“Don’t hate the player,” I tell people “hate the game.”
I tend to do this during training when I’m running through the Twitter algorithm.
You see, Twitter has been run by an algorithm for several years and it’s an algorithm that wants you to stick around as long as possible. So, as a result it hates links. It’ll mark you down for using them.
This is the point when I deliver the line.
The next question after a 10-second pause is what the hell are we supposed to do then?
This is the point when I talk about a thread.
Tell the story you want to tell on Twitter using a thread and tyou’ll be rewarded.
Why?
Simple.
You’ll spend more time reading and scrolling through the thread so you’ll spend more time on Twitter. The more time you spend on Twitter the more attractive your audience is. That’s why you’ll be rewarded.
Here are some example of what threads look like and what they can achieve.
A thread of threads
Thread: Digby the amazing lifesaving dog
Digby the dog helped stop a woman from jumping to her death.
So, Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue told the story with a thread.
The results were off the scale.
This is Digby. Today he did something amazing and helped save a young woman who was thinking of taking her own life on a bridge over the M5 near Exeter (threadđ) pic.twitter.com/eMnIG0Dve7
— Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service (@DSFireUpdates) June 15, 2021
Thread: What the council did in the floods
When flooding hit Doncaster the council built a thread of realtime coverage to spell out what it was doing in response.
The pictures were shaky, the staff looked sodden. Good.
Today has been another busy day as we continue to support people around the clock affected by floods at the same time as preparing for any more bad weather.@DoncasterDamian and @MayorRos have been on hand to see the many examples of amazing partnership work in actionâŠ(THREAD) pic.twitter.com/jVZES1QaXg
Thread: What a reporter saw on a tour of a recycling plant
“What are you thinking, St Paul?” remarked reporter Frederick Melo as he walked around the recycling centre looking at the crap some people tried to recycle.
Exasperated, Glasgow City Council built a thread of a dumped sofa and linked places where it could be recycled or donated.
đ·THREAD đ·
đ»Bulky Wasteđ»
If you have large items that donât fit in your bin, please donât fly-tip đ You can take items to your nearest Household Waste Recycling Centre, donate them, or request a bulk uplift !
— Glasgow City Council đșđŠ (@GlasgowCC) July 26, 2019
Thread: Why do pirates wear stripey shirts?
This thread I love because it tells a story any age can relate to.
Pirates, it seems, have been pigeonholed in history as stripey shirt wearers.
Historian and knitter draws upon pictures, text and historical resource to show how all this came about. It’s lovely.
Museum staff, are ye watching?
Hello, fellow pirate enjoyers! Ever wonder why fictional pirates and sailors are often depicted wearing striped t-shirts? Here is a thread for you! pic.twitter.com/qWnw4qExcr
— Capital Socks & Guernsey Frocks (@FiftyFathomKnit) May 3, 2022
Thread: Traffic chaos around Edinburgh
As much as we can tell stories we can also be informative.
In this thread, Traffic Scotland show the disruption in a thread of pictures and traffic warnings like an eye-in-the-sky traffic helicopter.
Thread: A court story with a successful conviction
Northants Police tell the story of a night that turned dark for a domestic violence victim.
The woman jumped out of a window rather than face her tormenter.
The content comes from a court story and it’s powerful.
*Thread*
This week, a 28-year-old man was convicted of offences after he caused so much distress to his partner that she fell through a first-floor window trying to escape him.
Read that again.
This woman willingly jumped out of a window rather than having to face this guy.
— Northants Police (@NorthantsPolice) May 13, 2021
Thread: The view from an NHS chief executive
In this thread Chris sets out the hardships and problems the NHS faces.
There’s multiple audiences for this from government to staff and the public.
Things are hard and here’s exactly how he spells out.
1/25 NEW THREAD. Where's NHS up to? Flat out, doing its best for patients, as ever. But struggling with covid and impact of long term fault lines. Concerning pressure, despite front line effort. Sits alongside interview today with @thesundaytimes : https://t.co/W5Y0POEhgt
This is useful, a list of online audiences for news organisations.
Press Gazette published this list for March 2022 online here.
Why its useful is that it looks at national titles and local titles equally.
They’re not newspapers anymore, either. They are news brands That embraces the fact that they’re often in print (declining) but also online (increasing).
