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Opening up to use social media can be tricky. Not least if you are the Ministry of Defence. Which is why this case study shows how one department of the MOD adopting social can lead to some unintended benefits.
by Tony Moran
With social media now so much a part of our everyday lives, it’s easy to forget what life was like without it.
If winter 2014 in the UK will be remembered for one thing it'll be the floods. It was the wettest January on record and not one many will forget in a hurry. But in an emergency how did local government respond? In one Southern council they were stretched to the limit.
by Louise Smith
Since Christmas, Maidstone borough has suffered its worst flooding since 2000, with significant property flooding and at least 36 families being evacuated – some up to four times in six weeks.
The three rivers in the borough have been repeatedly placed on flood warning, with more rain threatened for the coming weeks.
Sometimes, it's only when you stop and take a look back over your shoulder you realise how far you've come. In this personal blog post a Coca Cola comms person looks back to see how far forward his company has come.
by Neil Jenkins
I was chatting to some fellow internal communicators recently about our digital work at Coca-Cola Enterprises, and it wasn’t until afterwards that I realised what a frantic – and fantastic – few years it’s been.
Once upon a time there was a local council in need of an organisational narrative. But how do you go about creating one? And what can be learned along the way? One communications officer at Swindon Borough Council shares their experience.
by GUEST EDITOR Kate Steel 
When the now-familiar policy changes and funding reductions first began to bite at the heels of local government, we needed to make sure our employees were equipped – and inspired – to deliver our priorities with our residents and it became apparent that we needed a clear, consistent story about how our organisation was changing and why. So what did we do?
So what are the issues facing a creative agency? In this insight a team who specialise in creative internal comms ideas reflect.
by Alan Oram
We’re a pretty robust bunch of guys at Alive. We’ve even chosen to adopt a moose as part of the team. A splendidly powerful, determined creature, seeking supremacy, commanding respect and all that good stuff. It’s one of the ways we’re approaching life in a competitive industry in order to achieve success, become a super-profitable creative agency and smash our goals.
Admittedly it goes a little deeper than downright dogged determination, but it’s a good place to start!
Mistakes. We all make them. But many of us shy away from talking about them. One comms pro took a different view and created a massively popular post last year about making mistakes on Twitter. And now she's gone and written the follow-up...
by GUEST EDITOR Helen Reynolds 
With the 'first seven mistakes we have to make' post last year I started a club for those of us who have learned the hard way and cocked up on Twitter at some point.
Here are seven more 'mistakes': if you have done more than six of the fourteen you are a VIP member for the 'Twitter pro club'. (Rule 1: talk about Twitter pro club. We're communicators aren't we?!)
Last year the Government Communication Service - or GCS - announced reforms to professionalise government communications. Part of this reform aims to create excellent Internal Communications across government. Victoria Ford, Head of Communications at DVLA, has been leading a project to deliver a toolkit for internal communicators to support this aim.
Can I let you into a secret? *whispers* I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for internal communications. When challenged by my Head of External Comms I would deny it, but with a background in operational delivery and change management it’s inevitable I should realise its importance. So, when I got a call back in October from Russell Grossman, SRO of the Internal Communications Excellence project, asking if I’d lead a piece of work to deliver an online toolkit to support internal communicators I was always going to say yes.
For me it feels like internal comms takes a bit of a back seat. It is the area of comms everyone thinks they know best about and the one everyone thinks they can do themselves. I think there has been a real lack of investment in the profession and the people who serve in it. That’s why I loved the idea of bringing together what is now known as ‘The IC Space’ – a site for internal communicators to learn, share and borrow from.
What I wasn’t expecting was the huge amount of enthusiasm and support I have received from communicators across government who believe in the product and wanted to do all they could to bring The IC Space to life. The result is a truly collaborative, cross government effort. From Whitehall departments, to devolved government and agencies, I have received not only insight, experience and wisdom, but the skills and creativity of film makers and designers to make this happen.
So what’s the result? Well it is a resource that, although aimed at government communicators, is open to those outside government as well with an interest in internal comms. It is a place to find best practice. What I want it to become is a community, a place where internal communicators can seek advice and share their experiences. The site we are launching today isn’t the finished article. It isn’t meant to be. It is a site we are hoping you will go into, have a look around and let us know what you think. It is being delivered iteratively based on feedback from the people it has been designed to help. We’ll add what you want to it, just tell us what that is. So over to you. Go and take a look. Let us know what you think and, you never know, you may end up with a soft spot for internal comms yourself.
