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Thursday
Aug012013

future leaders on tour

Future Leaders, now in its second year, is giving talented public sector comms people the chance to expand their leadership skills. In the days of zero training budgets this is a timely initiative by LGcomms.

by GUEST EDITOR Emma Rodgers

When was the last time you got time away from the office to think about how you spend your time at work, how effective your leadership style is and what to do to build your own personal credibility?

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Tuesday
Jul302013

how social media can play havoc with your business continuity

It's normal now for the time between an incident hitting and 'first tweet' to be just 30 seconds. Armed with that knowledge, what can be put in place before that incident happens to help reassure and ensure business continuity?

by Steve Finegan

“We don’t have an official company policy. We know being social is quite popular, especially with some of our younger staff.”

“I don’t really place that much importance on social media.  I use twitter to market our products.  Sometimes I promote our voluntary work with local communities.”

“We don’t really bother with it.  We created a Twitter account because it’s the in- thing to do.  Most of our customers communicate with us via our website which has a range of interactive services.”

“We don’t use social media at all, it’s not a priority, besides, there’s less chance of us being criticised if we’re not online.”

“Our business is very active on social media.  We have our own Facebook and twitter accounts, and we regularly engage in conversations directly with our customers.”

If any of the above statements apply to you, then your business continuity plan needs to be ready.  Ready for what exactly?  Well, it’s really quite simple.  Whether or not your company has developed an approach to social media or chooses to leave all this social stuff to others, like generation Y (those born between 1981–2000), I’m afraid there really is no escape.  

Click to read more ...

Monday
Jul292013

how to transform a council website

There's many a council web site which could do with an overhaul. Especially when a new study by O2 suggests that 43 per cent of residents are frustrated that they can't access local government sites on their mobile or tablet. But fixing them can be easier said than done.

By Joanne Parker

The development of a website takes a while. So while the people at gov.uk were busy creating their new vision of what a website should be like, we were also having very similar thoughts.

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Friday
Jul262013

best by west midlands: how a region uses social media

A new white paper, called 'Best by West Midlands', which highlights best practice use of social media across local government in the West Midlands, is being launched today.

by Darren Caveney

We’re a smidge biased but we happen to think that West Midlands’ local authorities are pretty hot when it comes to their use of social media.

So when those nice people at Improvement and Efficiency West Midlands gave us the opportunity to back that statement up with a white paper on best practice we leapt at the chance.

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Thursday
Jul252013

what comms people need to know about seo and search

How do people find things? By searching for it. On the web. So having some knowledge of how to make your things easier to search for is an asset that comms people need. Here's a basic guide.

by GUEST EDITOR Sarah Lay

Search is important because so many people do it online. Thirty-five per cent of all UK visits online came from a search engine in January 2012, according to this survey by Hitwise, and the most popular engine of choice is Google (it had an 89% market share in the UK in June 2013). If so many people are using search as a short-cut to what they want online you need to make sure your information is the stuff that gets found.

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Sunday
Jul212013

why face-to-face conferences still matter in internal comms

With a shift to digital does an email from the top work as well as the traditional conference? There's a place for it. But there's a place for the traditional event too.

by Theresa Knight 

Picture the traditional staff conference - you know the one where the chief executive and senior managers engage with the workforce, give them key messages, put them into workshops and take questions from the floor.

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Saturday
Jul202013

learning to build an online community

People under rate how hard it is to build an online community. It takes months and years of careful work. Yet, it's increasingly a task being asked of communications. Here's what one person learned from a course acknowledged as one of the best.

by Andrew Brightwell

When I was asked a while ago why I'd signed up for the Online Community Management course, run by Feverbee, it took me a moment to decide how to answer. Should I try to say something clever or be honest? In the end I plumped for honest: "I'm here because I am called an online community manager and I'd quite like it to mean something."

It got a laugh, but I'm guessing my flippancy also revealed a little about my own attitude t

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Friday
Jul192013

when you meet and be social you can share social ideas

How do you spread knowledge across an organisation? Write something? Read something? Or you could do what Buckinghamshire County Council do and meet up to share social media knowledge. 

by Andy Holmes

So what do you do if you don’t know everything about a subject?

Spend hours researching it and reading as many books as possible?

Click to read more ...