Here it is:
And also…
What the numbers say
Leading the pack on 38.7 million is the BBC.
But what’s striking is the number of local titles and very often Reach titles led by Manchester Evening News 17.5 million in 10th, and Birmingham Live 11.1 million on 19th and Liverpool Echo 10.8 million 20th.
Examiner Live is 29th on 6.2 million, My London 6 million in 31st, Newcastle’s Chronicle Live 5.4 million (32nd), Hull Live 3.9 million (38th), Lancashire Live 3.3 million (45th), Bristol Live 3.3 million (46th),Nottinghamshire Live 3.2 million (48th) and Leeds Live 3.2 million (49th).
All this points to the importance of local titles in the media landscape.
There are those, of course, who will point out that the content mix of Reach titles in the mix is low on news and high on culture war memes like this one.
TikTok is no longer a fringe platform. It’s becoming mainstream. Amongst the vanguard of the public sector are South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue who now have 100,000 followers.In this post he shares some of the secrets of their success.
We made the jump after weeks of planning, discussing and lurking on the channel in a desperate attempt to understand how it worked.
Having done a âquick and dirtyâ social media audit at the start of the year, we knew that setting up an account on the platform was essential, not desirable, as it had become clear that we werenât hitting enough 16-24-year-olds through our existing channels.
But what had become apparent is that TikTok is like nothing weâve ever used before â and it would take more than some South Yorkshire overconfidence to make it a success.
Videos we didnât find funny at all were blowing up, whereas what looked to us like good content was flopping. And then there were the trends. And sub-cultures. How did all that work? Oh, and whatâs ASMR when itâs at home?
Eventually we decided that, having had some brilliant training to get us warmed up, the only way we would fully understand the channel is by diving in head first.
So, armed with our one page strategy and social media audit results, thatâs what we did.
Hereâs six top tips for anyone else considering doing the sameâŠ
Have a purpose
Whilst we eventually decided to take a gamble and dive in head first, we did set a clear purpose and strategy for our work on TikTok.
By clearly outlining why we needed to use it, and how the channel would help meet certain organisational objectives, we put ourselves in a strong position to deal with the inevitable questions we would get from curious members of staff.
Given TikTok has built up a (largely false) reputation for being a place that teenagers go to mess around and do âsillyâ dances, this proved extremely useful.
Understand the audience
Itâs no secret that being human, rather than corporate, on social media is generally the way to go when it comes to getting good engagement.
However, when it comes to TikTok, this rule applies more than ever. People use the channel to be entertained and educated, not hit over the head with dull public messaging.
There really is absolutely no place for anything that isnât, in one way or another, entertaining. So yes, feed in your core messages, but find a way to make it fun.
Assemble your squad
One question we keep getting asked is around how weâve got our staff on board. Itâs a good question, given whatâs already been covered above regarding TikTokâs reputation.
The answer, in a word, is persistence. Since launching the channel we have asked everyone we know across the service if theyâll be involved.
We knew from the off that not everyone would be game, and a key lesson we learned early on is that if people are only âlukewarmâ then thereâs probably no point using them â their lack of energy will only kill your Tok vibe.
So our mission has been to assemble a squad of people who are up for it â and who will give us extra when we come calling.
Keep it snappy
When I close my eyes at night, I can still hear Zanderâs voice telling me to mercilessly cut, cut and cut my edits down until there is hardly anything left.
And heâs right. Our figures suggest that the shorter the video, the better. After all â TikTok is a platform designed for short form video, and who are we to argue?
Embrace the chaos
With over 100,000 followers in the can, and the numbers continuing to grow, TikTok has now become our biggest social media channel by a country mile.
But that wonât stop me holding my hands up and saying, in the name of complete honesty, that this platform is completely bonkers.
Unfortunately for the more organised amongst us, itâs not a place where you can have and stick to a clear content plan. Trends will appear, and disappear, right before your eyes.
For us to be successful on the channel, we had to throw ourselves into it and accept the fact that itâs all a bit crazy.
Roll with the punches
Whilst we wouldnât change anything about our TikTok journey, itâs certainly not been easy. In fact, itâs been a complete rollercoaster.
Weâve had days where we couldnât sleep for excitement. Our videos have been âblowing upâ and, simultaneously, our follower numbers have been increasing at rates weâve never seen before in our careers.
