Flipboard is one of the new generation of news readers that provide a slick app to let you subscribe to news and topics on media websites, blogs and other social media and social networks.

The latest updates make it really easy to create your own magazine by curating interesting content that you find.

There are already more than half a million user generated magazines available, most probably read by the editor and her mum. However, it is still potentially a useful tool for PR and corporate communications professionals. One important thing to remember is that although Flipboard call it a magazine, all you are actually doing is curating existing content and not creating new articles.

I’ve created my own magazine called PR and Corporate Comms News. You can subscribe to it here.

These are some of my initial thoughts on how corporate communications and PR professionals can use it:

Select your Flipboard sources

The first step is selecting the right sources. The easiest way is to simply to browse the categories in Flipboard to add your favourite sources. For example mine include the FT, Harvard Business Review and The Guardian.

Then you use the search bar to search lots of social networks, but more importantly it also searches for RSS feeds which nearly every media site provides. This means you can add your favourite and more niche business and professional websites and blogs. Rather annoyingly Flipboard presents these (most useful) results last so you have to click more and then scroll right down past all of the social networks to get to the best results. So to add this blog you can simply search for “Stuart Bruce” or “A PR Guy’s Musings” and it will appear in the RSS feeds list.

The RSS search frequently fails to find feeds for sites that have them. If the search does fail to find the exact publication you want then you can manually type the full URL of the RSS feed into the search bar. An easier way to do it is to go to the site in your browser and then copy the RSS link so you can paste it into Flipboard.

Within Flipboard you can also connect your other social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, SoundCloud, Seino Weibo and Renren.

However, a big time saving tip is you don’t need to add every source as you can also easily add content to your magazine using a bookmark from your desktop browser. To install it go to the  Web Tools on the Flipboard website.

Create your Flipboard magazine and add content

Creating your magazine is as simple as finding the content you want to add in Flipboard and clicking on the + symbol and then choosing the magazine you want to add it to. They call this ‘+Flip It’.

At the moment it is still quite clunky and has a ‘beta’ fail to it and in the app the only way you can create your magazine is when you add your first piece of content.

You want to think carefully about the name. Remember you want it to be useful and interesting for readers so a descriptive title such as “PR and Corporate Comms News” is a better title for my Flipboard magazine than “Stuart’s PR Stuff”. You then want to write an interesting and compelling description. Mine is:

Public relations and corporate communications news and views for the digital and social era. Curated by international PR trainer and consultant Stuart Bruce.

Getting the title and the description right will make it easier for people to find you when they search and browse the user-generated magazines in Flipboard.

You will also want to go to the web tools page on the Flipboard website to add the browser bookmark tool that lets you “+Flip It” from sites you visit on your laptop.

On an Android phone or tablet you can also use the Share function to “Flip It” into your Flipboard magazine. You can also add a bookmarklet to your iPhone or iPad to do the same thing (although I haven’t tested this).

Curating the right content – including your own

The key to making your Flipboard magazine interesting is to curate useful and relevant content from lots of different sources. If you limit yourself to too few sources then your readers might as well read those publications rather than your curated one. Why listen to the monkey when you can hear the organ grinder?

The clever bit is to include some, but not too much, of your own content into your magazine. This should include:

• Blog posts – contrary to what the fashion-concious social media gurus will tell you blogs are still a very important channel for publishing your own content. They are one of the best ways to demonstrate expertise, in-depth knowledge and that old PR stand-by ‘thought leadership’.
• Mentions in news articles and features – in the good old days getting editorial coverage was only part of the equation. The bit that too many PR people missed was ensuring that relevant people actually saw these ‘press cuttings’. A Flipboard magazine is a great way of collating and distributing your online ‘clippings’. The fastest way to add them is simply using the ‘+Flip It’ bookmark in your browser.
• News – news releases, white papers and articles from your corporate website and social media news room. Remember that this isn’t always your most compelling content so be selective and only include the best content.
• Multimedia – you can include videos from your YouTube channel, photos from Flickr or Instagram, or even podcasts from SoundCloud.

Editing your magazine

You still can’t edit your magazine properly within the app, but Flipboard has now added a basic web editor tool. It lets you change the order of the stories and choose an alternative cover story. It also provides you with basic analytics showing how many readers and ‘page flips’ you’ve had, as well as how many articles you’ve curated. The web editor also enables you to create a new magazine.

