I’ve not blogged for a while and in the absence of anything worthwhile to say I thought I’d stick up a few images.
I almost always have an iphone with me & these are a few of the random shots taken around Newcastle and Northumberland.
Partly inspired by the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Brilliant Side Gallery although nowhere near in terms of quality.
A guest post this week from Anna-Clare O’Neill who is a freelance PR consultant based in North East England. You can follow Anna on twitter @AnnaClareONeill
As it’s National Freelancers Day this week (21 November 2012), I thought I’d share my freelance story with you…
It’s five years since I first fell into freelancing. That’s right. I didn’t choose to be a freelancer, it just happened. You could say it chose me.
(Much cooler 360 images can be viewed here & here)
Directly below my muddy shoes, almost 760 feet under the earth 1,400 men once hewed a living from the hot, dark, grimy pit of the land.
Less than 40 years ago the landscape would be scarred with soot, sound, smoke, grime and fire as armies of men and boys earned a living mining coal as their fathers and grand fathers had done before them.
But now it’s silent, calm and green with just me and a bike looking out over the Tyneside skyline.
I’m standing at the top of a former pit head that was once part of one of the world’s largest coal mines.
Thanks to everyone who came to see me speaking on the social media panel at the Northern conference in Leeds last week.
It was a larger audience than I’m used to but it seemed to go OK and people had lots of comments and questions.
Thanks also to the other speakers Jo Newbould from Asda and Alex Abbotts at Bromford who I really enjoyed listening to, as well as the excellent Helen Standing who chaired. Continue reading
In advance of my session at the CIPR North conference in Leeds tomorrow, I thought now would be a good time to repost my top ten tips for social media.
This first appeared in corpcomms magazine. Hope it’s useful.
Ross Wigham, service manager for communications at Northumberland County Council, offers up some advice on using social media to promote local, public services.
1. Try to think customer not corporate. This sounds pretty obvious doesn’t it but for too long we were focusing on what the council wanted to tell people, rather than thinking about the conversations that we should be having. Social media for councils and the whole public sector is a real game changer when it comes to engagement and that starting point should be thinking about the stuff residents want to talk to us about. It’s meant to be a conversation, so make sure you’re listening as well as talking. From a population of 300,000 we’ve now got more than 26,000 people signed up to our networks, despite being a predominantly rural area.
Continue reading
One of the best things about having young kids is training them to do stuff for you. That much is a given – Pass me the paper, get my car keys, fetch me another beer out the fridge and so on.
But I suppose there are only so many things that need to be fetched or carried so once you’ve got past that what is there?
Endless questions that’s what.
What summer?
Up here in Northumberland (and like most of the UK this year) our summer was restricted to about two weeks, giving us just enough time to construct an arc or drain away the flood water (see here for photographic evidence).
But in between all that we did want to do something to online to help publicise the best events, attractions and locations for fun days out in the summer holidays.
Think about how long you spend staring at the screen of a laptop, PC, ipad or smart phone messing around on the internet.
A lot, right?
Social media and the rise of the internet has brought so many benefits to our daily lives but has also led to a complete dependence on computers and devices.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be 36 years old.
Admittedly, that’s pretty young for a high court judge or politician but very old for a footballer or an Olympic diver.
In cricketing terms this would be an exciting start to the innings, just 14 runs away from raising the bat and heading on for a decent score.
But if I lived in Mozambique I’d be getting my affairs in order and starting to choose hymns because the average life expectancy is a mere 38. Just shows that when it comes to numbers it’s all about the context.
It’s funny what you find yourself working on. I never once imagined that as a local government head of comms that I’d be punting weddings and getting excited about soft focus pictures and ivory dresses.
But that’s exactly what we’ve been doing over the last few months.
Why, you may ask? Well as Bill Clinton famously once said ‘it’s the economy stupid’
a day without OJ - A comms, digital & PR blog by Ross Wigham 