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I’ve spent a really lovely day at CommsCamp in Birmingham, recharging my batteries after a busy few weeks. Spending time listening to (mainly) public sector comms people doing interesting things in their organisations has taught me loads about what’s happening at the cutting edge. It’s also reminded me just how powerful the unconference format is with the…

At Helpful HQ we’re a big fan of tools like the Lean Canvas or our friends Comms2Point0’s Comms Planning tool (PDF). A simple plan on a page or two that sets out what you’re trying to achieve, how you’ll know if you’ll achieve it, and what you’ll do to get there is more useful than a fistful…

To those of you who don’t regularly wrangle small children on a regular basis: look away now: this won’t make a great deal of sense, I’m afraid. The rest of you – hopefully, like me, you will have had your knowledge of the marine world vastly expanded by compulsive watching of The Octonauts, a sort…

When you tweet something about work that you shouldn’t have, or from the wrong account and it gets picked up, you want the ground to swallow you up. It’s awful, and the chronicles of social media crises are full of heads on pikestaffs. But what feels like a full-on social media crisis at the time,…

The Teacampers were on good form (and vast numbers) yesterday, to discuss the vexed question of social media guidance for civil servants which the GDS Digital Engagement team are currently drafting. It’s to their great credit that Emer, Lou, Jane and colleagues are developing the guidance in the open, in consultation with those inside and…

I don’t get out as much as I used to. Well, I do, but I don’t do quite as much speaking about digital engagement and how the public sector can use the social web as I used to. So it was great to be invited to Edinburgh last month to give the keynote (my first…

We’ve heard the story of the Motrin Moms. Nestle on Facebook. Or YouTube-if-you-want-to. But how can Press Officers and marketers get to practice using social media and getting the tone right so that they can avoid disasters and deal with storms if they hit? For quite a long time, I’ve daydreamed about a social media…

Back in July, I mentioned an event I was planning to organise to help bring big online communities together with government and the marketing agencies who work for it, to help stimulate creative thinking about new ways to work together. Thanks to the great team at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, we now…

At TeaCamp today, I’m taking the Campers through one of my new projects, Read+Comment, designed to offer hassle-free publishing of commentable documents online. Introducing Read+Comment from Steph Gray It’s based on some work I’ve done recently for BIS, updating the Commentariat WordPress theme so that the team can roll out more flexible sites around their…

I started my career in market research, where soliciting the views of under 16s is frowned upon without rather a lot of faffing around getting hold of parental consent. Online, surveys tend to ask if you’re older than 16, and if not, chuck you out. On balance, it’s probably a good thing that dubious marketers…