Category Archives: communications

The best day to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best day is today. It’s the same for you and your team.

The skills you need to communicate have been changing. A few years back I blogged a list of skills that every team needed. This started as a list of 40 skills. No more. This is now 55. But do you want to know the good news? I don’t think everyone needs all of them. But your team’s strength should be drawn from different areas.

I’ve divided this into nine areas. Everyone should get the strategic. Everyone needs the core skills.

Strategic

1. Be clear about your organisation’s priorities. Its priorities are the comms team’s priorities.
2. Report up weekly on . List what you are doing against the heading of your priorities. Otherwise you are just making noise.
3. Be able to look finance in the eye. Attach a financial value to the results you are achieving. Fewer GP appointents because of that YouTube clip and receptionists who triage? Attach a value to that.
4. Have a team of specialist generalists. If you expect everyone to know all the skills they – and you – will fail. Have them know core skills and excel at others.
5. Be gate openers not gatekeepers. Some of your best comms work will be done by frontline staff equipped with a smartphone. This is fine. It is to be encouraged.
6. To know what an income target is and to either plan for them or offer evaluated comms savings. A fifth of public sector teams have an income target. If you have one you’ll need entrepreneurial skills in the team rather than relying on ex-hacks to sell ad space.

Core skills the team will need

7. Know how to evaluate. If you are doing something, know why. Count the tweets and press releases you send. But count what people did as a result of all that. That’s far more important.
8. Know that social media isn’t about calls to action. Its being human and engaging 80 per cent of the time.
9. Know all the channels and who uses them. There is no one size fits all channel that will reach everyone. You need to know the online and offline channels and their strengths and weaknesses.
10. Be more human. Everyone’s job in comms is to carry a Field Marshall’s baton to see the big picture, wear a lab coat to know the data and have a plate of cake to speak human.
11. Always be learning.
12. Educate the client. Comms’ job is to help the organisation communicate better. Your job is to advise them how to do that by knowing backwards the complex and fractured media landscape. You are a professional. Give professional advice.
13. Be a diplomat, be small ‘p’ and big ‘P’ politically aware. Know how to handle people and give advice.
14. Speak truth to power. Know that you are able to give the right advice.
15. To listen to the public. Don’t be afraid to reflect their views back to the organisation even when it is critical.
16. To be able to tell stories. In different formats.
17. To know media law. McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists is your friend.
18. To know the value of internal comms. Engage for Success is a good starting point.
19. To know how to write a comms plan. Like this one.
20. To know how to interpret data. And know the right data to interpret.
21. To know how to respond as an organisation in an emergency. Increasingly, the emergency is what tests a team. This will happen to you at a time you need it least.
22. Look for the influencers who can influence networks. The blogger. The community leader. The campaigner.
23. To be able to communicate to the head and the heart. And know the difference.
24. To manage time. To know what meetings to make and those to break.

In person

25. To be professional, warm and engaging.
26. To present. To create a deck of slides and stand up and speak to an audience.

In words

27. To understand jargon but to communicate in plain English.
28. To write effective emails.
29. To write effective email campaigns.
30. To evaluate and improve email campaigns.
31. To write a press release.
32. To be able to write for the web.
33. To create and run a survey.

In pictures

34. To find copyright free images.
35. To take and edit
36. To record the permission of those who are photographed, update and maintain a model consent database.
37. To select information and create an infographic.
38. To know what branding is and why it is.

In video

39. Know the optimum lengths of video per channel.
40. Know how to plan, edit, film and add text and music to a video shot in-house.
41. Know how to plan and commission and external video.

In print

42. To know when a leaflet works and to liaise with designers.
43. To know when a newsletter or magazine works and to liase with designers.

In data

44. To know what data to look for and what data to count.
45. To know what open data is.

On Social media

46. Know the Paretto Principle. The 80-20 split is what works on social media. Make 80 per cent of your content social and engaging to earn the right 20 per cent of the time to make calls to action. People don’t want to be sold to on social media.
47. Think of Facebook as a broad landscape rather than just your page. Most people who use your organisation aren’t following your page but they are using Facebook. But they are members of groups and pages. So go looking for them there.
48. Make friends with Facebook group and page admin. They can help share content for you.
49. Join Facebook groups and pages as yourself. By being a human being you can show that real human beings work for the organisation.
50. To know what audience uses the main social media accounts.
51. To create on each platform engaging content with words, text and video for them with the right tone for the right occasion.
52. To know how customer services works with social media.
53. To respond using social media in an emergency.
54. To know new platforms and be able to experiment with them.
55. To be able to create and schedule content at the right time.

