Author: DTW Agency

Happy lunchtime – it’s been a cracking morning at the CIPR’s 2014 Northern Conference over in Manchester.

Joanna Halton from McCann has just kicked off by reminding the room of PR people that it is our job to create the content and tell the stories that engage and enthuse people.

Couldn’t agree more – the PR industry, ably being led by @wadds who delivered this morning’s intro session with a sterling vision for the future of the industry – Mr. Peston take note – is in a great position to lead the way for brands, organisations and communities when it comes to telling and sharing a compelling story about ourselves.

Joanna picked out content, social signals, online links and reognisable brands as being four key factors that all influence Google and guess what – us PR people should be standing up and grabbing that – we do it all, and we do it better than anyone else.

Starting at the end I’m moving back to the other focus of this morning – data, data and more data.

There’s loads of it, big, small, good, bad. It’s numbers, it’s scary. Us PR types are less good at that (which is why we invented inforgraphics – nice pictures to share!) but we can’t ignore it any longer.

That data should be informing everything we do – great PR is about being customer focused – that’s where the journey should start and end, not at the CEO’s in-tray.

Drew Bevine from Bellenden and James English from the BBC both built a compelling argument for why any PR team’s next hire should be a data analyst – at least – that’s what I took away from it.

Drew talked about a colleague whose career path went from good old fashioned PR to social media to becoming a data analyst.

She won’t be the last, and if data just makes you run away then just think about the added value that we as PR people should be bringing to our clients and projects and that you as an individual can bring to your employer.

PR will never secure a meaningful place around the boardroom table if we don’t embrace and take the lead on data.

When you work in an emerging industry such as social media, it can be hard to keep up with industry standard knowledge and accepted practice.

Not just because its practitioners in the main are young, inquisitive and exactly the sort of people who will be challenging the status quo but also because it is so new itself. In PR, you can argue about certain tactics but general strategy is more or less fixed because everybody understands what billboards, newspapers and news bulletins are and what they do. In Social Media, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s the equivalent of a newspaper deciding to print a copy one week then transforming itself into a radio station the following week – the very conventions and rules that the various platforms are built on are changing regularly and practitioners have to be more agile than most to adapt to the constantly shifting sands.

Whether its Facebook changing its algorithm to drastically reduce the number of people who will see a business’ posts unless they pay to have them seen; or Google+ taking posts on a topic and showing them to other users in their search results, or Twitter offering businesses the chance to have their own hashtag featured in the previously sacrosanct trending topics list – Social Media is nothing but fluid.

Which brings us to the point of this post – this infographic from Sumall – highlighting the worst times to post on Social Media. It’s a nice twist on the usual best times to post and I’m sure it’s backed up by various analytics and stats to prove that engagement is lower at those times. That’s not what my gut is telling me though.

Speaking as an individual Twitter user for a second, most of my tweeting and more importantly, checking my lists and tweets is done after 8pm, once the bum is parked on the couch and the kids are firmly secured in their holding cells.  LinkedIn is said to be least busy during the working day, which given the nature of the platform being the most professionally and work focused seems out of place. Tumblr users must party hard because none of them surface before lunchtime and there’s a black window on Pinterest users schedule between 5pm and 7pm.  Is this while the users are off preparing those delicious meals they’ve been pinning and repinning all morning?

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing so while you should use data, big or little, to inform and guide your decisions, the final choice should always be yours.  In fact you could make the counter-argument that if these really are the least busy times for posting then maybe that’s a great opportunity for brands and businesses to get their content out when there’s less noise?

US Airways have joined the long and growing list of organizations that have had some explaining to do after an inappropriate tweet or post appears on their account.

You can find the story details here but needless to say the story focus quickly moves on from the original error to the response. Once that hacking has been eliminated the company has to face up to the fact that it was an inside job and look at securing the damage as soon as possible.

This can involve locking the account, changing the password and making sure that only trusted sources have access in the minutes, hours and days afterwards when scrutiny of the channel is going to be at its most intense.

Regardless of whose fault it was, people are looking for honesty, transparency and accountability – the most effective social media apologies have been all of these things. Not every instance has to end with a sacking.

In the case of the American Red Cross, more funds ended up being raised for the organization by the beer brand mentioned in the tweet because it was handled sensitively and sensibly. I doubt an identikit corporate responsibility statement stripped of its humanity and humility would have achieved the same response.