But then weâve had days, weeks and even months where nothing has stuck. Videos we thought would do well have flopped, and weâve felt like giving up.
The algorithm is a cruel beast that will chew you up and spit you out. But, as long as you have a purpose and a strategy, stick with it â your time will come.
Jack Grasby is campaigns manager at South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue.
Every now and then Iâll crowdsource daft requests made to comms people.
I thought it high time to ask the same question again of the 6,500 Public Sector Comms Headspace.
Here you go. Can you beat this?
Daft comms requests
“Can you make this go viral at 2pm on Wednesday?” – Lucy Salvage.
“The man on the left of the group in this photo is standing sideways can you change it so he’s looking at the camera?” – Steve Collins.
“Can we have more white faces in the brochure for BME?” – Anon.
“Can we have a Twitter account to reach young people” and “Can we do a Facebook Live to stop drug addicts taking ketamine?” – Nick Lakeman
ââI need to submit an awards entry on Twitter by 5pm today. Can you set up a company Twitter account urgently so I can do this.â Bearing in mind the organisation had no Twitter account and no plans to have one either.” – Becky Kasumba
ââHereâs a template 1200 word spokesman press release from industry body and four A4 posters for our awareness raising month.â Thatâs it. That is the request.â– David Grindlay
âCan you send an all staff email, someone has taken the scissors from the post room and I need them back.â – Pete Le Riche
âGraphic design job: can you make the white, whiter?â – Victoria Edmond.
âThere are three cars parked on the overspill car park and the circus has just arrived to put up the Big Top. Please can you send out an all user email to tell them they need to move their cars?â – Louise Sharf
âCall from a member of security direct to me, head of internal comms: âThereâs a student in the library wearing a t-shirt that says: âJesus is a c**tâ. What should we do?â In the end security stared for so long trying to figure out their next steps that the student got a bit self conscious and sheepish and put their hoodie back on.â – Alice Oliver.
âCan we have a QR code? We want to email or text it to peopleâ– David Bell.
âCan u send an email to let everyone know all the emails are down?â – Ghazala Begum
âIncoming media query: âCan you tell me if the Bat Plane will be landing near the A9?ââ – Sarah Anne OâLoughlin.
âCan you write an awards submission for this survey-based campaign, but we should only enter it if the survey-based campaign results are favourable. Awards submission deadline is early June, survey-based campaign results expected early July.â – Stephanie Robinson Cutts.
âPhotographing the 5’6 Town Clerk presenting an award to the 6’4 Mayor – âJust fiddle with the photo and make us the same height.ââ – Emma Bye.
âCan you photoshop eyes onto the Trust Chair in this group photo? My colleague tried and the results were HILARIOUS.â – Charlie Grinhoff.
“Can you make this look pretty?” – Megan Olivia Duggan.
âOne from my charity days but my favourite 4pm on Friday media request ‘I understand you hold the media rights to Captain pugwash?’ We didn’t. The journo had looked at the wrong line in their contacts spreadsheet. But being the media professional I am, I didn’t immediately rule it out and said I would go away and check.â – Suzi Robinson.
ââYouâve sent us this mock design of how our leaflet would look in the wrong language.â Lorem Ipsum anyone?â – Karen Rowley.
“Going back in time regarding a print quote submitted with a new brochure: âWell if Iâm paying for 4 Colours I expect to see all of them.â – Philip Mackie.
“Please can Comms turn off the fog horn, I’m struggling to concentrate.” We work on the waterfront.â – Cath Akins.
âAsking us to remove a post and ban a user from a Facebook group that has nothing to do with us, because they complained about bad service they received from us and named a staff member directly.” – William John
âCan we have a map with QR codes linking to things to do in each area? Sure, just send me the links. Oh, thereâs no links, we donât actually have a list of things to do, a website, or any intention of producing one.” – Ruth Fry
ââCan we have lines to take, Q&A, full comms plan, photos, videos and the moon on a stick by COP a week last Thursday please for something maybe might be happening in 2044, we dunno yet. We have no idea on the hook or the key messages, but will definitely need a press release for it.â Obviously, not a real request, but sums all requests up in a nutshell.â – Pam Pye.
