PR, Communications and Employee Engagement in Social Housing

Using comms to raise awareness of hate crime

2012-01-24T16:40:00.003Z

Today Wolverhampton Homes has launched its Stop Hate in Wolverhampton campaign in partnership with the Council, Police, Safer Wolverhampton Partnership and Stop Hate UK. We developed the campaign after tenants at our Get Togethers last year told us we needed to do more to raise awareness of hate crime.
They said that hate crime wasn't a term they recognised and once it was explained, they admitted they would be very reluctant to report it for fear of reprisals or that nothing could be done about it.
We know that hate crime goes un-reported in Wolverhampton. It is thought that nationally for every hate crime that is reported, eight go un-reported.
We wanted to find a way to get people talking about this important issue so that anyone who suffers hate crime feels that it's safe to report it. The campaign is centred around this online pledge. The idea of the pledge is that we want to hear the voice of the usually silent majority, who like all decent people, are horrified by hate crime. Once you've pledged, the site takes you through to a page where you can like the facebook page, tweet your support or show your support with a twibbon on your social media profile.
We're also using traditional media relations, radio advertising, our tenants newsletter, our leaseholders newsletter and our internal publications to communicate the message.
We know that this isn't the kind of campaign that will make a difference in just two or four weeks, so we're running it all through 2012, in the hope that it will make a real difference in the city and to the tenants in the homes we manage.
At the end of the campaign, we'll evaluate the success by the number of people who've pledged, the organisations we've got involved, reports of hate crime and the opinions of tenants about whether they feel safer and more willing to report it.
Please do take the time to show your support.

Best Practice Guest Post from Northwards Housing: What is a Phone App anyway?

2012-01-18T20:26:00.000Z

KH: Using technology to give tenants greater access to services will be on the agenda of every housing organisation in the country. Here in a great guest post, Steve Finegan, Head of Business Effectiveness & Communications at Northwards Housing, explains the app-roach (boom, boom) that they've taken:

What is a Phone App anyway?

A question recently posed by a member of our senior management team reminded me that six months earlier I’d have probably, and with an element of cynicism, asked the same question. Even now I’m surprised at the speed at which the world of communications is moving. The thirst for information, the growth in real time consumer journalism and the need for responsive quick and easy customer engagement is upon us. It’s both exciting and challenging, although I’ll admit to being less clear where we’ll end up.

At Northwards Housing in Manchester, we’ve always prided ourselves on being innovative and pushing the boundaries, so the idea of developing a phone app for tenants to access our services from their smartphones was definitely something we felt needed to be taken seriously. We already have a strong access to services strategy based on one overriding element – choice. Like many housing organisations out there, we provide a whole range of different and convenient ways to access our services, so the prospect of offering another one, with the added potential to engage with a different audience, possibly a younger demographic, had immediate appeal. So what is the business case?

Despite our best efforts, our customer profiling information does not extend to smartphone usage, at least not yet, but we’re working on it. We know, however, that according to Ofcom almost a third of adults in the UK now use a smartphone. Those who download and use smartphone apps are not necessarily the same as those who use websites of course, as the user experience is entirely different. Those visiting the App Store or Android Market are looking for something that enhances their smartphone capabilities and the beauty of phone apps is quite often in their simplicity.

In direct contrast, our website - currently attracting over 20,000 visits a month - is crammed with information. If they choose to, people can spend hours reading the content, watching film clips and interacting with us online. The fact that they often don’t, of course, and the average visit is around 4m 5s, is perhaps a clue about what it is people really want from our online services. It also raises some interesting questions for the future development of micro sites and the benefits, or not, of doing so given that tenants accessing our website are not necessarily the ones using smartphones and downloading apps.

We know that digital exclusion in social housing is significant, with estimates of around 50% of tenants having no access to the internet with the subsequent impact on things like their ability to find work, to take simple advantage of discount shopping and even their children’s educational attainment. We also know that around 77% of job seekers are now using mobile apps, with Android being the most popular platform.

Our decision to develop the universal iHome app with Panda Media was based in part on our belief that, to address some of these inequalities, we need to offer access to the digital world in the easiest and most practical way possible. We also know that our future tenants will possibly be some of the first to show their parents the benefits of using the Northwards Phone App (free to download from 18th January 2012). Impressed by its simplicity as well as its future potential to interface with our housing management system, the unique ‘Get Involved’ section of the app is what gives it the edge. We were very enthusiastic about the ability to engage with our tenants quickly and easily and having complete control over this section of the app to update it as often as we need to.

We’ve built in a competition to launch the app to maximise interest and hopefully downloads too, so this is likely to be a regular feature, although we might not be able to stretch to an iPad every time! We’re also careful not to exclude anyone, so the same prizes are available to all tenants through our regular Northwards Xtra tenant reward scheme.

During the development of the app we also sought legal advice to help us understand and mitigate the risks. After all, the safety of our customers is important and we didn’t want people leaning over balconies to take pictures of their naturist neighbours catching a few rays, or inadvertently storing personal data on their phones without considering security. As a result, we’ve built alerts into the app to advise people on how to get the best out of it.

So where does this leave us? I’d like to say that in a few months from now, and as a result of the app, a number of people who never visited us online before will be choosing to engage with us in a way that suits them. If in the process we help some of our younger tenants to find a job, win an iPad or get involved in helping us to shape and scrutinise our services, then we will have gone some way to tackling the issue of digital exclusion and if not, then who can blame us for trying? After all it’s only a phone app anyway.

To keep up with the how their app launch is going, follow Northwards Housing on Twitter.

Selling social media to the internal audience

2012-01-12T18:24:00.000Z

Selling social media to your internal audience is as vital as to your external audience. I delivered this prezi to Wolverhampton Homes senior managers today. It seemed to go down well :) Feel free to pinch/adapt any of it.

Why (and how) you need to learn to love networking

2012-01-08T14:11:00.000Z

In my first PR job I used to have to go to networking events to try to make new business connections. At first I loathed them; I hated walking in to the room not knowing anyone and I hated the forced conversations. I knew I had to get over my fear and that if I forced myself to go to loads of them, I would get better each time. It worked. As I went to more, I became more comfortable and I can honestly say now I enjoy networking.

Networking is one of the most valuable professional skills, and if you're not a natural networker, it is one that is worth developing.

Over the years, through online and offline networking, I have been fortunate to make countless friendships that I really value, met incredibly intelligent and helpful people and learnt from loads of best practice. Networking helps you up the serendipity factor - you come across more people, projects and opportunities so you have more chance to encounter useful experiences.

Here's some tips I've picked up:

Don't hug the wall - it can be nervous walking in on your own but look for a friendly face and say hello.
If you've gone with people you already know, resist the temptation to only talk to them. Make the effort to meet new people and invite your friends to join in the conversation.
Smile.
Be genuinely interested in people - not for how they can help you. There's nothing worse than talking to someone who you can tell is trying to work out if you're worth speaking to.
Try to find some common ground. If you're at a conference, you can always ask what people have thought of the seminars or presentations as a good opener.
Swap business cards or contact details.
Don't dominate the conversation. Listen to what's being said and be enthusiastic about what they're saying.
Try to speak to as many people as possible, but give each one a good chunk of time. If the conversation is interesting and you feel a good connection with the person, let it flow.
Follow up afterwards with an email to say it was nice to meet you, a follow on Twitter or a LinkedIn connection request.
Build the friendship - keep in touch after the event.

Best Practice Guest Post: Bron Afon Community Housing's Award Winning Magazine

2012-01-04T19:58:00.000Z

KH: Most housing communications professionals will produce a newsletter or magazine for their tenants and residents. It is always a challenge to keep magazines interesting, fresh and a must-read. So when Ben Black, Communications and Marketing Manager at Bron Afon Community Housing, offered to share how he's developed their publication into a compelling read for tenants and won a CIPR Award, I leapt at the chance. Here's Ben's guest post:

Bron Afon Community Housing won the ‘best external magazine’ award at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations PRide awards for Wales.

In this part of south Wales, an estimated 26% of adults have poor reading skills. Winning this award was a slap on the back for our communications forum who worked so hard to make it a magazine that they felt their neighbours and friends would read.

The group were nervous when they set up a plain English group to check key publications that we produce. They felt that they would need A-levels in English but quick agreed that they simply had to understand what was written.

Every time they check Community News or another document they ask themselves five questions:

Does the document include jargon, abbreviation or technical terms?
Can any words be cut out or changed for shorter words?
Is the document easy to read aloud?
Do you think the spelling, punctuation and grammar reads correctly?
Do you understand the document?

Bron Afon’s strapline is ‘investing in people, homes and communities’. We do more than just fit new kitchens and bathrooms. In the last year we wanted to make sure that Community News carried this key message and was understood by readers.

To do this effectively we had to remember that: an average reader would find our strategic objectives boring!

We decided to present every story in plain English and in a professionally designed magazine that used strong photos.

Objective

The overall objective throughout the project was to produce a first-class magazine that residents would want to read, find useful and most importantly help them understand more about Bron Afon’s role in Torfaen.

Our objectives were:

they find the magazine easy to read.
they understand Bron Afon’s role in Torfaen.
they always read the magazine and find the content useful.

Strategy and tactics

We focus on a small number of key tactics for each edition:

ensure a balance between ‘soft’ stories and ‘business’ stories.
ensure stories carried the underlying message that Bron Afon does not just fit kitchen and bathrooms but actually invests in ‘people, homes and communities’.
always feature a Torfaen tenant, leaseholder or member on the front page.
ask the chief executive and directors to agree the key messages, ‘sign-off’ the story list and then let us get on with producing the magazine!
keep the word count on every story to a minimum.
listen closely to the views of the plain English group. If they did not understand a story then the ‘red pen’ came out and it was changed.

Another important output was regularly turning Bron Afon’s key messages into simple stories that would appeal to Torfaen residents.

For example:

Bron Afon spent £1.5m on making homes more energy efficient. We found a tenant who told her story about how she saved £400 in energy bills.
A new playpark was built on Bron Afon land but the real story was that local people had helped to design it. We found three young people who helped out and photographed them.

Outcomes

We surveyed readers and were impressed with the results. We received 61 responses. The results told us that:

100% said they found it easy to read.
100% said they understood Bron Afon's role in ‘investing in people, homes and communities’.

Our readers also told us:

“Everything in the booklet is up to date and gives you information that you need.”
“More pages needed, interesting information but ends too soon!”

KH: What I love about this case study is the tenant involvement. Tenants have been totally involved in the whole process here, from the front page through to the content and evaluation. It's a great example of how tenant involvement can make a service even better. Well done Ben and Bron Afon!

Soft power and employee engagement

2011-12-31T15:54:00.003Z

Soft power is the ability to make people want what you want. It was invented as a concept by Joseph Nye, and has been used by President Barack Obama when talking about foreign policy and international politics.
As well as its obvious use in politics, I think it is an idea that is also wholly relevant to employee engagement.
If we contrast it with 'hard' power - i.e. incentivising someone to do something (carrot) or threatening someone (stick), and we think about examples from our own work life, I'm sure we'd agree that hard power has limited influence.
When we have really achieved at work, and our organisations have done well, it's because we've all wanted the same thing. (I really felt this when Wolverhampton Homes was going for our three star excellent inspection.)
You can pay someone do to their job, and they will do it. You can set them targets and give them performance related pay, so they achieve them. But imagine if they want to achieve what you want them to achieve as much (or even more) than you do - they want what you want.
When you get that alignment; people who care passionately about what they do, they will achieve and take ownership of that achievement to the benefit of your organisation.

Easier said than done right? Nye explains in the video above what he believes to be the three skills you need to achieve soft power: emotional intelligence, the ability to have a vision and communications skills. How much does that resonate with employee engagement?

The four enablers of engagement are about attraction in the soft power sense - selling a compelling narrative to the organisation, behaving with integrity and listening to employees.

When examined through the prism of hard power, employee engagement would seem to be all about improving benefits, terms or conditions. But we know that although improved benefits might give you a bounce in engagement stats, it won't sustain once people have got used to them. Hard power also seems incredibly old-fashioned and out of sync with our work lifestyles now, which are less about control and much more about collaboration.

Much more important is that staff want what the organisation wants - or even better, the organisation wants what staff wants.

How can you use soft power with your colleagues, teams and clients?

We don't want everyone on social media, do we?

2011-12-29T12:22:00.000Z

Last week I had an exchange on Twitter with one of my friends, where she suggested that we don't want everyone in our organisations to be on social media. She suggested that for some people or roles, social media might not be a great idea. If you know me, you probably can already guess that I disagreed*.

I think that it would be great if everyone in an organisation could have some social media presence in a work capacity - it's about how they use it and for what. Can you imagine how much more rounded a picture your customers or stakeholders would have of your organisation if they could see all the (unsung) hard work that goes on?

Imagine if an Estate Manager could promote their estate inspections on Twitter or could film an area of litter being cleaned up and post it on YouTube and then share it on the Facebook page of their local neighbourhood.

Imagine if a Customer Service Adviser in a call centre could share in real time on Twitter that there had been an influx of calls asking a particular question and what the answer was, to save people the bother of calling.

Imagine if an Antisocial Behaviour Co-ordinator could empower the silent majority by posting the results of cases on Facebook and demonstrate that reports of antisocial behaviour are dealt with.

Imagine if the Finance Team could share how they have embedded value for money through video blogging so other organisations could learn from them too.

West Midlands Police is a great example of an organisation that is moving this way. From the WMP Helicopter on Twitter to Facebook pages for each Local Policing Unit to YouTube channels for Central Motorway Police, they are truly embedding social media in everything they do - and improving their reputation by doing so. Hell, even Police Dog Smithy tweets. I think if the Police can do it, with all the challenges they face, other organisations can and should open up in the same way.

There are obvious risks with opening up social media use in this way, but they can be mitigated. I think training and support have a big part to play; finding the people who are excited and willing to give it a go, starting with them, going slowly, building their confidence, making them aware of the risks and dangers and how to handle them...

I'd love to hear your examples of where social media has been opened up and what you've learnt from it.

*I conceded that spies may not find it helpful to be on social media (!) but everyone else: yes.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken

2011-12-19T21:39:00.001Z

Maybe it's because it's the end of the year or maybe it's these dark winter nights, but lately I've been in a contemplative mood. I've been thinking lots about how I can help people and my organisation achieve what they want and fulfil the potential I believe they have.
While mulling this over, I came across a great post the other day by Chris Brogan where he makes the case for repetitive action to build success. He gives the example of flossing your teeth; that to have healthy gums you have to do it every day and that daily practice leads to success. I think that is so true - whether you're dieting, learning to drive, practising your shorthand, engaging your team or managing your organisation's reputation, keeping at it, day after day, with energy and commitment will ultimately lead to success.
It is also true of negative habits. The title of this post comes from a Warren Buffet quote that he repeats in the video above, and he is right. Our negative habits are almost unnoticeable when we begin them but before you know it, you are knee deep.
I felt like that when I started smoking. At first I thought I could take it or leave it, but before I knew it, there I was smoking 20 a day. (I gave up in 2005 with Allen Carr. It was the most rewarding, self-esteem boosting, exhilarating thing I've ever done.)
Organisations can sometimes get stuck in behaving in the same negative way, just as people can. Or they can build the habit of success little-by-little until they achieve their goals. I know which one I want to be.
So I have some questions for you, what are you doing day-in day-out in your personal and professional life? And is it moving you closer or further away from your goals? What habits is your organisation practising? Are they helping you build success day by day or are they holding you back?

