Winning formula

Winning team: Elliott House with Kantar Operations at the IoIC awards. (l-r) John Liddle, Ian Feeney, Cheryl Liddle, and from Kantar Operations: Richard Coombe and Baljit Thandi

We don’t like to brag, but Elliott House Communications has just won two communication awards.

The Institute of Internal Communication (IoIC) held its Central Region Awards on Friday 24 February and we were named Class Winner in the best Electronic Newsletter category and also won an Award of Excellence in the Best Electronic Design category, for the newsletter we produce with Kantar Operations.

More than 100 of the region’s top internal communicators attended the glittering award ceremony at the Radisson Blu, East Midlands Airport.

The interactive monthly newsletter was developed in conjunction with the internal communications team at Kantar Operations, as a key tool for its Worldwide CEO, Sharon Potter, to communicate with staff based in the UK, North America and India about the direction of the business. The newsletter also goes out across the wider Kantar group of companies.

To be shortlisted alongside the region’s best communicators was already an achievement – but to win is an excellent result for us and the team at Kantar Operations.

Communicating consistently across three diverse regions is always a challenge but the innovative newsletter, which allows readers to interact with the content, has received much praise internally. We are thrilled that it has been recognised by its communication peers at the IoIC awards.

Like I say, we don’t like to brag. But we are rather proud. 

The Elliott House team with the trophy – John Liddle, Cheryl Liddle and Ian Feeney. 

Romantic communications

Love is in the air – well according to Hallmark and the 24hr supermarkets that were still selling flowers at midnight to last minute love makers.

In the rather chilly month of February, you can set your heart aglow with some commercial tat from the loved-up shops. Over-priced flowers (unless you made it to Tesco in time to buy the £5 dozen red roses it had on offer – who said romance was dead?), bumper boxes of chocolates and cuddly teddy bears that will spend the rest of the year gathering dust before you recycle them and that garish heart cushion in time for next year's haul. 

Don't worry, I am not going to cast misery over this rather marvellous love-drenched day. I am someone who is always happy to throw my full and sometimes quite frankly ridiculous support over all traditional events. (I am renowned for my annual Grand National party, not to mention Eurovision – although things haven't been the same since Tezzer's departure.) I just think it's amazing that we need a day to help us to communicate how much we love/like/fancy someone.  

Generally, words come easy for me as I spend my days tapping away at my computer at Elliott House Towers but for those that just can't confess their all, perhaps they need a nudge from Mr Valentine and his cohort of romantic retailers. 

Maybe we should celebrate that we have at least one day in the year when lovers, partners, husbands, wives, admirers and stalkers can actually say how they feel or at least get some help with expressing it. 

It's just a shame that we have to rely on the retailers to put those words in our mouths. Often the cheesy lines and forced innuendo mask any originality and personality. 

As silly as it sounds – it's a problem that often crops up in the corporate world. Now, I'm not suggesting that people should confess undying love in their company communications – but language is a powerful thing and should be used wisely. 

We often plump for words that we wouldn't normally use in every day talk. Using February 14th as an example, would you say: 

"I would like to utilise today to leverage my feelings for you so that I can yield a high return." 

Perhaps, we should just dump all the jargon and say, I love you. 

Much easier. More understood. And will probably get a much greater return on investment. 

So, on this day of loving and giving – here are my top words and phrases to 'dump' from your comms and some new, much better looking versions for you to fall in love with: 

DUMP                                  DATE

Utilise                                    Use 

At this point in time               Now 

Commence                            Start 

A large proportion of            Lots

Paradigm shift                       Major change 

Outside the box                     Creative

Blue-sky thinking                  Creative

Actionable items                    Things to do 

Buy in                                    Agree

Deliverables                           Tasks

Going forward                       In the future/from now on (if you need to use it at all)

Operationalise                        Do

Ramp up                                Increase

Strategic solutions                 A plan

Happy Valentine's Day from Elliott House Communications! 

Why readers matter most

We're a little bit excited at the moment because we've just been shortlisted for TWO awards at the Institute of Internal Communications awards for the central region. We're competing against the great and the good in the area and so it's fantastic to be recognised by our peers.

The publication that has been shortlisted is a monthly interactive newsletter we produce for employees of a global company. We ensure the content can be understood by a multi-lingual readership and make the newsletter easy and interesting to navigate.

We also have to think creatively for new ways to design and present the corporate information each month to keep it engaging for employees so they want to read about the future direction of the business.

Although awards are really nice (and fingers crossed for the 24 February everyone), even better news came recently when we were able to evaluate the monthly click-through rates on the newsletter. After two years, the numbers of people looking at the newsletter keeps on increasing and the new quarterly 'special' issues are attracting higher numbers too.

There's no denying, we're dreaming of that big awards trophy, but the truth is, the most important judges of our work will always be the readers.

What happens online when you die

This video made me chuckle (well may be more of a morbid cackle) as I was only wondering this very fact the other day: what happens to your online world, when your physical one comes to an end?

