EML Wildfire Tech PR Blog

Silicon Fen has been the electronics PR man’s candy shop for as long as I can remember, but it looks like Cambridge could soon have a new challenger gunning for its crown as one of the most important technology centres in Europe…. and that place is…. Sheffield.

Yes that’s right. I said Sheffield. The place made famous for steel production, having a football team named after a day of the week (that’s Wednesday for those not in the know) and Sean Bean.

Earlier this month Electronics Weekly reported data compiled by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) which showed that the University of Sheffield has now overtaken the University of Cambridge for engineering research income by almost 10 percent.

This is pretty significant.

Cambridge University and its superb track record of engineering research, technological discoveries and inventions was the unquestionable driver behind the formation of Silicon Fen. Many of the successful companies to emerge from the area started as Cambridge University spin-offs or were started by its graduates and academic staff.…

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Back in 1986, when Sir Alex Ferguson became manager of Manchester United FC, he would certainly never have dreamt that news of his retirement would be circulated with such speed 27 years later. Nor would he have imagined that the news would be broken online by a single, sub-140 character message on Twitter.

At 9.17am this morning – ironically just as we in the office were all leafing through the morning papers, reading rumours of his impending retirement – the club’s @MUFCOfficial Twitter feed sent out a simple tweet: “Sir Alex Ferguson retires. #ThankYouSirAlex”.

According to Pocket-Lint, the story was mentioned 1.4 million times and the #ThankYouSirAlex hashtag used over 100,000 times. What struck me, though, was not the speed with which it spread, but rather how this breaks from the traditions of sports media coverage.

English Premier League football loves to hold press conferences at any opportunity they can, holding them before and after every single game they play, when they make a new signing, when they have big news or if they just have something to say.…

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This month we have been discussing how to make the most of attending an event on behalf of a client. Obviously there are costs involved with putting on an event or sponsoring a bigger set up, but what is the point if you can’t capture further collateral to make the most of your spend?

Thinking in more detail about what else you can get from your presence at an event (be it speaking opp, trade show, press conference, etc) will not only help you develop interesting content for your social media pages, but also potential PR assets to benefit wider marcoms activity.

One quick and easy way to do this is to think about filming – and it doesn’t have to cost the earth. Here are some helpful tips:

1. Equipment – filming something to be used on your website doesn’t need an entire crew of broadcast professionals. Nowadays, even a standard iPhone camera can be enough to handle simple filming tasks if used correctly.

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I’m not really sure where this week’s Supreme Court ruling on copyright leaves us. However, the language certainly aligns the very niche activity of media monitoring by in-house PR teams or agencies for clients, to the broader issues of sharing content freely available on the internet, so I sense we’re moving in the right direction.

There are differing views on the ruling and I was struck by the rather luke-warm reception by PR Week, countered by Ardi Kolah on Brand Republic.

Obviously we’re in the PR business, and mostly because of the NLA v Meltwater action, we’ve put quite a bit of effort into minimising the risks of copyright infringement for ourselves and clients in recent years.

In our role it helps to be able to share the results of media relations activities, but if you are not very careful the cost of legally sharing coverage becomes unsustainable, particularly if the client has limited funds, and that’s a great shame.…

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It must have happened to everyone working in PR and marketing. You get a brief, exceed the targets and proudly present the results expecting the feedback to be wonderful. Only to then find yourself answering to someone further up the chain as to why you’ve not delivered on something you were never asked about in the first place.

Now imagine the ‘person further up the chain’ happens to be George Osborne and you’re starting to get an idea of what’s unfolding in the UK telecoms space at the moment.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the UK is a bit short of funds at the moment. With this in mind the Government got very excited at the end of last year and promised that the 4G spectrum auction would be adding a tidy £3.5 billion to the bank.

So it was perhaps a surprise when the auction raised ‘just’ £2.3 billion and particularly when people remembered that the 3G auction raised £22 billion.…

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