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Next time you are building a new website, do make sure that you have a comms person on the team.
by GUEST EDITOR Helen Gill 
For me, the power of social media as a PR tool is the power to publish your own content and start to influence and shape the agenda so that you don’t always have to rely so heavily on media relations any more. That’s why I don’t like the phrase ‘online PR’ or even ‘digital PR’ – it just feels like a way of doing what we’d always done but in a slightly different format.
Channel shift. That's the art of getting people to move from expensive ways of dealing with an organisation to cheaper and more effective ways. What role does comms play in this? Actually, a really important one.
There are significant savings to be made from channel shift with plenty of councils fully behind the digital transformation revolution, but moving your services online is just half the battle.
If your customers don’t start using the channel how are you going to reap the rewards that channel shift is capable of bringing? Creating compelling take-up campaigns is the answer and it’s not that difficult.
The following ideas are taken from Gandlake’s channel shift customers and have been successful in ensuring significant numbers select the web as the channel of choice.
Is the campaign dead? Should we not think about what we do 52-weeks a year? Or is there merit in shining a light on an issue?
by GUEST EDITOR Emma Rodgers 
A while ago, top blogger and US Public Health specialist Jim Garrow wrote a post on ‘death to the campaign’.
In it he talks about campaign focussed communications working against our aim of affecting real change for two reasons:
by Eddie Coates-Madden and Lisa Buttery
So, what happens when communications and customer services come together? Are there things in common?
Last week I went to the #channelshiftcamp organised by the brilliant @psfnick in Derby City Council’s stunning HQ.
I took with me my colleague Lisa Buttery, our Assistant Head of Customer Services, not least because the opportunity to line up and join up Comms and Customer Services is never one I think we should miss, but also because it was all quite new to her.
Today over a 24 hour period we’re urging all those involved in housing from landlords, tenants, suppliers and workers to share their ‘day in the life’ stories using 140 characters on Twitter.
By GUEST EDITOR Adrian Capon 
The idea to raise the profile of UK Housing from a tweetathon was ignited by the success of various initiatives #Walsall24, Greater Manchester Police and Local Government #Ourday. I first blogged about this here.
Can you name five female public relations agency heads? That was they questioned posed by PR Week before naming just four women. Thankfully, PR Week didn’t explain away the shortfall of women in top tier posts with the old cliché of “they leave to have babies”, acknowledging that the reality was far more complex than that.
by Liz Bridgen
I’m currently researching why women to leave middle-management PR jobs. Interestingly, one theme that keeps cropping up is that women leave PR because they find the work trivial and unsatisfying. That’s not to say that all PR jobs are meaningless and dull but for a variety of reasons (which would make another article in itself), the women I interviewed weren’t taking advantage of the challenging and exciting PR jobs out there.
The good thing about teaching and researching PR is that you can ask people lots of questions about what they do and why they do it.
It’s a funny old game, but could football clubs learn something about communicating from their local councils?
by Simon Alton
Football is the biggest sport on the planet, with millions of us spending an awful lot of time and money following our club - whether it’s going to a game, watching it on TV or (as in my case) following updates on Twitter while keeping half an eye on the kids in the park on a Saturday afternoon.
The level of loyalty football fans show to their clubs is unequivocal and unlike any other brand/customer relationship. The vast majority of supporters would never dream of going to support another club if they were unsatisfied with the way their club was performing. It’s just not the done thing.
Northumberland is one of the most beautiful corners of Britain. But it suffers from being far away from population centres and a lack of exposure. Go there and you'll fall in love with the place. So, bright people who look after the promotion of tourism have got active during a TV show that showcases it.
by Ross Wigham
It’s not often that I’m nervously tuned into ITV right before Coronation Street, furtively waiting for a middle aged TV star and former hit-maker to wax lyrical about my patch.
