Archive for December 2011

Remembering 2011

31 December 2011 admin Interests, News, Social Media No comments

Another year has passed by astonishingly quickly, so I wanted to have a look at a few stories of personal interest from the past 12 months.

Healthcare: The NHS Future Forum report made recommendations on how we can improve the UK’s healthcare, this opened a lot of debate into the best ways to modernise the NHS with many people worrying about the ultimate privatisation of the NHS with some extreme concerns of an American style system. I would say this is an unlikely scenario, however this year we did see an introduction to NHS privatisation with Hinchingbrooke receiving funding from Circle Franchise from next year.

Internal communications: Atos boss Thierry Breton set out his ambition to create an email free organisation, this created a lot of chatter, many reminiscing on memories of promises paper-free offices, however it did highlight a requirement for an improvement in how we communicate within organisations. Are emails the best way tool for internal communications? House of Fraser’s new internal communications system, Pulse, also promised to increase the effectiveness of their communications. The question is, how can we improve our internal communication systems, is the intranet the best system? And can we use the success of social media within organisations?

PR: The PRSA looked to find an up to date definition of Public Relations with their PR Defined project. This raised the question of whether it is actually important to define PR, or if it is even possible to define it. We also saw Bell Pottinger find themselves in the middle of an ethics debate after an investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Media: Few people could have predicted the dramatic downfall of the News of the World, even after the scandalous stories I personally was shocked when they closed the paper although in retrospect it was probably inevitable. The Leveson Inquiry was launched to investigate the culture, practices and ethics of the press, as a PR student this was extremely interesting to follow, giving an insight into practices behind the news, and possibly changing the future of our press, but will a crackdown on ethics kill off our ailing newspaper industry completely?

Ultimate Frisbee: It has been a brilliant year for the Leeds Metropolitan Ultimate Frisbee sports club, who celebrated their first birthday this year. While losing varsity was a shame the team has seen membership quadruple from last year and qualified for the university indoor mixed nationals. Internationally the work of Brodie Smith has seen Frisbee go viral with his trick shot video making international media. At home UK Ultimate have also been busy working on the development of the sport including links with Matalan’s Sporting Promise.

London Riots

World: This year has seen far too many shocking and tragic news stories. I was particularly touched by the devastating Norway Massacre, and shocked by the force of nature in the disastrous Japanese Tsunami. This year also saw the London and UK riots and the following debate on why it occurred and how we can prevent it happening again. We have also seen the Euro in crisis, as much as we would like to believe the financial crisis will pass it is looking inevitable that 2012 will be a tough year and not necessarily the end of our money woes.

It has been an eventful year, one that has seen social media take a bigger importance in how we communicate news. Who knows where we will be next year!

Finally, I would like to recommend this article showing the 45 most powerful images of 2011.

Festive Greetings

25 December 2011 admin Just For Fun No comments

My life on Facebook

22 December 2011 admin Communications, Social Media No comments

Our lives are made up of a unique series of events and experiences which shape our personalities and decide our futures. With Facebook becoming an important commentary of our lives it is now time to share these events with your online community.

As part of the new Facebook timeline one of the biggest and most interesting additions is the ability to add life events to your timeline. This feature really turns your Facebook timeline into a personal scrapbook and is an important element in Facebook’s evolution from a tool to connect to what could be considered the largest online collection of biographies.

As you play around with the updated features of your new Facebook profile you are able to add the events that have impacted on your life from your first word, the day you took up your favourite hobby to the day you met your future spouse. Facebook is allowing you to truly immortalise your life online and share it with your networks.

I personally quite like the feature and my profile already declares the date when I suffered an ankle fracture! Having said this I will not be sharing every thing in my life, but at the end of the day you have the ability to choose what you share with the world and what you keep away from the internet.

Some of the other life events include:

  • New job
  • Weight loss
  • Travel
  • New sport
  • First kiss
  • Loss of a loved one
  • Volunteer work
  • Military service
  • Bought a home

The question is, while these events mean a lot to you, and perhaps some of the people immediately around you, who else really cares about them? Then again, the same question could be asked about a lot of what is published online.

How do you feel about sharing your life story online?

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2011: What did we say and how did we say it?

19 December 2011 admin Communications, Interests, News, Social Media No comments

Infographic from AddThis Blog

It is that time of year, the Google Zeitgeist has been released and all around the web reports are springing up evaluating our use of online communications during 2011.

