Pickle Jar Communications

When I was 14 years old I took part in a fairly typical school exchange trip, staying with Carola Herman and her lovely family in a small town just outside Frankfurt, Germany. I was three years into learning to speak German at the time, but a couple of hours a week at school and no [...]

I’m afraid I’ve been ignoring you, my beloved blog. It isn’t that I’ve fallen out of love with you, it’s just I’ve been a little distracted lately. I’m afraid, dear blog, that I have been playing away a little. At the beginning of this week I created a new social network on Ning for communications [...]

Week before last PR Week published an article suggesting that PROs could learn a lot about social media from the US presidential election campaign. Sure, I agree that the candidates are using social media extensively in their campaigns, but I’m not convinced that they’re using it particularly well in some cases – Twitter being one [...]

Some of my readers may recall that back in February I chaired a CIPR Education & Skills sector group panel discussion on international PR. Following that event I blogged about the ethics of engaging with PR ‘norms’ in particular countries (specifically in China) and how easily this sits with a UK perspective of PR conduct. [...]

It’s a rather miserable looking Saturday today so I’m sticking indoors for now, instead choosing to catch up on reading this week’s Times Higher Education (THE). There’s a great example here of new media influencing traditional media, and showing that what gets said on a blog – even just a passing comment – can influence [...]

My approach to using new and social media as a PR tool is to forget about everything that traditional PR approaches might have taught us (well, perhaps not everything, but many things) and view it as something altogether very very different from media relations. Never sending a press release designed for a journalist to a [...]

I used the rare opportunity earlier this week while travelling on the train into London not to switch the laptop on (I did that on the way back to start writing this post) but instead to read last week’s issue of PR Week. It goes without saying that the word ‘blogosphere’ plastered on the front [...]

I was at the University of Warwick this morning with a former colleague and friend of mine having a catch-up and gossip over a coffee. She was telling me a little about some of the PR efforts that she has been making recently in the Warwick Manufacturing Group. Most notable was the opening of the [...]