Future comms made easy: social media, PR and digital communications.
This cropped up as a Facebook memory thing this morning. It’s brilliant.
Take a look at it here:
“She took a screenshot of his snapchat and he tried to deny it, he said I didnae like her instagram, I just liked her facebook post that was a screengrab of her instagram, it wisnae her actual instagram.”
If you need to know how the youngstrells are communicating with each other, it’s marvellous.
By the way, this is a YouTube of the actual embedded Facebook. Not a screenshot of their instagram.
For 12-years I was a journalist and rose to become assistant chief reporter of a daily regional newspaper. Back then I would have told you that the difference was news was everything they don’t want you to know. The rest is PR, I’d have said.
Eight years on and director of my own company I know the difference is more to it than that just a lack of shouting news editors and no double murders.
The truth is that if there was a Venn diagram, there would be surprising little between the two. At best, it’s a common use of the English language and the knowledge that news is people. And people like to read about people.
A yardstick of success. As a journalist, your measure is if you’ve got the front page. Failing that, it’s a healthy number of pageleads. As a comms person, it’s a number of things. Chiefly, being able to show the material difference your content has made. The number of foster carers recruited, for example.
Criticism. I say this with love, knowing journalists will take umbrage. There is nobody so thin skinned as a journalist. I knew this when I was one. I know it now too. As a comms person you are like a sniper in no man’s land. Under fire from all sides. Your organisation and those outside will throw things at you.
Professional regard. Journalists are special. Not trusted, especially. But special. They have a Press bench and a Press pass. Doors open. Comms people have a daily battle to have their opinion listened to. Solicitors? Planning inspectors? Doctors? Their word is law. But anyone with spell check and clipart thinks they are a comms person.
Audience. A journalist, in the words of a former colleague only half in jest ‘tries to make old people scared to leave their homes.’ They used to have one main channel. Like the printed newspaper or radio bulletin. Now they have to use more. A comms person needs to know as many of the 40 different skills as possible.
Skills. While the reporter needs more skills now than ever the PR or comms person needs to draw either individually or across a team up to 40 skills.
Diplomacy. A journalist can smile politely and ask why the chief executive has failed to build 100 homes on time. A comms person needs the tact to talk through the implications of how that failure will play out and suggest a course of action.
There are no jacks under it. As a journalist, I’d be encouraged to make a story a bit more exciting by ‘putting the jacks under it.’ Outrage, slam, row. As a comms person you play it straight. You stick to the facts which are always sacred.
Accuracy. Now, here’s a thing. I was more accurate as a PR person than a journalist. There. I’ve said it. The news desk request to write a story to fit a pre-determined idea is a thing. I’ve done it. In comms and PR you need to be certain of your ground or you become the story.
A difference. A journalist can try and make a difference by holding power to account. A comms person can make a difference by drawing up the right content in the right place at the right time.
Planning. Long term planning on newspapers was often tomorrow. The concept of a comms plan to work out the business priority, the audience and the channel is alien.
Obsolescence. The journalist suffers from being in an industry whose business model is being re-invented and as a result there are casualties. Comms as an area is developing.
Hours. Long hours to make sure the paper is filled are common on newspapers – who are often renamed media companies. Hours in comms and PR are long. But it’s rare to be stood outside a burning factory in Smethwick, I find.
Writing. Just because you can write for a newspaper doesn’t mean you can write for the web. Or Facebook or Snapchat.
Your employer and your ethics. You bat for your employer as a PR person. But you bat for your ethics first. At times you have to know your ground and say a firm ‘no.’
Innovation. There can’t be a more exciting time to be a comms person than now. The internet has tipped up old certainties. The tools we can use are evolving and the guidebook on how to use them you can write yourself. How good is that?
Like many former journalists, I admire good journalism. But don’t anyone think that being a reporter and being a press officer or a PR person are remotely the same.
Picture credit: Mattiece David / Flickr
A few days ago I posted about how a straight forward car fire could play out as video.
You can read it here. It talks about the impact of some content shot on a smartphone and posted by a firefighter.
Following from that, a firefighter tweeted this YouTube footage that goes one better. It’s brilliant. It’s shot from a body camera worn by a watch commander. It shows them directing the response to the fire and the impact of the housefire.
It’s powerful as-live content. You can see it here:
As West Midlands Fire Service say, this pilot is becoming adopted service-wide in the New Year.
What’s the advantage? Brilliant content that captures an incident as it develops. As body camera footage this doesn’t get in the way. There is no issue of a firefighter breaking off from what they are doing just to film. There’s also the benefit of good quality footage that can be used for training and internally as well as shared online and on TV.
