I'm off

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

So said André Gide. Wise man. It’s in that spirit that I’ve taken a gamble, and handed in my notice at work – I’ll be leaving in the new year.

We’ve completed a couple of major projects recently – a new website for the University of Westminster, and a major HR campaign (both profiled here.) Those two projects close an intensive 32 months which have been packed full of comms, PR, media, and public affairs work. It’s been a fantastically broad and challenging role during a period of intensive change for the University.

The Vice-Chancellor recently announced a new three-year plan, within our vision for 2015. It’s a big plan, and I fully support it.  However, I realised quickly that it was going to need constant communication, and it would be best served if the Comms Director could see it through to 2013 at least, and better still to 2015. I’m convinced that it’s best for the University if a new figure takes over in the new year to progress my work, avoiding the disruption of a handover mid-project – and this is the only window to ensure a smooth handover. I’ll miss the great team we’ve built here.

Having declined my manager’s kind offer to try and talk me out of it, I’ve taken a leap in to the unknown. I’m putting together a showcase of my work, and I’m happy to send my CV to anyone who’s interested. Both my current employers and Lord Rennard have offered to act as referees. If you would like to see my CV, or discuss any opportunities, do email me (rob@northumbrian.org.uk) or call me on 07961 814 527.

Lets hope that neither destitution nor consultancy await.

Out of context

One of life’s simple pleasures is the unexpected sentence, or the overheard snippet of conversation which, when taken out of context, is inspiring or baffling. It’s partly what makes Someone Once Told Me one of the most consistently entertaining sites on the ‘net.

I’ve always said that some day I would compile a book of unexpected sentences, the sort of things that make you say “well, I never thought that would come out of my mouth”, but I like to start small and pilot first – so before the book comes www.twitter.com/adventitiously

Adventitiously will be a 24 hour stream of consciousness, taken completely out of context. It will launch without warning (even I don’t know when I’ll do it), it will consist completely of passing thoughts of mine, things I overhear, or things I say. Nothing will be explained, it’s for you to imply your own meaning to the moments. An example from today might’ve been:

“If it had to be that big, did it have to be that colour?”

It might be hilarious, it may be profound, most likely it will be a complete waste of time.  We’ll never know unless we try. Whatever happens, I’d like to gather your reactions around the hashtag #adventitiously. So, if you fancy a day out of context some time soon, please follow @adventitiously now.

Who do they think they're talking to? Political party website content reviewed

This blog post is a supporting post in a series examining the effectiveness of British political party websites – for a summary of the short study, and my conclusions, click here.

I ended my summary post with the question “how did the party websites become so universally dull?” It’s easy to leave a question floating, much more dangerous to attempt to answer it. Below, I lay out my thoughts not as a polished prescription, but as a conversation starter for the parties.

As we aproach a general election and I open a political party website, it can be a little like sitting next to a stranger on a long train journey. I might be lucky enough to find someone interesting and engaging, who is up for a stimulating conversation. If it goes really well, maybe we’ll exchange contact details, have a few drinks, and a beautiful friendship is born out of a chance encounter. Alternatively, I might get the latent drunk – peacefuly asleep until the very last minute, when he suddenly starts shouting meaningless babble over my head at no-one in particular.

Political party website content generally takes one of three forms. First is rolling news and comment – press releases, and web news stories. Second  is information on campaigns and policies. Finally, information on conferences, and things like resources for activists – content for the internal audience.

Given that there will be a heavy supporter bias in the visitors to any political party site, rolling news well done is an opportunity to keep activists and supporters engaged and motivated. A balance is required between news and comment on the issues of the day, and news and comment on the party itself. This latter group of content – information about the people in HQ, the process stories, candidate selections, has a significant, and I would argue growing,  pulling power. However, parties are too keen to push this news to infrequently produced paper newsletters, or to Home sites.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who do they think they're talking to? – How the political party sites rank globally

This blog post is a supporting post in a series examining the effectiveness of British political party websites – for a summary of the short study, and my conclusions, click here.

Generally, my preferred measure of global website popularity comes from compete.com, who in this case only record traffic for the BNP and the Conservatives.

According to compete.com, the Conservative Party saw 4,698 unique visitors in June 2009 to the BNP’s 3,343. Unfortunately, in this  case Compete is not the best site to use – Compete’s figures massively under-report the actual traffic, probably because the majority of their data is gathered in the US.

Alexa

Without access to the likes of Hitwise, this forces me into the rather unpredictable world of Alexa. I don’t normally assign a great deal of weight to Alexa figures, and will avoid rehashing the arguments for and against their data here. However, I wasn’t prepared to use Alexa ranking as part of the scores, so they don’t have any bearing on the end result.

Read the rest of this entry »