Promoting your magazine

If you’ve given your magazine a good title and description then you should start to pick up some subscribers who find you directly via Flipboard. However, you can also help the process along by sharing the magazine directly with your contacts via any of the social networks you’ve connected to Flipboard. The short URL that Flipboard generates prompts people to download Flipboard and subscribe to your magazine. As with all automated services don’t just use the copy it generates, but write your own that says something relevant to your contacts.

If you are logged into Facebook the short URL it generates for you to share also shows some of your Facebook friends who already use Flipboard (or at least those who have connected it to Facebook). This means you can selectively send private messages to those people you think would be interested in subscribing. In the hurly burly of social network updates it is easy to miss what people have shared. As you know these people you should be able to judge if it is appropriate to send them the link via email, Twitter DM, LinkedIn message etc. But be sensible and don’t spam all your contacts with private messages.

And finally don’t forget the most important way to share content is still email. Simply email your relevant contacts and remember to include an explanation of what Flipboard is and why they should subscribe to your magazine.

Who uses Flipboard?

One downside is that Flipboard is only currently available for Android and iPhone so despite the fact it is a free app your magazine won’t be available to the millions of Windows Phone and Blackberry users. It’s also not the only news reader so lots of your potential audience might be using alternative readers such as Google Currents or Feedly.

Flipboard claims it has 56 million users with particularly strong markets being the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Spain.

Please subscribe to PR and Corporate Comms News and let me know if you create your own magazine.

The election for the 2014 president of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has sparked several fascinating debates on both public relations and the future and relevance of the CIPR. What is without question is that this time, in Dr Jon White and Stephen Waddington, we have two absolutely outstanding candidates for president. I would be delighted with either.

That said this is an election and that means a decision. I am voting for Stephen Waddington.

One criticism that some have levelled at Stephen (or Wadds as he is more commonly known) is that he is too focused on the social media and digital aspects of public relations. I do not believe this to be the case. I spent the first half to date (indeed most of my career) so far doing ‘traditional’ public relations. As has Wadds. What we have in common is an understanding of the deeper social, political and economic impact of the internet and social media, as well as the ability to translate this into successful public relations practice.

His statements on public affairs, corporate communications and internal communications all demonstrate that he is capable of leading the CIPR across the full range of public relations disciplines and practice. What’s more he understands that these old silos and specialism are not the future of the profession.

Stephen Waddington or ‘Wadds’ in his own words:

I spent yesterday at the European Parliament in Brussels running a training session for MEPs and their staff about Wikipedia and best practice. Most of what I said was based on the CIPR’s Wikipedia Best Practice guidelines that we produced last year in co-operation with Wikimedia and I had a small hand in helping to create.

On the Eurostar home I discovered that the training I delivered might already be out of date as yet another PR and Wikipedia ‘scandal’ had erupted this time about BP’s Wikipedia page. However, this time it appears that the ‘guilty’ parties probably aren’t BP’s PR team who appear to have followed all the best practice, but the online ‘chattering classes’ and some Wikipedians who’ve taken offence at PRs at a ‘big, bad’ corporate following Wikipedia’s own guidance.

Basically the story is that Arturo Silva, a member of BP’s corporate communications team in Houston, created the Arturo at BP Wikipedia user account and used it to interact with the Wikipedia community in order to improve the BP Wikipedia page.

His user profile is fairly comprehensive, explains what the account is for and makes it clear he will only contribute to BP’s Talk page:

“Welcome to my user page. I have established this account to help improve BP-related articles in line with Wikipedia standards and guidelines. In the interest of full transparency, I chose “Arturo at BP” as my username so that my affiliation with BP is abundantly clear to all parties I may interact with on Wikipedia. Per WP:ORGNAME, I believe that this username is appropriate, and I should point out that I will be the only person to use this account.

Out of respect for guidelines on conflict of interest and the importance of a neutral point of view, and in recognition of the ongoing debate regarding companies’ involvement on Wikipedia, I will only be editing Talk pages and will not make any edits to encyclopedia articles. My primary goal in being active on Wikipedia through this account is to improve the overall quality of BP-related articles in line with Wikipedia guidelines.

Any delays in responding to inquiries are due to my other roles and responsibilities at BP which take up a significant amount of my time, so I appreciate your patience with me. I do look forward to working with other editors, and welcome any questions you may have on my Talk page.”

