Tag Archives: bbc

LICENCE FREED: What comms and PR can learn from how the BBC use TikTok

TikTok is surging in importance as a comms channel and a new study shows journalism as an unlikely hothouse for developing how to use it.

According to the UK Press Gazette data news brands have been experimenting with the platform and the clear trailblazer? The BBC.

It may feel counter-intuitive but it’s entirely in keeping with the corporation’s pioneering use of new technology.

The BBC leads the field in the survey with a 2,000 per cent increase in follower numbers in the eight months to January 2023.

Interestingly, the top 10 leading news TikTok embracers include a mix of traditional broadcasters and new media – such as LadBible, Huffpost, CNN and ITV News.

There’s no representation for UK local media companies such as Reach or LocalWorld in the top 30 list. Combined, such companies pack a fierce punch on Facebook and with their websites. A lack of resource, a focus on e-mail newsletters and the scattered nature of their audience may explain their position. 

But, still.

What can public sector comms people learn from this list?

A fair amount. 

What you can learn from the BBC on TikTok

National content is vertical as well as landscape

Firstly, people looking to pitch to national media now have the additional route of vertical video. With the BBC’s main account @bbc they have 3.8 million followers and 2,170 videos. Their main focus is to refocus and tease their iplayer content. However, @bbcnews has a news focus with almost 800,000 followers and 442 videos.

Link: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFobyYRm/

Not one channel but many

The BBC is a big organisation with lots of content. It’s quite right that it has a number of accounts as well as identifiable journalist accounts. This gives an additional route to the audience.

The BBC TikTok style book need offers tips

Often, people are nervous of TikTok for its dances, memes, trends and creativity. I get that. But there’s a very strong argument to embrace that approach to fully embrace the platform. South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue do this brilliantly.

But what BBC News does offer is storytelling that’s with more of a straight bat.

Here’s a few things you can learn.

  1. Branding

In training, I often talk about the need to park-up traditional branding approaches when dealing with social media. That’s true of TikTok too. But what BBC News have is a translucent BBC logo in the top left of the screen along with a translucent red strip down the side. Scrolling through their timeline, it’s immediately clear to the viewer that this is from the same place.

A logo jpg added in the edit before uploading to TikTok can do this for you. 

  1. No bongs

The BBC News content doesn’t start with BBC News Titles or theme tune. Nor should it. That works on terrestrial TV. It doesn’t work on social media where the scrolling subscriber is met with the same five or 10 seconds of intro they already saw twice that morning.

  1. A title

Each clip starts with a clear title with black text on a white background with red and black edging. You have a headline summary, literally.

This looks as though its been added in the edit well before the upload. You could alternatively add a cover in the TikTok editing tool itself. This is certainly helpful if you’re scrolling through old video. 

  1. A strong opening three seconds

The law of social video is to startly boldly with either eye catching footage or an eye catching quote from an interview. BBC News manage this quite happily. 

  1. Cutaways are king 

Cutaways or B-roll is the footage which helps paint a picture. It’s shots of the picket line or cars sounding their horns passing the picket line. Over this you can add a voiceover or text to tell the story.

Like this clip of Thor the walrus:

  1. And voiceovers are fine

Much of the BBC News TikTok content is fairly anonymously presented. There is content with a reporter asking the questions and reacting but for the most part there is no recognisable news anchor. Authority comes from the branding and the blue tick not the sight of the newsreader.

This is a good example for comms people not seeking the limelight.  

  1. About a minute or less

Timing is also key. BBC News don’t have space for lengthy content. The days of hour long interviews between Robin Day and Margaret Thatcher couldn’t be further away. About a minute is the length of most of their video.

  1. Understand the complex and tell with simplicity

This is not new. The journalist has always had to get their heads around the complicated and then explain the story clearly to their audience. It’s jargon free. This chimes with public sector comms’ need to do the same. 

9. Avoid copyright issues

I’ve written about this before, but having a standard account as an organisation is dangerous. You need a business account. This limits the sounds you can use but means those available to you are safe to use. BBC News do this, too.

In summary

So, in summary, there’s lots to learn from BBC News for public sector comms. It’s not the only approach open. But it is a good template to see how to cover news and sensitive topics when you need to avoid a trend.

