Author: DTW Agency

Categories
News

Joe gives his view on work experience at DTW

Photo of two people shaking hands

Last week we played host to a third-year journalism student – Joe – from Teesside University – on work experience. We think it is important to give young people opportunities and experience in the world of work and in the PR and communications industry in particular. And it also keeps us on our toes having bright young things coming in and asking lots of awkward questions. Good luck with the future Joe!

Read on to see Joe’s views on his week at DTW Towers.

Hi – my name is Joe – I am a third year Teesside University student studying Journalism.

I’m in the final stages of my degree and I wanted to learn more about public relations, how it works, how companies operate etc.

I was given this opportunity by DTW for a week of work experience to gain an insight into the world of PR. I learned a huge amount over the week as I spent the week learning how to write press releases, work shadowing, sitting in on meetings and learning about problem solving, strategies and the bigger picture of PR.

Everyone who worked there was extremely friendly and welcoming which made settling in quickly much easier and meant it wasn’t difficult to ask anyone questions when I didn’t fully understand something.

I spent the week sat with Chris, Managing Director and Karen, Senior Strategist. Again, this could have been daunting, but their friendly nature was relaxing. I learnt a lot and the experience was hugely enjoyable, it has confirmed that PR is certainly an option as a future career for me.

Thanks everyone!

Joe Robertson

Categories
News

Merry Christmas from everyone at DTW

Frame from DTW Christmas animation 2018

We’ve made a little Christmas animation just for you – you just know you need to brighten up your day by watching it.

We have really enjoyed working with you in 2018 and look forward to catching up with you again in 2019.

Thank you for helping us do what we love – it is through our work with amazing clients and partners like you that DTW has been able to win seven industry Gold awards this year – we couldn’t have done it without you so it’s a huge thank you from us.

Have a fantastic Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year!

Categories
News

Mersey Gateway – an ideal Christmas stocking filler

Photo of cover and inner spread of Mersey Gateway commemorative book

Think you can’t fit a 10 kilometre infrastructure project in your Christmas stocking? Think again!!

For anyone who loves amazing infrastructure and engineering combined with beautifully well written and designed books the new The Mersey Gateway Project – A bridge to prosperity is a must.

Featuring some amazing not seen before images of the iconic new bridge over the River Mersey in Halton, it tells the story of the three-and-a-half year construction and the 20-year battle to get funding and planning permission.

We may be slightly biased as Paula and Sarah in our design team have done all the designs and artwork and we’ve had a hand in copy editing but we think this is an amazing book about a wonderful project.

Full marks to Laura and Michelle at the Mersey Gateway Crossings Board and Halton Borough Council for getting the story out of their heads and on paper.

The Mersey Gateway Project – A bridge to prosperity is available now for just £9.99 and you can pre-order your copy on Waterstones website.

Photo of Paula holding a copy of the Mersey Gateway commemorative book
Categories
News

Triple award success for DTW at 2018 CIPR PRide awards

Lorna, Hayley, Karen and Hannah with the awards from the CIPR Pride Awards

What a night! The DTW team was delighted to come away with three Gold awards from the CIPR North East Pride awards on Friday night (7 December).

Hannah Cheetham (right) picked up the hugely well deserved Outstanding Young Communicator award. We also won two big awards for our work with Sunderland City Council on its new Northern Spire bridge.

All in all, an amazing evening put on again by the CIPR at the Biscuit Factory in Newcastle.

To win Regional Campaign of the Year and Public Sector Campaign for the Northern Spire work is a real recognition of the blood, sweat and tears that Karen and others have put in on this project over the past three-and-a-half years. We’re very pleased.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ annual PRide awards recognise the best public relations work done by agencies, freelancers and in-house teams across the UK.

Categories
News

TUXtra – helping to build a bridge between students and the communications professions

TUXtra homescreen

What better way to spend a cold, dreary Wednesday night in December than with a glass of fizz and the people behind Teesside University’s exciting new media brand TUXtra?

Chris and Hannah (that’s me) did just that when we were invited along to TUXtra’s launch night to find out more.

So, before I tell you what we thought, let’s talk about what TUXtra actually is. A multimedia platform showcasing content produced by students and volunteers from Teesside University is what it says on the tin.

In other words, a news outlet, radio station and TV platform aiming to demonstrate the best work produced by the journalism, PR, film and TV and other students at Teesside University’s School of Computing, Media and Arts.

