Working alongside our branding and design team and reporting to relationship directors, the successful candidate will work on a range of client digital assignments from website and blog development, emarketing campaigns and social media coding.

Main role:

- Building websites from the ground up to completion

- Building and sending emailers

- Building CMS’s / Admin areas (using open source platforms)

- Responsible for organising your own time and managing web development timescales

- Client relations / management

- Browser testing

- Responding to digital briefs with pitch teams

- Overseeing web hosting, emails and domains

- Working with SEO team

Applicants must be familiar with WordPress and Drupal. Key skills include MySQL/PHP. Awareness and understanding of SEO and digital marketing strategies is also preferential.

The role will involve client relations so strong communications skills are a pre-requisite. Candidates must have minimum two years’ experience.

Freshfield is Lancashire’s only member of the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). Our personal development programme has been officially certified by the PRCA.

After a successful six months, you will be enrolled onto our Group Pension Scheme. The role will be based at our head office in Winckley Square, Preston.

Attractive salary and benefits. Start date: ASAP

This is a great opportunity to be part of one of the North West’s most progressive PR and marketing communications consultancies and work with some great clients and people.

Send CV and covering letter to recruitment@freshfield.com

Sadly, the current system involves too many PR graduates coming straight from university into the working environment without basic skills. True, employers have a duty to train and develop their people in the workplace, but much more should be done to prepare graduates for the technically demanding world of PR and communications.

The solution could lie in a post-graduate training programme focusing on the development of practical skills and knowledge. It could operate in a similar way to the one for young solicitors, who must complete a training contract before becoming a fully-qualified solicitor.

Just like the accountancy and legal sectors, PR is a professional service. However, there are no formal entries to market, either as a person or agency. This means it is essential for the industry to find more and better routes to professionalise and improve standards.

The new apprenticeship scheme for non-graduates is a welcome move in the right direction; practice-based training qualifications for graduates could be another. But we must continue to innovate and explore fresh options, especially at a time when clients are rightly demanding extra value and we want to be seen as their professional partners rather than service vendors.

We joined the PRCA in 2010 as a voluntary investment to professionalise our own business. The PRCA Consultancy Management Standard is an effective way for PR and communications professionals to demonstrate their commitment to delivering quality services. It’s an obligation that the industry as a whole needs to support more wholeheartedly.

Mark has joined the firm as a branding and design executive from Blackpool and the Fylde College, where he was an in-house designer overseeing on the College’s external marketing collateral.

Freshfield managing director, Simon Turner, said: “Many companies have been reviewing their brand positioning and marketing strategies over the last 12-months, which has led to us securing a substantial amount of new branding, design and digital projects.

“Mark brings an established skill set in brand development, marketing collateral and digital design and compliments our full service offering.”

With headquarters in Winckley Square, Preston, Freshfield is Lancashire’s only member of the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). It specialises in strategic communications, PR, branding and design, and digital services.

Freshfield’s has specialist sector teams in: advanced industries; built environment; education; energy and environment; government and public sector; healthcare; retail and leisure; professional and financial services.

A new Facebook development, titled ‘Timeline’, will allow users to tell their life story by giving them a new vertical timeline of photos, events and status updates

It’s another masterstroke by Facebook as it will encourage users to spend more time on personal profiles, freely giving in-depth personal information, and could potentially prove inviting to brands wishing to maximise advertising potential.

Big brands will already be planning how they can capitalise on the Timeline feature. However, it has ramifications for any company with Facebook pages as they could find themselves lost within the social network if they do not familiarise themselves with Timeline’s elements before it is fully rolled out.

The first software modification is something called ‘edge rank’ which is a new algorithm that decides what pieces of content are given prominence in newsfeeds. As a business page this could determine whether or not posts and status updates reach fans.

More worrying for business pages is that Facebook users will now be able to check or uncheck posts to deem them a top story or not. This gives users more control over news feeds and makes it vital for companies to strike good relationships with fans to limit the chances of being unchecked.