Wikipedia and PR: how to retain your integrity

2011-12-08T07:02:00.001Z

I just read this article in The Independent about PR agency Bell Pottinger allegedly editing its clients Wikipedia entries. (If you want to read more about Bell Pottinger I suggest you start with their own Wikipedia entry.)
If this is true then this practice brings the whole sector of communications into disrepute.
The wonderfulness of Wikipedia is that it is exactly that: an encyclopaedia of wikis, where anyone can edit what anyone else has said with honour and integrity so that we all become better informed as a result. All entries should be neutral and based on fact (which can be referenced). By manipulating information on Wikipedia, you lower the bar for everyone.
So what can you do if you want your organisation to be on Wikipedia?
What I did for Wolverhampton Homes was ask tenants (our customers) through our newsletter, if they would like to write one. This would be the ideal solution because then someone who uses your services and has an understanding of your business writes the entry.
When none were forthcoming, I approached an esteemed Wikipedian I know and asked for his advice. Andy Mabbett knows pretty much all there is to know about Wikipedia and has a great sense of neutrality. He advised that I write the entry as neutrally as possible, with references, and submit it for comment to the Wikipedia community before it was posted.
Wikipedians are a helpful bunch and value being asked to check posts because they know it ensures the information is high quality. Andy kindly helped me by reading, editing, formatting and further referencing my article. Only then did it go live on the site.
In an ideal world, your communications team wouldn't have to write your Wikipedia entry but if you feel your organisation is notable (and it has to genuinely be notable, not just that you think it is) and that it should have a Wikipedia page, that would be the way I'd advise you getting one.
You can read Wolverhampton Homes Wikipedia entry here.

Engaging for Success

2011-11-24T14:58:00.001Z

I've just come back from a really inspiring session at Birmingham City Council House (what a beautiful building!) about employee engagement, organised by my good friend and poker buddy Raffaela Goodby. It was part of the Engaging for Success taskforce, which was launched by the Prime Minister earlier this year. The goal of the taskforce was first to research whether engagement can actually drive growth (they concluded it can) and then to engage employees throughout the British economy so that our recovery is sustainable.
David MacLeod, who is chairing the engagement taskforce, introduced the session. David is brilliant; an entirely commercially-focused, people person. What he understands and communicates so well is that engagement isn't about some wishy washy 'make everyone happy' approach; it's about transforming the way businesses operate so they can grow and deliver more.
The aim of today was to bring engagement practitioners from public and private sector organisations together to discuss challenges and suggest solutions.
First, we had the opportunity to discuss the four enablers of engagement:

having a strong, strategic narrative (this is where we were and this is where we're going);
engaging managers (because actually without them nothing can happen);
giving employees a voice (and then listening to them) and
demonstrating integrity.

I heard some useful, practical tips on how to engage managers like measuring and benchmarking their engagement performance to engender a spirit of competition and, where personalities may find discussions about engagement difficult, presenting evidence and risk without forcing conclusions on people.
We also had the opportunity to discuss the engagement challenges in our businesses and where we think the taskforce should go from here (this was the first of 10 regional events across the country). I felt reassured to hear that other practitioners face similar challenges and it was incredibly useful to hear what practical stuff they're doing.
As always, the most useful bit was networking and meeting people who you can bounce ideas around with. It looks like the midlands engagement practitioners are going to carry on meeting quarterly, so if you want to join in or come along, follow Engage4Success on Twitter. All in all, a very good day - well done to the team from BCC for organising it so well.
(The video above is one that was showed today; it's used quite a lot but because it's so good at showing what great leadership is about.)
Sorry, correction, this is actually the video they showed:

Change of personnel in your comms team? Manage your social media carefully

2011-11-20T13:18:00.001Z

Managing communications through a change of personnel so the service is seamless is incredibly difficult. New people have new ways of doing things and chances are that's why you've employed them - because you want something new. Managing social media through a change of personnel is even more difficult.
In managing social media for our organisations, we invest so much of our own personalities and often, at this stage of social media development, where it's not truly embedded in many organisations, a change of personnel can mean a total halt to social media activities.
Two recent examples I've spotted are Testway Housing and Housing Plus Group. Testway was the first ever housing association on Twitter and used to be on of my favourite examples. It tweeted several times a day with useful, often funny, information and news. It had worked hard to build genuine relationships with its thousand plus followers.
Then on 6 July 2011, its twitter personality changed: it started tweeting much less frequently and then between August - October, it only tweeted twice and hasn't tweeted at all this month. I'm aware they've had a change of personnel in their communications team and it may be that they're reconsidering their approach to social media overall and twitter specifically. But to the outside world, it would look a bit odd and like the account has been half-abandoned.

With Housing Plus, it has been on Twitter for a shorter time (since 21 January 2010) than Testway but has still built up a good 300 followers. It had been tweeting regularly but its last one was on 19 August this year. I know their communications team has had a reorganisation (one of whom, Christine Howles, will soon be joining my comms team at Wolverhampton Homes). It's a shame their hard work building the community will have been damaged by stopping so abruptly without explanation.

It's really difficult to avoid this happening when the people who leave are the ones who've been pushing social media. When people are new in post (or there isn't anyone in post), their head is often spinning just getting to know the organisation. Keeping all the balls in the air without dropping one is practically impossible. The risk is because social media isn't embedded it becomes the most droppable. But to tackle this, the business needs to have truly embedded the ethos of social media far beyond 'so and so looks after twitter'. It needs to carefully manage any changeover, even if the new people feel they want a new approach.
Some organisations have embedded it brilliantly. For example, Walsall Council. Dan Slee, one of their communications officers, does an awesome job managing their multiple social media presences. But from what I've read of the organisation, and its other employees that I know who are on social media, if Dan was to leave, their presence would continue. That is the level of embedded-ness that communications teams should be looking to establish - that social media bigger is than one person, that the organisation truly gets it and that the external reputation management is what guides them to make a seamless transition.

The conversation is the relationship

2011-11-16T20:13:00.001Z

Last year I had some fab training as part of the Wolverhampton Homes leadership programme. It was about how to have 'fierce conversations' - conversations that are real and get to the heart of issues. (They mean fierce as in snap your fingers, dang, girl kind of fierce rather than grrrr fierce.)
I would really recommend the training company Fierce who delivered it; they have a great approach to improving organisational culture.
One of the key phrases they used was that 'the conversation is the relationship'. It's a phrase that has really stuck with me and that I often think about in my personal and work life.
What they mean is that without a conversation there is no relationship and the tone of conversation typifies the relationship.
I think that's so true - my best relationships are with the people I really talk to, listen to and share ideas with. My more challenging relationships are where the conversation has stopped (or everything that's being said is non-verbal) or one or both of us have stopped listening.
So I've got a question for you: who are you having a conversation with? And who are you not? And what impact is that having on your relationships?

Why the BBC's travel tweets are kinda beautiful

2011-11-08T20:36:00.001Z

Do you follow @BBCtravelalert on Twitter? Or @BBCTravelScot? If not, you should do, even if you're not interested in travel news for London or Scotland, which, living in neither London nor Scotland, I am not.

You should follow them because they are beautiful examples of how twitter feeds about boring subjects can be funny, tender, engaging and interesting. They respond to their followers, retweet useful information, make jokes, have banter and generally make nightmarish commutes all the more bearable.

Here's some lovely examples:

And proving the theory that if you think something, somebody else will have thought the same and probably will have blogged it already, here's a post from Mark Shaw highlighting their good work too.

Best Practice: Bromford's No Postcodes

2011-11-01T21:14:00.004Z

I saw a link for this video on Twitter and it's such a great example of innovation I had to share it. It was created by Bromford Support and aims to discourage young people from joining gangs and carrying knives. The video has interspersed footage of the Birmingham Riots with footballers and rappers saying 'no postcodes'. It is set to music and builds over the video - by the end the hairs on the back of my neck had stood up. Looking at it, I'm guessing it cost next to nothing to make, but it is incredibly powerful. It has already achieved more than 2,000 views on YouTube and this BBC coverage. Good work Bromford.

Why you don't need a social media strategy

2011-10-30T18:07:00.001Z

I am regularly asked to share Wolverhampton Homes social media strategy and I have to reply that we don't have one. Here's why:

A strategy should be concerned with the how question: how will you achieve your objective(s)? Recent examples for us have been 'how will we raise awareness of hate crime?' or 'how will we change people's perceptions of an area of our city?' These questions can be answered by describing the tools you will use, the messages you will communicate, the audiences you are seeking to reach and how will you know whether you've achieved your objective. If we ask the question 'how can we use social media?', the use of social media becomes the end in itself.
Too often people fall into the trap of confusing a social media strategy with guidelines. Guidelines can be very useful, particularly as you extend the number of people who are using social media in your business. Wolverhampton Homes guidelines are here.
Social media is a communications tool. As with other tools, our job as communications practitioners is to understand them and select the appropriate tool for the situation. I prefer to develop strategies for campaigns and messages rather than tools. Wolverhampton Homes doesn't have a newsletter strategy; we use the newsletter as a tool in campaigns - and we take the same approach with social media.
When you're using a new communications tool, it's better to focus on experimenting and learning how your audience responds to it than waste your time writing some grand strategy. It may give you or your managers (false) comfort but in reality, you are probably just postponing getting on with using it. The risk with new tools is that people may focus on using them for their own sake rather than focusing on what they want to use them for.
If you don't believe me, Eric Weave puts it much better than I can.

How to write an awesome job application

2011-10-26T20:59:00.000+01:00

I wrote this post a little while ago about job hunting and I thought it would be useful to write a post about the next step.

Now I am no expert in this, but I have experience from my own applications, recruiting people to my team and helpful tips other people have given me.

The aim of your job application is to get you an interview, at which point you'll have the opportunity to bloom in the eyes of the panel. You want to make it impossible for them to not give you an interview.

Read the job description thoroughly. It sounds basic but it is really important to understand what the organisation is looking for. If you're in the fortunate position of already having a job, you can select carefully those you apply for. Don't waste your time if you're not a close enough match to the person specification, but instead save the job description and periodically check back that you are developing that skill or experience set in your current role.
Give yourself enough time to do it. To write an application properly you need about 4-5 hours and it's best if you spread them over several days as you'll see different ways to improve it each time you read it.
Type your application. It makes it easier to read and sets a good impression. Most companies won't mark down for handwritten applications but you want to make it as easy as possible to read about all the great qualities you have.
Provide all the information that you're asked for, in the way the organisation wants it provided (e.g. chronological order or block capitals).
In the free form section or supporting information bit, you have the opportunity to really shine. Most of the time, everyone on the short list will have the essential criteria, so you can use this section to take your application from good to awesome. Refer back to the job description, repeat each element in your application and then write one or two really strong, relevant examples of how you meet that. Experience from your personal life is fine if you haven't got work experience but make sure it's relevant.
Use sub-headings to highlight different aspects such as Experience, Skills or Special Knowledge. Use bolding to highlight the key words that you're demonstrating from the job description.
Find out the organisation's mission, vision and values (usually on their website). This can be incorporated into a strong opening and closing paragraph, explaining how you can help the organisation achieve those goals.
Spell check it and ask someone to read it through for you.
Don't be disheartened if you don't get short listed - it's a very competitive market out there so it doesn't necessarily mean you didn't apply well. Try to keep your spirits up and good luck!

How to use social media to reach your key audiences

2011-10-05T07:06:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I was invited to speak at The Guardian in a seminar called Social Media and Social Housing: How to do it. The other speakers Nick Booth, John Popham and Helen Jeffrey from the NHF were brilliant and provided loads of useful stuff for me to think about. In particular, Helen showed how the NHF have successfully convinced senior managers of the value of social media and how they have managed multiple social media presences.
My presentation was about 'How to use social media to reach your key audiences'. Most of mine is made up of examples of how Wolverhampton Homes has used social media. Feel free to borrow any of them.

How to use social media to reach your key audiences

View more presentations from Kate Hughes.

Why Burger King's twitter feed is a load of rubbish - and four things you can learn it

2011-10-02T13:35:00.000+01:00

I came across Burger King's twitter feed the other day, after Dan Howe tweeted about it. Dan is absolutely right - it's god awful. A random sample is below:

It comprises a list of random questions with seemingly no response to the answers, all trying to sell Burger King's products, which have been helpfully (ahem) marked with a ®. Now I am someone who loves Burger King - give me a bacon double cheeseburger any day of the week and I'm happy - but this makes me like the brand a little (a lot) less. If their Twitter was witty, useful and engaging, I'd not only follow their account (giving them an opportunity to remind me daily of their mouthwatering meals) but I'd like them more and be more likely to pick them over one of their competitors.

So what can we learn from Burger King's mistake?

1. Use questions appropriately. Questions are a useful way to start a conversation on Twitter, but asking them without caring what people say in response and not even acknowledging their response, is just pointless. When brands get it right, a question can bring you closer to your followers/likers rather than making you seem like an annoying robot that won't shut up.

2. Reply to your followers. You can see bad old BK has not replied to any of its followers (indicated by the @ symbol) and a quick scout of its replies reveals its missed the opportunity to reply to this follower:

If Burger King is genuinely trying to offer its customers healthy choices, this would have been a good opportunity to engage in discussion with this follower. It could have explained what its doing to make its food healthier and its customers better informed. At the very least, it could have acknowledged the guy's response.

3. Don't use the ®. It makes you look lame. And uncool. But most of all lame. And definitely, never use the ™.

4. Re-tweet your followers. It hasn't re-tweeted anyone. Now don't get me wrong, I hate when brands retweet compliments, but there are times when a retweet can be useful for getting other people involved in the conversation. Even better if the conversation isn't about your brand. For example, when this person responded:

how much more engaging would it have been if Burger King had retweeted it, said that sounded awesome, asked for a twitpic, and then asked if anyone else can beat that?

So if you're reading this Burger King, please do the world a favour and put someone else in charge of your Twitter feed, before you put us all off your burgers.

Why I don't worry about social media evaluation

2011-10-02T12:41:00.003+01:00

I was asked to speak at Plus Dane Housing Group on Thursday about whether and how they should use social media. I described how we got started at Wolverhampton Homes and how we've overcome challenges.

One of the group asked about how I evaluate success, and I told him the honest answer, that really I don't. I report quarterly on likers and followers, but anyone worth their salt knows that those are mere counts. They tell you how many people follow or like your brand and that's it - but not how influential those people are, whether they think differently about your organisation because of the way you've interacted or whether they've been compelled to act.

