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It was the night before Christmas…

They say never work with children and animals, but we at DTW recently broke both of those rules when we decided this year to produce a Christmas video instead of a greetings card. But could we really pull it off in such a short space of time? Despite many a dubious glance, and at least one “I’ll eat an elf’s hat if you pull this off!” we got everyone together for…an interesting couple of hours. Trying to direct a one-year old to “Crawl like this”, and explaining to at least three separate six year olds what their motivation for the scene was,

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DTW shortlisted for six PR awards

DTW has been shortlisted for six CIPR North East Pride awards. Four of the awards relate to our PR and marketing work for Further Education colleges in the region. Projects that DTW has delivered on behalf of Newcastle Sixth Form College, Redcar & Cleveland College and Prior Pursglove College have all been shortlisted. The company has also been shortlisted in the Community Relations and Healthcare categories for the Listening to Cumbria campaign it created and delivered with NHS Cumbria’s communications team. The Listening to Cumbria campaign was critical to help local communities contribute to and develop an understanding of major

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Talking to government? Think policy hub, not department

The new Government Communications Plan might have a foreword from Francis Maude but the hand of Alex Aiken, the new Executive Director of Government Communications, is all over it. Having heard Alex present on the future of government comms at the recent CIPR Northern Conference, it is no surprise to see his favourite word of the moment – ‘exceptional’ – prominent here. What this document does reflect is both the repositioning of comms and PR at the heart of the government information machine and the creation of the new communications hubs. The one side of A4 communication plans summaries for each department

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CIPR guide to social media monitoring

I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week scanning through the CIPR’s new guide to social media monitoring. The new guide, which reflect the best practice outlined in the Share This and Share This Too books (a great starting point for social media stuff for the uninitiated) is a really good attempt at ending the confusion about the plethora of monitoring tools and approaches and aligning this activity to real business objectives. I don’t claim to be a social media guru (and don’t trust many who do) but anyone working in PR and comms who is still in denial about the

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