HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU 🎄
We’d like to wish all our readers a very happy Christmas and a sparkling start to 2019.
As it is the season of giving, we urge you to donate generously to two charities we’re proud to support:
We look forward to working with you in 2019 to make the world a clearer place.
The notion of ‘influencers’ has been all the rage in Brussels recently. Understandably. In the real world, influencer marketing – the practice of teaming up with influential people to help promote an organisation or product – can be highly effective.
The principle of influencer marketing is not new. We’ve all sniggered at grainy ads from the 50s featuring doctors flogging cigarettes that do wonders for a niggly sore throat. And in public affairs, we’ve also been at it for years – think pharma and patient groups, or agrochemicals companies and farmers – but calling it stuff like key opinion leader mobilisation (or whatever).
But in the social media age, the concept of influencer marketing has moved on a notch:
· It is far easier to build a public platform, so there are simply more people who are influential (as well as plenty more who think they may be, but patently are not)
· Similarly, it is easier to get an influencer in front of those one is seeking to influence online than it is offline
· Higher levels of mistrust in entities like industry and media makes credibility harder to attain, and influencers can help
Cue: lots of people, including public affairs practitioners, with high hopes for online influencer marketing.
Writing is hard. If it’s not you’re probably doing it wrong.
But just because writing is tough doesn’t make it impossible. Nothing is too complex to write clearly about if you follow these tried and tested rules:
Did you know that employers and employees can benefit from financial support and subsidies for training courses? If you are based in Belgium, there are two ways of slashing the cost of your training with us. Cefora offers subsidies for both employers and employees, while the Small Business Act reimburses up to 50% of the cost of training for small and medium-sized firms in the Brussels-Capital region.
Make sure you meet the general conditions to apply and do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions regarding the coaching options we offer and ways we can help you reduce the costs of your training.
Leo has worked as a journalist for over two decades, reporting from around the globe for dozens of titles on a plethora of issues – from reporting EU affairs in Brussels to covering the Zimbabwe elections in 2013. He was a longtime correspondent for Time in Brussels and his work has appeared in the Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Hollywood Reporter. He also edits The Economist Guide to the European Union.
Leo is Clear Europe’s lead writer and has written and edited numerous conference reports, speeches and articles for our clients. He has also delivered training on how to report the EU in Vietnam and guided journalists on study tours of Brussels.
We held our first open course on social media skills on October 8, with the Maastricht-based American media trainer Becky Castle Miller giving our 15 participants many useful tips on how to make the best professional use of Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other social media channels.Becky talked participants through different strategies for creating and managing their social media tools, using examples of how – and how not – to communicate online. But more than that, she gave participants the keys to creating an individually-tailored Social Media Action Plan – how to set goals, formulate messages and analyse audiences properly. Read More