Pickle Jar Communications

This week Mashable reviewed a new mobile app that enables you to create and send real postcards direct from your mobile phone. Postcard on the Run is a free app. When you launch it it gives you the option to create a postcard from existing photos in your phone’s photo library, to take a new [...]

One of the most popular conference presentations that I’ve ever given in terms of the audience reaction at the end of the session was a session entitled ‘A toybox of tools to enhance your online communications’. It was an indulgent session that threw strategy out of the window for a while and just looked at [...]

Why is it that when someone says something negative about our organisation online we think we have a social media problem or a social media crisis? And yet if someone says something positive about us we pat ourselves on the back and remind ourselves what a great organisation we are. The action is the same, [...]

I wasn’t always a ‘consultant’. And even to this day it’s a word that sits uneasy with me. At last week’s CASE Europe Annual Conference I found myself sat in the main opening session next to a young lady who had never met or heard of me before. And the usual opening question came fast: [...]

For a while now I’ve been flippantly pondering whether the group purchasing phenomenon led by GroupOn and the like could make its way into the education world as a means of attracting students. Not so much prompted by GroupOn, but inspired by a session I attended at SXSW that looked at trends in the use [...]

I was sitting in a pub enjoying a few drinks with my fella on Saturday afternoon. We’re both a tad geeky, so we’re sat there with our iPads scrolling various things, catching up on what delights Twitter has to share, laughing out loud as we scroll through awkwardfamilyphotos.com … as you do… Then he waves [...]

This week I delivered a session at the CASE Europe Annual conference. With a different workshop title advertised on the website from that printed and promised to delegates in the programme, I ended up squeezing two themes into one hour-long session, but I think I may have got away with it (feedback suggests I did), [...]

A couple of years back I conducted a study for the CIPR Education and Skills sector group on the use of online tools for education PR. You can view the report here (pdf). I’m now re-running the survey element of that study to see how the sector has moved on in the past two years. [...]

NO! Please stop it! Okay, I should expand on that a little I guess. Here’s the thing… for months now I’ve been noticing a growing trend of some university and college ‘corporate’ Twitter accounts (ugh!) retweeting positive comments that people say about them. This can be anything from someone enjoying an open day to a [...]

Please do shoot me down for self-ego massaging with this, but The Guardian have this morning published my blog post about using social media strategically for internal communications. I’m not going to re-publish the whole thing here as out of courtesy to the nice folk at The Guardian, it would be great for you to [...]