All posts by Lauren Woodhouse

Walking through the doors of Liberty Communications four months ago I was prepared for the unexpected.

Not knowing a great deal about the Technology industry I was ready for an influx of information and the possibility that I’d be very much out of my depth.However, as time went on and I got used to my surroundings I began to feel a little less like a fish out of water.

My first day at Liberty did not get off to a great start: having been invited into a brainstorm meeting for a client I learnt my first fairly obvious lesson; the need to understand what the client does before trying to help think up campaigns.

The sheer fear that I was going to be asked something or even that someone would look in my direction was enough to make me realise I needed to do my homework to get along in this industry. Slowly but surely however, I began to grasp more understanding, and began to enjoy the work I was doing far more.

As an intern at Liberty I have been fortunate enough to assist on a variety of their clients. Similarly working with a range of the Liberty staff I was able to learn from their different styles, industry knowledge and experience. Being able to work with not only the great team, but also their clients I decided to peruse my career within the technology industry further.

The B2B sector is not one that I would have imagined myself in (historically consumer is known as a more attractive, glitzy area) however, I found myself watching and even participating in the creativity that goes hand in hand with B2B. By learning the ability to take an often complicated topic and transform it into something news worthy and interesting is a fantastic skill to have gained. Not to mention being able to understand what such complex businesses do is something that will never fail to make me feel a little bit proud of myself!

With an exciting new job under my belt, I hope that the invaluable skills I have learnt from the team at Liberty will assist me in my first foray into the paid world of a PR as a junior account executive. I appreciate the time I have spent a Liberty a great deal and was thrilled to have been able to extend my internship, so all that remains to say is a big thank you to the Liberty team for all their help and insight throughout my internship.

Having left the countryside where I thought myself lucky to find an area with good phone signal, the move to London almost felt like I was finally entering practically a new world – the ability to use a phone without hanging out of a window, let alone having access to 3G internet on my mobile all the time was something that didn’t take me long to get used to!

Surfing the internet whilst on the move has become second nature to the majority of UK citizens with a smartphone. The need to check a train time table, a map or even Facebook is now habitual behaviour that consumers would struggle to live without.

3G demonstrated a monumental development in mobile technology, whereby a phone was no longer a device to just make and receive calls or play ‘Snake’. It was found that ‘79 per cent of the population use their smartphone for reading email, a higher percentage than those who used it for making calls’.

By introducing LTE/4G to consumers, the greater bandwidth can only enhance the smartphone experience and encourage users to be more independent.  Operators claim that LTE/4G is up to 10 times faster than 3G – the obvious benefits to consumers such as myself are clear.

Browsing Facebook; downloading my iTunes; streaming Youtube on my way home from work Tweeting my favourite ‘Made In Chelsea’ star; searching for a new flat and even storing my photos with Dropbox will all be much easier and quicker.

With this in mind I have found myself becoming more excited about my lengthy and previously very tedious journey home each night even if I can’t change being squashed into a tube carriage with 50 other people.

Although LTE is not currently available with my current operator, I would be keen to adopt it when it is – providing Kevin Bacon does not put me off in the meantime!

Having arrived at Liberty with a background in fashion Public Relations I was a little nervous as to how my knowledge would transfer to an entirely different sector. 

Fashion to Technology PR

Having anticipated what some of the obvious differences might be, I was interested to learn some of the subtler similarities to be found between two starkly contrasting branches of the same industry.

From my experience, PR for business-to-business (b2b) and business-to-consumer (b2c) technology products and services aims to demonstrate ‘life-enhancing’ features to end-users (be they Joe Blogs on the street or a CEO in a corporate boardroom) in the same way as fashion PR; specific techniques are used to help the target audience visualise how they or their business will benefit by purchasing the product or service.

Learning about some of Liberty’s campaigns across both b2b and b2c clients, I have been surprised to learn how things that seem so different on the surface can be actually very similar when it comes to strategy and implementation.

The launch of ‘Peelzone’ for example was one I thought would have been very different to that of a fashion event. However with the use of social media and the engaging publishing house tour, the overall concept proved to be not only unique and in that respect similar to fashion events I have previously worked on.

By truly understanding your target audience, an event can be created to appeal directly to the end user (journalist, consumer or CEO) it is targeting, and this is applicable across the board, all the way from fashion to technology.

Technology PR is still a new and exciting industry that I have only dipped my toes into, and I am looking forward to continuing to learn more about it as a sector, and more about what makes Liberty so special to its clients.