I glance over our Facebook insights and take the occasional squiz at Klout, but those stats don't change how we act on social media: we're more interested in trying to be useful than worrying about how many people re-tweet something we say. For us, social media is such a small part of what we do (it can be just three minutes a day), it's simply not worth spending hours collecting and analysing data - particularly when we have so few likers on facebook (245).

However, evaluation is an important part of running an effective communications function because it tells us (and the rest of the business) whether we are succeeding or we need to try a different tack. The objective of my communications team is to protect and enhance the reputation of Wolverhampton Homes. Our newsletter goes to 23,500 people, a story in the Express and Star can be read by up to 120,000 people and a publication to our staff goes to 705 people. To measure whether we're meeting our objective or not, it's more useful to evaluate those much larger aspects of our service than our social media work.

Of course, if your brand delivers a greater percentage of its communications on social media and you're that way inclined, there are lots of ways you can measure it. (There's tonnes of blog posts out there on this subject - this one makes a decent stab at it.) But if you're just getting started, my advice would be not to worry about it and just get on with being useful.

Do you want to work in my team?

2011-09-24T07:36:00.002+01:00

I'm currently recruiting for a Senior Communications Officer for my team. I looking for someone who can come up with great ideas, develop creative publications and work to tight deadlines. We're a fast-paced team with a can do attitude and innovative approach. If you're interested, check out the job description for more details.

Kit Kats, FOMO and digital inclusion

2011-09-22T18:40:00.000+01:00

One of the most exciting projects I'm working on at the moment is the New Low Hill Community Website. The website is part of a wider project called 'Celebrating Low Hill', which aims to champion an area of Wolverhampton.
I've been working on the website with a group of tenants and Hugh Flouch and Kevin Harris from Networked Neighbourhoods. The tenants - some of whom had never used the internet - were inspired to try and set up a website so that they could shout about the great stuff going on in their area. They had got tired of people knocking the place they lived and they wanted to tell the world about Low Hill.
Since June, the group has been meeting every week or so at the local community centre, fuelled by lots of tea and kit kats, to put their idea into action.
With the help (and immense patience and knowledge) of Hugh and Kevin, they have built the New Low Hill Community Website, which will launch on Thursday 29 September (it's password protected at the moment). They named it 'New Low Hill', because they wanted it to be a fresh start for the area.
They selected the colours - based on Low Hill's historic village green; they decided what should be on the website and the kind of discussions they hope will take place; they decided who should do what and they built the website themselves.
Carol (third in from the right) did the majority of building and her IT knowledge was, as she admits, very low - she wasn't even used to a QWERTY keyboard.
Jackie, (fourth in from the right), who had, up to that point, forcefully resisted the internet at home has today had it installed. The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) has driven her to get on-line and proves what I'd long suspected that social media is a driver to digital inclusion..
Today they presented the website to their local councillors, Peter Bilson and Paul Sweet. They told the story of what they had done and asked for their support in getting it off the ground, while making sure they were clear it was not to be used as a party political tool.
Their passion for their area and their anticipation at the potential of this on-line community shone through and the councillors happily said they would support it.
This is the start of a hugely exciting journey for the group and Low Hill and I can't wait to see where they take it.

Caption (L-R): Joan Morgan, Pat Kinsey, Carol Billingham, Jackie Durnall, Cllr Peter Bilson, Cllr Paul Sweet. (Behind) Anita from Midland Heart and Hugh Fluch.

Engaging Public Sector Talent (and influencing engagement)

2011-09-15T21:47:00.000+01:00

Today I went to the Engaging Public Sector Talent GovNet conference in London. It was looking at how public sector organisations can engage their staff in financially constrained times. There were some really interesting speakers, including Colin Miller at Kent County Council who has introduced Total Reward Kent - a new way to reward staff, and Paula McDonald, Deputy Director of Workforce Reform at the Cabinet Office. Some speakers weren't that relevant to housing, but the common theme running through (as if we didn't know!) was that employee engagement is about persistence, intelligent effort and creativity.

What kept crossing my mind however, was, how can I influence employee engagement from my position? As Communications Manager, I see my team's function as a kind of in-house consultancy. I want us to (and I believe we do) give an agency level service combined with an in-house understanding of the business. As well as delivering all communications for the business, we advise and counsel on strategic issues. But when it comes to deciding how the business is run, we are limited.

We know that the two biggest influences on employee engagement are leadership of the business and the line manager. From Communications, we can have bearing on leadership but it's more challenging to be able to influence line managers so that they more effectively engage their staff. More challenging - but not impossible. That's the thought I'm going to take away from today.

(The conference was at the QEII Centre opposite Big Ben. I kept meaning to take a photo but didn't get round to it, so here's a beauty from Furyksx on Flickr.)

It's nice to share...

2011-08-30T19:42:00.000+01:00

As an only child til I was seven, sharing wasn't something that came naturally to me. When my little sister came along, all of a sudden I had to get used to sharing everything. Fortunately, it's now something I can see the advantages of.

Today at Wolverhampton Homes, we've taken a small step to make our content more 'shareable'. We've now got buttons to share our news stories via Twitter and Facebook. (We've had an RSS feed for a long time but my impression is these are becoming less popular and most people find new content through social networks now - but I'll save that for another post.)

Why would we want to do that?

News organisations have seen the benefit of encouraging their readers to share their digital content for a long time now. They know that news has more value when it's spread from person to person, than if the organisation itself tries to put it out there. When a third party has said 'hey, this is worth reading/viewing,' it is more likely to be read/viewed and then shared further.

Housing organisations can reap the same benefits. We want the people who engage with us on social media platforms and who visit our website to be able to do the share our content as easily as possible. If they see something interesting, they can share it at the touch of the button and our content can be spread virally much more easily.

Crucially, the reader/visitor can also choose how they share the content as well. The app we're using allows the user to edit the tweet or post (rather than auto-posting as some apps do) which means that if people wish they can say 'this is a load of rubbish' about something we've written. Of course, we hope they don't (!) but the editable function gives the user the power and we hope, in turn, Wolverhampton Homes more credibility as an organisation which isn't afraid to hear what the community has to say.

We're giving it a go on the news hub but if it turns out to be popular, we may extend it to our other web pages.

Happy sharing!

What The West Wing can teach middle managers

2011-08-21T17:24:00.000+01:00

There's a great scene in The West Wing (in season 4, the episode called Holy Night) where a new speech writer, Will Bailey has been hired. The President has looked over his first speech and has given him some notes. Will doesn't agree with one of them and raises it with his boss Toby Ziegler.

But then he is given the opportunity to say it directly to the President and, overcome with nerves, he stutters and stammers. Toby reviews Will's work with the President, in Will's earshot, and defends him saying: 'he caught the bad note'. Will asks Toby what he meant and Toby reveals that the President had written the bad note on purpose, to see how comfortable Will would feel about 'telling truth to power'. Will kicks himself for not having the courage to speak up.

It occurred to me that working life is often like that for middle managers. We are often put in positions where we can anticipate the negative impact of a senior management decision, we disagree with a line that is being taken or that we feel senior managers are not demonstrating the values that they expect from the rest of the organisation.

It takes a great deal of courage - and a culture of openness and honesty - to be able to tell truth to power. It's much easier to nod along or to say what we know our bosses want to hear; much more challenging to constructively and respectfully disagree or call someone on their behaviour.

But that's what we must do and, indeed, is what senior managers want us to do. In organisations, decisions often have to be made quickly, under extreme pressure, and hearing all points of view strengthens that decision making, protecting the organisation. If we absolve ourselves from telling truth to power, the organisation, our customers and our integrity will suffer.

(The clip above shows Will first meeting the President, not the scene with the bad note, but from Will's reaction, you get the idea.)

A day in the life

2011-08-14T20:23:00.000+01:00

Someone keeps googling 'a day in the life PR' and finding my blog, even though I've never posted about that and it occurred to me that I perhaps I should.

It will come as no surprise to you I'm sure that there is no typical day in my job. Every day is different, which is why I love it. Last Thursday wasn't a typical day but it was a pretty busy one.

It started at 9.20am. I got to work later than usual (we work flexi-time) because I was shattered from the previous day, when I'd gone into work early to see if our shop was ok after the riots (it was, just one broken window) and then driven to Trafford and Stockport to visit other organisations which have great employee engagement (Trafford Housing Trust and Stockport Homes).

First thing I had a meeting about our annual garden competition ceremony which is taking place in September. With a colleague, we're planning a larger event than last year thanks to sponsorship from our grounds maintenance contractor Continental Landscapes.

Following that meeting, another colleague came over to my desk chat about employee engagement. We had a debate for two hours (yes, two hours!) about how best to engage our trade staff. Typically they are the least engaged group. They are generally less well-informed about what is going on in the business yet they have the most contact with our customers so should be best placed to help us improve the business. It was two hours well spent because we explored the issues fully and now we're in a stronger position to move forward.

After that my Senior Communications Officer briefed me on where we're at with our latest newsletter production. Tenants Update is due out in September. It will include a summary of our annual report and, in line with TSA requirements, it has to be out by 1 October. It's looking good and on track to meet schedule.

Then I proof read our E-bulletin, an internal publication that we issue every Friday afternoon. It features all the hard need-to-know news of the week, plus compliments by customers/colleagues for our staff and a section on 'in the media'.

I then whizzed through my emails. Typically I get a couple of hundred a day. I'd usually read them as my first job of the day but on this day the time had ran away. I scan them and flag them for follow up or forward them to delegate the work. I get nervous when the flagged emails get over 50. They're hovering in the 60s at the moment - eek!

The next task was writing an article for Homes News, our staff magazine. My colleague is project managing it's production and this time we're having a fresh look to bring a theme to our employee engagement work. The article was about how and why (because of the Equalities Act) we are publishing equalities data on our website. You can see it here. I ate my lunch while writing it.

Then I drove into town for a meeting at the civic centre. Wolverhampton City Council (the authority which owns Wolverhampton Homes) is adopting systems thinking and one of my colleagues there gave a presentation on it. It was fascinating to see how they're using it and in particular the culture change that it is stimulating. As I understood it, systems thinking is about changing the way you think about something using the redesign of a system as a learning process and catalyst. The learning is the key to it.

Ultimately it should result in more empowerment for staff, better service for customers, less bureaucracy, more partnership working and generally a better, more efficient organisation. As the presentation went on, I kept thinking about the link with employee engagement. I want to learn more about it and I'd like to trial it in my team. It was a great end to a busy day that left me feeling inspired.

Thank you 24housing

2011-08-07T10:46:00.000+01:00

Thank you 24housing for including me in your list of top 30 under 30 of young housing leaders.

Reading through the list, there is a huge range of inspirational individuals who have clearly been bitten by the housing bug too. All functions of housing providers seem to be represented; from development to tenant involvement, from quality to customer experience, which shows that the sector has done a great job of developing its young leaders.

Congratulations also go to my colleague at Wolverhampton Homes, Steve Charles, our IT Manager, who is included on the list and I know, from first-hand experience, that he is a fantastic leader.

Well done to all.

Seven links (I love the internet)

2011-08-05T10:34:00.001+01:00

I love the internet. This week, Dan Slee, someone who I admire enormously, listed me in a blog post about seven links from his blog and five bloggers he likes. I once tweeted that following Dan on Twitter makes you more intelligent, so I took it as a huge compliment. The idea of posting seven links is you share older posts that deserve a fresh airing to a new audience. (I have broken the rules slightly.)

My favourite post: I wrote this post about how to get a job in PR. It was dedicated to my then intern Meghan, but really it was for anyone who is job-hunting and it comes free with a gigantic hug.

My most popular post: A fairly recent one this - about how to convince your boss to let you give social media a go. It's my most popular by a long way, I hope because people have found it useful. Keep fighting the good fight, social media comrades. (It also has a lovely picture of the red arrows making a heart, which I took on a day out with my mum.)

A post I still believe in: Six months after I got my first in-house role I wrote this post about how agency and in-house roles differ. Looking back, I was right, (and unusually tactful about the huge volume of work!).

My first slide share post: This was actually from the first big presentation I ever did to the National Housing Federation Marketing and Communications Conference. It was about how to engage tenants through social networking. The third slide is a picture of Geri Halliwell. I used that picture to illustrate a story about when my family first got the internet. It was 1997. My dad came home with a huge computer and said: 'Kids, we're going on the internet!' About five hours later, the thing was finally set up and we logged on. (Remember the clicks and brrs of a modem?!) We all crowded round and eventually got into a search engine (this was pre-google). Dad said, what shall we search for? At the time my little sister was mad on the spice girls, so she suggested them. Dad typed it in, and, I don't know if you remember the internet at that time, but it was dominated by a particular type of site that wasn't exactly family-friendly. Put it this way, the spice girls we found weren't the ones we were looking for. ;)

My moment of clarity post: It took me a while to realise the role of employee engagement in communications, but when I did it was a light bulb moment. I wouldn't stop banging on about it at work and something must have stuck because now I've been given responsibility for it.

A post about digital inclusion which makes me feel like we haven't achieved much: I wrote this post more than two years ago about about digital inclusion work my local authority was carrying out. I'm looking after a couple of digital inclusion projects at work at the moment: Homes on the Net (a project to teach tenants to use the internet) and Networked Neighbourhoods (a project to set up a website in Low Hill in Wolverhampton). They're good but it doesn't feel like we're moving fast enough. I'm impatient for outcomes!

My post about getting started on Twitter: this was my first post that was really successful, probably because I tweeted it. (Which is ironic considering my twitter friends already know how to use twitter.) Some of it seems quaintly out of date now.

Now for my five bloggers who have inspired me, made me laugh, made me cry and taught me more about the world:

Nick Booth - as inspiration goes, for me, they come no higher than podnosh
Rob Brown (and all of the Staniforth blogging crew) - timely, punchy, relevant posts about PR and the social web.
Matthew Gardiner - Chief Executive of Trafford Housing Trust, a great writer who gets excited by possibilities.
Sheryl Yvette - Sheryl showed me that to being true to yourself is a strength, not a weakness.
Drew Benvie - brilliant posts about the media, PR, agency life and tech

How to build engagement through your facebook page

2011-07-28T21:55:00.000+01:00

Lots of housing organisations now have facebook pages, which is great – facebook is undoubtedly where our customers are. But social media only really gets powerful once you achieve engagement with your audience. How can you generate conversations so that you can improve services based on the feedback you receive?

What we found at Wolverhampton Homes is that it takes perseverance and ideas. We’ve been on facebook for just over a year and at first, we had very little interaction or engagement.

We knew that we had to do more to get tenants involved so we promoted the page online (our website and twitter account) and offline (newsletter, posters, events and merchandise). We developed a content plan, which sets out which stories, pictures, videos and topics we post. We had regular brainstorms in the communications team on how we could generate conversations. I also gave my team members targets of how many likers we wanted to achieve and asked them to come up with new ideas to spark engagement.

