Manifest Comms - Guest Lecture

(Photo from Manifest Comms website they have won lots of awards!!)

Last week we were lucky enough to receive a lecture from Alex Witham and Lizzie Marlow, both of whom are Leeds Met PR Alumni and are now working at Manifest Comms in Leeds.

It was a really great, informal and conversational lecture and I thought I would share 5 key pieces of advice that I jotted down during their talk:

Agency VS In-House Experience

The chances are you’re probably going to get a lot of experience throughout your degree. I have undertaken placements and a year-long internship with various Leeds agencies throughout my time at university. Sorry to reiterate everything that’s always being preached, but it really is true – experience is invaluable to help you succeed in your degree and PR career.

Despite having a lot of experience under my belt, one thing I regret is not having undertaken a placement with an in-house PR department. I have always wondered how each experience compares and how they differ in developing an entry level practitioner’s skills.

This week I asked a number of course friends to comment on what their respective in-house/agency experience taught them. Adding to the comments, you’ll learn why I love agency work later in this article…

#Nomakeupselfie

The no-makeup selfie campaign has been a successful way of raising money and awareness for cancer support, with Cancer Research receiving over 800,000 donations and raising £2 million in 48 hours. This campaign is a great example of how social media can be hugely important for communicating important issues.

An Interview with Blogger Olivia...

Blogging has become a social media platform for the fashion gurus of modern society, but do we really appreciate or even recognise the hard work and creative posts?  It has given people like us, the encouragement to try different trends and venture away from the easy options, exploring more than one colour and unleashing that inner Gok.

Twenty year old and fashion fanatic Olivia, reveals her award winning blog: www.whatoliviadid.com, her journey into the fashion industry and “what Olivia did” to get where she is today:

The campaign that I love in February

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) launched the Blood Doesn’t Grow On Trees campaign on 21^st February, and the campaign is still running to date.  As a regular blood donor and a communication student, this campaign caught my eye.

Image sourced from blood.co.uk

The importance of SEO

For a long time now SEO (search engine optimisation) has been thought of as a dark art, black magic or an immeasurable formula. However with the growth of the internet age, this area of Public Relations is not to be overlooked.

Search engine optimisation in its simplest form is to try and make companies feature higher in Google’s rankings when entering keywords. It is important however, not to overuse these keywords as Google has the right to penalise and even take down your site off their search results pages. The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase traffic to a particular website in order to increase sales. A good way to measure how successful an individual is performing in his or her job role is to see the amount of hyperlinks they attain back to the company’s website.

Image sourced from Google