In many ways it has been the year of Twitter; from the Arab Spring, to UK Riots Twitter has been at the heart of updating us all on what is happening on the front line. Twitter has continued to increase in popularity so much that even my mum has signed up for account. Tumblr has also seen a huge increase in popularity, and is it me or are certain other blogging sites starting to nab some of their key features?!  StumbleUpon is another site which has grown in the past year, maybe we can conclude that we are just bored and addicted to new information.

It has not been good news for everyone. For those of us who were teenagers during the 2000s the inevitable news that MySpace has eventually fallen out of UK’s top 10 social networks should be a little bit sad, MySpace reminds me very much of college with Facebook following me to university.

So that is how we shared information online in the past year, but what is it that we were talking about?

If you have not looked at Google’s review then go and have a look, it nicely sums up lists of our googling over the last year. From Rebecca Black to the Royal Wedding, there are no huge surprises but it does show quite well what has happened in the past year.

Do you have any predictions on online social trends for the 2012? With the Diamond Jubilee, Olympics and potentially the end of the world who knows what we will be talking about.

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Brilliant use of QR codes

17 December 2011 admin Communications, Leeds One comment

Brilliant use of QR codes

I love this clever use of a QR code as part of a campaign to raise money for Simon on the Streets.

Facebook’s timeline

17 December 2011 admin Communications, Interests, News, Social Media 3 comments
Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

On the 23rd December our Facebook profiles will all be getting a new look as the long awaited timeline is rolled out over all profiles. However if you cannot wait until then the timeline is available from here.

Naturally as with all Facebook updates there will be lovers and haters. We could sit here and complain about it, but the reality is Facebook is not going to change it for us, and very few of us will stop using Facebook. In a years time will you even remember what the old profile looked like?

The timeline simply puts together the pieces of the puzzle, it takes the information that you have already volunteered to Facebook and combines them to create the timeline of your life. Even though I told Facebook my birthday, home town and parents seeing it shown as one item is a bit much. As a result I would recommend that you check out the information and make sure you want everything shared!  It is also important to make sure that you check the public view and make sure there is nothing on show that you do not want on show.

Here is a selection of some of the most interesting things being said about the new Facebook online:

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Are apprenticeships a threat to PR degrees?

13 December 2011 admin Education, Employability, Interests, News, Public Relations 5 comments
English: Graduation hugs

Image via Wikipedia

I am an advocate of apprenticeship schemes and believe that the introduction of PR apprentice schemes can only be beneficial for the industry. It would seem I am not the only fan with this year’s PRWeek census reporting 94% of agency MDs wanting such a scheme and a staggering 92% saying they would consider employing an apprentice.

They are completely right in their thinking, apprenticeship schemes enable organisations to employ low cost workers and train them to be suit the needs of an organisation, this is instead of paying for a more expensive graduate from university who will still need to adapt to your organisation.

It is also a very appealing option for young people with the PRCA in partnership with Pearson in Practice working on plan to provide three-year long on-the-job training, qualifications and work experience to non-graduates from diverse backgrounds. This offers an entry route into a PR career to individuals with the skills and passion required in the industry but who otherwise may not have been able to afford a degree at the increased price.

With the option of an apprenticeship the length of a standard PR degree it makes university seem a dramatically less appealing option. With the choice of being paid to gain the skills and experience the industry demands or amassing considerable debt to obtain a degree with which you may still be unemployable, the better option should be obvious.

Is this a threat to PR degrees then? There are a number of very well designed, developed and respected PR degree courses in the UK and I highly doubt that an apprenticeship scheme would kill these off, however I do think it is important for degree courses to ensure that they are offering students employability skills, particularly in light of Marshall Manson’s recent comments on PR degrees.

Another issue is how current PR undergraduates should react, should we be concerned? Perhaps, apprentices are initially significantly cheaper with the advantage of learning organisation specific skills. This should simply encourage undergraduates to work harder to gain a range of transferable skills which can be utilised over a number of organisations.

Overall I think this is another important development in the PR industry. Many PR professionals are former journalists, but with journalism being an increasingly difficult career path younger PR professionals come from different routes such as studying PR as their main discipline or graduate schemes. Apprenticeships are simply another development in entry routes into the PR industry, and one I would say is very positive.

What is your opinion on PR apprenticeships? Do they pose a threat to the PR degree?

Wordle: PR Apprenticeships

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Deadlines

13 December 2011 admin Education No comments

Deadlines

You can tell deadlines are approaching when all the textbooks come out to play.

Social Media and Internal Communications

12 December 2011 admin Communications, Human Resources, Interests, Internal Communications, Social Media One comment
An example of the share buttons common to many...

Image via Wikipedia

It would be fair to say that social media has changed the way we communicate and it looks set to continue to create Zuckerberg‘s vision of an open and connected world.

