Entries have just opened for the UK Social Media Awards 2013 which are now in their fourth year having previously been known as the Some Comms Awards. I’ve been a judge since the start and am pleased to say that I’m judging again this year alongside some great people including: PRCA chair Sally Costerton; Frank PR chair Graham Goodkind; Paul Fabretti, head of social media for O2 Telefonica and Stephen Waddington, European director of digital and social media for Ketchum.

The UK Social Media Awards are particularly special for me for as well as the usual ‘Best Use of’… Twitter, Facebook, social media in a crisis, community engagement etc type awards there is a very important one.

The Mark Hanson Award honours my former colleague and good friend who we tragically lost in 2011. It recognises the “brightest and most promising social media communicator under 30 years old”. This award is free to enter and you can self-nominate. So if you’re under 30 and doing great things then please don’t be bashful and put your name forward. If you know someone who is eligible please make sure they enter as too many folk are typically British and too reserved to put their names forward.

The awards are sponsored by PR Moment and supported by both the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA).

This viral video digital public affairs campaign from the Campaign for Equal Marriage was the winner of last year’s Best Viral Campaign and the overall Grand Prix prize.

It’s almost a year since I sold my 50% stake in Wolfstar and decided to become an independent communications consultant and trainer. The time seems to have flown by, but it can’t of been that long ago as tonight’s SABRE Awards in Brussels reminds me.

Wolfstar has been shortlisted for a Gold SABRE Award for its work as the global lead PR agency on the launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play phone, a campaign which very much happened while I was still running Wolfstar. The team did a great job to successfully launch the Xperia Play at Mobile World Telecom in Barcelona in February 2011.

Details of the phone had been extensively leaked before the launch and there was huge buzz and expectation about the much anticipated ‘PlayStation’ phone. That meant the main challenge of the launch wasn’t generating coverage – there was almost too much of that – but instead it was focused on ensuring accurate and quality coverage, to combat some of the many rumours circulating on tech blogs. This was before Sony acquired all of Sony Ericsson to create Sony Mobile, so it meant that messaging had to be carefully planned between the then two separate companies.

The team worked with several of Sony Ericsson’s other agencies to create a range of creative content that was then published on a custom-built social media newsroom that had been optimised to publish content in ‘real-time’. This meant that as journalists live blogged as the actual launch was taking place the team was using the newsroom to constantly provide new official content for them to use.

UPDATE: Just spotted that there is now a mini-case study on the new WolfstarPR site. Good luck to everyone, especially Will, Clare and Anthony who did most of the hard work.

Today’s announcement of the PRCA Awards 2011 shortlist reminded me of a post about top 10 tips to win a PR award that I’d started writing more than six months ago, but never got round to finishing.

Over the last 18 months or so I have judged PR and social media industry awards for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the Public Relations Consultants Association (last year, not this) and the Some Awards. As a result I have seen hundreds of award entries ranging from the brilliant to the mediocre. Over the years I have also entered and won a few modest awards of my own. These are just a few thoughts that have accumulated as a result of this experience.

1) Stick to the rules

You would be surprised how many entries you see that have simply not obeyed the rules. It shouldn’t be hard to stick to the specified word count, use the headings/sections required and provide any supporting material in the right format. If you can’t even get the basics right why should the judges waste time on your entry when there are dozens and dozens that have obeyed the rules?

2) Customise your entry

You will possibly want to enter the same piece of work into more than one category and into different sets of awards. That doesn’t mean you can just keep recycling the same old entry. On the most simple level, the rules for different sets of awards are frequently different. You’ll also need to rewrite the entry for different categories. The focus and elements that you might want to highlight for ‘Best International Campaign’ might be different to those for ‘ Best Technology Campaign’, even though it is for the same campaign.

3) Make it perfect

Do you really want an award entry that is meant to showcase your excellence to contain spelling and grammar mistakes (I know as I type this that I’ve inevitably made a mistake in this post)? In any industry sector mistakes would be a problem, but when you are entering awards for excellence in the communications industry you’ve got to show you can communicate perfectly.