We all use facebook personally and that has helped us understand the platform as a consumer; we could see what tactics other companies were trying. We also went to social media networking events where we picked up tips from other organisations.

Not everything worked – we ran a couple of competitions that we had very few takers and we had many posts that didn’t achieve any likes or comments, but after about six months, we reached a tipping point.

We finally had enough customers who liked our page to start seeing some genuine and useful engagement and we were producing regular, useful, interesting content that our customers seemed to like. Customers started writing on our wall, asking questions, commenting on our posts and even posting their own pictures.

Now we are fortunate that we have regular interaction and engagement with customers through our facebook page. It’s rare that a day goes by without some level of engagement or discussion, and all these comments and feedback give us the opportunity to improve our services and change things for the better.

Anyone who is trying to build engagement through a facebook page should stick with it. The engagement won’t come quickly (unless you’re very lucky!) so don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t start seeing engagement straightaway.

(I originally wrote this post for a publication by Verse One.)

Great copywriting from Tesco

2011-07-17T10:35:00.000+01:00

I'm a bit of a geek for great copywriting and this was so perfect I just had to share it. In case you can't read it from my rather blurry pic, it says:

'Favourites.' Your regular in-store shop waiting for you online.

It was on the back on a Tesco delivery van. People driving behind it have mere moments to take in the message and this is so elegant, crisp and economical with words that it does the job brilliantly.

I love the single quote marks - the introduction of the favourites concept. I love the use of shop to describe what you buy, rather than basket, trolley or items, which transforms products into a destination. I love the 'waiting for you' which subtly compels the reader to act.

In short, I think this is very fine copywriting. Bravo Tesco!

You know you're an innovator when...

2011-07-13T15:31:00.032+01:00

You have your best ideas in the shower.
People describe you as tenacious and you're never sure if it's a compliment.
For you, good enough is never good enough.
You talk a lot but you listen more.
You bookmark web pages, favourite tweets or tear out pages of magazines obsessively.
You're regularly exhausted from the battle (but you get up and do it all again the next day).
You think of ideas for everything (and it annoys you that you haven't got time to put them all into practice).
Your friends are all cleverer than you.
You keep snacks in your desk drawer.
You praise other people's ideas rather than claiming them as your own.
You're willing to take the hit if an idea doesn't work out.
You share your successes.
People ask you for advice and you end up learning from them.
You wake up in the middle of the night and email or text yourself.
Your favourite question is 'what if...?'
You love change.
The harder you work the luckier you get.
You never feel like you've reached the top.

How to increase your Twitter followers*

2011-07-11T06:53:00.000+01:00

*No, don't worry, I haven't lost my mind and become a spambot.

The other day I was asked how to increase followers on Twitter and although I gave a (140-character) reply, I thought it was worthy of exploring further. I wanted to say that the better question is to ask how can I increase engagement with twitter followers? Or; how can I make sure my tweets are relevant, interesting or useful to my followers?

Everyone who uses Twitter quickly understands that its power doesn't come from one-way, broadcast style communication but instead from conversations and interactions (such as retweets). It's much more valuable to an organisation or an individual to have regular, useful engagement with its followers than to have lots of followers.

For example, a parish Council might have a customer base of just 1000 people living in a small village. If it joins Twitter and starts to have regular, useful conversations with say, 50 of those people, they will be (real world) connected to most of the other residents of the parish. If you are helpful and informative, listening to them and answering their questions, they will re-pay you by spreading the word of your latest event, or what's happening with road works.

But likewise an organisation or a person might have hundreds of thousands of followers, but if they never converse with them the value they can detract from it is immediately limited (certain celebrities, I'm looking at you).

However, it's true that to get started building your community, you will need followers. This is where you can use those listening skills. Organisations can search for people who are tweeting about, or interested in, the topic they want to discuss and follow them. Listen to what they're saying, answer their questions, suggest useful (non-salesy) links, re-tweet their queries and generally try to be useful.

Your tweets should be human, funny, kind and empathetic; never commerical, boring or repetitive. The customer insight you can get from twitter is phenomenal: your customers will tell you more about them than you ever thought possible. That's why you've got to listen and be interested in what they say.

You can also read and comment on their blog posts, like their facebook pages and watch their youtube videos - it all helps to build your understanding of that person or group of people.

Fixating on the number of followers you have is like fiddling while Rome burns; it might make you feel better but it won't get you anywhere. Instead focus on developing relationships, having conversations and publishing useful content. Before you know it the followers will come.

Goodbye gimmicks, hello day-to-day...

2011-06-20T09:34:00.000+01:00

I attended LocalGovCamp on Saturday and since then I've been thinking about how I can share my thoughts and what I learnt. As my brain is currently a big plate of ideas spaghetti, I thought it would be more coherent if I broke them into smaller blog posts based on the sessions I attended.

The first session was 'Twitter 24'. It was about what local authorities and other organisations have got out of events such as GMP24, Walsall24, Freebridge24 (which I blogged about here) and Shrop360.

The general consensus in the room was that these events generate media coverage, demonstrate the range of work the organisation carries out and crucially, wins over a hesitant internal audience.

Now I love a PR stunt as much as the next gal but something about these type of events make me feel slightly uneasy. I can't help but think, 'ok, but what about the day after that?' If we're going to move from social media being shiny and new to something that actually transforms services and therefore, people's lives, then surely we have to think about what happens the next day?

It's something I've been thinking a lot about at Wolverhampton Homes because, after 18 months of persistence, we've got to a point where social media is working for us reasonably effectively as a (two-way) communications channel, but it isn't yet transforming services.

These events do generate media coverage (though perhaps not for much longer given they're losing their novelty status) and do, to some extent, show the work of the organisation (albeit in a largely 'broadcast' sense). But my worry is about trying to win over an internal audience with something that is essentially a gimmick, misses the point of what social media can do. It feels a bit like we're dumbing down.

When I think about where I would like Wolverhampton Homes' use of social media to go, the utopian ideal I'm aiming for is where social media genuinely empowers customers and staff to cut through all the crap and get things done.

I'm imagining geo-tagged estate evaluations, communities that feel safe in and proud of their neighbourhood, twitpics of estate improvements, genuine consultation, easier reporting of hate crime - so it can be tackled and further incidents prevented, open data so customers can judge our performance and be given genuine service choices, an empowered silent majority and less antisocial behaviour because people know and feel able to speak to their neighbours.

I'm trying to work backwards from that picture and think what needs to happen to get to that point. I think the key is about up-skilling tenants and staff so they see the possibilities. It's something we're already doing with Homes on the Net and Networked Neighbourhoods, but I know we need to do more of it, now I've got to figure out how. That's the thing about LocalGovCamp, it can give you a head full of ideas but the important thing is putting them into action.

Photo reproduced under Creative Commons licence by kind permission of Andreas Nilsson.

How Wolverhampton Homes got started on social media

2011-06-17T18:05:00.000+01:00

On Wednesday I spoke at a Verse One Digital Strategy Seminar in Birmingham. My presentation was on how Wolverhampton Homes got started on social media. Here it is - feel free to pinch all or part of it.

How Wolverhampton Homes Started on Social Media

View more presentations from kate_s_hughes

Live Tweeting: what I've learnt

2011-05-25T07:45:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I live tweeted one of Wolverhampton Homes' Get Togethers. Our Get Togethers are opportunities for tenants to get involved and tell us what they think on different issues. They are held four times a year in four areas of Wolverhampton.

The aim of the Get Togethers is to widen the pool of people who get involved, by holding the events in the evening, moving them around the city, and giving tenants more casual, 'fun' opportunities to tell us what they think. But there are still lots of tenants who can't (or don't want to) attend.

I wanted to give those tenants a chance to share their opinion. I decided to live tweet one of the Get Togethers, using the hashtag #whgt. The subject was 'who should be given Council housing?' - a very emotive subject and one which had previously generated a lot of comments online. (See this facebook conversation.) This is what I've learnt:

Check your internet access first - we were using a dongle and a mobile phone and at our first Get Together, the Wednesfield one, they wouldn't work - cue much embarassment! I should have taken the dongle and phone to the community centre to check they would have reception before the big day. Fortunately, there was another Get Together the following day at St Joseph's Church Hall, in Merry Hill. Our fab IT team brought along their dongle and booster and we had access.
Be prepared for a lot of tweeting - I didn't tweet literally everything but most of the key questions. I wanted to give our Twitter followers an experience as close to actually being there as possible, so there was a lot of typing!
Tweet pics - I tweeted one, of the outside of the venue, but I think more would have been good and made our stream more engaging. It would be good if there was two people tweeting: one could tweet pictures and the other could do the words.
Make people aware you might not be able to chat while doing it - my colleagues are a lovely, sociable bunch and they kept coming up to me to ask how it's going. It was a bit tricky to respond without being rude, while trying to respond to what people were saying on Twitter.
Publicise your hashtag first - we promoted it on Twitter, facebook, at the venue, through our news stories and on our website. I think for the next Get Togethers we'll stick to the same hashtag so it starts to get known.

We had some really useful comments in response - including some from a tenant which suggested different ways we could advertise properties to reduce refusals. That is just the kind of valuable feedback that we are looking for from the Get Togethers. We had five people respond to us in total - not a great amount admittedly - but the quality of the conversation definitely made it worthwhile. As with all our social media, we take an experimental approach and on this occasion, I'd say it was a success.

How Ryan Giggs can repair his reputation

2011-05-23T19:50:00.000+01:00

Who would swap places with Ryan Giggs right now? The famously private footballer finds himself at the centre of a media storm after allegedly taking out a super injunction to prevent reports of an (again, alleged) affair with Big Brother star Imogen Thomas.

Following the Scottish Sunday Herald's front page yesterday and increasing internet reports linking Giggs to the story, MP John Hemming used parliamentary privilege to name him today.

Whether Giggs has had an affair, whether it was him who took out the injunction, his reputation is in tatters. How can he repair it?

If he hasn't had the affair, the answer is simple. He should make a short statement through his management saying that it is not him and leave the media storm to move on.

If he has had the affair it is more tricky but he can still bounce back. His years of keeping his head down and excelling at his career will not quickly be forgotten. I would advise him to do a one on one televised interview on a programme like This Morning this week - tomorrow if possible but if not certainly before Saturday's Champions League final.

He needs to apologise publicly to his wife and to Thomas for the distress he has caused them. He should admit that seeking to control the media in this day and age, is impossible and he shouldn't have sought the super injunction. He should explain that he took that course of action through fear of further hurting his family and that he is asking for their forgiveness. He should halt all legal action against Twitter and its users and take responsibility for his mistakes. His PR team need to work with him to practice his answers to every possible question.

By admitting his mistakes, he will win grudging respect and have an opportunity to explain what he has done.
Notoriously shy, he will likely feel very uncomfortable about being questioned about his private life, but without giving the public the opportunity to hear his side and a genuine apology, he will struggle to rebuild his reputation.

That reputation was previously good; while others were sleeping with prostitutes or texting pictures they shouldn't, he was living the quiet life and winning medals for his club. Humans make mistakes - that's part of life, and it is for his family to decide whether he should be forgiven. It may not be forgotten by the media but if he gets his act together, it will certainly pass.

Image reproduced from Twitpic, posted by @SportingIntel.

How to convince your boss to let you give social media a go*

2011-04-26T15:08:00.001+01:00

*This blog post could also be called 'how to feel the fear and do it anyway'.

So you want your organisation to start using social media? Perhaps you've been using it for a while personally and have seen other organisations reaping some of the benefits? Perhaps you sense you've got some persuading to do of senior managers?

Who you have to persuade and how much you have to persuade them will depend on where you work: some organisations have a culture that is open to innovation, others prefer to observe before dipping their toe in.

Presuming that you've already developed your social media skills through your personal use, you'll have to start by making a business case. Some of the questions that the business case should answer are:

1. Won't it take too long? We're already rushed off our feet - how can we possibly launch a social media presence as well as doing everything else?

It doesn't have to. Initially setting up either a facebook or twitter account doesn't take long (10 minutes at most). When you're starting out, you won't have many followers or likers to engage with, so it is likely that you will be starting the conversations. This means you can post as and when you have time. At Wolverhampton Homes when we were starting out, we probably spent 20 minutes a day checking and posting on social media sites. Even now, when the communities are more mature, we still only spend about 40 minutes a day posting a replying. Social media, by its nature, is quick so you can allocate more resource as the community grows.

2. Aren't social media sites blocked on our computer network?

They may well be. If social media sites are blocked for security or management reasons, find out who controls access and make the business case to them (if you have a senior manager in your corner that would help as well). Explain they need only open the sites to you and whoever will be updating and posting in the first instance and that you would be happy for them to monitor your usage to check it is genuinely business related. They might want assurances about passwords and security - offer to take whatever security measures they advise to protect your company.

3. What about the risks? Aren't we exposing ourself to criticism or negativity?

Yes - to some extent. Social media does make it easier for customers to voice their (good and bad) opinions of your services or products. But,crucially, whether your organisation is on social media doesn't make a difference to whether people will talk about you on it. People will still use social media to air their gripes, it's just you won't hear it.

Ask yourself this, do you have more respect for a company who ignores its customers or one that listens, takes complaints and compliments with equal consideration and then improves what it does? Criticism isn't a bad thing - complaints should be treasured because they allow you to learn and improve. By using social media, you give your company a chance to win that particular customer back in a public forum - which will also mean other customers' respect for you grows when they see how you well handled it.

4. Will it be worth it? What will we get out of it?

How you use social media will determine how much you get out of it. At the risk of sounding cheesy, you get out what you put in. If you don't post regularly, rarely engage with the people who follow you and just peddle your press releases, you won't get much out of it. And your customers/stakeholders/followers/likers might actually have a worse opinion of you than when you started.

But if you genuinely seek to engage people, show an interest in the world around you and communicate that you care about your customers, you will reap the rewards. To reassure people who are reluctant about social media, you could (and should) offer to regularly report different measures of your performance. This means they will have a stake in the community that you are growing and will start to understand its value.

5. Are our customers on the internet? Do they use social media?

Recent estimates about internet usage among social housing tenants at about 30-50% but I suspect it is higher than that, particularly with the growth of smart phones. That is a trend that is only going to increase.

There is no doubt that you will have customers who are on facebook and probably some who are on twitter too. More than 600million people worldwide are on facebook and although the rate of joining has slowed, it's not stopped by any means.

I'm sure I've missed some questions/barriers out. Let me know if there are any other that you're being asked and I will do my best to answer them.

Why Employee Engagement is Key

2011-04-23T12:43:00.000+01:00

The longer I am in my job, the more I see that managing the reputation of a large organisation is about much, much more than external communications - in fact, the key is employee engagement. As a former journalist and PR consultant, my focus has predominantly been media relations and customer communications.

Understanding the link between effectively managing reputation and strong employee engagement was a light bulb moment for me. Engaged staff are not only ambassadors for the brand, but they're the best way to get your message out there - to customers and stakeholders.