To a former journalist like myself, I’m fascinated at how the round of phone calls to fire stations is being replaced by a round of social media checks.
A downside? It’s possible that downloading the film, editing and uploading may prove fiddly. But do the benefits outweigh this? It would seem so.
Would this work elsewhere? It’s tricky to see how day-to-day police, NHS, housing or ambulance footage could be used if people were included on the content. Yet, this Oldham Council video with a Go-Pro does give a taste.
Class, be more like West Midlands Fire Service.
I can’t wait to see the content that emerges from it.
Poetry? In good communications?
There’s a few lines of verse I have to be careful with because when I read them my eyes always fill with stinging tears. I can’t help myself.
You may know them. They are from AE Houseman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’. He was inspired to write them after climbing the Clent Hills in North Worcestershire and looking towards Shropshire in the distance.
They are lines filled with a sense of loss. Soldiers in the First World War often took them with them into the trenches. Wilfred Owen carried a copy with him.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
I was reminded by this by an unconference session at GCS North in Manchester earlier today. Poetry in communications was floated as a session idea almost as an afterthought. Feel a lump in the throat? I do.
Here are two surprising things. First, Houseman never knew Shropshire well. He was from Bromsgrove. He would see the hills in the far-off distance to him they were a place that were just out-of-reach. Second, Houseman for all the passion of those lines was outwardly a cold man. An academic of the Classics he was an unemotional fish. But he believed that poetry works best when it aimed at the heart and the emotions. I think he’s right.
All too often creativity is squeezed out of a comms job, one person remarked.
Yet, a piece of creative writing can – at times – connect better with people than the formal tone.
There is a tremendous video used to promote Dublin that marries spoken word poetry with images. It’s a powerful thing. You can see it here.
It goes back to the heart v head argument I’ve written about before.
But poetry can also serve to articulate something. One attendee at the session with a condition remarked that writing verse about his condition helped him articulate it in a way he couldn’t in conversation. Another said that a back-to-work colleague overcoming depression once communicated through a poem as she felt awkward talking about it.
If you are struggling to find the right words poetry to appeal to the heart could help you.
Picture credit: Mark Peate / Flickr
Why give frontline teams access to social media? Easy. Because they create the best content.
It’s long been a drum I’ve been banging and I find it odd that this hasn’t mushroomed faster.
Take Highgate Fire Station in the West Midlands, for example. They responded to an abandoned burning car on November 4 and posted a short video clip the next day. Just 21 seconds and features a firefighter in breathing aparatus extinguishing the blaze. They posted it to their station Twitter account. You can see the video here:
Earlier car fire in action. Remember that arson is a danger to us and members of the public! pic.twitter.com/pZPNOavpOs
— WMFS Highgate (@HighgateFire) November 5, 2016
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In terms of resource, it took one firefighter less than five minutes to shoot, edit and post the content. It’s the kind of thing that back when I was a journalist the fire crew would barely mention. Why? Because they are routine to them. To the residents they serve they aren’t.
Tweetreach say that 39,000 accounts were reached by the tweet which was shared 13 times. Included in that number was the Birmingham Mail who ripped the video and created their own video which they posted on their own channels.
A smartphone that can record video and some WiFi. That’s it.
On a basic level, it said that firefighters risk their lives to make the area they serve safer. It also works to promote the work of the fire service and better connect with residents.
So, why wouldn’t fire and rescue services want more of this? In fact, why wouldn’t the rest of the public sector want to tell people about the job they are doing? And yet, so many oprganisations are still reluctant to invest and trust their staff.
You may know that for the past 18 months or so I’ve been helping to deliver video skills workshops via comms2point0. The aim is to give people the skills to plan, shoot, edit and post video using a smartphone or tablet.
They are a joy to deliver. Steve and Sophie who I deliver them with are good people to work with. I love doing them and seeing people go on a bit of a journey from unsure to taking their first steps. Then later on I may see them blossom into a sprinter and marathon runner who are travelling to amazing places.
One such blooming dropped into my Twitter timeline from Chris Bentley. Chris works at Acorns Hospice which is a hospice in the West Midlands that specialises in looking after childern.
He shot the following video here:
You don’t have to be a parent to get the humanity and dignity of this story. It’s beautifully told.
While you know I help deliver video skills workshops you may not know that I lost my own mother 12 years ago. She died in a hospice surrounded by many of her family. I don’t know how it feels to lose a child as the Harvey family have but I painfully know what it’s like to lose a loved one in a hospice. I wish that when it is time everyone has this.