Most of this is inline with Wikipedia’s own guidelines and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Wikipedia Best Practice Guide that was created last year by the CIPR’s Social Media Panel in conjunction with ‘Wikipedians’ and Wikimedia.

I’d have recommended that the user profile stated absolutely that he worked for BP’s corporate communications team and there is question mark over if the company name should have been included in the user name, but apart from that it is all pretty good.

Arturo Silva then used his ‘userspace’ on this account to draft improvements to the BP page which he then pointed to on the BP talk page. He wrote everything from a neutral point of view and importantly always provided credible third party references for everything he wrote. This is precisely what is recommended in the CIPR guidelines and the idea is that this information is then checked by independent ‘Wikipedians’ and eventually incorporated into the actual Wikipedia user page by those independent third party editors.

Where it appears to have gone wrong is that despite Wikipedia’s commitment to a ‘neutral point of view’ the reality is somewhat different. The CIPR guidelines state that the definition of a neutral point of view is:

“All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopaedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias. Fundamentally, where there is a contentious issue associated with a topic, Wikipedia content should be a good reference for the debate. In a few words, neutrality means this: report the debate, don’t take part in it.”

The problem is that people don’t agree what “representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias” actually means. However, for some Wikipedians, and some member of the social media chattering classes, big business is always suspect and they would prefer for it not to be included as a ‘significant view’. It’s fine for an environmental activist to actually edit the page (as long as they don’t actually work for Greenpeace), but not for a ‘big, bad’ company to follow Wikipedia’s own guidelines.

On reflection I think my training yesterday is still valid as I caveated the CIPR’s Wikipedia Best Practice guidelines with the advise that it was always best to err on the side of caution. There are some brilliant, sensible people who devote hours of valuable time to editing and improving Wikipedia. But, as in any community, there is also a minority (who are always the most vocal) who aren’t reasonable and want their personal micro-view of the world to be inflicted on everyone.

It’s that minority you need to be careful of and reflect in your dealings with Wikipedia which is why I advised “Just because you’re allowed to do something, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea”.

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.

In December I took part in a fascinating panel debate on ‘Defining ethics for today’s communicators’ at the European Association of Communication Directors‘ forum in Amsterdam. It was facilitated by Mike Cooper, editor-in-chief of the Holland Herald and the other panellists were Andre Manning, the vice president and global head of external communications at Royal Philips; Nicole Gorfer, the head of communications at Roche Pharma AG Germany; and Professor Rosa Chun, Chair of Global Leadership and Responsibility at University College Dublin.

Much of the discussion focused on the importance of ethical codes of conduct for communications professionals. From the audience Philippe Borremans, chief social media officer and CSR coordinator at Van Marcke Group, asked how many of those in the room had signed the Code of Athens (PDF). Not a lot was the answer. Although personally I don’t believe that means people don’t subscribe to it. My own hand stayed down as I haven’t signed the Code of Athens, mainly because I had no idea you needed to. If Phillipe had asked if I was aware of it and abided by its principles then I could have given an unequivocal yes.

Many of the principles of the Code of Athens has since been incorporated into the codes of conducts of many of the world’s professional public relations and corporate communications organisations.  I joined the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in 1988 when I was still a communications student (although it hadn’t yet achieved chartered status) and have abided by its professional code of conduct throughout my entire career.

One of the points that I made was that codes of conduct were pointless unless they were enforced with sufficient vigour. Despite the existence of codes PR and communications people still have a dubious reputation and are constantly maligned in the media with phrases like “PR spin” common parlance. The danger for ethical public relations and communications professionals is that we are too often confused with the often far more high profile unethical communicators and publicists.

We must demonstrate that membership of professional bodies means something. This means rigorously enforcing codes of conduct and sanctions against those who transgress them. At the moment we still have professional PR organisations whose members appear to transgress yet ‘internal investigations’ clear them of wrong doing. The processes need to be far more transparent. The UK PRCA’s investigations into potential malpractice by Bell Pottinger simply reported that “there was no credible evidence of wrong-doing”. The actual report (Word) was slightly more critical, but couldn’t be termed an in-depth investigation.

