We talk PR and Entrepreneurship with Seven Hills co-founder Nick Giles. By Startacus Admin Nick Giles is the co-founder of Seven Hills, an acclaimed and award winning campaigning communications company. Named as the UK’s fastest-growing PR consultancy by PR Week magazine in 2012 and listed as one of the UK’s 100 best new firms by Startups.co.uk, Seven Hills, co-founded in 2010 by Nick Giles and Michael Hayman, has been credited with redefining UK enterprise through initiatives such the StartUp Britain campaign and MADE: The Entrepreneur Festival which takes place in Sheffield this week.
We caught up with Nick just before the start of the Festival to talk PR, find out more about MADE and Seven Hills itself. Cheers Nick for your time. Your portfolio of clients within the entrepreneurial scene is pretty vast - what makes working in this area exciting to you as a PR company? Working with entrepreneurial clients is hugely exciting. You run MADE: The Entrepreneur Festival in Sheffield, that is now in its third year.
Who knows? Enterprise-led recovery. Is your media release Twitter ready? If you’ve ever played Telephone, you know how easy it is for a simple message to lose its meaning. Sending out a media release is like playing this childhood game. Very few journalists will ever replay it the way you want and the essential message can be lost as people reword and rework your beautifully crafted prose into just a few short sentences. That’s just the name of the game in public relations, but the advent of social media has made the job even harder. Thousands of citizen journalists are now reinterpreting your media release into less than 140 characters. A recent example was an announcement from the Northern Territory Government in Australia during Cyclone Carlos allowing non-essential public servants with child-caring responsibilities to take personal leave if they could not get alternate care arrangements for their children.
The tweets from those spreading the word looked something like this: Non-essential public servants urged to stay at home due to #TCcarlos The result? The AVE debate: Measuring the value of PR. Using Pearltrees To Create Multi-Media Press Kits. Posted by Tom Foremski - May 11, 2010 My regular readers know about my rants on the subject of press releases. My rants are not about the content of press releases but that they do not use the media technologies that we have today. {Please see: Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die! Few press releases have more than one link, or have links pointing to useful information such as: - a link to photographs- embeddable videos- background information- customer quotes- analyst quotes- related news stories- related news releases Such links make my job easier -- instead of Googling around for that information I can find it more quickly. Yet despite having many people agree with me, the PR industry still has trouble understanding these very simple things.
Another way to produce an interactive press release is to use Pearltrees. Pearltrees is a visual way of creating a collection of web sites. (This is a live window in that you can move around within it and browse the content of each pearl. The Diaspora Project and Kickstarter: The Power of (Micro)Fundin. Since we broke the story about the Diaspora Project last week, the plans for an open source, distributed alternative to Facebook has seen widespread press. But just as importantly, funding for the undertaking has skyrocketed. The Diaspora Project is the brainchild of four NYU computer students, and as Sarah Perez noted in her article, while the concepts of "open source" and "distributed network" might not normally have mass appeal, the latest round of privacy concerns with Facebook have helped to generate a lot of attention for the project and the concepts behind it. The project is currently being hosted on Kickstarter, a site that lets entrepreneurs crowdsource funding.
Kickstarter allows entrepreneurs to set a funding goal and deadline, as well as offer an optional set of rewards to their backers. Last week, Diaspora was $2000 short of their $10,000 goal with under a month left to go until reaching their deadline. 5 Tips for Interviews That Produce Great Content. Today’s marketing strategies are increasingly built on a foundation of great content.
But anyone who contributes to a blog or has committed to a weekly podcast knows that producing a steady stream of high-quality content can be quite a challenge. At some point, you run out of ideas. What's a content creator to do? Find others who have good ideas that you can share and ask them great questions, says master interviewer Susan Bratton.
Bratton is the host of popular podcast DishyMix and the creator of dozens of instructional products including “Masterful Interviews” and “Talk Show Tips.” Here are her five top question-asking tips: Stay focused.