NEWS NUMBERS: Reach plc websites reach more UK people than the BBC

Here’s something public sector communicators need to know.

Reach plc’s combined websites reached more people in the UK than the BBC.

The figures were announced by Ipsos Iris which form the new UKOM audience data.

Here they are in the list as the highest UK channel in 5th behind global brands Alphabet (i.e. Google) Meta (i.e. Facebook), Amazon and Microsoft.

Why is this significant?

It’s significant because it represents a reminder of the importance of traditional media and that they are re-inventing themselves.

It’s a reminder to take local media seriously.

Reach plc have more than 100 print newspaper titles and more than a dozen web presences like Staffordshire Live. They also have national titles The Daily Express and Daily Mirror.

Reach have done some great work with changing from the traditional print focussed model to the hybrid of print and web.

The flipside is that I’ve questioned Reach plc’s lack of policing of online comments in the past and the BBC remain the most trusted news brand in the UK.

AUNTIE SOCIAL: Why the BBC should be your new favourite corporate account

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I’ve often said that the secret to decent digital communications in being human.

What is being human? You recognise it when you see it. It can be sharp and witty. It’s not corporate speak and its not jargon.

Often when I’m training I’ll see a look of anguish on people’s faces. They’d like to be human. But they’re worried about what people would think.

Step forward, the @bbcpress Twitter which has been on fire of late. But rather than be a branch of the entertainment industry the account skilfully switches between the humorous to the rebuttal to the more measured. But that’s fine. Choosing which is what makes the account special and why it should be your new favourite corporate account.

If the BBC can you can

Often, people will be reluctant to be human because they are risk averse. That’s fine. The BBC has been a political football for decades. If they can you can.

The Alan Partridge announcement teaser

There’s a great scene where Alan Partridge tries to attract someone he knows from a distance away. It’s painful. So, the teaser is marvellous.

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The Alan Partridge announcement with the Alan Partridge meme

There was a running gag in Alan Partidge’s first series about wanting a second series. Badly. Really badly. So desperately, you could smell it. So, of course an Alan Partridge meme to announce a new series is the way to go.

The online rebuttal

The BBC have become bold at shooting down misinformation online.

 The League of Gentleman announcement

A simple announcement wouldn’t have chimed quite so well as this that chimed with their dedicated fans.

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And the more formal announcement

The decision to expand World Service was treated to a more straight bat. But that’s fine.

The measured tribute But it is not all fun and games. When the mood is sombre @bbcpress find the right gear too.

All this is content that for local government digital media pioneer Alastair Smith and the rest of the BBC Press Office team can share pride in. Good work well delivered in sometimes difficult circumstances.

Picture credit: Elliot Brown / Flickr

BBC EXPERT: Fear change in tech? You’ve seen nothing…

burkeWorried the world is changing too fast? Here’s a thought. You’ve seen nothing.

In 1973, former BBC tech writer James Burke had imagined what 1993 would look like. He came up with what looked like wildly futuristic. Databanks, personal data storage and computers in schools. Older people would be confused, he said.

In 2013, he spoke on BBC Radio 4’s PM. It’s an interview that fried my brain at the time and it’s rattled around in my head off and on for a while.

Fear change? Brother, sister you’ve seen nothing, as Burke says:

“Something is going to happen in 40 years time, if my guess is right that will change things more than since we left the caves. The next 20 years are going to move so fast and in so many directions at once that we’re going to have a job just keeping up.

“The problem is, as we try and solve problems like privacy, feedimng the poor ovf the world and solving the ozone layer we spend months and years of committee time trying to solve these short term problems while in the background in 14,000 laboratories around the world nanotechnology is creeping along very quietly.

“A nano metre is about 1/70,000th of a human hair so one nano metre is the size of about three atoms. There are systems that allow you to manipulate atoms to use them to build molecules to build stuff.

“In about 40 years, and this is not me speaking this is a Nobel prize winner called Richard Feynman who said this all 50 years ago who said there are no physical laws that mean we can’t produce a physical nano-factory.”

Your personal nano-factory, Burke explained, could work as a desktop 3D printer using air, water and dirt and ascetelene gas and you can make anything you like. Anything.

“We will in about 40-years time become entirely autonomous. In other words, be able to produce everything they need for virtually nothing. That will destroy the present social economic and political system because they will come pointless.