Ask yourself, if you read something in a newspaper about John Lewis or you spoke to somebody who worked there, who would you be more likely to believe? I think most people would trust the person above the newspaper, particularly if it was someone they knew. In addition, engaged employees = happy customers so the organisation's reputation is doubly boosted if you can crack employee engagement.

Essentially, without effective employee engagement, reputation management will always be on the back foot, responding to external situations rather than leading the agenda.

I've developed the reputation model above for Wolverhampton Homes. It's based on a brand management model developed by Manchester Business School and I think is probably relevant for most housing organisations. It shows that employee engagement represents about 25% of our reputation, with the other quarters being customer experience, image and identity.

Feel free to use it/adapt it for your organisation or to challenge it if you don't agree.

Should you allow comments on your facebook page?

2011-04-15T18:38:00.000+01:00

For social housing communications professionals who are dipping their toe in social media, twitter is the obvious place to start. It's quick and easy to update and, most importantly, while people can say stuff about you or to you, they can't post on your profile. Someone visiting your profile would only see what you've posted unless they do a search for mentions of you. For control freaks like us, that is reassuring.

However...we know twitter tends to be where our stakeholders (the media, other housing organisations, politicians and the like) gather, whereas our customers are mostly on facebook. The thing is, if you're serious about engaging with tenants through social media, you need to be on facebook.

You can set up a facebook page and only allow comments to be posted by admins - but then you won't achieve true engagement and your page will simply become another broadcast channel. Or you can allow people to post what they like (mitigating the risk using the profanity blocklist function) in the spirit of 'trust until proven otherwise'.

At Wolverhampton Homes we allow people to post comment, pictures and videos freely. We've been on facebook for 11 months now and I have never had to delete a post or block an individual yet.

That's not to say I wouldn't delete a post - if content that is offensive, illegal or defamatory is posted I'd delete it without a second thought. Depending on what it was I'd most likely block the person as well. We want our facebook page to be a place where people feel able to talk about the things that matter to them without being shouted down, and part of our job is protecting that community from offensive posts.

But if we (as an organisation) feel criticism is misplaced or the issue has not been understood, we have the debate openly and with full respect of the individuals' views (two recent examples are about Decent Homes and who should be entitled to Council housing).

I think you gain more respect from the people you are trying to serve if you are willing to engage in open and honest debate, no matter how uncomfortable it may be at times.

Best Practice: Bromford's Strategic Plan

2011-03-20T11:25:00.002Z

They're smart cookies over at the Bromford Group's comms team. I recently stumbled across their Strategic Plan and thought it outstanding, not only in presentation but in concept too.

Since being at Wolverhampton Homes, and experiencing the incredible improvement drive that inspections give organisations, I've learnt that we're at our best when we're all aiming for the same thing. When everyone has got a clear understanding of what the organisation needs to achieve and how it's going to do it, the energy is unstoppable; even the less-engaged employees become motivated to succeed.

Bromford is a housing association and as such, it can set it's own measures by which it can judge it's journey. In it's plan, it says:

"We will judge our success against ﬁve key measures. By 2016 we aim to achieve:
• UK leading levels of customer advocacy
• Outstanding levels of key business partner advocacy
• 1500 affordable homes completions every year
• National recognition as one of the UK’s best employers
• Recognition as one of the most efﬁcient affordable housing provider"

I love that - it's so short, easy to remember and for staff, I imagine it's easy to get their head round and know what they're aiming for. I also think the modern design and strong use of images makes it a powerful publication for selling the idea internally but also to the outside world. Well done to them.

How to use social networking sites to engage with your tenants

2011-03-16T19:35:00.000Z

How to use social networking sites to engage with your tenants

View more presentations from kate_s_hughes
This was my presentation from the NHF conference. Feel free to pinch any of it or let me know if you want to chat about any of the points I raise in it.

Which organisations are good at social media?

2011-03-13T11:21:00.000Z

I spoke at the NHF Marcomms Conference on Thursday about using social media to engage with tenants (I'll upload my presentation and handout in the next few days). One of the questions I was asked afterwards, was which organisations are good at social media?

If you're looking to develop your companies' use of social media, it would be a good idea to follow in the footsteps of these organisations so you can see how they encourage interaction and engage with their audiences.

Housing:

Solihull Community Housing - I love their facebook page. They have a great mix of corporate stories and more 'friendly', chatty stories that give you an insight into the organisation's personality. They come across as caring, customer-focused and (I think this is the most important) human.

Testway Housing - I've flagged up Testway before on this blog but they are so brilliant, they deserve another mention. They were the first housing association on Twitter and use it in a very natural and engaging way. Speaking to their Comms Team, I know that they have found their Twitter account engages more stakeholders and fellow organisations in the sector rather than customers, but I would still say it has been a success for them. A lot of companies find that facebook tends to be where the customers are and twitter is where the stakeholders are - but stakeholders are still an important group and engaging with them effectively and being seen to be open to engaging with customers is a powerful way to raise your company's profile.

Freebridge Community Housing - Freebridge use Twitter effectively and have also experimented with Freebridge24, which I blogged about here.

Flagship Housing - one that I've only just had a look at but seems to be doing a great job is Flagship Housing. Their facebook page has an enviable number of likes (622 - jealous!) and has also built great connections with other local organisations such as the police and local media, which makes it even more engaging for customers. Great stuff.

Accord's Social Breakfast is brilliant. And I see they're also advertising for a Web and Comms Officer in Birmingham, which would be a great opportunity for somebody.

Of course, I have to give a plug to Wolverhampton Homes, where I work. We're on Twitter and Facebook and we're still not using it as much as I'd like, but we are getting there. If you follow say, hello and we'll follow back.

Councils:

Walsall Council - setting the standard that the rest of us can only dream of reaching, Walsall Council regularly impresses me with its authentic, innovative and un-scared (if that's a word) use of Twitter. Dan Slee, a press officer at the Council, blogs about his use of social media here and a great post he wrote recently is about how Walsall posted all it's contacts over a 24 hour period on Twitter. I love points three and four - it's not about network access and it's all about network access. Network access is one of my personal bugbears - if we want staff to engage with customers through social media, we need to make it easy for them.

Hopefully that'll give you an idea of some organisations to keep your eye on. If anyone knows any other great examples, post them below because it's always useful to check out best practice.

Going to the NHF Marketing and Communications Conference?

2011-02-13T17:36:00.000Z

On 10 March, I'll be at the National Housing Federation Marketing and Communications Conference. I'm giving a presentation in the afternoon on how to engage with your customers using social media. If you're going to be there, come and say hello.

The results are in...

2011-01-16T09:48:00.000Z

You may have noticed I haven't blogged in a loooong time. Since starting at Wolverhampton Homes almost a year a go, I have been incredibly busy and, quite frankly, too knackered to blog. However, one of the reasons I've been so busy could finally be announced this week.
In our recent Audit Commission inspection, we were found to deliver an excellent (three star) service and have excellent prospects for improvement. Yay! Needless to say, we were all delighted.
To our customers and the outside world, it doesn't mean as much as when we achieved two stars in 2007, which was the trigger for drawing down funding for the Decent Homes programme, but for colleagues and board members it is external recognition of how far we've come on our journey. For what its worth, I think the funding linked inspection regime was the catalyst for the improvement and that is why it's a real shame that the Audit Commission is being disbanded.
Inspectors commented on the transformation from a service that was sub-standard to one where customers can have confidence that things will get done and that they can get involved in how that service is delivered.
We're not perfect (and goodness knows when we make mistakes, we get even more frustrated than our customers) but we're committed to continuing to improve and its renewed my excitement to work for an organisation that has the energy, drive and determination to make a real difference.

Photo by Katie Harbath kindly reproduced under the Creative Commons Licence.

A day in the life: Freebridge's Twitter Experiment

2010-11-29T20:06:00.000Z

On 19 November, Freebridge Community Housing carried out an experiment designed to show the variety and volume of enquiries it receives. It decided to tweet every contact for a 24 hour period so that customers (and peers and the media) could see for themselves the wide range of emails, calls and letters that social landlords take every day.
It was similar to Greater Manchester Police's experiment in October, which used several twitter accounts to show every enquiry they had over 24 hours.
These experiments both showed the human side and the day-to-day reality of life in public sector organisations. Social media, and twitter in particular, is perfect for allowing organisations to be more transparent than ever and show in real time what they do with zero financial cost and minimal human resource. Both experiments also generated valuable media coverage.
As public sector cuts start to bite, it will become more important than ever for organisations to demonstrate what they are doing and how they are contributing to society. Social media offers a great way to do this cheaply and effectively.

Breaking Into PR

2010-10-10T18:52:00.001+01:00

One of the websites I find most useful for PR commentary is www.ragan.com. I came across this video through Mark Ragan's twitter feed had to share it. It covers the skills needed to break into the PR industry, which I've also blogged about here, and why women dominate the profession.

I agree with the practitioners in the video that the skill set required to succeed in PR is much broader and more complex than it once was. For me, the wide variety of activity and the intellectual demands are why I love communications and I get a buzz out of my job. From crisis communication to people skills, from managing budgets to social media, the pulls on PR professionals are greater than ever and young people entering the profession need to be tough, agile and persistent to break through.

Best Practice in Annual Reports: Bromford Group

2010-08-18T10:49:00.000+01:00

It's that time of year when landlords are preparing their annual reports. This being the first (and last) year of the TSA regulatory framework, social housing providers have got a new task: to provide an annual report for tenants by 1 October. The key aim of these publications is to make it clear for tenants to be able to see the standards (or offers) that landlords commit to and then whether they are meeting those commitments or not. Tenants must be involved in the production of the annual report.

Traditionally, most landlords have reported performance to tenants in an annual report, whether that is in a few pages of the tenants newsletter or through the website. Some landlords also opt to produce an annual report for stakeholders, which can be used as a marketing tool, to 'sell' the housing provider to local authorities, MPs or other landlords. In my job, I get sent quite a lot of these, and generally they all blur in to one. But this year Bromford's stood out.

Sent out as a link to their website (yay! no more burying my desk in dead trees!) and titled Facing Up to Difficult Questions, the housing group has spoken to key influencers and decision makers in the sector and asked them what they want to know. With creative photography and clean lines, Bromford's annual review is fresh, modern and relevant. Well done to their Comms Team for a cracking job.

Want to get a job in PR? My 20 top tips

2010-06-17T21:40:00.001+01:00

This post is inspired by my rather marvellous Media Relations Intern Meghan Tyrer who has been working with me for the past couple of months. The jobs market is tougher than ever for graduates but if you're savvy and persistent, opportunities are still out there. Here are my top tips (and I'd love to hear yours in the comments):

Absorb as much media as you can: read as much as possible, watch every news bulletin, develop (if you haven't already got one) an internet addiction and become an expert at eaves-dropping. Your mission is to become a sponge, taking everything in. Save/bookmark everything that inspires you.
Develop your critical thinking and constantly ask yourself questions. Why was that story chosen as the lead? Why was that picture used? How did Organisation A handle such-and-such media storm? What would you have done? Who benefits from that particular story? Who commented? What did they say? Why?
Develop your writing skills. If your grammar is weak, brush up on it. (You could do worse than read this.) If you lack confidence in your writing, get practising.
Start a blog. Don't wait to be given the opportunity to write - get on with it! Pick an area that is relevant to your job search and start writing about it. Your opinion is just as valid as anyone else's. The more blogs you can read and link to, the better. If you've got the time, blog every day. Comment on other people's blogs and make a mental note of what makes certain posts popular or otherwise. Wordpress or blogger (which is what I use) are good, free platforms.
Join Twitter. I know, I know, I go on about Twitter all the time but it is certainly an easy way to build your network. Here's an old post I wrote about getting started on Twitter.
Join LinkedIn - yes, it's dull, yes, it's corporate, but there are also no naked pictures of you on your mate's stag do and for that reason alone, it's great for business networking. Protocol dictates you don't add people you haven't actually met. But do make sure if anyone you've worked for is on there that you (very politely, of course) ask them for a recommendation.
Sign up with as many recruitment agencies as possible. Good Birmingham ones are AF Selection, Blue Skies and 2nd City Resourcing. Also check out the Guardian Job pages (Media and PR jobs are on a Monday) and PR Week. Sign up for all the email job alerts you can.
Surround yourself with positive, intelligent people. Job hunting is a hard slog. For young graduates who are still finding their feet in the world it is even tougher. There will be days when you feel really low and you will need good friends and family to pick you up.
Don't get into (more) debt! Debt is evil! Avoid it like the plague.
Exercise. Do you think champions sit on the sofa all day? No they don't! Anna Wintour plays an hour of tennis at 5am every day. Admittedly she probably also eats small children for breakfast, but still you will need stamina and energy to keep you going.
Remember those positive, intelligent people you're surrounding yourself with? Get them to read over your CV and/or supporting statements. A second pair of eyes will always pick up something you've missed.
Get as much experience as possible through internships, work experience or volunteering. These look great on your CV and give you a taste of the world of work.
Network your socks off. If you live in Birmingham, congratulations because there's myriad opportunities to meet new people for free every day. Check out All Brum for the latest.
Write a list of every person and organisation you want to work with and write to them telling them why. Research potential employers and think of great ideas for their business. Write to them or find a way to meet them to tell them about it.
Practise your elevator pitch. This is named after Hollywood executives who only have the length of a ride in a lift with some famous director to convince her about their pet project. The idea is you need to be able to sell yourself in 60 seconds. What are the key skills you can offer? What's your unique selling point? Are you particularly knowledgeable in a certain area? Or do you have bags of energy? Or great client service skills?
Save all the compliments you get. Keep them in a big 'Actually I Am Brilliant' file for those days when you need a boost.
Read this. It's the definitive job hunting book.
Roll with the punches. It's unlikely that you'll get the first or even the first 20 jobs you go for, so develop a thick skin. It's nothing personal, you just weren't right for that role. Focus on what you've learnt through the process instead.
Make an inspirational playlist and play it loud. I love the lyrics to this.
Stay positive - you can do it - and good luck!

Freedom of Information Act requests are the sledgehammer in the journalists' toolbox

2010-05-12T22:27:00.001+01:00

As an in-house PR at a public sector organisation, I have to deal with my fair share of Freedom of Information Act requests. I welcome them: transparency and openess for all organisations are good things, and even more so when public funds are being administered or used.

When the FOI Act first came in, I was a journalist at the Express and Star and I remember the excitement in the newsroom. It was an almost overwhelming thrill: "we can ask for anything!" But as wonderful as they can be, Freedom of Information Act requests are open to over-use.

Good journalists know that they have many other tools they can use to extract information from organisations, including good old-fashioned nurturing of the contacts book. Instead of going to the hassle of submitting an FOI, there's a lot to be said for giving an organisation a call and simply asking the question.

Good PRs should treasure their relationships with journalists. If they want to keep the relationship on a positive footing, they'll do everything in their power to supply the journalist with whatever he or she wants, knowing that nothing winds reporters up like being given the run around.

