Pickle Jar Communications

Following attendance at a workshop this week during which I led an exercise in aligning organisational messages with audience wants and needs (see my diagram for this, and blog post about it,  here), a colleague from the University of Nottingham this morning sent me a link to this comic entry on xkcd.com. Very appropriate!

I’m a great believer that the printed university or college prospectus is not dead, nor will it be so for a while yet. However, I think universities and colleges are increasingly becoming aware of the need for their print materials and online presence to interact with each other to enhance the student experience. However, to [...]

In response to an enquiry by London Business School, Hitwise has produced a list of the top 100 websites visited by students in May 2009. Quite a useful list for those of us working in Higher Education communications. It’s available to view here.

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 [...]

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 keep saying this and I will say it again – I love Twitter. I am a big fan. This week as I was updating the Pickle Jar Communications website, I was twittering about my progress. This was simply done as an update to what we have been upto at PJC – not with the [...]

We’re delighted to announce that we launched our new website this week. As with any successful website, we aim for it to be an ever evolving project, but we’re happy with the results so far. New features include a Twitter feed (anyone reading this blog for a while will know what a big fan I [...]

Scott Berinato’s post, Delta-Northwest Create the Press Release of the Future, on the Harvard Conversation Starter blog highlights an exemplary use of a micro-site for PR purposes. In my mind this is a great example of a multimedia release. Clear thought has been given to the stakeholders and communicating direct with key groups (staff, customers, [...]

As part of the work we’ve been doing for Ideas for Life TV, we were recently involved in a conference on digital media for business hosted at Alton Towers (18 March). Working with Ember Regis, we interviewed the key speakers from the event. Two of them were specifically speaking about how digital media can be [...]

It’s all about the kids today. What are they doing online? How can we make the web and video games safer? The launch of the report of the Byron Review is of course welcomed by most people – parents in particular, I suspect. The report itself acknowledges that “headlines have contributed to the climate of [...]