There will be no need for nations or governments, he argues. They are there to regulate shortage, protect you and re-distribute wealth and if there is no shortage there is no need for them.

“We have spent the last 150,000 talkative years dealing with the problem of scarcity. Every institution, every value system everfy aspevct of our life has been determined by the need to share out. After the nano factory does its thing we will then be faced with the problem of abundance and in a society where there is no need what’s the point of government.”

There will be no need for social institutions or even cities, Burke says.

So, really, dear reader, you not getting Snapchat may be looked at, if it is looked at all, with mirth far greater than the Smash TV ad robots.  Of course, this is all prediction.

You can listen to the audio clip here:

//embeds.audioboom.com/posts/1574606-james-burke-predicted-the-future-in-1973-now-he-does-it-again/embed/v4?eid=AQAAAH8gJ1jOBhgAghghhh

LIKE WTF: “A like’s a like… never fall in love with a liker.”

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.

LONG READ: A Tomorrow’s World for future comms

tomThere was this great TV programme when I was a kid called Tomorrow’s World where amazing new concepts were demonstrated.

Back in 1979, the amazing invention called the mobile phone was road tested. We would, they said, no longer have to have to rely on landlines. In 1969, they called school computers and in 1994 it was the internet.

The mood music of it all was that one day, things would be so much different. It would be better but we were in control. For a while now there’s been a few emerging trends that I’ve been trying to make sense of. They’re now just starting to drift into view and they’ll change things for everyone. Not just comms people.

Bear with me. It’ll get weird, but let’s walk through it together.

A man in glasses has told me my fridge will talk to my scales

A couple of years ago a futurologist in sharp glasses told me that the internet of things was coming. This would be objects connected-up to the internet to allow them to talk to each other. Your scales would work out your ideal weight and, if you wanted, tell your fridge when milk stocks were running low to re-order semi-skimmed milk rather than full fat. And not chocolate. Or your smart whiskey bottle will let you know if someone is nipping at your Johnie Walker Blue Label.

Of course, the possibilities of all this are endless. Predictions of the scale of the internet of things – or IOT – range from the seriously mindblowing to the you’ll need to sit down because you’ll be rocking back and forth unable to comprehend. Deloitte says that a billion devices will be shipped in 2015. By 2020, Gartner says this will reach 25 billion devices or the equivalent of six devices for every person on the planet.  Cisco says it’s 50 billion. Intel have it at 200 billion. Either way, it’s going to be a lot and my new printer that I can email and has its own URL blinks back at me as proof.

There’s always a trade-off with tech and one that equates to the Native Americans getting a handful of shiny jewels in return for the island of Manhattan. They dangle something cool in front of us and we handover loads of stuff they want. In this case its stacks and stacks of personal data. Think of Facebook. They give us a place to post baby pics and view cat videos. We give them our date of birth, school, University, where we live, where we work, spending habits, political beliefs and who we want to win Strictly. It’s a marketer’s dream. But the University library of information you’ll give to the internet of things will make Facebook look like a Janet and John easy read book.

Your communications will be automated

So, as the internet of things grows the more devices will communicate to each other. We just won’t see it. But what we will maybe see is sharp tailored personalised communication based on our sleeping, spending and drinking habits. It’s happening already to some extent. I think of the Troop canvas shoulder bag that keeps cropping up in my Facebook timeline after I google searched it last week. However, with lots more data the possibilities open up.

“More of our communication will be artificial and less of it will be human,” says Tracey Follows in The Guardian. “It is now common to say that the world is uncertain and therefore can’t be planned for. One thing is certain though. We are entering into a world that’s post human.”

The link did the rounds on Twitter. The tag ‘post human’ certainly jarred with some people in my timeline but it’s an eye-catching line. To some extent it is factually accurate. All that data. All those fridges. All those supermarkets. But to some extent it’s also wrong. The communications that will really stand out will be that which makes best use of the data to personalise it. As a married father of two children who likes cricket, technology and doing things with my family at the weekend anything that takes that data and helps me spend my time and money better is welcome.

Your crisis comms needs to be really, really good

We have the expansion of tech through the internet of thing and others the surrender of all that data.  Here’s a really bright and cheery prediction. There’s going to be a massive cyber attack along the lines of a web 3.0 9/11. Not if. When.