On occasion there's no other way to get the information the journalist needs; that's when she or he should pull out the FOI request, and the PR should snap to it. While the PR might not always like it, it plays an important part in a democracy where journalists (and citizens) are given their rightful respect.

(If this is an area that interests you Martin Rosenbaum writes brilliant blog about it.)

We Can Win!

2010-04-07T22:01:00.000+01:00

As I was driving to work along the M6 the other day, I noticed the massive poster proclaiming 'We Can Win' in support of Birmingham's UK 2013 City of Culture bid. The sun was shining, the traffic was moving quickly and life was good - I thought to myself we can win. It's a great, positive slogan, full of confidence and energy.

When I got to work I logged on to the bid's website. I didn't feel the same sense of energy from the website but I could also tell it was early days and that the campaign was growing in momentum. I liked that hundreds of Brummies have already had an input into the bid. It would be easy to knock what has been done so far and point out where things could have been done better, but that is the kind of mentality that Birmingham needs a lot less of.

It's great that Birmingham has made the short list, along with Derry, Norwich and Sheffield, all of which will be hard competition to beat. I hope that more and more people get behind the bid over the next few weeks and that add in their ideas of what makes Birmingham such a great city for culture. I've added mine in - have you done yours?

One year of blogging: some thank yous

2010-03-21T19:56:00.000Z

My blog is one year old this month and in that year I have learnt an enormous amount, so I thought it would be timely to thank some of the people who've helped me.

Pete Ashton is the reason I started blogging. Specifically, this post by Paul Bradshaw where Pete summed up why Joanna Geary had got a new job on The Times made something click in my mind. One of the sentences he wrote: "I persuaded her to blog because I thought it’d be useful for her career, but I do that with everyone" really stood out. It made me realise that through blogging I had a chance to learn a new skill, set myself apart career-wise and let people know what I thought.

Through numerous conversations with Nick Booth, I've learnt an immeasurable about social media and the mentality of collaboration. He also taught me the phrase JFDI or Just F***ing Do it, which is probably one of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard and one that I think about frequently when I feel hesitant about new projects.

Rob Brown of from the brilliant PR Media Blog suggested I do shorter, more frequent posts so that people would get into the habit of visiting my blog regularly. I'm still working on that one (!) but I do try to do at least three posts a month. Ideally I'd be doing three a week, but sometimes life (and the job I'm paid to do) gets in the way.

Many other people have given me a hand by retweeting my links, posting useful articles and commenting on my blog. Thank you to everyone who has helped me learn to blog over the past year.

Turning Your Customers Into Champions

2010-03-06T10:46:00.000Z

One of the other inspiring sessions at the NHF Marketing and Communications Conference was from Lynda Thomas, Director of External Affairs, at Macmillan Cancer Support.

She talked about how Macmillan had approached re-branding their organisation a couple of years ago, recognising that it was becoming more competitive to raise money and that the public's relationship with charities was changing - people don't just want to donate, they want to engage.

They spent about 18 months working with external consultants carrying out market and internal research crucial thing she said was that it wasn't about a new logo, font or website - it had to come from a complete culture change within the charity.

Macmillan decided to relaunch with a new logo, a new ambition, and new values. It also decided to use social media to engage further with its customers. I think landlords can use social media in the same way and give a voice to their customers. When organisations start having a public conversation with their customers, there is always a risk but I think they are far outweighed by the benefits.

Macmillan, like all social housing providers, is non-profit organisation, but unlike social landlords, the people it supports (people living with cancer and their families) are very vocal and passionate about the brand. Social housing providers tend to find their customers are fairly quiet when they are happy with your service but when you make mistakes, it will end up in the press or they will tell other customers, both of which damage your reputation.

Social media gives a voice to those who are happy with your service as well and allows customers
to see the organisation is honest. Landlords genuinely value feedback and involvement - perhaps more than any other type of organisation - but customers need to see and hear about how that has improved services.

It's not an easy journey for landlords because it takes time, energy, money and confidence but I think it's a path worth following. It's worked for Macmillan: since they rebranded, more people get involved with them than any other charity.

Writing Winning Awards

2010-03-06T09:41:00.002Z

It's taken me a little while to write up my notes from the NHF Marketing and Communications Conference in February 2010 (I've been busy with Brum Twestival!) but here's the first of a two parter.

One of the workshops I attended was about writing winning awards. Rosemarie Anderson, Chief Executive of Rockingham Forest Housing Association, talked about how they'd won the 2009 national What We Are Proud Of award - even though they are a small housing association, with only 20 staff.

She said the benefits of winning awards include media coverage, staff morale, cementing relationships with partners, meeting strategic priorities and business opportunities.

But it's important not to just apply for awards willy-nilly. They can take a lot of time (and sometimes money) out of the organisation and the business case needs to be solid.

Once the business case has been made, the organisation needs to go through these steps:

Plan ahead – it takes much longer than you think
Assemble project team – ensure everyone is aware in the business of who is managing award submission and what is required of individuals. (Don’t delegate to the most junior team member.)
What makes your project unique?
Put in context, tell the story of the organisation
Use partner and customer feedback
Read the criteria and stick to it – dates, word count, images, presentation
Be creative – use film, supporting materials (clearly labelled), images#
Grab attention with first two pars
EVIDENCE – statistics, surveys, results!
Include press cuttings, coverage if you can – but not pages and pages. A summary page and two or three of the strongest.
Have your PR ready to roll if you win.
Thank everyone and CELEBRATE!
Take a long term view – if you don’t win, get shortlisted, evaluate, was it still useful exercise?

DON’T:

Miss the deadline
Make typos or mistakes
Leave out outcomes – most important bit
Give up – have another go next year!

My organisation, Wolverhampton Homes, has just been shortlisted in three categories (Career Development Star of the Year, Inspirational Colleague of the Year, Procurement Team of the Year) for the Inside Housing Housing Heroes Awards. We'll find out in May if the entries were good enough to win!

Are you going to the NHF Marketing and Communications Conference?

2010-02-17T21:01:00.000Z

I'm going to the NHF Marketing and Communications Conference in London on Tuesday (23 February 2010).

If you're going too and would like to meet up for a coffee, let me know by commenting below or emailing kate.s.hughes@gmail.com

The Future of News?

2010-02-09T20:02:00.000Z

Last night I went to a great event: the Future of News West Midlands. It was organised by Philip John of the Lichfield Blog and inspired by the UK Future of News.

We heard a presentation by Andrew Brightwell on his hyperlocal blog Grounds, which was set up for the Colmore Row area of Birmingham, with the support of Urban Coffee Company. After his talk, we were asked to discuss the business models that could support news blogs.

The context for this discussion is the steady decline of local and regional newspapers and the increase in local news being provided by blogs such as Lichfield Blog, one of most vibrant I've read. The problem with news blogs being staffed by volunteers is they frequently have day jobs and are blogging in their spare time, yet they provide a valuable service to their communities.

We mooted various ideas as a group including advertising (which is difficult because you need someone to do a sales job), setting up syndication networks (difficult because who manages it all?) and selling journalistic skills for events (difficult because it takes a way time from writing news).

Two ideas I keep coming back to are: sponsorship by stakeholders and organisations paying to display content.

I think stakeholder organisations which would benefit from engaged communities should be (and possibly would be) happy to financially support local news blogs. At Wolverhampton Homes, we're happy to support the City Show because it is a fantastic event for the whole community and by supporting it we get publicity. I think a blog which scrutinises our work, engages our residents, reduces antisocial behaviour and encourages a community spirit is just, if not more, important as an annual show.

A great local blog in Wolverhampton is WV11 which is dedicated to the Wednesfield area. Run completely by volunteers, it provides regular news, events and information which our residents can access for free. The team behind it have a rigorous editorial policy, just as a newspaper would, because they know their credibility to visitors depends on it.

If a hyperlocal blog was to be sponsored by stakeholders it would need to make it clear that it wouldn't affect their editorial content. The stakeholders would have to respect the blogger's decisions and not seek to influence them at all. Admittedly this would depend on the type of relationship and the strength of the individuals' characters.

The other idea, of paying to submit content, is a route 24dash have gone down. 24dash is a public sector news website where organisations pay an annual subscription charge to be able to upload a certain amount of posts each month. They make it clear that organisations pay for uploading content so that visitors know the context of what they're reading.

Judging by 24dash's steady expansion over the past three years (it launched a monthly magazine 24housing a couple of years ago), it seems to be a model that is working for them.

Both business models have their flaws but in the right situation could work. The conclusion our group came to was that there is not one answer to the problem. Instead small news blogs will need to experiment with a variety of revenue streams depending on their community, sector and circumstances. It's an exciting, if slightly scary, time to be looking to the future of news.

Best Practice: Answering the 'So What?' question

2010-01-23T15:01:00.000Z

As tenant participation (or resident involvement) becomes embedded in the practice of social housing providers, another question is rising up the agenda: so what?

It's not enough to involve residents or empower residents to make key decisions, landlords have to be able to demonstrate the difference that that participation has made.

As well as being able to show the outcomes, organisations need to feed back to residents what has changed so they can make a reasoned judgement about whether sharing their opinion has made a difference (in the hope that it has, and that will encourage other residents to get involved).

Different organisations answer this challenge in different ways, but one that I particularly like is this Resident Involvement Impact Report (although it could do with a catchier name!) from Soha, a housing association in Oxfordshire. I like the way its set out in tables so that you can easily see what the outcome was for each area of resident involvement.

If anyone else knows of any other good examples, I'd love to see them. Comment below or email me at kate.s.hughes@gmail.com

Lists, lovely lists

2010-01-10T13:41:00.000Z

I've made a list of the social housing communications professionals I follow on Twitter. You can find it here.

If you would like to be included on it or you know someone who should be on it, please get in touch - either by commenting below or via Twitter.

How I (accidentally) made a mini-meme

2010-01-02T18:16:00.000Z

The day before New Year's Eve I was mulling over the past 10 years and thinking about what I have achieved and what I still would like to do. I posted a tweet on Twitter summing up my decade with my personal statistics.

Here's my tweet. I tagged it with the hashtag #decadeinstats and before I knew it, several other people had done the same thing. After two days more than 150 people (most of whom I didn't follow, nor followed me) had also tagged tweets with the hashtag. This shows how quickly things can spread or go viral. Here's a search for the hashtag.

When something gets pick up by other people and spreads naturally it is called a meme. It's made me think about how organisations can try to start memes to promote their values. One great example of this was the hashtag #welovethenhs, which was started in response to criticism of the NHS in the American media.

As a heavy Twitter user, who frequently spreads other people's memes it was exciting to have created one of my own, even if I hadn't it done consciously.

I have a new job...

2009-12-10T07:18:00.000Z

So, I have some news. I have a new job. As of 18 January, I will be the Communications Manager at Wolverhampton Homes. I'll be managing a small team and returning to the Black Country where I used to be a reporter at the Express and Star. (I can even see the Express and Star flag from my new desk!)

I've spent the last eight months at the Orbit Group as a Marketing and Communications Manager for Orbit East and Orbit First Step and it has absolutely flown by. I have learnt enormous amounts about how organisations work and how they can be successful.

What I'm most proud of the Orbit Group for is our continued involvement and leadership of Mortgage Rescue. The scheme, set up by the Government just over a year ago to help people at risk of repossession, has had its fair share of criticism in the press. But when I have seen the kindness, hard work and passion of my colleagues who have done so much to keep people in their homes, I feel a huge sense of pride. (Not to blow Orbit's trumpet too much, but we're leading the way nationally with more than 50 people helped to stay in their homes.)

Wolverhampton Homes is an Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO), which means it manages the 24,000 homes owned by Wolverhampton City Council. ALMOs have their fair share of challenges, not least a funding-dependent inspection regime, which will see me go through my first full Audit Commission inspection next year (eek). But I am well up for it and feel inspired and motivated about my new post. Bring it on!

Circle Anglia PR Win

2009-12-06T19:10:00.000Z

One of my colleagues flagged up a story this week and I thought it was such a great example of using media relations I had to share it.

Housing group Circle Anglia commissioned a survey on neighbourliness and where and who has the friendliest neighbours. Here's the link to their media release. The survey found, among other things, that young people are least likely to know their neighbours.

The BBC picked up the story and used it on their Have Your Say forum and I expect other media will carry it over the next few days as well.

Surveys are a good media relations tool because they position the organisation as experts and a news creator. It also allows the key messages of the organisation to be subtly woven in to the story; in this case, that Circle Anglia is about more than providing homes and wants to help create close knit communities.

Another element of Circle Anglia's story was they broke their results down into regions. This was a clever move because it means they can target local media as well as national and potentially achieve greater media coverage.

I'll keep looking for other media covering this story and post links to any I find below.

Part Two: How should housing associations tweet?

2009-12-06T18:42:00.000Z

Housing associations can utilise Twitter to help find their online voice. Effective use of Twitter can help create an impression of a human, caring organisation which wants to engage.

Here are my tips of how housing associations should tweet:

1. Use a human voice. It doesn't necessarily need to be spelt out who is tweeting but the voice should be human rather than robotic. You can use an automated feed to some extent but if that is the sum total of your tweets, your followers will be unlikely to reply (and therefore engage) with you.
2. Tweets should be professional. This doesn't mean they can't be fun or have a lighter tone but they should always something that you'd be comfortable re-reading in Inside Housing's satirical Closed Circuit column.
3. Reply to the people who reply to you. This is more than good manners: it's good business sense to engage with the people who have been kind enough to take an interest in your work.
4. Include links to your websites wherever you can. This makes it easier for people to understand what you are tweeting about and helps drive traffic to your sites.
5. If possible tweets should be short enough to re-tweet (about 100-120 characters). The more concise your tweets the easier it is for them to be re-tweeted.

It takes time to build up a community of followers and find an organisation's online voice but it is a worthwhile investment to become a listening and engaging organisation.

Part One: Should housing associations tweet?

2009-11-29T19:52:00.000Z

If you know me, follow me on Twitter or have read this blog before, you probably already know my answer to the above question. Yes, I think housing associations should tweet. Here's why:

1. It shows you're (or want to be) a conversational organisation.

Being part of the online conversation shows your housing association wants to listen and cares what its customers and stakeholders think.

2. It helps you engage with stakeholders and customers.

Twitter gives your customers and stakeholders, including the media, another way to find out about and communicate with your organisation.

3. Being on Twitter allows people to see the human side of your housing association.

Because of the conversational nature of Twitter, auto-tweets (an RSS feed that automatically posts tweets) and bots (robots that search for, spam and generally annoy people) are disliked. Showing your organisation's human side - genuine emotion, admitting and rectifying mistakes openly, being polite to your followers - is welcomed. Well, have you ever chatted to a robot?

4. It keeps you at the front of your followers' minds.

For the two seconds it takes for your followers to scan read your tweet, you are in their minds. If you are lucky enough, interesting enough and write short enough tweets, you may also get re-tweeted to your followers' followers.

5. You're 'in the room' already.

You can hear if you are being criticised publicly and Twitter gives you a fast channel to respond.