You can take a look at the new toolkit for internalcomms here.
Victoria Ford is head of communications at the DVLA.
As one organisation looks to take on new staff their head of communications and engagement sets out a little of her own comms journey.
This blog has been written to support Helena’s latest comms recruitment campaign. I wanted to talk about how comms as a career can really open doors for you and will do this by reflecting on my own experiences. It’s fair to say that Comms has and always will be my passion, regardless of where my career takes me. It has been an amazing journey against a backdrop of changing comms practices, channels a go go and a technological revolution.
Blogging has come a long way through the early days of the internet. But for one veteran blogger he can see that things have changed...
by Mark Allen
Remember way back in 2005? It was only a decade ago.
We started to realised the true horror of the tsunami, George W Bush was stating his 2nd term in the USA, but social media as we know it today was just a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.
Social media was just for geeks and ‘blogs’ and ‘citizen journalism’ were the next big thing (despite having been around for years)
Well I shall let you into a secret. Blogging probably saved my life. But even I think it is past its sell by date in 2014.
There can be a lot of frustration as a comms person. Here are a few ways to count to 10 breathe, relax and work out plans to make your job easier.
While flicking through Twitter yesterday lunchtime I was drawn to an article by Eddie Coates-Madden, Assistant Head of Services, Communications and Marketing at Hull City Council - @pseudograph.
Eddie has created a great blog post about the wonders or perils of working in comms which he referred to as -the comms team credit matrix, aka damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I responded on Twitter by saying that over the years I have developed some coping mechanisms and a few frustrated comms people asked me to share them with Twitter so here goes.
In the array of channels and platforms facing a comms person sometimes the online community gets overlooked. What's that? It can be the web forum and the place where people with a shared interest come together. But what makes them work? What ingredients do you need if you are thinking of setting one up yourself? Or what makes them tick if you want to understand them more?
by Richard Millington
If you’re new, here’s a background primer on successful communities.
Successful online community building is connecting a group of people online and making them feel a part of something special. This 'something special’ element is the overlooked bit.
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...
“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’.
Just recently, one comms2point0 post asked us all to stop navel gazing and look to the stars instead. As part of this the writer cautioned readers to be wary of any new 'trust' campaign and the Building Trust campaign in particular. One of the authors of that report now responds by arguing that trust is perhaps one of the most important assets we have got to get us to the stars.
by Neil Wholey
Steve Chu in his comms2point0 post here has set a challenge which I totally agree with that we must “make the case for communications to be at the centre of our organisations’ thinking”. One of Steve’s points is my number one priority to “show that communications can be a frontline resource, either by reducing the costs of service provision, improving frontline efficiency, or targeting declining resources more effectively... prove your £20,000 campaign has saved your organisation £1 million.”
by James Baker
Well happy new year everyone. It's nice to be back at work after a bit of a recharge and absence from everything social and digital. I did pretty much abstain for the majority of the duration bar a bit of old school YouTube streaming of Christmas classic music vids. (East 17, Macca and Wham still being untouched by Maria's sorry sorry efforts...)
This did mean however that when I did eventually click the Facebook, Twitter, Vine and Instagram apps - I was feeling like I was playing catch up and had missed out on what seemed like loads of really important info and exciting stuff in both my personal and professional worlds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do you give an overused subject a new lease of life? By turning it into an infographic...
by Dave Musson
I’ll admit, I’ve been in love with infographics for quite some time. Staring at a chart packed full of funky colours and showing just how many fossil fuels Justin Bieber is likely to outlive was depressing but also fantastic; what a cool way of representing data!
From that point on, I’ve been desperate to make a decent infographic about something Council-related, but had never quite created something completely satisfying. Something was lacking and I couldn’t pinpoint what... until I realised the answer was, as it has been for so much of my local government career, gritting.
An infographic about gritting. Of course!
On 11 December it's the first ever G8 dementia summit, in the final days of the UK's presidency. It's an event imbued with hope – the hope of anyone who has ever been affected by dementia or loved someone who has – hope of a better future.
by Anna Hepburn
For the Department of Health, the summit is just one moment in our ongoing digital engagement around dementia. But it’s a very special moment, when we expect to be able to reach more people than before. It matters to so many people what is discussed at the summit and what progress is made. Inevitably there is not enough space to accommodate all the people who would like to be there. And that's why it's especially important for the Department of Health digital team to deliver the best digital coverage we can.
I was listening to Public Enemy’s ‘Harder than you think’ recently, and it took me straight back to the summer of 2012.
‘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’.
