the comms team credit matrix... or the damned if you do, damned if you don't theorem

You know that sinking feeling you get when someone wants a comms plan but doesn't actually have a plan themselves? Don't worry. You're not alone...

by Eddie Coates-Madden

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy”. 

Sometimes it just seems to be the role of the comms and marketing team to try to make the best of somebody else’s bad job.

I suspect that anyone who has ever worked in a local authority comms team has, at least once, found themselves looking at a 'client' who has just announced the launch of something, almost certainly in the next few days, and is now demanding a ‘marketing plan’.

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speech writing and 'the vision thing'

So, what happens when you need to write a speech? For someone else? And your words can help win the day... or lose it? Here are some tips.

by Will Mapplebeck

It's 1987 and then vice president George H.W Bush is starting to think about the possibility of taking over from Ronald Reagan as the occupant of the White House. 

There's an election to get through, but most analysts agree he's a shoo-in for the big job.

Only one problem, he's not sure what his presidency might look like.

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how a cute dog meme helps scoop up a sticky comms problem

It's a tricky problem and something that people regularly complain about. Dog poo. But how do you communicate it? With an internet meme. A pic with a message that's easily sharable.

by Helen Reynolds

One person's dog poo is another person's gold.  When a few weeks ago I was asked to think of something for social media to encourage dog owners to stop leaving their dog's poo around I knew we had a great opportunity to get people talking.

Nobody likes stepping in a dog poo.  A few weeks ago I was on a date and I stood in the same poo outside my house twice. Embarrassing! 

So this weekend we've been trying to make people smile and make dog owners think about their responsibilities by sharing pictures of dogs (kindly offered by my friends on Facebook) with funny captions I added with an app on my phone. We tried to have fun with the story on our website too and our local paper and BBC Radio Wales carried the story.

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how a police force used lego and youtube to tell a story

Christmas crime-awareness messages. They can be a bit dull, can't they? What, when we're out looking to have fun? Well, West Midlands Police turned to Lego to help get their message out.

by Peter Edney


As part of our Christmas crime prevention campaign we launched a special festive Lego animation on our YouTube channel over the weekend.

Every Christmas we look for new and innovative ways to share important messages to as many people as possible during the festive season.

This year I had the idea of creating a Lego animation that we could share across social media to add a bit of fun to a serious message.

More than anything we want everyone to take steps to secure their homes properly and deter burglars. One aspect of that is to advise everyone not to leave piles of presents under the Christmas tree where they are visible through windows and doors and could be inviting to opportunistic thieves.

The animation itself, which was made out of work time at no cost to the force, is made up of more than 500 photos which were taken on two mobile devices using an app called Clayframes (link) which then stitched them together to bring the characters to life. 

The app was very simple to use (I’d never created an animation before, which you can probably tell from a few rogue bits of movement!) and the final video, which took around 10 hours to complete, was then edited by a colleague to add the ‘special effects’.

We decided to launch the video on Sunday morning with the view that Sunday afternoons/evenings are busy on social media – particularly with the X-Factor Final and Sports Personality on TV in the evening.

We also ensured that someone was covering our Facebook and Twitter accounts all day on Sunday up until Midnightso that we could engage with everyone who was sharing the video.

This was followed up on Monday by sharing the video far and wide with all of our Twitter users, media, blogs and local partners to maximise the reach. Less than 48 hours after going live it has now been seen by more than 25,000 people on our YouTube channel.

For more information about West Midlands Police follow @WMPolice on Twitter, to see the video visitwww.youtube.com/WestMidlandsPolice

Peter Edney works in West Midlands Police corporate communications department.

Picture credit.

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campaigns that made a difference, and one that should have

I was listening to Public Enemy’s ‘Harder than you think’ recently, and it took me straight back to the summer of 2012.

by Julie Waddicor

‘Harder than you think’ was the iconic song used by Channel 4 for its ‘Meet the Superhumans’ campaign for the Paralympics. Now, that was a truly outstanding bit of marketing. Yes, they had huge budgets and yes, they had blanket TV coverage, the like of which we in local government can only dream of. But fundamentally, some bright spark had the creative vision to identify the people taking part in the Paralympics as super-human, rather than defined by their disability, and to use a song with the line ‘Thank you for letting us be ourselves’.