6. You can communicate your brand's key messages (subtly).

The word subtly is the key. On Twitter, an overly commercial tone will make your followers leave you. Housing associations, which seek to make a difference to people and neighbourhoods rather than pots of cash for shareholders, have an advantage here.

7. When managing a crisis, you have a network on tap that you can communicate with at a seconds' notice.

If disaster strikes, you can use Twitter (as well as your website, your staff and your call centre) to communicate quickly.

8. You can keep abreast of news, policy announcements and what key decision makers are thinking and doing.

If you put time into building a strong community by following, engaging and sharing, you will hear news first on Twitter.

9. You are providing customers with another channel to give you feedback (and then you can close the loop).

The housing sector's regulator, the Tenant Services Authority wants housing associations to offer their customers a range of ways to feedback on services. As the percentage of tenants with access to the internet increases, (currently for Orbit East, about 50% of our residents have access to the internet either at home or work) social media will grow in its uses for customer feedback. Once you have acted on customer feedback, you can quickly communicate what has changed/been repaired/improved.

10. Twitter is where the conversation is.

If you wanted to chat to people you wouldn't go and sit in an empty room. Equally, there is probably limited value in setting up a forum or chat room on your website unless you are achieving high levels of traffic. Go where the people are.

Case studies

If you want to see a housing association in action on Twitter, I tweet at www.twitter.com/orbitgroup. Another housing sector Twitter user that I like is Testway Housing - they tweet regularly and are human about it.

Twitter is not a catch-all social media answer for housing associations, but it is an easy way to join in conversations and listen to customers. It's likely that Twitter will fall out of favour at some point, but the principles of social media: listening, sharing, collaborating and conversing; will remain. Housing associations, with their strong focus on customers, should be chomping at the bit to make the most of social media tools.

On Friday I'll tweet Part Two: How should housing associations tweet?

The Tenant Services Authority starts the fight back

2009-11-21T14:33:00.000Z

This week's Inside Housing cover story is about the housing sector rallying to support the Tenant Services Authority (TSA) in light of criticism by Grant Shapps, the Shadow Housing Minister.

The campaign, dubbed Operation Pink owing to the TSA's love of fuchsia, originates from the Chartered Institute of Housing and the G15 group of the largest housing associations in London among others.
In the past year Grant Shapps has said publicly of the TSA:

From a communications perspective, Grant Shapps' frustration with the TSA provides an interesting challenge. Every time I read one of these quotes I flinched, putting myself in the position of the TSA's comms team. How would I respond if I was managing public relations for an organisation that had been roundly scorned by the very person that in six months time could hold its fate in his hands?

My tactic would be to come out fighting. I'd put up a strategic communications calendar up on the wall of the office and I'd mark every day leading up to the election, indeed every minute of every day, for proving the organisation's worth. I'd use every communications tool in the book to show pound for pound value for money and efficiency. From speeches to web presence, media relations and events, I'd lobby the Conservatives hard, emphasising the TSA's adaptability to change, capability to drive service improvements and complete commitment to put tenants first and I'd ensure not one penny was wasted in the process. I'd call on supportive organisations with clout to back us up and I'd make as much noise as possible while doing it. I wondered why the TSA didn't appear to be doing any of these things.

Then on Wednesday, the TSA's annual report dropped into my inbox. Judging by that publication, Operation Pink and the five press releases issued in the last two weeks, the fight back has started. The Conservatives may not win next year's general election but whatever the result, the TSA can only improve its position by standing up for itself. I will watch its progress with interest.

How to report performance to tenants

2009-11-07T15:17:00.000Z

It might sound geeky, but in my role, one of my favourite tasks is reporting performance to tenants. This is not because I'm mad about numbers or statistics, but because it brings together the three strands that I think should drive social housing: resident involvement, continuous improvement and communications.

What to report?

The Housing Corporation used to issue a code of performance that needed to be reported to tenants, but since the advent of the Tenant Services Authority, no specific guidance has been in place. Instead the regulators look for clear and honest performance reporting but delegate freedom on the specific elements to the social landlord. At Orbit East, we've made a commitment to tenants that we would report on our service standards. These standards are our promise to tenants of how we will serve them.

How?

It's important that performance information can be clearly understood. Tenants haven't got time to spend poring over figures and graphs. Traffic lights, smiley faces, colours and arrows are all simple ways to communicate performance. Sometimes a pie chart can communicate the information visually much easier than text.

Wherever possible it is also useful to include a benchmark - the standard that the best landlords are meeting - and the previous year or quarter's performance, so the tenant can see the trend.

I use the tenants' newsletter to report performance annually, but depending on your organisation's needs and your customer base, you could use your website, a dedicated publication or a letter quarterly or even monthly. I think it's also crucial to include commentary, to explain the results and most importantly, how the organisation will improve its performance moving forward.

Here's the most recent performance document I produced. I'd welcome anyone's (particularly from tenants) comments on how it could be improved.

Thanks to John Marchan for the use of his traffic lights image.

Are you a secret social media linker?

2009-10-07T20:43:00.004+01:00

Recently, I've become aware that my social media habits are not regarded as normal. When I've enthused about something I've seen on Twitter to my family who aren't into social media, I've been met with raised eyebrows and smirks.

When my friends asked me what I was doing on a certain evening and I said I was going to an event about mashing up data, they wrinkled their brows and looked bemused. They knew better than to query me further and wrote it off as one of my little oddities.

When I told work colleagues that I was volunteering at Solihull Social Media Surgery, silence fell. I explained that I was one of a group of people who are helping councillors learn how to blog. One asked me 'are you paid?'. When I replied that I wasn't, he said 'but, why would you do that?' I started to say it was fun to help people learn about the power of social media but then I realised I sounded rather strange and I buttoned my lip.

It hasn't quite got to the stage where I sneak around in my pyjamas, looking for my next fix, but until my friends and family get hooked on social media too, I'm going to have to keep quiet about being a secret social media linker.

A quick round up of CIPR Northern Conference

2009-10-06T21:53:00.007+01:00

I spent today at the CIPR Northern Conference in Leeds. It was a very inspiring day with great speakers and some strong examples of how PRs can improve their service offer in-house or to clients.

For those who can't decipher my notes above, here's a whistle stop tour:

1. FT columnist and MD of Taylor Bennett, Heather McGregor said as the speed of the news cycle increases, the value of opinion grows. PRs need to concentrate on targeting the commentariat by finding out what they like, being creative and building the relationship. You can use a tool like Editorial Intelligence.

2. Newly appointed Deputy MD of Wolfstar, Mark Hanson, stepped into the breach to deliver a session on Twitter in the place of Stuart Bruce, who was unwell. Steps: listen to the conversation, be human, consider who tweets (comms person might not be best choice), evaluate.

3. Yasmin Diamond, Director of Communications at the Home Office said her role is about being diplomatic, resilient and fast-paced. Her team wants to improve the reality and improve the perception of reality. Campaign to prevent theft worked well.

4. MD of Staniforth and author of PR and the Social Web, Rob Brown spoke about social media. Google insights shows in the past five years searches for 'PR agency' have halved. PR practitioners need to embrace social media to connect with journalists, promote brands and engage audiences.

5. John Neilson, Director of Group Media Relations at BAE Systems said working in PR is like being a fighter pilot, flying through the flack. His advice: don't take it personally, be open and PR you work internally so the rest of the organisation knows your value.

6. Sarah Knight and Charlotte Thompson of BJL presented a masterclass on social marketing. Steps: scope, develop, implement, evaluate, follow up. They talked through their campaign to reduce incidents of domestic violence in Hull.

7. Robin Wilson of McCann Erickson demonstrated tools to evaluate social media: twithority, tweetbeep, search.twitter.com. He summed up PR in social media to being about talking, energising and listening.

8. Blogger and former Director of Communications for the Labour Party, Alastair Campbell boiled reputation management down to objectives, strategy and tactics. Get those right - regardless of the tools you use - and you can't go far wrong.

PR: How do agency and in-house roles difffer?

2009-09-21T20:29:00.013+01:00

Before I moved from my PR consultancy job to an in-house role at Orbit Housing Group, I asked people around me how they thought it would differ. Some of the responses I had were 'watch out for the politics' and 'you'll get dragged into everything'. I was also told it would be cosy, comfy and devoid of challenge. Now I've been in post for six months, here's my take on life in-house.

You have greater exposure to all areas of the business.

In my new role I've spoken at board meetings, written bids, organised development events, selected telecoms hardware and managed the staff awards scheme, all of which I'd never done before. This early exposure to different parts of the organisation has meant I have a greater understanding of its culture and objectives. I think as a sector, PR practitioners need to understand the range of management functions to be truly effective. We can use this knowledge to shape the organisation's ambitions, strategies and plans. (Here's an interesting presentation by Brett Attwood about why and how to go about that.)

You may be one of one.

I'm the only communications professional in my team. Going from an office where I spoke the same language as my colleagues, where we had the same mindset and approach, to a team where I was the only one of my type was a jolt. Now my immediate colleagues are Resident Engagement and Performance Management specialists, so our joint projects take in a variety of perspectives. Although it was new to me, I think this way of working benefits the business and our customers. It reduces silos and encourages a more rounded approach to problem solving. I'm fortunate to still have the opportunity to bounce ideas round and share best practice in Orbit's monthly group communications meetings with PR colleagues from different regions.

The volume of work is limitless in-house.

At an agency, you do what you are paid to do. You sell the client your time or a specific product and once you have delivered, you invoice them. In-house hours in the day are the only limitation on workload and because you are 'there', you get asked to do lots of things that you wouldn't do if you were working externally. I think this has enriched my understanding and it's certainly benefitted my CV, but it's made me think carefully about how I manage my time and prioritise my work. (I keep saying I'm going to take up the Getting Things Done way of working, if only I could find the time!)

You need to pay extra attention to the external focus.

Naturally, the focus shifts from external to internal as you move in-house. The majority of drains on your time come from colleagues meaning there is less time to spend proactively shaping the external perception. A good practitioner needs to be aware of this and keep it front of mind. I've found it important to pay extra attention to developing and maintaining formal and informal channels to pick up external perceptions.

So which is better?

Neither agency or in-house practitioners have the edge: both have inherent strengths and weaknesses. It's important that the client understands those before structuring their resources. Every organisation is different and will require a unique approach, there is no one size fits all and ultimately, it comes down to the relationships the practitioner forges that determines how effective he or she is.

I'd welcome any comments on how you think in-house and agencies differ.

Brum Twestival #2

2009-07-09T20:17:00.004+01:00

Following the success of BrumTwestival (the Brum version of Twestival) in February, Brum Twestival Local has been launched. In the great city of Birmingham, England, as in hundreds of other cities across the world, people who know each other from Twitter will be meeting up to raise money for a local charity. (The first Twestival raised money for charity:water.)

Unfortunately I don't have direct experience of the first BrumTwestival so I'll be relying on people who went to let me know what worked and what they want again. Along with @roblangley and Jashpal of PallMall Media, (and anyone else who wants to chip in) we'll be looking for as many ideas and contributions as possible.

First things first, we need to pick a date. It can be between 10th-13th September and could include some kind of daytime community event as well as an evening shindig. These are other things we (and by we I mean the Brum Twitterverse) need to decide:

charity (and whether we should aim to raise enough money for the selected charity to do a specific thing)
venue(s)
what we're going to do
photography/filming
theme
techy aspects
music/radio
food
drink
promotion
art/design
stickers
t-shirts
prizes
how much to charge for tickets
and can we get John Lamb there?

If you've got any thoughts/suggestions/want to get involved DM me @katehughes, email me at kate.s.hughes@googlemail.com or comment below. The suggestions have already started to come in.

(We'll be tweeting from @brumtwestival shortly.)

Close Your Eyes...

2009-07-04T09:15:00.003+01:00

Last week I had the chance to go down to the Homes and Communities Agency and take part in a focus group about their new website.

The questions were about intuitive navigation (whether things were where I thought they'd be), the overall content and the design of the pages.

What surprised me was how much of the original website I hadn't noticed or had forgotten - bearing in mind this is a website I use at least once a week and sometimes every day. For example, I said it was good that the new website had a link to the HCA's Twitter feed, and then they showed me the original website - and that had a link to it too.

It made me think about web design and how I read web pages. Unlike books or magazines, web pages aren't meant to be read left-right. A website like the HCA's is largely about sharing information, so the most important consideration has to be can people find what they're looking for. (Here's a cool article about how people read web pages.)

Thinking about it, the majority of my visits to their website are as a result of an e-zine I receive which has links to news stories or updates to the website. Generally I give it a quick scan and see if there's anything relevant to my area of work and then click-through, so I don't struggle to find things.

Since then, I've tried closing my eyes before I visit a site (don't try this in the office), try to remember it and then see if it was how I thought it would be. It amuses me how frequently I am wrong.

It made me realise that what people remember about websites is the content, not the nitty gritty of the design. Sure they'll remember if the design is particularly outstanding like this one (it's a work of art) or if it's a nightmare to navigate, but generally it's the information that people are after.

Why not try closing your eyes before you next visit a website?

How can social media be used to communicate with residents?

2009-06-16T22:14:00.004+01:00

I heard a presentation from Paul Fox from Neighbo this morning at the CIH conference in Harrogate. He spoke about how social media can be used to build communities (on and off-line) and help people communicate with their neighbours and their social or private landlord.

As a passionate user of social media, this is something i've been mulling over for a while. I think the opportunity for housing associations to use social media to improve their residents' quality of life is huge.

Some of the benefits that Paul has found:

Being able to consult directly, quickly, cheaply and easily with residents

Letting residents know about problems

Checking whether residents are happy with work their service/quality of work

Making it easier for residents to get to know their neighbours and build friendships

Halting/minimising anti-social behaviour by empowering the silent majority

Allowing residents who work/can't spare the time/have no inclination to contribute through traditional methods to have a voice

Paul has found that decision-makers (landlords) can be resistant because they can't see its value and are concerned about excluding those who already engage. A couple of challenges that I would also anticipate are:

Digital exclusion - how can we ensure that everyone has equal access to communicating with us through social media? (And that's a whole Digital Britain can of worms)

Investment - I've got to make the case for social media and customer communication to my colleagues, so cost and, more importantly, value for money will be key

One of Paul's key points was that social media should be used as a supplement rather than a replacement for existing communication channels. This is something I definitely agree with.

I believe social media has the power to make a real difference to tenants and I'm looking forward to seeing the results.

And the winner is...

2009-06-16T21:17:00.006+01:00

I've just got back from the Chartered Institute of Housing's conference in Harrogate. My favourite exhibition stand was Gentoo's. Gentoo sponsored the Imagination Cafe at the conference. Since Gentoo formed and re-branded, it has pitched itself as a dynamic and bold organisation and the stand reflected that perfectly.

This is it (apologies for the rubbish photo quality, taken on my mobile):

It was styled as a kind of Arctic wonderland with hundreds of little squashy penguins nestling on cliffs. The idea was that visitors to the stand would take away a branded penguin, which has a sign hung round its neck, take a photo of it and upload it to Gentoo's facebook group.