Thomas Lee upon sees an internet of things showroom in San Franscisco by US firm Target where a car alarm wakes a baby whose cries are spotted by sensors which play soothing music. It dawns on him:

“We are so screwed… it was all very impressive, but I couldn’t help notice an irony: the retailer that ion 2013 was subject to a hack that compromised the credit card data of 100 million consumers now wanted people to entrust their entire homes to the internet.”

So, I’d maybe look at how you respond when there’s a data breach and things fall over.

Your internet is being automated

Data, data everywhere. That’s for the geeks, right? Actually, no. Not really. In a really challenging piece in Vox Todd Van Der Werff wrote a piece under the headline ‘2015 is the year the old internet finally died.’

He drew a simple conclusions from a number of recent stories which he maps out in the piece here before concluding:

“The internet as we know it, the internet of five, 10 or 20 years ago is going away as surely as print media replaced by the new internet that reimagines personal identity as something easily commodified that plays less on the desire for information or thoughtfulness than it does the desire for a quick jolt of emotion.

“It’s an internet driven not by human beings but by content, at all costs, And none of us – neither media professionals, nor readers can stop it. Every single one of us is building it every single day.”

People prefer the snackable and the fun, he argues. And it’s true. Yet most comms people haven’t got that.  They – we’re – born in a world of newspapers and press releases. They – we’re – institutionalised to think that the organisation we work for is the centre of everyone’s waking moment and if it isn’t that’s their fault not ours.

At this point I think back, not for the first time, to the former Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher who said that we need to communicate like insurgents. In other words, fast, agile, snackable, fleet-of-foot content that thought more about the person than the organisation.

Getting good at data… and saying ‘no’

Of course, we’ve said it for years that data will be important to communications. We’ve said it but I’m not sure we really acted upon it. I’ve got a bit testy with the open data community in the past for not being very good at talking to people. But I wouldn’t deny the potential that data has to make the world a better place and to help you communicate better. I think of open data helping to expose massive fraud in Canada. I think on a very micro level the Coast Guard comms person who when I showed her followerwonk realised there was a spike in how active her Twitter followers were at 6am and then decided to schedule some content every day at that time.

The reality is that communications and PR people are very, very bad at using and interpreting data and need to be better. We also need to be much, much better at kicking back and asking for the data to be produced by the people who are asking us to write the press release, set-up the Twitter account or plan the campaign.

There is an art to saying ‘no’ and I don’t think comms people say it often enough. Sometimes, this can be done politely. Sometimes, this needs to be done by banging the table. Or in other words, to be able to command the skills of ‘Yes Minister’ alongside almost but not quite ‘The Thick of It.’ But maybe just be really careful who you are Malcolm Tucker direct with, okay?

So what does all this mean?

It means more things changing faster. It means the Robert Phillips phrase of ’embrace chaos’ being ever more relevant. Why? Because that’s all we can do. There’s a long tail with all of this. This will take shape in some sectors way before they reach others. But this is the direction we’re headed.

SOCIAL CONTENT: Are You Getting the Balance Right?

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for comms planning and having a purpose.

If the aim is to do something then it makes sense to have your comms pointing at that.

The only thing is that social media isn’t like that. It’s social. So, a stream of call-to-action updates just won’t work. It’s as social as a stream of flyers being pushed through your letterbox.

So, what’s the answer?

There needs to be a balance of the social and the stuff you want people to sign up for, buy or do.

Often in training I’ll refer to an 80-20 split. The 80 per cent is conversational and engaging content. The 20 per cent is the things you’d like people to do.

In a fascinating interview on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Bottom Line’ Asda’s social manager puts the balance at 10 to 1.

Dominic Birch, Asda senior director of marketing, innovation and new revenue, said that the social media team has now become part of the wider PR team.

“We didn’t have a budget. So it wasn’t the case of advertising that we were on Facebook. Each time we posted some content we had to rely on even a very small number of people at first liking it for that content to be seen my anyone else otherwise we would be speaking to ourselves.

“We averaged two or three posts a day, every day, so maybe 20 posts a week.

It started to get interesting when they started to get customers to chip in with decisions. Nothing big. Customers chose the design for Christmas tea towels.

