Category: Social media

Fuel prices power community of interest

Price information on a petrol pump dashboard

People living in small towns and villages don’t need telling that life is harder without a car. Disconnected, underfunded and unreliable, public transport doesn’t serve rural areas well in my experience.

My home county of Pembrokeshire typifies this picture, although there are efforts to address this. Welsh researchers found this year that some areas don’t even get one bus an hour! Bus stops (reduced by 3%), routes (15% less) and opportunities catch a bus (down 22%) all contracted during the pandemic across Wales.

And thanks to global events putting a rocket under fuel prices, life is harder for drivers too. As ever, these changes hit deprived communities and people who can’t work from home hardest.

It’s a grim picture. It may explain why talk about ‘connecting places’ often hits a wall of scepticism.

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Building trust takes more than soundbites

I’ve thought fitfully about relationships and how they shape our views during this grinding start to the year.

They keep families, teams, political organisations and communities of interest together. They’re imperfect, occasionaly fractious and sometimes maddening. But we would not be ourselves without them.

Connections and shared experiences that make life worth living have festered on the backburner since March last year. No amount of Zoom catch ups can fill the void this creates in our lives.

This is the context to my becoming more anxious with feelings that, for all the benefits that technology brings, people aren’t connecting with others who hold different views to theirs.

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Focusing on what matters (and avoiding what doesn’t) in 2020

As things return to normal after Christmas, I’ve thought a lot about what 2020 will be like for myself and those close to me.

It’s my 45th year, which makes me officially middle aged and will soon see me enter a different age drop down category in online surveys. It’s a big one for me personally and professionally. I feel grateful to start it in good health, with a happy family and a brilliant role as director at Social’s South West office.

The last decade has brought huge changes – political, social, technological – which confounded many predictions and upended the status quo. We started it as a family in Manchester before moving to the South West in 2010 and making a new life here. Through all of that, the most important and constant factor for me was the people: family, friends and colleagues, some of whom I worked with in 2010. They helped make 2019 a year to remember.

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Listening to your stakeholders, or out of the loop?

Public relations has come to mean quite a few things to different people. It’s a broad, ill-defined discipline covering an array of skill-sets.

Despite this, the core principles that underpin what we do are consistent. Chief among those is one that distinguishes good work from truly fantastic results, which can put organisations at the heart of conversations that matter to them.

This is, quite simply: understand your audience.

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Reputation matters: how developers can build trust in their work

Without putting too fine a point on it, developers’ reputations have had a challenging year.

I’ve been to a few public meetings lately where they’ve been criticised. It’s always been like this, especially when people don’t want development in their areas.

But it feels like the volume and tone of criticism has changed over the last year, as a growing range of issues has hit the mainstream. Land banking, executive pay, leasehold concerns, viability assessments and worries about the green belt are all in the headlines.

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New year, new hopes and engagement approaches

This Christmas was a good moment to reflect on what happened in 2017 and make plans for the year ahead.

Unusually for us, we haven’t travelled beyond Bristol this Christmas. Spending the festive break in Somerset provided an opportunity to really think about these things, as well as spend time with family and friends.

The last 12 months have been a hell of a time for me; memorable, challenging and exciting. It was a bit stop-start, with the snap general election disrupting projects whilst providing a new level of uncertainty for a government already absorbed by Brexit. Anyone remember ‘strong and stable’? It didn’t go well when the PM visited the South West and was a new low point for drab, one-way political campaigning in this country. It all feels like a different era now.

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