Tuesday
Jul162013

tips from the frontline on surviving a re-organisation

Being put 'at risk.' Going through a re-organisation. Chances are if you work anywhere these days you stand a chance of going through this stomach-churning process that tests patience and commitment and frays nerves. Tom Phillips in his 39-years in local government did every kind of job imaginable and some best not imagined. After surviving a series of re-organisations he took voluntary redundancy in 2011.

by Tom Phillips

They don’t give out campaign medals for surviving local government reorganisations, or I’d have a chestful. I’d only been working in my first job a week when they announced the 1974 changes following the Local Government Act 1972. It never really stopped after that. When I finally stepped off the merry-go-round in 2011, I had been in jobs placed “officially at risk” twelve times. In one particularly hectic phase in the 1990s, I was “at risk” three times in six months, in a service suffering badly from central government interference and privatisation.

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Jul142013

tweeting godiva

Our friends from Coventry City Council always set high standards across their comms and digital activity. And they put on some pretty mean events too. The Godiva Fesitval 2013 gave them the chance to showcase all of these skills. What Coventry teach us is that Twitter might just be the festival platform of choice.

by Gareth Lewis

 The first weekend in July saw the fantastic three-day Coventry City Council-organised Godiva Festival take place in Coventry’s War Memorial Park.

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Jul112013

11 things you should do with your facebook page

Here are some top tips from the person behind one of the best council Facebook pages around

by Claire Bustin

1. Allow people to post on your page – It's good for interaction and gets people talking. It’s also much easier to monitor. Disabling posts on your page means people can only ask you something by commenting on one of your posts - it's easy to miss these comments.

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Sunday
Jul072013

300

300 is a perfect score in ten pin bowling. A very rare feat. But the comms equivalent is delivered quite regularly from what we get to see through the comms2point0 lens.

by Darren Caveney

Because I am sad and I count these things, I happen to know that this is the 300th post to appear on comms2point0.

And so it seemed a good time to reflect on the brilliant case studies and posts we’ve featured along the way and the lessons we’ve learned.

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Thursday
Jul042013

what are you doing writing just press releases in 2013?

Press releases are still relevant in 2013 but pr and comms is so much more than that. This handy check list shows you why.

by Dan Slee

It seems as though I've spent much of the last couple of years that no, you don't always want a press release. What you actually want is a webpage, a series of tweets on Twitter or an audio clip.

Earlier in the year I presented this rather fine deck of slides to LGComms in Manchester and wrote a blog post around the subject of Die Press Release, Die! Die! A post partly inspired by the rather fine Tom Foremski post of the same name from way back in 2006. A whole load of text words and images. 

It turns out I was wasting my time. What I really should have done was to just show this table from Fred Godlash from the BusinessWired blog. It talked about a post they wrote in 2007 that put the price of a press release at $5,000. The equivalent price is $7,500 they surmised. Oh, how I wish that was the case for the corner of the public sector that I work in that collectively put out more than 1,000 in the previous 12-month period. You can read the full post here.

But what really caught my eye was a table that set out the reasons for writing a press release in 2007 compared to 2013. I've reproduced it here:

Why? Because it really nails the motivation behind getting a message out. In the past the aim was ink inches and coverage in the local newspaper. Today, the aim for any communications person is to think both print and digital.

The question is, are you? And how are you doing it? If you are not what are you doing about it? 

Dan Slee is the co-creator of comms2point0. He also blogs here.

Picture credit.

 

 

 

 

Tuesday
Jul022013

up for the cup: june's top posts

It's the most eagerly awaited news of the month. Who is in the coveted top five of most read posts on comms2point0? Who? Who? Have I won? Will my CV be decorated with a silver cup from those nice people? Wait no longer! The answers are in...

by Dan Slee

So, the stats are in, the numbers have been crunched and the most popular post of the month can now be announced.

It's also been a busy month with some excellent quality of writing. We've added more than a dozen posts to the site that's worth taking a look at.

The winner as ever gets to have a finest quality Chinese plastic cup that will be the envy of their workplace, family, street and town.

Click to read more ...

Monday
Jul012013

7 things I learned at the big yak

The Big Yak was an internal comms unconference staged by the IC Crowd who are lovely people. In this post, here's what one person learned and seven take-homes...

GUEST EDITOR by Corrinne Douglas

I set off for London and The Big Yak, an internal communications unconference with a mixture of excitement and a bit of apprehension. Over 100 comms pro’s coming together to discuss internal communications, most of them having never been to an unconference before, would we have enough to yak about?

Click to read more ...