“At 3pm. The awareness day is today, can you just chuck some content out both internally & externally that links it to something we are doing, be great if you can get some staff and customers to take part.” – Caroline Howarth
ââMake the most accessible website, ever.â Same person, same website: âYou need to use this specific shade of light green behind white text.â I suggested many accessibility compliant combinations, but eventually relented to make it that specific light green, only to be told it was the wrong green and change it all again to a different but still non-compliant shade.â – Keely Gallagher.
âMake this go viral,â will always be my biggest head-banging-against-wall moment.â– Sarah Rochester.
âI’d like everyone in the organisation to know what great charitable work this team is doing, without writing an article about it, or doing anything that may be perceived as us promoting it.â – Brioney Hirst.
“Can you email everyone to tell them that emails are down?” – Penny Gibbs
“Can you send me a word document of the entire website so that I can use it to learn how to create an App version of the website?” – Sacha Taylor
“Can you âcommsâ this?” – Christine De Souza
“Got asked if I could make a video go viral again this week. You think I’d still be working if I could make videos go viral?” – TĂžbias Der Mönch
Thank you to Anon, Tobias der Monch, Christine De Souza, Keely Gallagher, Vicky Croughan, Nick Lakeman, Becky Kasumba, David Grindlay, Alex Thurley-Ratcliff, Sarah Rochester, Penny Gibbs, Brioney Hirst, Pete Le Riche, Victoria Edmond, Louise Sharf, Alive Oliver, David Bell, Ghazala Begum, Debbie Goodland, Sacha Taylor, Sarah Anne O’Loughlin, Stephanie Robinson Cutts, Emma Bye, Charlie Grinhoff, Megan Olivia Duggan, Suzi Robinson, Karen Rowley, Philip Mackie, Cath Atkins, William John, Kaylee Godfrey, Lucy Salvage and Steve Collins.
One of the beautiful things about the internet is remix culture… taking something and making something else.
It’s been at the heart of the internet since it started. Think CassetteBoy back in the day. Or creative commons licences. Or memes.
TikTok has really taken the idea of remix culture and given it an oxygen mask filled with pure mountain air. Baked into the platform is the abillity to re-use and repurpose.
So, the duet can be a video you shoot where you respond to another video, for example.
Or it can be using the audio of another video to create your own take on the original.
Scrollingh through TikTok I noticed four examples of remix culture not in high fashion or pop culture but… cricket.
Cricket? You mean that stale sport played in front of a handful of elderly people?
It turns out that cricket is really embracing remix culture on TikTok.
Why is this useful to a comms person?
Because people like remix culture. They like and share it. It builds your audience because they’ll stick around for your next video. Your next video may be one you really want them to see with a call to action.
I’ve said it dozens of times before but if 80 per cent of your content is not about selling things that’s a decent number to aim at.
Durham cricketers react to a village cricket clip
‘That’s so village’, is a term attached to really bad cricket. It’s the red ball equivalent of being a pub team.
Thanks to the advent of decent cameras and the internet there’s a whole host of clips that are attached under the village umbrella.
Shooting reactions is a well established way of generating content. In this case, Durham County Cricket Club show village cricket clips to a couple of their players and they film their reactions. They then mix the original with the reaction. It’s not hard to do.
The result is a fun clip with LOLs…
Reacting to a reaction video
Even more meta is Worcestershire County Cricket Club’s reaction to a reaction. In this case, football pundit Rio Ferdinand reacts in the studio to a goal being scored.
That clip is repurposed by WCCC as a means of underlining just how good a wicket one of their bowlers has taken.
Clever.
Remixing the audio
David Warner is Cricket Australia’s pantomime villain. He’s been suspended for his role in cheating in the past.
In this clip, they get Warner to lipsync what looks to be a Bollywood clip about violence.
What does the film do? It underlines the player. The player makes a joke about his reputation. It reaches an audience who probably are not listening to Test Match Special.
âWeâre a data driven organisation,â many organisations boast before throwing the data out of the window when it comes to ordering staff post-pandemic to return to the office.
If you work in Government you may have observed the sight of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Minister for government efficiency, touring offices to count civil servants at their desk.
More is better, he argues.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is leaving this note for civil servants who arenât at their desks⊠pic.twitter.com/7KzBcGKVJP
So, I thought Iâd read through the academic evidence over whether the office or WFH – working from home – is better.
The simple answer is that it depends.