“What was really interesting was that 4,500 people went to the bother of asking whether they liked design ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’. Actually, it was that moment that with 18 million customers we understood that if you connect to the right ones they really do care about what you do, what they say and why wouldn’t they? Ultimately, they’re going to come into your shop and choose to buy it.”

Big numbers is not the answer as fewer people see the posts. If the people who like your page are true customers it’ll cost you less effectively to reach them through Facebook ads.

“There is a danger that social media becomes diarrhea. We had a rule of thumb that for every post we wanted to push or sell something to be very blunt about it we had to put 10 other posts in the bank. They are there solely to engage our customers. We have to have done hard work  talking about what the customers wanted to talk about before we have the right or licence to push something out.

“It’s a two-way dialogue social media. It just is. Our starting point is not to sell. It’s to listen. A few years ago we had a Christmas ad that was based on insight that it was Mum who does the heavy lifting, organises the present, gets the tree, cooks the meal and we depicted this advert and were met with a media backlash. Some people thought this was filmed in the 1950s and Fathers for Justice were going to do protests in the turkey aisle but we had three or four thousand comments saying things like ‘I nudged my husband awake when that came on the TV and said:L ‘that’s how it really feels.’ If you’d have gone back two or three years there would have been a high level meeting and the advert would have been pulled.”

That’s useful insight. Are you getting the balance right?

 

Creative commons credit

Balance https://flic.kr/p/9herYu

 

FOR UNDER 24s: Create Content Without Boundaries

109934945_0b552b44bc_oSometimes you stumble on something that catches your imagination and fills in some of the blanks.

That happened listening to Millie Riley a broadcast assistant who was talking on BBC Radio 5’s Review of 2013.

She was talking about how under 24-year-olds consume their radio and how their radio is online, face-to-face, shared… and on the radio.

It reminded me that you can learn things from people outside public relations and I was listening thinking of how this affected me in my job as local government public relations.

Listening to Millie talk about her radio was like listening to someone talk about a foreign country. But that’s fine. I’m not in that generation born post 1982 that are known as Millenials.

Just think of it all as content without boundaries.

As Millie says:

“It’s just to do with great content. Wherever there is great content we will be. The main understanding is that it can be funny, it can be news, it can be documentaries. We can put lots of different hats on. There’s a misunderstanding that we want really funny stuff or just music. Actually, we can do all sorts of things.

“As clichéd as it may sound, wherever there is great content that’s where we’ll be.

“They’re listening to the radio and they don’t even realise they’re listening to the radio. They’ll be listening to clips on the BBC website or whatever. They’ll suddenly realise: ‘oh, that’s radio.’ Everything out there is just an amalgamation. It’s just stuff to be interested and enjoy. It might be radio. They may not even realise it.

“We do have lots of options. But if you create content that’s multi-platform and multi-media and Radio One are really good at this. They’ll create a video and then they’ll talk about it on air and people will watch it online and they just bring the two together and I think that’s the way to do it.

“The more their content becomes ubiquitous and the more they become a name on YouTube and that’s the main platform that they’re using the more people will become connected to Radio One as a brand. They’ve definitely upped their game at the beginning and end as that tells them that it’s Radio One. They’re getting better at that.”

You can hear Millie’s contribution on Soundcloud too here…

https://soundcloud.com/millie-riley/millie-riley-bbc-5live-radio

So, that leads to this kind of content. A Muse track with a homemade video and 60,000 views.

So, what does that piece of radio advice mean for my corner of communications?

It made me think of something Julie Waddicor wrote on comms2point0 about making friends with creative people from colleges as part of a campaign. That makes sense. There may be some rough edges but you’ll get a different perspective.

By thinking of something more creative you may open the door to something like Melbourne Metro system’s ‘Dumb Ways To Die’ which saw a 21 per cent dip in track incursions and 67 million views on YouTube.

So, it begs the question, what are you doing to get a message to under 24s? And others?

Are you really sure that press release of yours is making it?

Or should there be different talents in the team too?

Picture credit 

Dial http://www.flickr.com/photos/tunruh/109934945/sizes/o/

OFF SPIN: Why Malcolm Tucker must die

As beautiful illicit guilty pleasures go watching BBC2’s The Thick Of It is not exactly an out-of-control gambling habit.

A satirical fly-on-the-wall Yes Minister for the 21st Century Civil Servants and politicians scheme, plot and manipulate obsessed by the whims of public opinion.