While many people have let social media into the personal areas of their lives I think it is important to embrace the technology and look at how we can utilise it in other areas of our lives in the mission to create this open and connected world.

This is a hot topic at the moment, particularly after Atos announced ambitions of a workplace free of internal email. It is also something I am very interested in personally, being a perfect combination of two of my interests, HR and social media.

Naturally some organisations are hesitant in contemplating giving up some of the technologies they have come to rely upon and adopting social media inspired systems, however there are some obvious benefits in such a change.

There is nothing more frustrating than not knowing about something that affects you and in the workplace this can lead to disgruntled employees. Well designed internal communication systems can ensure that staff are notified of matters concerning them, from job opportunities, to events, to changes in contracts. The nature of social media means that staff are able to have conversations about these matters which can help an organisation understand the opinions of their workforce.

Intranets have been the most popular choice of system for sharing knowledge and while I would not dream of indicating they are redundant, they can certainly be improved by social media tools. For example an organisation could create a wiki style system allowing all employees to submit additions or edits to articles for approval. Alternatively if an employee is struggling to understand a topic or task even after reading an article they could post a question in a forum where anyone in the organisation would be able to offer feedback.

When an organisation is spread across different units nationally or even internationally it can lose its company identity. Social media is able to reinstall this identity. It allows easy communication between teams who may have never even met and allows a constant connection to the heart of the organisation, be that in the Head Office or another unit.

One of the most inspiring men I know is the director of a medium sized organisation. Speaking to him it is impossible not to understand his vision for the organisation and be motivated to achieve better results. Everyone who speaks has a conversation with him respects him and believes in his passion, unfortunately the logistics of the organisation mean that while he is dedicated to his staff team there is not always the opportunity to talk to all of them individually. I believe one solution to this would be for him to write a blog available to all the organisation’s staff, allowing his message to reach and inspire everyone. Social media brings down barriers meaning that he could have conversations with his staff even when he cannot meet his staff.

A very important aspect of social media is monitoring conversation and opinion. Within the workplace this can be used to see reactions to announcements or blog posts. It can be used to see how many staff are accessing company newsletters, or looking at job opportunities. There are many ways an organisation can monitor usage and get an improved understanding of their organisation’s people.

There are also potentially significant financial benefits as demonstrated by this article from Simply-Communicate, these systems return on their investment through saving on costs such as printing and recruitment.

Obviously it is important to be careful when introducing social media into the workplace, a model such as Facebook or Twitter is more likely to cause loss of productivity. It is important that a system based on social media is designed for maximum productivity and minimum distraction.

Social media is not a completely new tool in the internal communication’s toolbox, rather it is a natural progression of the current tools such as internal emails and intranets. I think it is important to look at using the successes of social media to continue the development and effectiveness of internal communications. The possibilities of how we can utilise social media seem endless and with innovation and development we could certainly see some beneficial changes within our internal communications.

Does your organisation use social media in their internal communications strategy?

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My consultancy experience

7 December 2011 admin Career, Placements 3 comments

During the summer I was fortunate to secure a short term placement with Eden PR in Nottingham. They offer a consultancy style service mainly catering to mostly Midland based clients from a range of industries including insurance, law and retail.

Working in a consultancy with the experience of Eden PR seemed an ideal opportunity to learn about the industry and develop the skills I had learnt during the first year of my degree.

The placement involved a dose of reality with long hours and hard work giving an insight into the life of a PR professional, but with the consultancy’s staff arriving before my start time and often leaving after my hometime it was made obvious that PR is not an easy career. Yet I was not put off.

Eden PR offer a structured placement plan, so from my first day I was made aware of the tasks and projects I would be working on during my placement. The tasks included media monitoring and researching but possibly the most educational task was in drafting press releases. I had been taught at university to write right, tight and bright press releases, but I soon learnt that this approach is not always suitable for the client or publication that you are writing for. I had to put into practise my writing skills to produce flowery press releases suitable for glossy lifestyle magazines and friendly pieces for local newspapers.

It was fantastic to see how a PR consultancy works, something that you simply cannot learn in the classroom. The team at Eden PR were fantastic, they were welcoming and eager to teach despite the very busy environment and as a result half a year later my experience is still having a significant impact upon me.

One of the greatest things about Eden PR is that they offer a structured placement plan, this ensures that you get to see many different aspects of the consultancy and your relatively short time there is well spent. This year they also offer a paid summer internship programme which is a brilliant opportunity for anyone interested in PR and I hope they will continue this. I would definitely recommend the organisation to anyone looking to develop a PR career within the East Midlands.

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