I’m quietly proud that a workshop that I’ve been involved with may have played even a small part in delivering such an effective video. It’s a video that doesn’t stand alone. It is part of a fundraising campaign to carry on the hospice work. Good communications can seem cold. Find out the business objective. Tell stories and create content that helps that. Evaluate by seeing if the business objective has been reached. But for the coldness of this, what makes it work is the warmth of the storytelling as Chris has done here.
The truism that good PR and comms can make a real difference is never truer than it is here. I can’t wait to see the results of the campaign and will be chipping in with a donation here. I hope you, if you can, do too.
At the Association of Police Communicators event in Grantham I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for a while After exchanging pleasantries, I asked what was keeping them busy.
A conversation that challenged
“Actually, I’m wondering about taking digital out of communications altogether. Because it should really be in other parts of the business too.”
They then spoke about the £70,000 they’d saved someone else through a digital process.
There’s a good point there. But take digital comms out of comms? It’s good to be challenged.
There’s certainly no point in having a lovely piece of digital communications on a wider process that’s a bit rubbish. Or for comms people to sit in a room and never talk to anyone or be involved with anything.
A paragraph that chimes
Then I read this from the digitally talented Sarah Lay who left her local government job recently.
For you see all communications and communicators should now be digital – they should be equipped with the skills and knowledge to work to the demands of digital, often as the primary channel. But digital is not purely communications – it is also customer service, it is IT and technology, it is behaviour and analytics, it is marketing and product / service development.
It’s that thing again.
Don’t just communicate for the sake of it. Work out why you are communicating then measure it. That way you can look finance in the eye.
Definitely developing new skills.
Here’s the slide I keep coming back to and have done for months.
W. Edwards Deming was an American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant. His work has been acclaimed as being one of the key factors that led to the Japanese industrial boom from 1950 to 1960.
He is absolutely right. Without data you are just another person with an opinion.
During my career I’ve not always appreciated this. My career has been a struggle between thought and action. As a journalist, I was measured by action. Write the story, get the scoop. Long term planning was literally tomorrow.
But as I’m often now taking the bigger picture I see the value of data to help you calmly make decisions.
The problem with data is that it doesn’t kick the door down and demand you send out a press release. It’s dull. It’s a pile of numbers. Yet, what stories it can tell you if you spend long enough panning for it like a Klondike fontiersperson hunched over a pan rext to a running stream.
Good data can save a life.
It can tell you, as I heard today at the Association of Police Communicators conference, that abusive behaviour starts in the teenage years. So, comms has been targeted at teenagers that abusive relationships are not acceptable because the data said that’s when offenders start.
So shouldn’t you spend more time panning for data?
For 12-years I worked on local papers writing whole forest-pulping amounts of stories on everything from table-top sales to triple murders.
More than a decade since I sent my last nib the industry keeps tugging at my coat tails.
Today, I read an earnest defence of local newspapers blogged by Ian Carter. You can read it here. In it, he defends the industry against the accusation of clickbait, listicles and falling standards. In particular he siezes on a well-documented story of a frontpage story of an out-of-date pasty being sold. It’s five years ago. Or, rather as this is newspapers there are CAPITAL LETTERS to show OUTRAGE:
“As part of the case for the prosecution, he digs out a story published five years – FIVE YEARS! – ago by the Folkestone Herald.”
Hey, maybe Ian is right. So, I’d like to share some more contemporary work in the style of a listical featured in the excellent Angry People in Local Newspapers Facebook page you can see here.
So, join me to jump for joy, raise a glass to fine quality local journalism and look sad next to a pothole. There is a post I’ll write on newspapers and where they feature in 2016. This isn’t it.
Seven years ago I started to blog and everything that I do now is influenced by that decision.
I’m changing the way I blog. Just as an experiment for November first. Maybe for good. Maybe not.
After talking with Ben Proctor and being impressed by Amanda Coleman and @gwynnek I’m going to post something every day. Sometimes on comms2point0. Sometimes on LinkedIn. Always here.
What is blogging? It’s thinking something through publicly, then keeping a public record of it to share.
Why change? Because I want to see what impact it has on how I do things. And because I quite fancy a place to develop half-thought thoughts as short reads or possibly longer. For the past couple of years I’ve been writing about things that I’m running a workshop or a session on. That’s fine. But I’d like to expand beyond that too.
Why #blogvember? Because a month feels achievable. Some content every day.
Why a dog video? Becuase I really don’t like reading pronouncements from other people about how they use social media. Just do it, chap. Go on. But this public declaration just to myself is sugared with a viral dog video just for you.
There.
Just look at the little chap’s face.