Pickle Jar Communications

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: [...]

Yesterday I delivered two workshops to a number of delegates at the EUPRIO annual conference in Averio, Portugal. My session was one of seven on the progamme, all running twice that morning. Across the two workshops I seem to have been joined by more than half the conference delegation. This staggered me but just goes [...]

I occassionally browse online sites where people post projects that they require freelance support for. This morning one caught my eye because it’s right up my street – a small company wanting support to boost their online PR. Great! A small company thinking along the right lines. Many don’t even yet understand the benefits of [...]

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 [...]

As an avid reader of the Mashable blog and a communications professional working largely with the Higher Education sector, I was quite interested to see the recent Startup Review of Unigo ‘a free online platform for college students to share their opinions, photos, videos and documents’. It’s important that I keep aware of sites like [...]

I know I am always banging on about how PR people need to rethink this and rethink that, but today David Cushman has posted a really useful presentation on slideshare that really helps PR people to visualise the differences and challenges them to find ways to engage with what he calls ‘P2PR’ (I like this [...]

I attended a Higher Education External Relations Association (HEERA) meeting week before last as a representative of the CIPR’s Education and Skills group. They were chatting about different events that they might put on. Having recently become aware of Wilkes University’s highly targetted advertising campaign that ran in Spring 2007, I mentioned this to them [...]

As I sat with my other half yesterday evening watching Channel 4 news I couldn’t help but comment on how inappropriate it seemed that the news item reporting on G8 leaders discussing food shortages should be accompanied by cutaway shots of said G8 leaders sitting down to dinner. It was therefore no surprise when The [...]