4) Get permission

In the frantic dash to get your entry in before the submission deadline it is all too easy to miss getting permission from your client or boss. Don’t. Many companies and organisations have rules and policies for how, when and even if they enter awards. Your relationship with the client or your boss is far more important than winning any industry award. I’ve seen winning entries withdrawn because the PR agency didn’t get permission from the client before submitting it. Some clients are happy to just give permission, others will need to approve the entry, especially if the campaign involved more than one agency.

5) Give credit

Your excellent work is rarely, if ever, a solo effort. Make sure you give appropriate credit to everyone in the team. This includes junior team members, suppliers and freelances, as well as the in-house team at the client that made all your great work possible. It also includes other PR agencies, design or digital agencies that worked on the campaign.

6) Tell the whole story and make it standalone

When judges have to look at dozens and dozens of entries they don’t have time to go off and look at all the supporting material. The entry on its own has to be enough to grab the attention of the judge and convince him/her that the entry is worth considering. The supporting material will only become useful when sifting the final shortlist.

7) Tell the truth

However tempting it might be to ‘gild the lily’ or spin the results – don’t. It was always ethically wrong, but now it is much easier for judges to research the campaign themselves. Remember ‘Google never forgets’. The internet is also a mine of publicly available data. If judges smell a rat they can and often will check for themselves. I’ve been on judging panels where we’ve eliminated entries for inflating the results or making claims that are obviously spurious.

8) Make the objectives match the results

For me, and I do know other judges who differ from this opinion, the most important elements of an award entry are the objectives and the results/evaluation. It doesn’t matter how creative or impressive the actual campaign was unless it actually delivers tangible results that meet the objectives set. The best objectives are usually communications objectives that can be measured. Superficially setting business objectives (e.g. sales) can appear to be better, but you have to make sure that the work you actually did was the main contributor to achieving that business objective. Usually entries don’t because they can’t. And a word of warning – judges can often tell if you’ve written/altered the objectives to fit the results.

9) Say why it is different

You don’t win awards just for doing good work. All your work should be brilliant. You should win awards for doing things that go that one step beyond. Perhaps it is that the odds were stacked against you and you overcame them. Maybe it was a frantically short timescale to deliver. Is it the first time something has been done this way? Whatever it is, make it clear why it is different.

10) Explain what challenges you had to overcome

Judges live in the real world. We know that things rarely go 100% to plan. S**t happens. It’s how you pick yourself up and fix the problem that is impressive. Don’t be afraid to use your entry to share what went wrong, just remember to say how you turned adversity into victory.

These are just a few quick tips off the top of my head. If you’ve got any more tips then please leave them in the comments.

This year I’ve again got the honour of being one of the judges in the second annual Some Comms Awards. There are 19 different categories to enter, including a new one – the Mark Hanson Award, in honour of our colleague Mark Hanson to recognise the brightest and most promising social media communicator under 30 years old.

The Some Comms Awards are organised by Don’t Panic and are supported by the PRCA, CIPR, LGcommunications and PRmoment.com.

The other categories are:

• Best use of Twitter
• Best use of Facebook
• Best use of Youtube
• Best use of Foursquare
• Best Business Blog
• Best Viral Campaign
• Best Community Engagement
• Best use of Social Media to Research and Evaluate
• Best use of Social Media in a Crisis
• Innovation
• Private Sector
• Public Sector
• Charity / Not For Profit
• Low Budget Campaign
• Best Social Media Campaign
• Best In House Team
• Best Small Agency
• Best Large Agency
• Grand Prix

You can enter up to four categories for free, with additional entries costing £50 + VAT. The closing date is Friday, 22 July.

I’m one of the speakers at the conference which is on Thursday, March 3 at the stunning Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. I’ll be speaking about measuring and evaluating social media and the thorny subject of ROI (that’s return on investment).

