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.

why balloon releases are a bad pr idea

The balloon release was once a part of the tool kit of the PR team. But increasingly this has become a thing of the past as pressure groups mobilise online.

by Dan Slee

If you think of involving a balloon release as part of your comms activity you’re either stupid, enjoy littering, killing animals or think it’s still 1986. 

Back in the day the sight of helium-filled baloons drifting towards the sky was an impressive one.

A lovely splash of red against a clear blue sky was an impressive way to round-off an event and look for the ‘ooooh’ factor.

Click to read more ...

attention localgov geeks! it’s an infographic about gritting!

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!

Click to read more ...

delivering a digital G8 dementia summit

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.

Click to read more ...

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’.

Click to read more ...

social media, for social good

James Baker, the FSA’s Social Media Manager, explains how social media can help us identify norovirus outbreaks much earlier than labs confirm the cases.  

by James Baker

If you're part of the digital and communication revolution currently happening all around us, you might have already seen how the FSA is embracing social and digital media to help communicate and build relationships with you, with food businesses, with other government departments and with our stakeholders.  

Click to read more ...

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.

Click to read more ...

who was post of the month in november?

So, it's the day of reckoning. With 2013 slipping away and just two more highly sought after 79p trophies for post-of-the-month to award, which posts were hot in November?

by Dan Slee

Rather like the Oscars of the comms blogging world the post of the month cups can quite literally change careers.

An addition of the highly-prized prize can lead to overnight joy, better fortunes and a pay rise from a boss who has now recognised the wisdom of the winner.

Ever heard that line about being a prophet in your own land and never getting heard?

That's so often the case but with the post of the month this can be turned on its head.

Click to read more ...

five banging lessons Altern8 can teach communications people

Rave legends Altern8 are back and this time they want to be Christmas number one. Cliff Richard they are not. But what can the rave duo teach comms people? Quite a lot, actually.

By Dan Slee

Back  in the early 1990s a band from Stafford emerged from the rave scene to make a dent in the popular imagination

Dressed in RAF chemical gear Altern8 played hardcore techno music that spilled out of clubs and from cars onto the radio and onto Top of the Pops.

Mark Archer and Chris Peat for three years were the face of rave music. Only they weren’t. They dressed in yellow face masks and refused to have their pictures taken without them.

Click to read more ...

after the press release dies

The debate on the future of press releases is well established. But with the UK Government wading in and Coca Cola going even further with a wish to abolish them by 2015 the clock is well and truly ticking.

by Dan Slee

It's seven years since the ground-breaking post 'Die! Press Release! Die! Die!' was written.

Tom Foremski's this-can't-go-on wail reads as powerfully as a Martin Luther deconstruction of one of the central pillars of the public relations industry.

"I've been telling the PR industry for some time now that things cannot go along as they are," Tom wrote, "business as usual while mainstream media goes to hell in a hand basket."

Click to read more ...

3 reasons why you can’t build a decent website without a comms expert

Next time you are building a new website, do make sure that you have a comms person on the team.

by GUEST EDITOR Helen Gill

For me, the power of social media as a PR tool is the power to publish your own content and start to influence and shape the agenda so that you don’t always have to rely so heavily on media relations any more. That’s why I don’t like the phrase ‘online PR’ or even ‘digital PR’ – it just feels like a way of doing what we’d always done but in a slightly different format.

Click to read more ...

standing in the way of control

Now here's a question which regularly crops up: 'How do we control social media?' Actually, that's the wrong question. A better one would be: 'Should we try to control social media?' And the answer to that is no. A big, fat, no.

by Darren Caveney

Social media. When you strip it back to the basics, it’s pretty much just a series of conversations. People sharing opinions, chewing the fat, asking questions.

Talking.

And, as my pal Dan Slee would say – ‘being human’,

Which is why I’ve always struggled with products sold by companies which seek to govern these conversations. To control them.

Control your social media activity, lock it down, stop people having their own accounts, put lots of measures in place to prevent staff going off and engaging, being social. Having human conversations.

From what I can see, some of these companies take this control ‘offer’ and repackage it to sell their services by creating a kind of fear of social media.  Within the sales pitch you almost sense a belief that, actually, staff shouldn’t  really have access to social media anyway.

Click to read more ...

a crowd sourced list of bumper christmas present ideas for pr, digital and comms people

So, Christmas is getting closer and the goose is getting fat. But that still doesn't help you buy something rather good for the comms, digital or pr person in your life. Ever keen to help we've drawn-up a knockout list of present ideas.

by Dan Slee

It's happened to us all when we've opened a present under the gaze of a loved one only to find it's a beige jumper two sizes too small.

"Thank you," you somehow manage to say with a forced smile. "That's really lovely," you say in a test of your diplomatic and public relations skills.

But there is now no need to spend Christmas Day looking like Alan Partridge just in order to make your Gran happy.

Click to read more ...

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.

Click to read more ...

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:  

Click to read more ...