Picture credit: Ryan Dickey / Flickr

For three years I was the sole voice of the council’s Twitter and for five years drew-up its social media strategy and tactics.

We started with one account and when I left there were more than 70 many of which I was really proud of.

There were many things I learned along the way. One that stands out is setting out how you’ll use social media and how you expect others to use it. In other words, ‘Play nice. We’ll talk to you so long as you don’t swear, okay?’ This is only what front counter staff have pinned up and most of the time we never needed it.

I noticed these social media house rules from GDS. They’ve been around for a while but I’ve not seen them before. You can see the original here.

Why they are great

They set out what’s covered, what they’ll do, when they’ll do it, what they can’t do, what they won’t tolerate and what they expect of you. So, if someone shouts and swears they can point at these and show them the red card. Or a user can tweet them and know roughly what to expect.

I’m sure GDS won’t mind if you cut and paste but you’ll need to tweak them a little for your organisation.

The social media team at GDS are responsible for several different social media accounts on a variety of platforms.

We’re happy to help you in any way that we can and look forward to seeing your views and feedback. We do however expect our users to offer us the same level of courtesy that we offer them, so we have a short set of house rules:

1. All users must comply with the social media platform’s Terms of Use as well as these Terms of Use.
2. We will remove, in whole or in part, posts that we feel are inappropriate.
3. We will report and remove any social media profiles that are set up using GOV.UK imagery, including fonts, without permission.
4. We will block and/or report users on Twitter who direct tweets at us which we believe are:
   1. Abusive or obscene
   2. Deceptive or misleading
   3. In violation of any intellectual property rights
   4. In violation of any law or regulation
   5. Spam (persistent negative and/or abusive tweeting in which the aim is to provoke a response)
5. You are wholly responsible for any content you post including content that you choose to share.

Anyone repeatedly engaging with us using content or language which falls into the above categories will be blocked and/or reported to the associated social media platform.

Responding to users:

1. We’ll do our best to respond to your enquiries within four working hours.
2. We’ll try to help you, or direct you to people and/or departments who can, wherever possible.
3. Our working hours are 9.00 – 17.00 Monday to Friday. We’ll deal with enquiries sent outside of this time as soon as possible when working hours resume.
4. The @GOVUK twitter account is here to provide information and support for users of the GOV.UK website.
5. The @GOVUK Twitter account is not a political account and cannot respond to political tweets.

We do not respond to tweets of a commercial nature

Whilst we are happy to receive such material, we will not respond as we are governed by strict procurement rules. You can keep up to date on our procurement platform, Digital Marketplace by visiting https://digitalmarketplace.blog.gov.uk/ or by contacting enquiries@digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk.

We reserve the right to modify or change these conditions at any time.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Eight years ago I walked into a room in Birmingham for the last few minutes of an event about digital communications hosted by a relatively new company.

There was about 30 people in the room and a bloke who was at the front came over and introduced himself.

“Hello, I’m Dave,” he said shaking my hand. I’d met Dave Worsell for the first time. The event was the first govdelivery annual conference. Fast forward and the company has grown, changed and been re-named as Granicus. Dave remains the same.

On September 26 along with my colleague Darren I’ll compere Granicus’ Public Sector Communications Conference in London.

The event has grown but Dave has stayed the same. So has the ethos of what he and his team does. They believe in really good communications but with a generosity of sharing good learning that chimes with my own. Here’s a thing. Without Dave I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do now and comms2point0 would look very different. It began as a site in 2011 with myself and Darren. In late 2013, I was weighing up whether or not to leave the security of a salary make it my full-time job. A conversation with Dave was instrumental in helping me make the leap and in April 2014, I worked on comms2point0 full-time. Darren followed 12-months later.

So, when I say it gives me great pleasure to compare the event this month, I mean it.

When I say you’ll learn something if you go along to the event, I mean that too.

There will be 13 speakers and a whitepaper that myself and Darren have written. The focus will be on income generation and better communications.  I go every year to this  event because I always learn things and if you go I know you will too. And Dave is great and he has a great team.

The Granicus UK Public Sector Communications Conference will be held in London on September 26. For more information click here.