However, stricter enforcement isn’t the whole answer as most of the ‘PR’ practitioners engaging in unethical behaviour are the 80% who aren’t members of a professional organisation. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations needs to be more vigorous in promoting chartered status and help clients and employers understand that the benefits of employing a PR professional who is a member of a chartered institute are the same as employing a chartered accountant rather than a bookkeeper.

In a recent PRmoment article the CIPR’s director of policy and communications Phil Morgan said:

“The CIPR’s Royal Charter recognises that professional standards in public relations are in the public interest. The status of public relations depends on gaining respect for the quality of the work we deliver and for the integrity with which it is carried out. Vital to this is the accountability provided through codes of conduct such as the one that all CIPR members make a commitment to when they join.

“Ethics within such codes are expressed in general terms – honesty, integrity, transparency, confidence and competence. These concepts need to be applied in a rapidly changing world and both professionals and the public need access to resources that keep them relevant. In key areas, especially digital and social, where the profession is changing continuously and expectations around disclosure and transparency are increasing, everyone needs access to best practice and resources that explains the central ethical concepts in terms of their day-to-day work.”

During the EACD debate I also made the point that indications from the UK were that unless the public relations profession put its own house in order then government might step in and do it by regulation. The Leveson Inquiry and subsequent report into press standards shows that there is appetite for statutory regulation. Likewise the public affairs and lobbying profession is facing statutory legislation to force it to publish a proper register of clients. In both instances it is because the industries have failed to provide adequate self-regulation.

Today unethical behaviour is more likely to be exposed

Another issue that I raised is that today there is a new dimension to ethics. If we believe that public relations is about reputation then fundamentally it must be about behaviour. There has always been a divide between what is right and wrong, although where that divide lies is always open for debate and indeed might change in different circumstances. What is different today is that in the past you had a greater chance of ‘getting away’ with bad behaviour. There was a limited number of people scrutinising you and even more limited number capable of exposing your bad behaviour. Bluntly you had a chance of getting away with it.

The rise of social media and citizen journalism mean that companies and organisations are under far greater scrutiny than they ever have been. Every customer, every employee, every member of the community has the power to record what they see and to publish it in an instant. Your media statements can be analysed by experts – be they bloggers, academics, campaigners or enthusiasts – who will identify every error and have the capacity to expose your ‘spin’.

So even if you don’t subscribe to the notion of doing the ‘right’ thing because it is right you need to behave better, just because you’ll get caught and be exposed if you don’t.

Some of the panel discussion also focused on the difference between personal/professional ethics and corporate ethics. In the same PRmoment article Professor Tom Watson of Bournemouth University gives examples of how personal professional ethics in public relations are frequently violated:

“Every year, a few students coming back from placements with stories of how their PR employers had misled clients, asked them to write fake customer reviews on websites, switched account teams after winning pitches, charge high for untrained internship staff and falsified evaluation data.“

He adds:

“The route to ethical public relations lies primarily in the honesty and moral compass of individuals, especially those who are leaders and managers of PR operations; not in a heavier, quasi-judicial system.”

Professor Watson is right we should be able to rely on “the honesty and moral compass of individuals”, but we can’t make the assumption that it will always automatically kick in. There needs to be far greater emphasis in PR education and training on teaching the fundamentals of ethics and illustrated with practical examples and ‘moral maze’ type exercises. This should start with PR undergraduate and post graduate courses, but also be part of the membership induction when someone first joins a professional body like the CIPR. Philippe’s idea of signing the Code of Athens is a good one and perhaps we should look at getting new members to physically sign the CIPR code of conduct.

The debate about public relations ethics isn’t going to go away and I believe will continue to increase in importance and is an issue that the PR profession needs to take far more seriously.

An analysis of recent tweets mentioning the word Rotherham throws up some interesting results. The first graph looks at the ‘level of buzz’ on different days and perhaps not surprisingly the top day was November 25, the day after the news came out that social workers at Rotherham council had removed three children from their foster carers because the carers were members of UKIP.

A more interesting graph is the one that identifies the top users by share of voice:

The top two tweeters by share of voice are Respect by-election candidate Yvonne Ridley (43%) and Respect MP George Galloway (25%) with the rest all about in the 7-11% range. Another on the list is Richard Lowe (UKIP’s by-election candidate). Blogger Harry Cole, the Telegraph’s James Delingpole and Patrick O’Flynn, chief political commentator of the Express also make the top ten.

