongoing for the next 18 months at least. But it’s critical to the future of the business. My personal belief is that if you work in the PR industry and want to continue working in the industry you need to equip yourself with digital skills.
We are delighted to be hosting a breakfast briefing at our offices in Leicester Square on Thursday 4 February from 8am as part of Social Media Week: London organised by Chinwag.
Over breakfast we’ll show you the role that we believe PR and communications has to play within a social media strategy and each of our teams will share their practical experience of delivering programmes via blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We’ll also give you a whistle stop tour of recent work that we’ve delivered for clients such as The Economist, Symantec and Tesco.
Interested? Visit the Social Media Week booking site for more information and to sign-up. Its free to attend.
Our breakfast is just one event taking place during the week in London – and indeed worldwide. Parallel Social Media Week conferences take place simultaneously in multiple cities around the world. The aim of each event is to advance the use and understanding of social media in the corporate, public and non-profit sectors.
Diffusion’s Dave Ross-Tomlin and Speed’s Chris McCcrudden talk to PR Week about Google’s new Nexus One smart phone.
Help us countdown to Christmas. The Speed gang has devised a Twitter media quiz to entertain and delight you during the last 12 working days before Christmas. Follow @speedcomms and at midday each day we’ll tweet a media question from 2009.
Each day one of the correct responses will be picked and random and the respondent will receive a fantastic prize from the fairies atop the Speed Christmas tree. The answer to the day’s question and the winner will be announced via @speedcomms.
Festive prizes naturally include plenty of booze, chocolate and maybe even a turkey!