However, one core thing that runs through all of the research is that one size does not fit all. All WFH or all in the office is not the best outcome.
For those that do work from home, working out where the boundaries lie between work and non-work is the biggest single challenge to keep burn-out at bay. And the danger of burn-out is real.
The downsides, they found, were home office constraints, work uncertainties and inadequate kit. That the survey spanned 13 European countries including the UK strengthens the findings.
Well motivated workers thrive
If you’re self-motivated and are well led you will thrive with WFH, is the finding of Jelena and Rosaâs research. However, those not well motivated wonât adapt well and a purely online approach can lead to burn-out, unhappiness at home and a lack of sleep.
During the pandemic many areas of life went online. In this research amongst psychologists, 80 per cent enjoyed working from home but 42 per cent found it difficult at some stage.
While there clear benefits for working from home there are far fewer for women with young children. The burden of looking after them falls proportionately more on them than it does on men.
Back in January, I asked the question of where people were with the process of the return to the office. Of almost 300 public sector comms respondents, most – 43 per cent – were working from home and 39 per cent working hybrid.
Working practices of public sector comms, January 2022
Just over 10 per cent were in limbo waiting for a new process, five per cent never left the office and just one per cent had moved back to the office.
The COVID-19 pandemic will prove to be turning point in history. There was the UK before it hit and after. Oxford University hospitals director of communications Matt Akid talks of how the pandemic has been captured in the staff’s own words.
Beyond Words is a unique book of images, many taken by frontline NHS staff at Oxford University Hospitals (OUH), which reflect their personal and professional experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our aim was to create a book to chronicle an extraordinary time in the lives of all staff working at OUH and to produce something of high quality which would show that in-house NHS communications and graphic design teams can match anything from the commercial PR world â at a fraction of the cost.
The total budget was less than ÂŁ10,000, to cover the costs of professional printing of the book, which was kindly provided by a grant from Oxford Hospitals Charity whose remit is to support patients and staff at OUH.
The book was written and designed in-house by our Communications and Oxford Medical Illustration (OMI) teams â with photos provided by OMI, Oxford Hospitals Charity and our own staff.
We wanted to enable staff to submit their own photographs for inclusion in the book to document their own experience, and we also wanted to thank staff for their incredible service during the COVID-19 pandemic by enabling them to order a free hard copy of the book.
All of this fitted in with our Chief People Officerâs Growing Stronger Together â Rest, Reflect, Recover programme to support the health and wellbeing of all staff working at OUH as we emerge from the pandemic.
In April 2021 we launched an eBook called Stories from the COVID-19 Pandemic – #OneTeamOneOUHwhich told the story of OUHâs response to the first 12 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We wanted to help our staff to make sense of their experiences by telling their stories, to share how they felt, and to talk about what they did as individuals and in teams.
And so we invited all staff to submit their contributions in order to truly reflect the experiences of our people. More than 50 teams and individuals submitted their stories and many were included in the final eBook.
Based on this evidence that there was a genuine appetite from staff for communal storytelling in order to reflect on personal and shared experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we came up with the idea of a printed book of photographs.
Jackie Love, our Head of Design, came up with the title of the book, Beyond Words, to reflect the fact that these experiences can be difficult to put into words but powerful images can tell a story and evoke emotions.
Our strategy was to encourage staff engagement in the project and so on the NHS Birthday on 5 July 2021 we communicated a call to all staff to submit their photographs. We also collated images taken during the pandemic by our in-house teams while Jackie developed the creatives, the look and feel of the book, structured around our six OUH values of compassion, respect, delivery, excellence, learning and improvement.
We made the decision to publish the book in January 2022 as we approached the two-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 positive patients being admitted to our hospitals, in order to maximise media interest and as a milestone for our staff.
We also invited staff to order a free copy of the book to meet our key objective of the book being a thank you. We had a pre-ordering window in November 2021 and a further ordering window in January 2022 after the book was published. We also worked with our Voluntary Services team and with Oxford Hospitals Charity on the logistics of distributing hard copies of the book to staff working across four hospital sites and at multiple other community locations.
3,500 OUH staff ordered a copy of Beyond Words, both before and after its publication in January 2022, and we have also had overwhelmingly positive feedback from staff about the book and free copies being made available as a thank you gesture.
