Author: DTW Agency

This week Emma Maule, social media officer from The Law Society and I were invited to give a presentation at a PARN communications event in London on Thursday.

PARN is the Professional Associations Research Network – the group that works with organisations that are made up of professional members such as the Law Society, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the Institute of Biomedical Science who hosted the event.

The topic was a review of #Solicitorhour – the twitter chat where members of the public interact with solicitors on a different topic weekly at 1pm on Thursdays, which has been operating for just over a year.

#Solicitorhour was the ideal topic to discuss as the event focused on how membership based organisations can better communicate with their members and the public on a regular basis.

We’re proud of the success we’ve been able to achieve in the previous 12 months.

• 77 #Solicitorhour sessions
• 13,016 tweets
• 5 million timeline deliveries
• 5 million users reached
• 2,332 unique contributors

Other speakers included David Biggins from The Institution of Engineering and Technology on how to generate shareable content and from Sandra Scott from the UK Council for Psychotherapy on managing member content in magazines.

We had a great audience who asked several questions both about #Solicitorhour, the Use A Professional Use A Solicitor campaign we created for the Law Society in October 2014, and how an agency like ourselves can work successfully and seamlessly with a large, multi-faceted organisation like the Law Society.

The presentation is embedded above for you to view and download and I would be more than happy to answer any questions you have about the campaign or #Solicitorhour – apart from our future plans!

Facebook has begun the roll out of its new ‘Reactions’ feature which is the much vaunted response to the age old clamour for a ‘dislike’ button. Users in Ireland and Spain (lucky them!) are the first to get access. Apparently these two markets have been picked as test beds for the functionality as they have fewer international connections than other markets Facebook operates in, as well as – in Spain’s case – allowing testing of how the emoji based reactions will go down with non English speaking users.

You can get an idea of how reactions will work from Facebook’s launch video:

 

So how will it work?

When ‘Reactions’ lands in the UK at some unspecified point in the not too distant future (exactly when will depend on the results of the aforementioned testing) the chances are it will be enabled for individual users’ accounts first, with Pages (the homes of businesses and brands) following on from that.

As well as having the ability to “Like” a post, users will also be able to react using five other emotions: “love,” “haha,” “yay,” “wow,” “sad” and “anger” – each coming with it’s own friendly emoji.

 

 

Posts will include a tally of how many of each reaction has been applied to it and it’s worth noting that each user will only be able to apply one reaction to a post – so you won’t be able to ‘like’ and ‘yay’ the same post.

What will it mean for me?

Well, aside from your friends on Facebook being able to react to your posts in a load of different ways, the big news as I see it is how brands and businesses are going to handle this functionality being enabled on their Pages.

Online commentators are already pointing out how reactions has the potential to be misinterpreted and it’s still not clear what the implications will be in terms of the algorithms Facebook uses to push posts out into user’s news feed – it could be that a post with a greater number of ‘angry’ reactions gets given less weight by the algorithm than one with the same number of ‘wow’ reactions, but of course those reactions will be determined by the content of the post and the make-up of a Page’s audience.

There’s also the potential that the new system is open to abuse…

Evaluation

If, as expected, Facebook incorporates Reactions information into its analytics package, we’ll have access to a much more granular level of data through the analytics dashboard. This will help massively with things like promoted content targeting, as well as developing an understanding of a Page’s audience as a whole.

That said, it also opens up the engagement metric – something which is currently pretty hard and fast – to interpretation as to what a user’s sentiment was when they clicked on a particular reaction, so it will be important for Page owners to consider how they want to use and measure this data (as well as the weight and credence they give to it) in advance of it rolling out to their Page.

So, that’s our initial reaction to ‘Reactions’. There’ll be plenty more head-scratching as it takes hold in the UK in the near future. Before then the message for brands and companies is to prepare by understanding why your audience is engaging with you through Facebook in the first place. Then you’ll have a good idea of what they want from your content.

What does the north east want from the new UK government?

How long have you got…..but to invoke the spirit of JFK, we should be asking not what the government can do for the north east but what the north east can do for the country.

This morning’s announcement by George Osborne that cities across northern England will be given greater powers is welcome news.

This is a great opportunity for many (mainly Labour controlled) cities such as Leeds, Sunderland and Liverpool to follow the blazing trail set by Greater Manchester last year and secure meaningful devolution.

But will they? There are many sceptics of the Government’s Northern Powerhouse initiative (not to mention its wider policy plans) in important positions in town halls across the north.

The temptation for local authorities who might like to use some of these powers is that they will start trying to set their own conditions and rules under which they will work with government to use them. PLEASE DON’T.

The reality is that central government holds the cards here – a newly elected Conservative majority government will be in no mood to make concessions over the detail of these plans – it will be George Osborne’s way or the highway.

Just look at the leaked detail and quotes released ahead of his speech in Manchester today as being reported on the BBC:

As part of the devolution plan, only cities that elected their own mayor would be given control of local transport, housing, skills and healthcare.

“I will not impose this model on anyone,” Mr Osborne will say, “but nor will I settle for less.”

The message is clear – no elected mayor – no extra powers. This is the defining political context which will shape the next five years. Local authorities who want to make up their own rules might find themselves playing a lonely game with dwindling resources.

It will be no surprise if those areas that engage with government on this issue suddenly find other opportunities developing further down the line.

Back in 2010 our work with Halton Borough Council on the Mersey Gateway Project was put on hold when all new major transport schemes were put into the pot for the Comprehensive Spending Review.

The project team and senior council leadership – officers and members – worked with us and our partners Interel Consulting to quickly engage with the new agenda, demonstrate the value for money of the project and the already significant private sector contribution to its funding. The end result – approval from government and INCREASED funding at a time when austerity measures were really starting to take effect.

The rewards will come to those authorities and LEPs who are fast movers and engage with the new more confident government agenda.

 

Most people probably give little thought to how lucky we are to live in a society where we can enjoy freedom of the press.

DTW has been listed in industry bible PR Week’s Top 150 agencies in the UK for 2015.