There's a whole lifetime's worth of you sitting on a virtual cloud. While your physical belongings might be carefully packaged up and perhaps sent to the charity shop, who packs away your Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin laundry – not to mention any other 'items' drifting around in cyberspace?   

I guess if you have time to get your affairs in order, you could spend a few days closing down your online self. That or leave the passwords behind to make it easier for others to disconnect you once you're gone. 

Or as this video suggests – maybe you let the online world re-create a virtual you in the future, turning all your information into a hologram. It could become a very different way of haunting people. Well, why bother doing it yourself, when you could get your cyber self to do it. 

  

Happy fourth Birthday Elliott House

It was a cold, wintry day in November, four years ago, when I left a full-time job to start Elliott House Communications. After years of fine-tuning my craft inside agencies and organisations, it was time to go it alone.

Anxious thoughts about abandoning a regular salary were soon drowned out by the sheer excitement of creating something of my own. I had a vision for my business that would focus on writing great content for companies that cut the corporate jargon and inspired readers.

I wanted to deliver outstanding service to my clients too – constantly outperforming the last piece of work we did for them – and build relationships that meant more than just contractual agreements. Business is about people after all. 

Four years on, and I can honestly say I've loved every minute of the journey so far. The recession has been tough but, in many ways, it has also been one of the best times to start up and run a business. Learning how to be lean, focusing on our offer, using our creativity and delivering quality have been key to our success.

We developed a cost-effective, interactive, online magazine model, which is perfect for internal newsletters as well as customer communications – and as well as high-quality printed magazines, we have created campaigns such as reward and recognition schemes, websites and internal branding for large and small organisations. 

   

We continue to learn and add to our skills as technology keeps on moving and social media opportunities change the way we consume information. 

We have been privileged to work with some fantastic businesses and people. From small companies and charities to universities and large global organisations that have entrusted us to create engaging communications for thousands of their employees and customers.

Our thanks to everyone we have worked and partnered with in the last four years. It has been our pleasure.   

Where will we be in the next four years? Still here, still innovating, still working hard.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Beating the recession

What an inspiring blog post from Chris Barraclough in Marketing when he suggested that the recession is a great time to start a new agency.

The part I agreed with the most was when he referred to clients seeking new solutions that could improve their ROI and how starting out means you have none of the 'administrative fat' of the big agencies.

It's a premise that Elliott House has built its business on and an offer we find is attractive to our clients.

We can offer experienced and skilled editors and designers to work on projects at a cheaper price than the larger agencies as we don't carry any unnecessary overheads. It means we deliver a top service to large and small businesses but without the hefty price tag – especially good news now everyone is guarding their budgets more closely.

Times are hard but the right proposition, an abundance of creative ideas and excellent service will pay off every time.

Shopping for better communication

It's good to see that the high street has started to fight its way back into consumers' shopping baskets. Large supermarket chains and out of town retail parks may have lured us into their free parking lots with cheap deals and the convenience factor but smaller high street stores have at last spotted the crucial gap in the market. Their employees.

While online shopping has eliminated the need to exchange any kind of niceties with shop assistants (no one likes being pounced on as soon as they arrive in a store) it has also removed any physical human interaction which might have resulted in more product knowledge, confidence and actual joy in your purchase. (I don't know about you, but I still get a nagging doubt about my decision after buying anything on the web.)

Online shopping in the UK may be estimated to reach 81bn euros in 2011, according to the latest figures from IMRG, the UK's industry association for global retailing, but retailers are recognising there is still money to be made on the high street with the right proposition.

Holland & Barrett have just announced that it's shifting its marketing away from price promotions to focus more on its employees' expertise. It's a strategy Elliott House thinks is worth shouting about. It could be just the tonic for information-starved consumers who want reassurance that they're buying the correct product - rather than ignorantly shoving a packet of vitamins in the trolley alongside their frozen peas at the supermarket.

In a similar vein, retail guru Mary Portas is on a mission to bring a lot of love back to the high street. Her exploits in setting up her own shop in House of Fraser are currently being aired on Channel 4 and while she is focused on creating a better high street experience for older women, the principles she sets out about customer service should be on any store's shopping list.

"Shopping is about a sensory experience," explains Mary in the House of Fraser video below. "I want customers who come into this shop to feel cared about, loved. I want them to think: 'the time I was in that shop I was truly looked after.' And then I want them to feel fantastic."

While 37 million people might shop online in the UK, they and over 23 million others, are still interested in the 'sensory' shopping experience too. 

Investing in a better shopping environment means investing in employees. Mary shows, as is Holland & Barrett, that staff training, product knowledge and communication are key to pulling people through the door.

Customers want to be served by staff who believe in the brand, that understand the product and can help them to shop in confidence. And employees need to feel valued, knowledgable and informed to be able to do their jobs well.

Regular and effective internal communication can help retailers deliver those goals and beat the competition.