Now, providing students with a platform to showcase their work is great, but what makes TUXtra different from any other student newspaper or radio show? To start with they have some seriously impressive facilities which wouldn’t look out of place in industry, we were given a tour and there’s been a definite upgrade since I was a Teesside University student myself.

What’s really valuable though is giving students real-time ownership and responsibility over the whole operation, from a team producing the content, to editors with responsibility for sub-editing and selecting what appears online on a daily basis. It’s a winning combination to produce graduates who have more than just classroom experience.

As a business we enjoy excellent links with the University and it’s great to see them really investing in their students and offering a platform to develop experience and industry links which are so vital when standing out from the crowd after graduation.

Having a degree is a great starting point, but we can’t ignore the fact that businesses look for graduates with industry experience who can jump straight in and start benefitting the business from day one.

TUXtra isn’t a replacement for rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty on a work experience placement, but it does provide a consistent, easily accessible way for students to gain that all important industry experience and boost their employability.

Our verdict? It’s still early days (TUXtra was created over the summer) but we’ll be keeping a close eye on how things develop and we’re excited to see what the future has in store.

The potential is there for this to be a hugely valuable resource for the University, its students, and their future employers. Kudos to Teesside Uni and its students for delivering.

Thanks for reading

Hannah

Categories
News

DTW helps secure Project of the Year award for Northern Spire

Chris, Karen and the Northern Spire team collecting the Project of the Year Award

Teamwork and collaboration are always at the heart of excellent communications. That’s why it was great to be alongside some talented partners to win a major award for one of our biggest client projects this week.

Sunderland’s Northern Spire bridge was named Project of the Year: Engineering, Construction and Infrastructure 2018, at the Association for Project Management (APM) awards in London on Monday (26thNovember).

We collectively beat off some stiff competition to win the award that recognises great project management. Northern Spire was up against a number of outstanding engineering and infrastructure projects from across the UK, including the Royal Navy’s new HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, medical research centre The Francis Crick Institute, Master Gas System Expansion Phase-1, by Saudi Aramco, and The Temperate House Project.

Karen and Chris from the DTW team have been working on site for the best part of three years, working alongside Atkins, Faithful+Gould, and AECOM, the Sunderland City Council team and main contractors Farrans and Victor Buyck, as well as numerous sub-contractors.

That has put communications and PR at the heart of the project and meant we have collectively been on the front foot when it comes to communication benefits and engaging with stakeholders.

Work began on Northern Spire in May 2015. During the three-year build programme, more than 2,000 people worked on the project, clocking up more than a million work-hours. It was built within its allocated £117m budget, two thirds of which was met by the Government and the remaining from Sunderland City Council.

During recent months, different aspects of the Northern Spire project have been recognised at award ceremonies up and down the country, from the design of the structure, to the methods used to construct it, project management and public engagement.

Collaboration is at the heart of what we do. Communications and PR has a part to play both internally and externally on big projects like this and we’re very fortunate that we get to work with some of the best in the business on this and other projects.

Categories
Insights

The lessons, fears and opportunities in AI

Black and white photo of a vintage tin robot toy

AI… it’s a Steven Spielberg film starring Jude Law right? It’s a distant concept that isn’t impacting us yet. Think again. Machine learning and AI is growing and already impacts everyone’s lives every day. As I learned in a compelling morning of presentations around AI in PR at the very impressive PROTO in Gateshead, hosted by the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations).

The thing is, AI (that’s artificial intelligence by the way) is already in our lives, from social media algorithms, to customer service chatbots on websites. I can guarantee we all encounter AI every day in some form or another.

AI is defined in the dictionary as:

A branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behaviour in computers.
The capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behaviour.

That’s quite a broad definition. If we took that at face value, a calculator is AI… so we need to add an extra layer to this, and that’s where machine learning comes in.

To quote AI startup Wordnerds: If it’s not making decisions, it’s not AI.

What struck me from the presentations I saw, is there are two aspects to perceptions of AI: Fear and opportunity.

Fear

Kerry Sheehan from the CIPR’s #AIinPR panel talked us through the impact that AI is having not only in our industry but across a lot of enterprise. On face value, AI is replacing a lot of work done by humans; doing it quicker and better, hence a fear that machines are taking our jobs; the robots are taking over!

Well, this is partly true. What machines are doing is taking away the entry-level work for graduates and young people to get into an industry. This is around the traditional skillsets such as risk management, data management, and listening; the day-to-day bits and bobs that get many of us starting out do to get the experience needed to take the next step on the career ladder. Without this work, what is the new starting off point for those coming into the industry at the beginning of their careers?