Helen Doling, a nurse on our Haematology Day Treatment Unit, said: âTruly amazing book. Very grateful for my copy, providing a lasting memory of dedication and hard work of so many in such a difficult time.â
Daljit Dhariwal, a surgeon in our oral and maxillofacial surgery team, said: âA really fantastic record of one great team coming together through the adversity of COVID to deliver the best care for our patients.â
Beyond Words has also been read online more than 4,000 times since launch by readers as far afield as the USA, Australia and India.
And it has attracted positive national media coverage by BBC Breakfast News, as well as local media pick-up.
Weâre proud of the book and weâre thrilled itâs been shortlisted in the âBest Publicationâ category of the CIPR Excellence Awards â fingers crossed for the awards ceremony in June .
Matt Akid is director of communications at Oxford Universities Hospitals NHSTrust.
Itâs been a busy few weeks and over a cup of coffee I was reflecting on what Iâd learned.
Itâs a useful exercise I sometimes do after a particularly rapid period.
For some reason, it was the questions that people asked during training that really stuck with me.
I was reflecting on how my answers are often around what questions they can ask of the people they work with. All of that points to the importance of building a relationship with people. For some communications is science. For me itâs a lab coat and a piece of cake. The lab coat represents the data and the cake is the soft skills you need.
It led me to what questions I most find myself asking or recommending.
Q: You want half a day from me, I need 15 minutes from you, is that alright?
The comms inbox can be a wondrous thing. It can move from command âwe need a poster by tomorrow or this thing will fail and it will be your faultâ to âcan you help me reach young people?â In other words, some people think they can click their fingers and some donât.
The question I often find myself reaching for when people prescribe what they want is this: âYou want half a day from me, I need 15-minutes from you, is that alright?â
The need for 15 minutes is to go through a basic comms planning template. Iâve blogged about this before here. You can rattle through in 15-minutes or take far longer.
There’s a load of supplementary questions in the comms plan but it starts here.
Q: Who are you trying to talk to?
The more aopproachable way of asking: âwho is your audience?â Itâs a question to pin down who they need to talk to. They know the people they serve better than anyone. Plug into that.
Q: When you say âour audience is everyone, can you jot down what that looks like on a piece of paper⊠and then identify the top three?
The audience is rarely everyone. When it is, youâll probably need to break it down into demographics and channels to find each audience. This helps them understand this. If youâve only got finite resource would it be young people on TikTok or the over 55s on Nextdoor? What would you go for?
Q: We both want this to succeed, we know that donât we?
Sometimes at the start of comms planning, Iâll mention this just to name check the elephant in the room. They may be engineers / clinicians / a station officer. You are a comms person and your expertise is to help people communicate. You both want a successful outcome but it helps to spell it out.
Q: What does success look like?
A broad question to help them pin down what theyâd be happy with. That needs to come from them. Selling 100 tickets? Selling 100 ice creams? Recruiting 100 firefighters? What is success? Thatâs your starting point. So, if you recruiting firefightersd, how old do they need to be? The questions start flowing from the number.
Q: Who, what, when, where, why, how?
Kipling wrote that everything he learned came from six good men. Their names were Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. These are known as âopen questionsâ. They encourage open answers. The question âIs your favourite colour blue?â encourages a closed answer that doesnât encourage conversation.
Q: Why, why, why, why, why and why?
Toddlers in supermarkets ask questions. âWhy is tiger bread called tiger bread?â They are curious. They find out information. Be like a toddler. Ask a why question politely six times and itâs amazing what you find out.
Q: What is working and what is not?
Evaluation means you can see what works and what doesnât. Do more of what works and less of what doesnât. Itâs that simple.
There’s no question that the wind is filling the sales of TikTok the short form video channel.
What has started as a Chinese platform with music is morphing into a genuine contender to break the Facebook monopoly.
The public sector, by and large, has been eyeing up TikTok warily. Innovators have been experimenting.
Trends and audio
One key way to get people to see your content is to ride on the coat-tails of poppular trends and popular audio.
In a nutshell, a trend can be a particular style of video. It can originate in one part of the world, burn fiercely and just weeks later be burnt out. Similarly, a music track can drive a popular style of video.
If you watch one video on a trend, say, you can lose yourself in exploring other takes on the trend.
With this crop of video, there’s some examples of public sector creators using trends. Why bother? Because if you do this you are likely to reach a a larger audience so when you’ve got that must-share content you are reaching more people.