All of these stories underline the key truth of social media company accounts – even though they represent brands, they are run by humans and humans are all as fallible as one another – so if an unfortunate post and its aftermath jumps to the top of your in-tray one rainy day, bear that in mind and act like a human, not a brand.

“I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was, now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it is weird and scary to me. It happened to me, it’ll happen to you too.” – Abraham J Simpson

Grampa Simpson wouldn’t have known that he was talking about the life of a Social Media manager but he pretty much was.  As soon as you get used to the workings of one platforms after it tweaks its processes, algorythms or associated electronic jiggery pokery, then another goes and changes it’s feathers too – in this case LinkedIn.

For a good little while now, LinkedIn let company pages display their products and services in a separate tab on the page – kind of like an online catalog that could then link back to a website or microsite and could also be recommended by grateful and helpful customers. Last week LinkedIn announced that they were doing away with this feature and replacing it with something called ‘Showcase’ pages. (Above)

These pages at first glance look like subpages – the screenshot shows Microsoft’s LinkedIn company page and the Showcase pages they have set up for Office, Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Lync (me neither). There is a ‘see more’ button underneath but if you scroll to the very bottom of the page (again, me neither) you will see a carousel displaying other Showcase pages a Company Page may have. Microsoft has 12 but you wouldn’t know by looking so I’d expect this feature to be tweaked shortly.

If you click onto a showcase page then this is where things start to get a little confusing. The page looks exactly like a Company Page in its own right – there is a large cover picture at the top, a small description, website link, industry category and even a list of followers. There is a small ‘see more’ button underneath which when clicked displays the ‘home’ Company page and other Showcase pages a brand has but it’s very well hidden.

The Showcase page functions exactly as a Company page does with updates that can be liked, commented upon and shared within your own network.

All of which confirms my own initial thoughts that LinkedIn is trying to get into the content publishing and sharing game itself and is trying to make up the ground on Facebook and Google+ by building its own little data-mine of your likes and preferences.  The more you tell it about yourself through your own sharing and posting, the more it will learn about you and tailor future product updates and roll outs towards you, and help make you more visible and viable to it’s corporate client base of recruiters and headhunters.

On a personal level, more and more thought-leaders, celebrities and big names have been given publishing capabilities within LinkedIn, which is a shorter form Blog similar to Medium, which is distinct from a regular post.  Ordinary folks like me have are beginning to receive this capability now, again I suspect with the intention of creating more specific content to let LinkedIn narrow down the kinds of things you’ll be interested in down the line.

I think the departing Products and Services tab will be a loss compared to the current format of Showcase pages. If you are a big corporation like Microsoft, then yes, you have more rationale for setting up these pages but if you are a smaller company or producer, by taking the plunge you risk diffusing your content and messages as right now the onus is very much on the user to go hunting through the Showcase pages of a company to find precisely what they want to know – it’s a lot easier if it’s literally on the same page.

Another month so there must be another change to Facebook – and this one is more than simply moving the search bar from the right to the left of the screen.

Facebook announced that its Pages are getting a new, more streamlined look but if you manage pages for your organisation or clients, you need to be across what is going to happen.

The biggest change is that the timeline is going down from two columns to one, which means it’s goodbye to highlighted images and videos. Yes, they are making images slightly larger and introducing new fonts and icons,  but it’s not going to have the same visual impact that a highlighted piece of content will.   The timeline is also switching position so it is now on the right with follower information and company information in the left column.

Apps are now hidden away under a tab called ‘More’ – as are personal profiles and other details. They will be accessible but how many fans will take the time to click through and explore without at least a visual reminder?

For page admins, a weekly metrics section has moved to the top right and includes ad data, likes and post reach along with the historic timeline underneath it, Total page likes has moved left under the profile picture but critically the talking about this number has disappeared – raising the importance of page followers and the possibility of another recruiting followers arms race.

Cover images may also need to be adjusted as the page name and category now appear in white text at the bottom of the image and the profile picture itself has moved a little bit higher than before.

It looks like Facebook are attempting to bring their mobile and desktop viewing experiences into closer harmony which is all well and good but does this mean they are prepared to sacrifice fangates and other useful apps to make it happen?

We’ll see.

It’s new year and time for another brave new world for the NHS.

Never mind patients waking up with a hangover, Government reforms will make 2014 a challenging year for GPs and others running the new-look NHS as CCGs, CSUs, NHS 111 and all sorts of other acronyms get to grips with their new roles at the heart of what is still the world’s best healthcare system*.

