Helpful Links: January

Recently we have:

  • Analysed whether the pandemic changed who UK audiences trust online
  • Completed a second course on video training for press officers
  • Reviewed the social media effectiveness of a client in Germany – we’re working with them on recommendations right now
  • Delivering social media training for NGOs in Papua New Guinea
  • Kicked off a new project on social media governance for a regulator
  • Helped marketing teams across Europe from a pet food brand grow their crisis communication skills in a virtual workshop format
  • Helped a power company move its public engagement work online and get focussed input to its strategy

As always, we’ve been busy reading too, here are a selection of some of the articles we’ve found interesting and wanted to share with you. Firstly look after yourselves, here are five ways to stay positive during lockdown.

Misinformation

After this week’s events at the Capitol Building there will be plenty to digest in next month’s Helpful Links on misinformation and the final days of the Trump presidency.

Recently Twitter have announced their updated plans to combat misinformation around the Covid vaccine.   The UK government is actively monitoring for coronavirus misinformation too.

This is a really interesting podcast on misinformation, including the statistic that people over the age of 65 shared 7x more fake news than people between 18-29. Depressingly this study found that that nearly half of people don’t think the WSJ does do their own reporting, a similar percentage of people do think that Facebook does their own reporting.

Social Media and Digital News

Is Substack the answer to social media fatigue and failing media?

12 things James Whatley learned by taking a year off Instagram

The Government Communications Service looks ahead to future trends in social media and digital comms for 2021.

Pre Covid-19 New Year’s Eve generated Facebook’s biggest spike in messaging, photo uploads and social sharing, in March 2020 this was dwarfed by traffic spikes which continued through the year, in turn this New Year set new records.

Discover which topics are taking hold in conversations across Facebook and Instagram and are on the cusp of going mainstream in the year ahead.

Instagram has shared their Year in Review: How Memes Were the Mood of 2020

Joe Biden will take over the @POTUS Twitter account with zero followers in a break from tradition.

Crisis Communications

F5Bot is a nice free Google Alerts-style tool that pings you an update when your brand or keyword pops up on Reddit or HackerNews, where issues can sometimes bubble up first:

Amazing timeline of links to the unfolding of the Covid crisis in the UK from December 2019, by crisis comms expert Charlie Pownall.

As the massive FireEye and Solarwinds cyber incidents rocked the security world in late 2020, we’ve seen several of our clients take an approach like GoDaddy’s to test-phishing their own people to see how well they stand up to social engineering attacks which could compromise security.

Really insightful thread on Covid Comms and Crisis Comms from Gavin Kelly.  Transparency is key but information also needs to be accessible. Endless slides of data are transparent for some audiences but opaque to others.

Good Digital Communications

Walmart is growing a group of employee Tiktokers:

Good to see a CEO engaging in conversations on Twitter.

Helpful news and updates

We publish our Helpful Links monthly. All previous sets are available via this link.

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