Chief amongst them is the figure of Malcolm Tucker. Like ‘Iago with a blackberry’  as The Spectator calls him in the programme itself, he is the government’s director of communications whose Machiavellian command of the dark arts of spin is direct drawn from the underworld. Nothing is too low.

“Congratulations on your first confirmed kill,” he chillingly writes on a card to a junior who ill in hospital goes along with his plot to unseat the Leader of the Opposition. Out of the box the card comes from drifts a helium baloon with a picture of the deposed Leader sellotaped to it. A perfect blend of malice and slapstick.

Watching the programme is also a secret vice of comms people to talk of the programme illicitly in hushed tones.

A few years ago the subject of The Thick Of It came up in a conversation I had with someone who had worked at the heart of government in the Civil Service. “On a good day it was nothing like it,” the individual said. “On a bad day it was actually a toned down documentary.”

Yet, part of me thinks people will look back in years to come and find that Malcolm Tucker is a bygone relic. Obsessed with newspaper headlines and able to cajole the Priesthood of journalists with bribes and threats.

Or maybe the government comms people of the future will be just as frenetic and just as twitchy about public opinion. It’s just that it’ll be the bloggers and the digital journalists they’ll be obsessed about.

The fourth series ended with Tucker disgraced, chased by a press pack from a police station after handing himself in to be arrested after he perjured himself at a public enquiry.

And Malcolm Tucker to use a very Malcom Tucker word is ‘is damaging’.

Why damaging?

Because he forms people’s warped idea of what a public sector comms person looks like. Which is why he needs to be brought down from grace. It’s why he needs to die. Under a bus. Outside Parliament. With a single bunch of flowers from his ma in Scotland. Leaving a stack of cracking YouTube clips as his legacy.

Comms, like journalism, is a broad church and across it finds all sorts of characters and practices. Yet there is nothing I find in what he does remotely similar to what I do working in an environment that encourages open access to social media and open data. Central government people may disagree.

But as Alastair Campbell, the man who did most to create the late 20th century idea of a spin doctor, said recently the landscape has changed: “You can’t dominate the news agenda now. The agenda is more chaotic but that’s a good thing.”

LINK SPLASH: Facebook, Ellie Simmonds and a viral golden postbox

Sometimes something happens that leaves a big glow with everyone who hears it.

Sometimes something just flies unexpectedly on Facebook and goes viral.

That something happened when Paralymic swimmer Ellie Simmonds, who started her career in Walsall won her second gold of the London 2012 Olympics.

An outburst of deep joy on Ellie’s face was reflected back by all those watching and especially by those in the borough where she was born and learned to swim.

She’s moved to Swansea since to build her career but still has close ties to Aldridge in the borough of Walsall.

Straight after the race the debate was about where in Walsall the gold letter box would be. As a marketing ploy the gold letter boxes and the stamps of the winners takes some beating.

We’d spotted a picture posted on Twitter using Twitpic by a BBC reporter James Bovill of a workman painting the postbox in Aldridge High Street.

We shared it on Facebook acknowledging where it came from in the spirit of the social web. You can see the page here.

And 24 hours later the image had been liked 3,215, had been shared 273 times, commented on 117 times and had been seen by a potential audience on Facebook of 29,608. We also put on 100 new likers.

Tim Clark, a press officer at Wolverhampton City Council, recently wrote an excellent post http://twoheads.squarespace.com/comms2point0/2012/8/1/how-a-cloud-burst-took-facebook-by-storm.html on the 16-second clip of torrential rain that captured the imagination as it went viral.

The point that both make is that it doesn’t have to be polished content to work. Just something that captures the imagination.

The team behind the the Team GB Olympics team as well as GB Paralympics team know this too with a cracking use of licensed images of athletes in action, medal successes on Facebook. Every athlete and team, it seems, gets their picture added to the page with some staggering numbers of shares and likes. The Team GB Facebook page is one example. The Paralympics GB page is another.

Here’s five things it shows

1. Reporters with mobile phones can reach big numbers by putting mobile first.

2. What takes off doesn’t have to be great art.

3. Timely posts work.

4. Sharing is a good thing.

5. Paralympians are amazing people.

Creative commons licence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eleanor_Simmonds.jpg