The top nine most shared URLs are all about the UKIP foster parents story with the tenth being a Guardian story on Labour’s controversial selection process.

The related phrases word cloud surprised me as the dominant related topics were not foster parents, council or UKIP as I had expected.

In fact none of the related phrases stand out more than any of the others. It is interesting to note what words do not appear. New Labour, Nigel Farage, Denis Macshane and Yvonne Ridley all do appear, but Labour and Sarah Champion (Labour’s by-election candidate) don’t, although Sarah and Bluebell Wood (Sarah Champion is CEO of this Rotherham hospice) do.

As a comparison I also took a quick look at the results for Croydon North where there is also a by-election. Once again Respect’s candidate Lee Jasper is a related phrase, but not Labour’s candidate Steve Reed. If you exclude the automated @CroydonFeed then once again Respect dominates the conversation with Lee Jasper and George Galloway topping the list. Although this time three Labour names do make the top ten – Richard Angell from Progress, Coop Party staffer Martin Tiedemann and shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna (who incidentally beat Labour’s candidate Steve Reed to win his own selection in Streatham).

One possible explanation for Labour’s candidates not appearing on either related phrases cloud is the rather odd use of @sarah4rotherham and @steve4croydon as Twitter handles. The use of campaign names rather than real names give the impression of being terribly impersonal and that the candidates are only interested in votes, rather than individual local people and issues. It looks like 20th century campaigning using 21st century channels.

It also shows that Respect is putting more energy into using Twitter and that Twitter doesn’t actually reflect what is happening on the ground.

I used Edelman’s TweetLevel to analyse tweets between November 11 and November 27.

There are a lot of Twitter analysis, influence, measurement and evaluation tools. A lot! However, for PR and corporate communications professionals TweetLevel from Edelman is definitely worth a look and there is new version just released. For a start it is designed by people who really understand public relations, corporate communications, public affairs and the relationship between influence and reputation.

TweetLevel lets you analyse by Twitter ID and topic or hashtag. Unlike some tools you don’t need you don’t need to authorise it on your Twitter account to analyse a Twitter ID. This means you can easily use it to analyse an account that you are interested in. It also doesn’t ‘force’ you to tweet about it in order to see your full report.

The topic or hashtag analysis lets you see who is talking most and is influential about the most relevant issues. The advanced search options on TweetLevel are also impressive with the ability to filter specific date ranges, languages, include/exclude words and phrases and search within a Twitter user ID. You can also analyse how a specific URL is being shared.

For the topic search you get three graphs. The first is level of buzz over the period, showing the peaks and troughs. The second is a pie chart showing the top users by share of voice and the third is a bar chart showing the most shared web links. You also get a ‘related phrases’ word cloud. The related phrases can be a really useful tool for helping to refine not just the words and phrases you monitor for, but also the ones you should use in conversation and engagement.

Another interesting feature is that once you’ve performed a simple or advanced search you can enter your email address to be mailed with a list of the most influential tweeters (not simply the most popular). This isn’t an email harvesting exercise either as Edelman don’t keep your email address.

A tip for PR or public affairs people is that one way of using the Twitter ID analysis is to identify other topics that someone is interested. You might already know that they are a relevant stakeholder for your issue or organisation, but what else makes them tick? Do their other interests make them potentially more of an ally or perhaps a threat? Do you share other common interests so you can engage on more than just your issue?

Once you have done the Twitter ID analysis you get a graph showing where someone sits on an influence/popularity axis and is categorised into different types of Twitter account: Viewer, Commentator, Curator, Idea Starter and Amplifier. You also get a word cloud showing the topics they talk about most, an activity graph showing when the user has been most active and the time of day that they tweet most. You can also compare one user with another.

One improvement that I’d like to see is the ability to filter the word cloud, in particular to remove hashtags. If someone frequently uses a hashtag or has recently been at an event with a hashtag then this can skew the word cloud and make it difficult to see what they actually talk about.

My influence score is 80.8 and TweetLevel identifies me as an Idea Starter / Amplifier.

Idea Starters are the “small collective of people who are the creative brains behind many of the thoughts and ideas that other people talk about… their insightful opinions often flow and are repeated throughout conversations long after they have left.” Amplifiers are “people who frequently have a large audience and following.”