Not all of the examples here are public sector but all have ideas that can work well in the sector.
Public sector TikTok ideas
Creator:@redbridgecouncil
Purpose:Voter registration amongst young people.
Trend or Audio: ‘Everybody’ by Back Street Boys.
Why this works: It’s self deprecating and shows a sense of humour. It links a music track with a call to action. You’re original. You’re the only one. You may or may not be sexual.
Creator:@thisisrangerkeith.
Purpose: By having no clear call to action the video reminds viewers that it’s good to take a break in the wild and listen for just a moment to bird song.
Trend or Audio:None.
Why this works: It deliberately shuns trends and trending audio that people can jump on to reach an audience. By doing so it reinforces why the countryside is a good place to go and recharge. This isn’t a service. It’s a bloke called Keith that you can build a basic web relationship with. You can even by merch.
This is by an individual rather than an organisation. I’m taking this that he could be a countryside ranger.
Creator: @southyorkshirefire
Purpose:Entertaining content.
Trend or Audio: #ringlightchallenge and the ‘Nobody wants to see you naked’ audio.
Why this works: This is a really good example of a public sector account embracing the platform. It creates entertaining content so it can build an audience and then deliver calls to action. This is a piece of that entertaining content.
The #ringlightchallenge began as a trend amongst super fit gym goers so they could show off their rippling shoulder muscles. It was then subverted by others. The overweight girl with the light disappearing into the fridge, for example. The audio ‘nobody want to see you naked’ is also a trend which the service have used here.
Creator:@livingliverpooltour
Purpose: Explainer video.
Trend or Audio: None.
Why this works: Living Liverpool Tour is a man who loves Liverpool and wants to explain and explore the city he clearly loves. The purpose is to educate and inform. This video is an answer to a question posed to him why playiong fields in the city are called locally ‘The Mystery’. By using period pictures, a voiceover and original video it tells the story of a mystery donor.
“Now,” each video concludes, “where shall we go next?”
It’s a lovely piece of place marketing.
Creator: @worcsacutenhs
Purpose: Celebrating a patient story.
Trend or audio: none.
Why this works: This is a video that works on its own independent of trends. A patient story its a celebration of a baby born 15 weeks early finally going home.
The issue of ramping down after an emergency is the pressing issue facing public sector comms. How can work get back to an acceptable pace? Here are some crowd-sourced excellent ideas that may be a bit life saving too.
When rabbits are pulled out of hats every day the act stops being magic and it startsto be normal.
Over the last two years public sector comms teams have worked long hours to communicate in a pandemic. Their work has helped saved lives. They have pulled a field full of rabbits out of a factory of hats.
But let’s be honest. The cost of this sacrifice is being overlooked. You only glimpse the real cost in conversations. Heard about the entire team who burnt out and walked off the job in the space of a month? Or the one who went off with stress and never came back? Or the one who can’t sleep regular hours anymore?
In March 2022, there is a sense that the worst has passed and business as usual has long since returned. With 100,000 daily cases and 192 dead on the day in March 2022 I’m writing this the idea that the storm has passed is open to debate.
But anyway, how do you return to normal?
In an anonymous blog, one senior comms person observes that the emergency pace of long hours has become expected. It’s now baked in.
But should it be?
Of course not.
The major comms challenge of 2022 is not how to ramp up delivery but ramp it down before even more people burn-out, go off with stress or quit the profession.
How to ramp down is the big strategic question.
I’ve asked members of the Public Sector Comms Headspace to come up with some ideas.
A comms strategy and a plan
A comms strategy and plan. Some clearly identified organisation priorities, comms objectives linked to them and an activity plan so we can plot resource against it. So that we know what weâre working towards most of the time and can schedule our days and weeks, and our leave – apart from, say, 10 to 20 per cent of the time when thereâs a genuine emergency or reactive situation.
Bridget Aherne
Learn to say ‘no’
Build and maintain a strong comms team and wider network so you always have other people to share your experiences with, to vent to, to support and be supported, to laugh with in the dark and not so dark times, to be a touchstone so you know it’s not just happening to you.
It’s really tough and it’s not over yet, but at least you’re not alone.
Giuseppina Valenza
Ask why is it urgent
When people say ‘this is urgent’, ask why?
