🎄 HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ONE AND ALL

We wish you a wonderful, stress-free holiday season and look forward to working with you all in the New Year.

Season’s greetings from Gareth, Ali and Fraser

🎄 SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ROARING 2020s

We survived the first real decade of social media! What now?

Our marketing manager and social media trainer Ali Colwell makes her big predictions for the future of social. From privacy changes to TikTok, take a look at how social media will adapt and evolve in the coming years.

Have a read of this latest blog.

🎄 PITCH AND STRIKE

• Make sure your news is newsworthy, not some cheap PR stunt.
• Focus on the impact on people, not process.
• Provide a hook by piggybacking on big news events.
• Make quotes quotable in press releases.
• Ditch jargon, acronyms, tired clichés and trendy buzzwords.

🎄 FESTIVE BONUS BITES

• Podcasting has been on our minds for a while – which is why Gareth sat down with Kenny Day from AIRSNEXT to learn from a pro. Give it a listen.
• In an interview, be prepared for hard questions and rehearse the responses. You don’t want to be caught out like Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. 
• The Guardian’s Brussels Bureau Chief Daniel Boffey gave some great tips on how to pitch to his newspaper at our festive edition of News and Booze. They included:
  • Get to know journalists. Be a friend. But more importantly be a source.
  • With 250-300 emails a day, make sure your pitch is newsworthy.
• The death of former UK health minister Frank Dobson gave us the chance to relive this straight-talking interview with Jeremy Paxman. RIP Frank.
• When working with journalists, confusion can arise over ‘off the record’, ‘on the record’ and ‘background’. Luckily, POLITICO Europe has drawn up a helpful guide.
• If anyone is tempted to duck out of a TV appearance at the last minute, Kay Burley from Sky News reminds us that avoiding a difficult interview doesn’t mean avoiding difficult questions.