With patient engagement and the input of friends and family increasingly important in helping shape the delivery of services around the country one of the biggest challenges for those in charge of the new system is listening to and communicating with their customers (aka patients).

Throw in the amount of NHS-related noise you get through social media and the challenges are significant.

For me, CCGs have to follow three clear and simple rules to keep their communications and engagement activities on track.

1)   Listening is as important as talking – communication is not a one-way thing – listening to and acting on patient feedback is essential

2)   Keep it simple stupid – don’t lapse in to dear old Donald Rumsfeld territory – no jargon please when talking with patients and the public

3)   Put customer service at the heart of what you do – as consumers we now expect the best ethical standards of the public sector combined with the best customer service standards of the private sector. Some parts of the UK public sector get that. Other’s don’t and it shows. Make sure you are on the right side of the fence.

*I’m no medic but name me another system you’d like to swap the NHS for that will improve healthcare outcomes and that the UK plc can afford. Answers on a postcard please to @dtwchris.

PS – 10 points if you can spot the key role that Commissioning Support Units play in the new look NHS on the Department of Health’s overview of the new-look system.

Struggling? I don’t blame you – they don’t even get a mention despite being key players in providing

Being based up here in the sunny north east we have thankfully missed the worst of the flooding and power failures this festive season, but friends and colleagues round the country have suffered – our sympathies are with them in cleaning up what must be a horrendous mess.

Picking up on the public and social media comment the most common complaint (as ever it seems) is all about the failure of companies to communicate with customers about what is happening and when it will be fixed.

Why is this always the case, and do the alleged poor standards of customer service really reflect the reality?

Christmas really presented the perfect storm (sorry). Staffing and other resources were depleted over the break, and the number, frequency and intensity of the storms was almost unprecedented, so I have great sympathy with the communications and customer service teams trying to piece things together with scant information and unhappy customers.

Getting the communications right on these occasions can really reap rewards, and technology has to be at the heart of the solution. Earlier in the year we lost water at home and our provider, Northumbrian Water, was outstanding in the way they communicated with customers on a Saturday morning about the issue for what was a fairly localised problem.

An alert on the front page of the website might be expected (but still pretty good for 8.45am on a Saturday) but to get two texts that morning telling me about the problem, when it would be fixed and how to find out more was a great example of pro-active customer service.

UK Power Networks decision to increase payouts for those affected over Christmas was similarly effective, but on a much bigger scale. Customers no doubt welcomed the extra cash, but what this announcement also did was put the company on the front foot with the national media and gave them an opportunity to hit the airwaves for a 24-hour period and talk about what they were doing to fix the problem, which they did well.

Weather happens and it’s getting worse, most of us get that and will accept it has impacts, but what we won’t accept in 2014 is a failure to communicate. The energy companies (and others) have much to think about moving forward.

Trinity Mirror’s decision to completely close the 150+ year old Liverpool Post was a shock in December, but is surely a sign of further consolidation in the local newspaper sector in 2014.

Not good news for journalists, newspaper readers or local democracy. All those local councilors who regularly blast their local media for “getting everything wrong” and misrepresenting them might start having different concerns if their local paper suddenly disappears.

The challenge then for local authorities, as for companies, is to build their own networks online and communicate directly with residents and businesses. Many are ahead of the game – look at the social media presence of the likes of Monmouthshire or Northumberland or the excellent case studies showcased in the Comms2point0 blog – and you can see the great work already happening.

For those behind the curve the culture change and resources required to deliver social media services effectively can prove a shock, but with local media ever further stretched it is local authorities’ online networks that will become the key communications platforms as we move throughout 2014.

DTW has been shortlisted for six CIPR North East Pride awards.

Four of the awards relate to our PR and marketing work for Further Education colleges in the region. Projects that DTW has delivered on behalf of Newcastle Sixth Form College, Redcar & Cleveland College and Prior Pursglove College have all been shortlisted.

The company has also been shortlisted in the Community Relations and Healthcare categories for the Listening to Cumbria campaign it created and delivered with NHS Cumbria’s communications team.

The Listening to Cumbria campaign was critical to help local communities contribute to and develop an understanding of major changes to the way healthcare services are delivered in the county.

DTW Director Hayley Stewart said: “We’re very pleased with this recognition for our work. We’re working with more and more FE colleges and education academies right across the country and we know that the work we are delivering is having real results on the ground.”

The winners will be announced at the CIPR North East Pride awards dinner, which is being held at the Hilton Hotel in Gateshead on 4 October.