In a sea of samey stands, it was creative, memorable and provided a talking point. If you're in Harrogate this week, check it out.

My suggestions for getting started on Twitter

2009-06-07T13:18:00.003+01:00

This post is inspired by my sister @jesshug who is new to Twitter. As a huge fan of Twitter I'm always encouraging more people to use it but once they have signed up, what then?

1. Get your profile set up.
Your bio, your avatar and your website, if you have one, all help people learn about who you are and that makes them more likely to engage with you. If you want to engage with people about a particular topic, it's a good idea to mention that in your bio.

2. Follow people (but not too many people).
If you go follow-crazy people will assume you're a spammer. To find people to follow, it's a good idea to search for people tweeting in your area or about what you're interested in. I had a pretty slow start to Twitter until I was fortunate enough to come across Stef Lewandowski's post on 50+ Brummie twitterers. It opened up a whole social media community where I live that I wasn't aware of. As I work for a housing association, I also regularly search for social housing, PR and communications. This has helped me find people who tweet about things I'm interested in. Note: 'following people' is not the same as an 'add' on facebook.

3. Reply to people.
When somebody asks a question or talks about something you're interested in, reply to them (this means you click the arrow at the right-hand side of their tweet). Don't be offended if they don't reply back, they may have had many other replies or just not seen it in time and the moment has passed. To check your replies, click on your user name, below 'home' on the right-hand side of your Twitter home page.

4. Post links and re-tweet.
If you come across something interesting, post a link and description to it. If you enjoy reading something that somebody else has tweeted, re-tweet it. This means you copy the tweet, with the person's user name and put RT at the beginning. If there's space you can add your thoughts about it. Here's an example I tweeted this morning. People use 'via' in different ways but I use it to refer to when someone else has re-tweeted and I came to it via their re-tweet. It's bad form to re-tweet and not credit the twitterer.

5. Tweet.
This is a pretty obvious point, but when you're getting started is probably the hardest thing. Just tweet anything, where you're going, where you've been, things you've seen, things that make you laugh, what you think about things - anything, but tweet. For other ideas check out this blog post of Paul Bradshaw. The more you tweet, the more people get to know who you are. I would also say the Twitterers I enjoy following show their personality through their tweets - instead of just posting links to their blog, say.

6. Promote your Twitter account.
Through your blog, on your business card, on your email signature strip, through your other social media, to your friends, when you meet new people, when you give presentations - any opportunity you get.

7. Attend tweet-ups.
I can't speak with a whole lot of authority on this one - as I've only ever attended one tweet-up (a tweet-up is when people who know each other on Twitter meet up), but that (wxwm) was brilliant fun, inspiring and thought-provoking, and helped me put faces to usernames. Don't feel shy, just say hello.

8. Take part in Follow Friday.
Follow Friday is when you recommend people to follow to your followers. Include the hashtag #followfriday and the person you're recommending's username in the tweet. It is useful if you can also give a description of the person and what they tweet about. Follow Friday is a good example of how something can be picked up by the Twitter community. Here's a cool blog post about it.

9. Don't protect your tweets.
Protecting your tweets puts a barrier between you and new followers. Social media is about collaborating and communicating, so unless you have a very good reason to protect your tweets, I'd say don't do it.

10. Use Twitter on your phone
Being able to tweet when you're out and about means you have more opportunities to engage. You can download applications like Tweetie, Twitterfon or Twitterberry which make it really easy to tweet from your phone.

What else can you think of that people do to help them get started on Twitter?

Read all about it? My top ten rules for tenant newsletters

2009-04-21T20:01:00.003+01:00

One thing I always hear about tenants' newsletters is that people don't read them. How can housing associations make newsletters more reader-friendly?

These are my top ten rules, but I'd love to hear your suggestions:

Let's hear tenant voices: quote them wherever possible. Ask tenants to contribute articles, write in letters or talk about their neighbourhood.
Pictures, pictures, pictures! Ideally, of tenants - people like to see people. Make sure the photos show a diverse range of customers so no one feels excluded.
The copy should be sharp and sparkling: get rid of unneeded words and let your organisation's personality shine through.
Balance the words and images: great swathes of texts are off-putting. Break the copy up with bullet points, cross-heads and pull out boxes.
Keep it short: anything over eight pages is tooooo loooong.
Be brave: if your organisation has made a mistake or performed poorly, admit it, say how you will put it right and then let customers know when you've done it.
Use regular features as landmarks throughout the newsletter so ctenants know to look out for them.
Pinch good ideas from wherever you can. If it works, use it.
Involve tenants - and ask them what they want and give them the opportunity to comment on the newsletter.
Strive to make every edition better than the last.

And a few last pointers on design:

Pay a professional to do it: it'll be worth every penny
Make it colourful, but ensure the balance is easy on the eye
Minimum point size 12 for the copy - anything less is tiring to read.

What are your rules for tenants' newsletters?

A guide to effective internal communication

2009-04-12T10:10:00.004+01:00

In housing associations, as in any large organisation, it's important that internal communications are effective. Good internal communications have a positive impact on staff morale and employees' ability to do their job well - and vice versa when communications are poor.

This week I found a great guide to effective internal communications that I wanted to share. It comes from the Lancashire Communications Network, a group of council press officers working in Lancashire, who get together to share best practice. It's available here.

I'd be interested to know what you think.

Solihull: digital inclusion and quality of life

2009-04-02T09:27:00.007+01:00

Social media - and indeed the internet as a whole - has huge potential to make a difference to the quality of social housing tenants' lives. But digital exclusion is a barrier to engagement. Recent figures produced by the National Housing Federation show:

46% of housing association tenants have a computer at home
35% have access to the internet at home

That don't take into account residents who have access to the internet at work, through a mobile phone or library - but even so, the percentages are low.

Digital exclusion presents a set of challenges for communication professionals working with housing associations. Conversely digital inclusion presents an opportunity to engage with tenants - and make a genuine difference to their quality of life.

Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council (my local authority) is taking great steps to combat digital exclusion. It has been awarded Beacon Status for its innovative approach through a project managed by Solihull Community Housing (SCH).

Working with charity ReCOM and Solihull-based social enterprise the Colebridge Trust, the project provided tenants in 42 high rise blocks in north Solihull (where only 26% residents were on-line) with PCs and access to the internet.

This means tenants can access training, use local services, search for employment opportunities, send and receive emails, transfer their home, pay bills and their rent - as well as visiting news, entertainment and social media websites. I'm looking forward to see how the project progresses and I'll be particularly interested to see how SCH uses social media to connect and collaborate with tenants.

Are you one of the tenants who has benefitted from this project? What do you think about it? What do you think SCH should do now to keep the momentum going?

In the pink: the journey of a news story

2009-03-29T09:29:00.004+01:00

(LHA-ASRA is one of my PR clients.)

The first question every journalism student is asked, is 'what is news?'. The easy answer is it is something new. (See here for a more complex definition that I don't completely agree with.) But what makes a good news story 'fly' is a more tricky question.

This week my colleague Lorna Hirst issued a news story about housing and regeneration group LHA-ASRA working with Layton Burroughs Residents Association to tackle antisocial behaviour in Mansfield. There had been problems with people being intimidated by groups congregating in an underpass (presumably because it offered somewhere dry to hang out).

One of the tactics to tackle this has been installing pink lights in the underpass. The pink lighting creates an atmosphere that is uncomfortable to linger in, similar to toilets which use UV lighting to deter drug users. Oh, and it also happens to show up spots and blemishes. Guess which angle was picked up by the media?

James Hoy, reporter for the local newspaper, The Chad, was first to pick the story up, quickly followed by the Nottingham Evening Post. The Nottingham Evening Post also decided the story was worthy of a comment piece by Oonagh Robinson.

The same day (Wednesday 25 March, 2009) the BBC's East Midlands Today programme filmed the underpass and interviewed Tony Gelsthorpe, Chair of Layton Burroughs Residents Association. As well as broadcasting it in their news bulletins, the BBC uploaded the story to their website and it was included in the BBC's school report (where students research and write their own news stories).

The Sun managed to boil the story down to a 15-word NIB (or News In Brief) headline 'Spot of Bother'. (Hyperlink not available.)

By this point the story seemed to be everywhere. BBC Five Live picked it up and shared their interview with Radio 1, 2 and 1Extra, which all ran the story throughout their news bulletins on Thursday. Mansfield 103 broadcast it, we arranged interviews of our client with BBC Radio Northern Ireland.

The same day it was on the front page of The Telegraph. On Friday it appeared with a picture in the leading magazine for the social housing sector Inside Housing.

It has also appeared in:

Sky News in Australia

The Brisbane Times

The Australian

Breaking News in Ireland

as well as numerous other media and blogs.

What was it about this story that made it so widely-covered?

It sounds silly - before you know the science, pink lights to stop antisocial behaviour sounds daft
It lends itself to a pun rather nicely
It can be summed up in 15 words
It makes a good picture
Tackling antisocial behaviour is topical (and The Telegraph and The Sun are particularly keen to cover ASB stories)
The media get the majority of their stories from other media, once one picks it up, the others soon follow

Where are all the women?

2009-03-26T20:48:00.004Z

Yesterday PR Week announced its top ten PR gurus. Only one is a woman, Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Corporate and Legal Affairs Director for Tesco.

If we assume that the poll (of journalists and industry associations) is accurate, and knowing that twice as many women as men join the PR industry, - why is this the case?

These are some reasons I've considered:

If women choose to have children they have to take time out of their career for maternity leave
If women choose to extend their maternity leave they are disadvantaged by missing crucial years of their career
Women aren't as ambitious as men (I don't agree with this)
Women are discriminated against (my impression is this isn't the case)
PR is mirroring journalism - its closest industry - by having large numbers of women at the lower echelons and large numbers of men at the top. Maybe senior male journalists respond better to male PR directors?
Are women less good at doing their own PR than men? Selling themselves, making their successes known and putting themselves forward to manage high-profile campaigns.
Are women less good at networking and manipulating the politics of the workplace (and therefore don't make the leap to board-level director positions)?
Women are paid less than men and perhaps don't value their contribution in the same way?
Lack of women role models creates a self-perpetuating cycle

As a young woman and a PR practitioner, I'd be interested to hear what you think. Am I missing something? What can be done/is being done to change this situation?

Pastures new...

2009-03-25T21:44:00.011Z

After two years at Quicksilver PR, I'm leaving to work at OGL Housing, part of the Orbit Housing Group, as a Marketing and Communications Officer.

During my time at Quicksilver PR, I've worked with housing associations LHA-ASRA, BCHG and through the Quantum affordable housing consortium, EMH, Derwent Living and Futures Housing. I am sad to be leaving my colleagues and clients but looking forward to the challenges ahead.

In my new role I'll be particularly interested in how OGL Housing can use social media to communicate and collaborate with tenants. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear from you.

I'd also like to hear from any design/print/photography suppliers in the Midlands/East Anglia/South East - preferrably with experience of working with housing associations.

Please comment below or email me at kate.s.hughes@googlemail.com

A few words about how I use Twitter

2009-03-25T21:25:00.004Z

I tweet about social housing, social enterprise, marketing, PR, communications, journalism, politics, public affairs, Birmingham, the news, funny things i've seen or heard, yoga, TV programmes and really - anything.

I get really excited when a story breaks on twitter, so I can be quite noisy. I try to keep my 'what I'm having for lunch' updates to a minimum, but I like amusing tweets too. I engage as much as possible, like to re-tweet and will re-follow if you have a bio, a profile pic and some relevance to my area of work.

@ me if you want to connect!

www.twitter.com/katehughes

The future's green

2009-03-25T20:04:00.011Z

(Black Country Housing Group is one of my PR clients.)

Richard Baines, Director of Sustainable Development at BCHG, was quoted in The Guardian today talking about how the fitting, maintenance and development of green technologies in housing presents an opportunity to create a sustainable (in both senses of the word) industry. He is right.

As the car manufacturing and construction sectors grind to a halt thousands of skilled workers are coming onto the jobs market while housing associations (pretty much the only organisations currently building homes) need contractors who are able to install eco-measures such as solar panels and air source heat pumps.

Investment in training and developing people in this area would benefit not only the economy by providing employment, but also the community (and the planet) by reducing carbon emissions and domestic fuel consumption.

BCHG recognises that green technologies should not just be confined to newbuild homes (also see this Twitter conversation between David Mills, Media and Communications Manager at a prominent housing association, and I). In fact a whole industry can be built on retro-fitting bio-mass boilers, insulation and the like, to older homes.

PR and communications have a major role to play in creating support for this burgeoning industry as well as ensuring tenants, staff and partners are kept updated on how they can use eco-measures to reduce their carbon footprint, tackle fuel poverty and save money.

David Strong, Chief Executive of Inbuilt, in this blog, makes the point that behavioural change must form part of the Government's Heat and Energy Saving Strategy, if measures such as investing in developing eco-exemplar affordable housing schemes are going to have an impact. Clearly this is true, but I feel this is already happening.

Even as recent as ten years ago, most people weren't aware of the need to avoid using plastic bags wherever possible or to recycle everything they can, but these messages have been broadcast by the media - and gradually these small acts have become part of our everyday culture.

The social housing sector is in a strong position to disseminate clear and compelling messages to convince the Government, tenants and stakeholders that green technologies offer opportunities for employment, as well as making the world a better place.

Does regional journalism have a future?

2009-03-16T11:22:00.003Z

I've just added my comments to a debate on whether regional journalism has a future on The Guardian's Media website here

What do you think?

The National Conversation: a whole lot of noise?

2009-03-14T22:09:00.006Z

Since social housing regulator the Tenant Services Authority (TSA) came into being at the end of 2008, it has had a busy few months launching and leading the National Conversation.

The idea of the National Conversation is that tenants should be able to have their say about the issues that matter to them - and as such, should be able to contribute their thoughts to how social landlords are regulated. While not revolutionary, like all good ideas, it is simple.

In a relatively short period of time the TSA has engaged with thousands of tenants through face to face chats (in a horrendously pink camper van), questionnaires, tenant-organised events and videos on the TSA's YouTube channel. It aims to find out what standards tenants expect from their social landlords, relating to every aspect of their service from repairs to how easy (or not) it is to move home.

The conversation period draws to a close next week and in the coming months, it will be interesting to see:

how the raft of tenant opinions are analysed
the standards that result from the conversation
whether and how the TSA continues to converse with tenants
how this ultimately improves the services tenants receive

With genuine and measurable improvements to services, the National Conversation will have achieved more than a whole lot of noise.

In the beginning, there was...communication

2009-03-14T21:27:00.000Z

This is the start of my blog on communications in the social housing sector. I'll be discussing the ways that social landlords communicate with tenants, peers, partners and staff - and how effective communications can have a genuine impact on the success of these organisations.

I'm interested to hear from people - particularly tenants - who have any thoughts about or examples of how housing associations can communicate better.