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a campaign that reached 1,000 tweets an hour

When a housing comms officer wondered if a Twitter event about public housing would work he floated the idea on Twitter and sought support. It painted a picture of the work that went on in the sector and the people who work in it. And yes, it worked with the #housingday hashtag trending on Twitter.

By Adrian Capon 

On 13 November the UK Housing industry used 140 characters to tweet about the work that goes on every day, singing off a single hash tag hymn sheet - #HousingDay

In the build up to the day, there was significant support and promotion from across the housing UK Twitter universe. Announcements were made on Comms2Point0 and our Yorkshire Housing Communications team blog. The media via Guardian Housing, 24 Dash, and Inside Housing featured the day. The National Federation of Housing, Chartered Institute of Housing, Northern Housing Consortium and Tenants Advisory Service proceeded the day with tweets and emailing news about the day to members.

It’s fair to say they got right behind #HousingDay.

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how marketing campaigns are the key to channel shift

Channel shift. That's the art of getting people to move from expensive ways of dealing with an organisation to cheaper and more effective ways. What role does comms play in this? Actually, a really important one.

by Andrew Bennett

There are significant savings to be made from channel shift with plenty of councils fully behind the digital transformation revolution, but moving your services online is just half the battle.

If your customers don’t start using the channel how are you going to reap the rewards that channel shift is capable of bringing? Creating compelling take-up campaigns is the answer and it’s not that difficult.

The following ideas are taken from Gandlake’s channel shift customers and have been successful in ensuring significant numbers select the web as the channel of choice.

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the campaign is not dead

Is the campaign dead? Should we not think about what we do 52-weeks a year? Or is there merit in shining a light on an issue?

by GUEST EDITOR Emma Rodgers

A while ago, top blogger and US Public Health specialist Jim Garrow wrote a post on ‘death to the campaign’. 

In it he talks about campaign focussed communications working against our aim of affecting real change for two reasons:  

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tweet today #housingday

Today over a 24 hour period we’re urging all those involved in housing from landlords, tenants, suppliers and workers to share their ‘day in the life’ stories using 140 characters on Twitter.

By GUEST EDITOR Adrian Capon

The idea to raise the profile of UK Housing from a tweetathon was ignited by the success of various initiatives #Walsall24, Greater Manchester Police and Local Government #Ourday. I first blogged about this here.

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when social media can be a career killer

 Can you name five female public relations agency heads?  That was they questioned posed by PR Week before naming just four women. Thankfully, PR Week didn’t  explain away the shortfall of women in top tier posts with the old cliché of “they leave to have babies”, acknowledging that the reality was far more complex than that. 

by Liz Bridgen

I’m currently researching why women to leave middle-management PR jobs.  Interestingly, one theme that keeps cropping up is that women leave PR because they find the work trivial and unsatisfying.  That’s not to say that all PR jobs are meaningless and dull but for a variety of reasons (which would make another article in itself), the women I interviewed weren’t taking advantage of the challenging and exciting PR jobs out there.

 

The good thing about teaching and researching PR is that you can ask people lots of questions about what they do and why they do it. 

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up for the cup: october's top posts

Back in the early days, when they were good, U2 sang about October being the month where the trees are stripped bare, of all they wear. But there wasn't a bit of that last month on comms2point0 where we had another feast of new comms posts.

by Darren Caveney

Competition for the coveted 69pence cup shows no sign of slowing down. And we had a stonking, record number of website visitors to our little old site again last month.

But which was the most read post?

In fifth spot was Hull's very own 'hit parade ever-present', Eddie Coates-Madden this time with the fab 'wake up and sheikh up: five years is too long to embrace technology'

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