Opportunity

There are still some essential human skills that the robots will never be able to gain. Think strategy, creativity, ethics, and people management.

These two diagrams are the result of a study looking at the skillset in PR now and in 5 years, and how AI will impact on them.

Source: CIPR

As scary as new technology is, there is some real opportunity for all of us to use AI to improve our productivity and service, whatever line of business we operate in.

We at DTW have found opportunity in AI through some of the tools we use. We’ve been trialling a tool that automatically transcribes our videos so we don’t have to manually make subtitles (thus increasing accessibility of our clients’ messages). We use social media smart scheduling tools that analyse when the most engaging time of day is for our clients’ Twitter and Facebook accounts so we can post when they’ll get the most exposure.

So, these are some of the lessons we’re learning in PR around AI that can be applied to other industries:

  1. Don’t be scared. Take advantage of the technologies to improve your productivity and professional offering.
  2. Make sure you have an understanding of the technology. The CIPR is going to offer coding classes so PR professionals can create and better understand how AI programmes work.
  3. Don’t use tools for the sake of using them. Make sure they offer the right solution for you.
  4. We all have an ethical responsibility to ensure AI is influencing decisions in the right way (i.e. not biased or prejudiced or inappropriate). For example, Amazon became aware that children were learning how to talk through voice commands on their Echo devices, which meant they were learning a blunt way of talking: “Alexa, do this… do that”. So, they decided to adapt the AI technology to only respond to commands from children that included a ‘please’ or a ‘thank you’.

So, the robots? Not so scary after all!

Categories
News

DTW joins Northern Spire team to share tips on ensuring project success

Title screen from Northern Spire video, opened August 2018

The link between communications and PR and good project management is something we’re passionate about, so put us in a conference full of project managers and our ‘inner nerd’ starts to really show.

This week DTW joined the Northern Spire team at the Association of Project Managers’ Power of the Profession conference in Manchester.

Around 200 of the north’s leading project managers, from a diverse range of companies and sectors, including representatives from Shell, Northumbrian Water, the NHS and Transport for the North, gathered to share their best practice ideas on getting the most out of your people and processes in order to maximise production and success, and achieve greater outcomes for the community by managing projects more effectively and efficiently.

Key to the discussion was the importance of focusing on and communicating stakeholder and community benefits in project management, and the vital role stakeholder communication plays in ensuring the success of a project.

Members of the Northern Spire team from Farrans Construction, Faithful+Gould, Atkins and DTW exhibited, and presented to delegates on the importance of placing and communicating benefits at the heart of your project.

Here’s four DTW top tips for using communications to make your project a success:

  • Start with research and by listening to your stakeholders – communication is a two way street – make sure you listen to the concerns of your community – whether that is employees, customers, residents or retailers. Put yourself in their shoes, think about what their concerns are and make sure you address them.
  • Focus on benefits and tell your story – once you know where you are starting from because you’ve done your research and have clear objectives, take people on a journey and make sure your story focuses on the project benefits and outcomes at every stage.
  • Engage directly with people – be open, honest and transparent with your audience – even when you have bad news to tell them – and you’ll get the credit in the long run. It takes time, guts and sometimes broad shoulders, but remember that feedback is what you want – it will help you improve your project and deliver better outcomes.
  • Be a good neighbour – remember you are just passing through – projects are inevitably temporary, even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes! You’re just dropping in as a temporary member of a real permanent community of residents, businesses or employees, and the project is for them, so putting their interests first is what it’s all about.

The communications budget on Northern Spire accounted for only 0.5% of the total project budget, yet the buy-in to community engagement, public and media relations from everyone, from Sunderland City Council, main contractor FVB Joint Venture, Atkins, Faithful+Gould, and sub-contractors on site, meant that communications ran through every fibre of the project.

Getting all of the project team on board took time and involved huge amounts of leg work at the beginning, however, the results far outweighed the budget and the effort, evidenced in the huge community pride demonstrated when the bridge was unveiled in August, and the 20,000 people who came to walk across the deck before it opened to traffic.

With communications, a little really does go a long way, and taking the time to involve people can make the difference between perceived success and failure.

Six months after a project is finished, very few people will remember whether it was delivered on time or on budget, but they will know whether or not they like it.

So, don’t leave that to chance. Take the community on the journey with you and then you will all arrive at the desired destination together.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

Categories
News

DTW fastest riser in Prolific North Top 50 PR agencies

Overhead view of a man drawing a big upwards arrow on a pad of paper

Let’s just start by saying that you always have to take any industry rankings with a pinch of salt, but this is one of the meaningful ones.