Other speakers who will be talking about their award winning social media campaigns include:

• Adrian Arthur and Richard Ranft from the British Library talking about its UK SoundMap
• Mark Jennings of FreshNetworks talking about using FourSquare for the Jimmy Choo trainer hunt
• Emma Leech of the University of Nottingham on its Election 2010 blog
• Jordan Stone from We Are Social on the Marmarati campaign for Unilever [disclosure Wolfstar Consultancy counsels Unilever globally on social media PR at a corporate level]

You can book your place at the Some Comms Awards Conference here.

A couple of months ago I was privileged to be one of the judges for the SOME Awards (SOcial MEdia). The shortlist we drew up is here and includes Liverpool Football Club, JD Sports, McCann Manchester, Seventy Seven PR, Speed, We Are Social, the British Library, Friends of the Earth, BBC, FreshNetworks and 1000heads to name but a few. But if you want to find out the winners and enjoy a good night of entertainment and high quality networking then you need to attend the ceremony next Thursday.

A reliable source tells me that there are still a few tickets left which you can book online.

Unlike many awards these are free to enter, with the only cost being to attend the awards ceremony on December 9. The Some Comms Awards are being run independently by Don’t Panic, the events company that was responsible for organising the UK’s first ever public relations social media conference way back in November 2005. I was one of the speakers at that conference, as was Neville Hobson and Philip Young and we’re all judges of the Some Comms Awards which means we’ve all got a long track-record in public relations social media. Other judges include Kerry Bridge (global digital media communications manager at Dell), Alex Aitken (director of communications and strategy at Westminster City Council), Rob Skinner (head of PR at PayPal) and Phil Jones (UK sales and marketing director at Brother).

The independent awards are being supported by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and LG Communications.

The entry deadline is September 20 so you’ve got plenty of time to complete your submissions into categories that include Best Business Blog, Best Industry Blog, and Best Social Media Campaign. There are also sector specific categories covering private sector, public sector, charity/not for profit as well as team categories for in-house, small agency and large agency.

As well as being a judge of the Some Comms Awards I’m also a judge for the Public Relations Consultants Association awards.

The COI is full of excellent PR and marketing professional’s whose job it is to ensure that the millions of pounds that the government spends on PR and marketing is spent in the very best way. In terms of spend it is one of the UK PR industry’s biggest ‘clients’. The fact that the COI has recognised how bad AVEs are should send a very strong signal to the PR industry and clients in the commercial sector.

I started my first public relations job 20 years ago and even then AVEs were a totally discredited metric. Personally I think AVEs are mainly used by weak PR people who aren’t confident, mature or strong enough to stand-up to marketing people who ask for AVEs because they are simple to understand and compare with other marketing communications spend. The fact that AVEs are intellectually vacuous seems to be irrelevant because they can hoodwink and mislead the board/C-suite with a metric with a £/$ sign in front and pretend it is something to do with ROI. It isn’t.

I will provide clients with AVEs if they insist, but only after first counselling why they don’t work and then making sure that every time I provide them they come with a health warning and accompanied by a more intelligent way of measuring and evaluating success against agreed objectives.

Last night the Wolfstar team went to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations PRide Awards. Wolfstar was nominated in three categories and was lucky enough to win the Best Use of Social Media award. I’ve just been going through the other winning case studies and was disappointed (actually no I was disgusted) to see that so many of them used AVEs as part of the measurement and evaluation. What’s even worse is that some of the entries use the even more spurious ‘PR value’. This is where they multiply the AVE by a made up number (usually three) and say that it’s because ‘editorial is worth three times as much as advertising because it’s more credible’.

How is public relations going to be taken seriously as an industry and profession if PR people aspiring to be the best of the best use such discredited measurement tools? It’s little wonder that PR is not always given the respect it deserves if we’re surrounded by those with so little understanding of their own industry. What’s even worse is that the judges let them get away with it and gave them awards! It’s the judges who have really let the PR industry down.

For next year I’d like to see the CIPR following the COI’s lead and proving that it is at the forefront of the profession by sending out a strict instruction that AVEs are not an acceptable measurement and evaluation metric for award entries. At the very least it should start a debate and consultation on the issue.

I’d welcome comments on this post as I’m sure that there are many PR people who will disagree with me – and many that will agree!