Is it a legitimate, couldn’t-be-foreseen priority which will achieve a real outcome for the organisation. Or is it ‘shit, we forgot to tell comms – quick fire them an email.
If it’s the earlier, fair enough. If it’s the latter, well, sometimes saying ‘no’ can be a good thing and demonstrates planned, professional comms is not a rabbit-out-of-a-hat demo.
Sharon Dunbar
Have a workplan and make it visible
Show senior managers the service’s workplan on a regular basis. It might not stop the request coming in but it will make it a little easier to push back.
Suzie Evans
A detailed plan for you
We are currently addressing some of these issuesâŠ
Slowing down the inbound requests by making customers think about what they need before they ask. A drop down menu of options available negates the need to send unsolicited âwe need some commsâ emails. Also an auto response to acknowledge and manage expectations- business critical? Patient safety related? Weâll be with you within 24-48 hours. Time specific but no major impact? Thatâll be within 3-5 days. Longer term request? Weâll put it in the queue and youâll hear from us within 7-10 working days. Customers need to understand Comms arenât sat there playing Wordle waiting for the next request to land.
Also try to work with programme and project managers/directors to educate them into understanding that they need to identify the comms outcomes they need to achieve before they can ask you for resource. Because if they donât know, then you canât work out if you have the capacity to offer support for it.
Develop some self serve options so that some of the âsmall câ comms can be delivered by colleagues across the organisation. One of our execs recently took a selfie with staff, submitted it with a couple of lines and we did the rest. Not all content needs to be created by CommsâŠ
Finally, be supportive of your team and help them decline unnecessary requests and meetings and enable them to ask âwhyâ rather than simply react with âyesâ.
Louise Sharf
Research through social listening
Use social listening to show whether there there is actually public interest⊠people are often actually looking in a different direction
Susannah Griffiths
Never stop challenging
Never stop challenging and asking why. Urgency has become a habit with corporate colleagues, perhaps due to the amount of actual crisis comms needed to be turned around at pace over the last two years. Time is needed to check work aligns to priorities and has purpose, and there needs to be a clear recognition of the difference between crisis comms and poor planning.
Sacha Taylor
Relax and cut the audience some slack
Our audiences are also exhausted. After two years of having to pay attention to our channels to access vital information they needed to meet their basic needs, such as income and healthcare, theyâre finally able to get back to some level of normality. We need to cut our audiences some slack and stop communicating like theyâre hanging on our every word, theyâre not.
Ruth Edwards
Selfcare: Deliberately cut back on work hours
Make yourself less available and work to a sensible drum beat, so you have the capacity for genuinely urgent matters. Work out what actually isnât going to break any eggs if you slow the pace down.
Melinda Brown
Selfcare: Look after yourself first and then others
âPut your mask on firstâ is advice I often give out, but forget to tell myself If you are not ok then you arenât in a position to help others and do your job effectively. So, hard as it is, look after yourself. How ever that looks to you.
Sara Hamilton
Selfcare: Book and take proper leave
Take your annual leave.
And really take it – no ‘Oh, Iâll just log on for a minute,’, no ‘Oh, Iâm around if you need me Mr/Mrs CE.â No, ‘Iâm not going anywhere therefore Iâll pick up my phone’.
Kate Pratt
Selfcare: Switch off
My other half was prised away for his birthday weekend recently, two days of no internet and Scottish sunshine. On return he remarked that a really difficult issue heâd been dealing with had been made worse by people emailing each other all weekend about it. A bit of perspective and energy helped him resolve it on the Monday. His advice to his senior, academic peers was, switch off more and make better decisions.
Lucy Hartley
Don’t say ‘I’m busy’
Being visible about what work you have on. Just saying âIâm busyâ doesnât cut it with others who also think theyâre busy.
Lead-in times really help, and a clear message that if this work is taken on, something else has to give. Usually does the trick.
Clare Parker
Thank you to Bridget Aherne, Sarah Forgione, Melinda Brown, Sam Kemp, Caroline Howarth, Georgina Button, Kate Pratt, Hannah Rowley, Kelly ShutlerRosalie Fairbairn, Suzie Evans, Louise Sharf, Sacha Taylor, Sara Hamilton, Clare Parker, Lucy Hartley, Susanna Griffiths and everyone who contributed.