We’re very pleased that DTW has been ranked by Prolific North as #15 – and as the fastest riser – in Prolific North’s latest annual list of the Top 50 PR agencies across the north of England.

In a list dominated by Manchester agencies we’re classed as the largest in the north east, but more importantly than that, it shows the results of the really great creativity and hard work put in by the DTW team over the past year. Our focus is always on delivering results for our clients in our key sectors of infrastructure, government and membership organisations – so we’re really pleased.

As ever it’s a huge thanks to our team, clients and partners who make these things possible.

PS – Prolific North has a PR list, an integrated list and a digital list. Given that we operate across the increasingly blurred disciplines of PR, marketing, digital, design, video, animation and social media it’s always a bit of a head-scratching moment working out why you’re on one list and not another, but if you’re looking for strategic comms support please get in touch.

Thanks for reading

Chris

Categories
Insights

How to use the new LinkedIn update to increase your reach

Mobile phone showing the LinkedIn homepage
CHIANGMAI, THAILAND -FEBRUARY 7, 2017:LG Nexus5 opened to Linkedin app. Linkedin is a social networking website for people in professional occupations.

We all try to keep our LinkedIn feeds up to date don’t we? We try to log in frequently to check-in to the oldest ‘big’ social network out there but let’s face it, for many of us it’s never our most used app or website. Well, this blog might change all that.

In October, LinkedIn announced BIG changes to their feed algorithm meaning not only will we be seeing some fairly different content when we log in, but we’ll notice our personal content getting a lot more attention.

What’s the update?

Let’s set the scene: LinkedIn has over 567m members who post more than a million posts, videos and articles each day. The thing is, it was the content from a select few (the most followed 1%) that dominated the LinkedIn feed meaning that lowly users like me (and probably you) didn’t get much of a chance of our posts appearing on feeds, let alone get engagement.

LinkedIn followed the common rule in social networks – the more engagement a post gets, the more likely it will appear in feeds, which means that key influencers like Bill Gates and Richard Branson, who have a lot of followers, get more engagement, and therefore appear in more feeds – which gives them more engagement, which gets them in more feeds and…well, you get the picture.

What those clever folk behind LinkedIn have decided to do is look at who is posting that content and evaluate how much a like, comment or share would mean to the author.

Following me so far? Ok – to use the examples that the social network have used themselves:

LinkedIn update

Source: LinkedIn

Why does this matter?

LinkedIn started as, and remains to be, a social network focused on individuals (professionals) connecting with each other; rather than organisations talking to their audience. Indeed, here at DTW, we champion individuals using LinkedIn over organisations – as seen in the employee advocacy work we do with our clients. It is this personal level that LinkedIn are bringing with this new change.

Therefore, if you are looking to spread your organisation’s message on LinkedIn, now is the time to do it from your personal profile, rather than your company’s.

What should communicators do?

  1. When you’re posting content on social media, what is the main objective? It’s for your audience to read it, and engage with it. From DTW’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if that reach comes in the form of a company post, or an employee’s post, as long as that content is being read and engaged with.
  2. Therefore, if you use LinkedIn as a platform for your communications, now is the time to think about enabling your employees to share that content in their own feeds and networks, as well as sharing it on your company page too.
  3. It’s important to encourage employees to share your organisation’s updates and content on their own channels. This might be in the form of internal communications like an intranet or companywide email – either way, let them know the content is there. As part of this, encourage engagement on other posts that they see in their feed too.
  4. This personal-level of sharing might be trickier to monitor as engagement on personal posts won’t appear in your company’s LinkedIn analytics. For us, it’s not too important (we all chat to each other about our posts), but if tracking ROI is a key objective for your organisation, there are employee advocacy tools out there that can help; like Smarp or Sprout Social’s Bambu.
  5. We’ve helped clients build confidence amongst their employees to post on their company’s behalf, and using an employee advocacy tool, it can be easier for everyone to share content. With this new algorithm update, it’s a great opportunity to get engagement and recognition for it.

We’re really excited about this LinkedIn update – it’s a step forward to bringing social media back to being social.

Thanks for reading!

Jess

Get in touch.

Sign-up for news from DTW:

Linkedin-in Vimeo

Copyright © 2024 DTW | All Rights Reserved | DTW is a trading name of DTW Communications & Marketing Ltd.

View our privacy policy