TweetLevel’s general verdict on my Twitter ID influence score is:

You are a Twitter superstar. In your segment, you have a huge number of followers who find what you are saying interesting. As Spiderman said, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Carry on tweeting and sharing your opinions – people like what you have to say.

One of the big criticisms levelled at Klout is that it doesn’t really measure influence and it can’t be trusted because it keeps its algorithms secret. Personally I find Kred and PeerIndex to be far more useful tools. Unlike Klout TweetLevel is transparent about its methodology and publishes the formula of how it calculates the TweetLevel. It uses more than 20 different variables, all of which are explained. Because the science of influence isn’t really a science then much of this is open to challenge, but that’s exactly what Edelman want you to do:

This tool will be in permanent beta as we seek to continually improve its functionality based upon your feedback. Even though we believe that it goes a great way to understand and quantify the varying importance of different people’s usage of Twitter, by no means whatsoever do we believe we have fully solved the ‘influence’ problem. What we would appreciate is your views, advice and criticism is crucial in helping us understand social media measurement.

TweetLevel was created by Edelman director and head of influence engagement @jonnybentwood.

I’ve been publishing The Stuart Bruce Daily using paper.li for a while and it has never been something that I’ve put a great deal of effort into. In fact it always felt a bit ‘spammy’ to me and I often thought about stopping it. The reason I kept it going is that it does seem to have an appreciative audience and I regularly have positive interactions and comments because of it – on public social channels, private channels and even face-to-face when I’m speaking at conferences.

So today I’ve spent some time curating what appears so that it is hopefully more public relations and corporate communications focused. I’ve added some dedicated new content sources and set some filters. At the moment it still takes content from all of my Twitter timeline links, but I’m going to tweak my Twitter lists and make some of my private ones public so I can use them to create the content.

It’s always interesting to get feedback so let me know what you think.

Earlier this year I was one of several contributors to the ‘best-selling’ PR book Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals. It was published by Wiley in July and on pre-sales alone became a best-selling PR book on Amazon (which admittedly doesn’t require huge volumes of sales!)

Despite the breadth of is content there was much that Share This didn’t cover which is why I’m so pleased that Wiley has commissioned Share This Too. The new book won’t just be an update of the first, but will contain entirely new content from some of the authors of Share This and some exciting new contributors.

The two chapters that I contributed were: Modern Media Relations and Social Media Newsrooms; and Modernising Public Affairs for the Digital Age. I’m getting asked to deliver more and more online PR training to both in-house teams, public affairs consultancies and PR agencies and the three most popular are modern media relations, online crisis communications and digital public affairs.

The book has received some terrific reviews and endorsements from a host of business, media and public relations experts including Apprentice ‘star’ Lord Sugar, David Meerman Scott (author of the world’s best selling PR book), Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) and Paul Mylrea (director of communications at the BBC).

Share This Too will feature contributions from 35 contributors but the two I’m most thrilled about are Jed Hallam (who is hopefully about to become a best-selling author in his own right with The Social Media Manifesto) and Chris Norton. Jed and Chris are both ex-colleagues who I had the tremendous privilege of working alongside and I was able to learn so much from when I was MD of Wolfstar.

Share This Too will be edited by Stephen Waddington and Rob Brown with contributions from: Dominic Burch, Robin Wilson, Simon Sanders, Ged Carroll, Kate Matlock, Adam Parker, Mark Pack, Sharon O’Dea, Paul Fabretti, Michael Litman, Russell Goldsmith, Daljit Bhurji, Stephen Davies, Scott Seaborn, Dan Tyte, Matt Appleby, Kevin Ruck, Hanna Basha, Chris Norton, Becky McMichael, Rachel Miller, Stuart Bruce, Richard Bailey, Jane Wilson, Julio Romo, Jed Hallam, Katy Howell, Gemma Griffiths, Philip Sheldrake, Richard Bagnall, Drew Benvie, Andrew Smith and Simon Collister.

To mark the first two years of the UK’s Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government the bright folks at Insight Public Affairs have put together a great mind map infographic of the policy issues. Insight has mapped out the:

‘headline policy drivers spanning: the economy; public service reform; localism; welfare reform; and, the international agenda.’

The mind map is a useful tool not just for public affairs and corporate communications professionals, but anyone who is interested in UK politics.

You can also download a PDF or contact John Lehal at Insight for an A2 poster.