One of the most significant changes to Facebook is something called ‘open graph API’, a direct attempt to link Facebook with the rest of the web, rather than constrain users within the social network. Like or share buttons which have been used for some time on a number of websites can now be developed with further social plugins.

Furthermore, open graph will allow developers to choose a verb and a noun which can be used in published activity stories. The static ‘like’ button will become something of the past and replaced with ‘running with Nike’ or ‘listening to Coldplay on Spotify’. This will provide brands with unrivalled ways of creating a social experience for fans.

Ticker is another component of Facebook Timeline which creates a secondary news feed shown in Facebook’s home pages. Companies will be able to gain exposure in the Ticker for activity stories containing links to apps, but action-orientated updates such as liking and commenting will affect the life of a post.

This means that a post will be prolonged every time someone takes an action against it, but if the post does not gain any engagement from fans it will not appear at all. Businesses with Facebook pages could therefore fall into the trap of posting status updates without it having any impact.

The benefits of Facebook Timeline will far outweigh the negatives and businesses can prepare for this major change by:

-          Using media to its full potential – photos and videos will be favoured by edge rank.

-          Being engaging; remember only posts which have actions against them such as ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ will be shown in users’ newsfeeds. Facebook’s features should therefore also be used as much as possible, think Facebook questions and polls to gain opinion.

-          Introducing photo-based competition tabs. Encouraging users to upload photographs and having the ability to share with friends will ensure they are seen.

-          Finally, it is important to embrace the new social apps, don’t be frightened to experiment, social media platforms such as Facebook allow small brands and businesses the option to compete with the big boys.

It’s safe to say that as soon as Timeline is rolled out globally, there will be a number of concerns over privacy. It could be seen as a clever way of capturing more user data to further appeal to advertisers and many will fear the additional features may encourage identity theft.

While it is important to bear the above in mind, the phenomenon that is Facebook will press on with Timeline, so businesses must embrace the changes in order to use Facebook pages to their full potential.

On further scrutiny of the detail, the government is making a strong signal that decisions for local planning should rest locally and passage should be related to local sentiment, unless there is an issue of national policy at stake which can then be referred to the Secretary of State.

Local planning authorities will prepare development plans, through consultation with local communities, which set the broad framework for acceptable development in their area.

The finer detail of what is ‘acceptable’ and the need to consult locally for any ‘large scale’ developments is still unfolding, with further supporting regulation to follow.

Of course, any developer who commits to consultation and engagement with the local community will benefit from the open communications process, which is to be encouraged, and the transparency that brings for all concerned. Being clear about how to follow this process will be key.

What cannot be prescriptive is the relevant type of consultation and engagement. At Freshfield, we tailor any specific programme of activity according to need. One size does not fit all.

It may be that an online programme of engagement works for one case but, for another, more direct communication with a local community is more appropriate and effective. The solution may be a combination of simply talking to people at events, combined with online communications.

Where there is relevant engagement, the new neighbourhood community planning bodies will be able to approve plans without the otherwise time-consuming passage through local planning processes, with benefits all round for the developer and the community in terms of time and resource.

In case we are all in any doubt about the increasing relevance of the localism issue, it is worth noting a proposal recently turned down because of the scale and type of opposition presented by a local community group.

Trafford councillors voted against a recommendation to grant planning permission for Peel Energy’s proposed 20MW Barton Renewable Energy Plant in Davyhulme – a significant development creating hundreds of jobs and supplying power to 37,000 homes.

However, it still failed against the opposition of more than 5,000 local residents who signed a petition against it, citing issues of air quality and health and overturning an original proposal to approve the plan by local councillors.

Watch this space, if you are a developer especially. Now the work begins.

The initial implications can be seen in the landmark case in Stevenage where the Planning Inspector rejected an appeal for a development by Cala Homes as part of a major 9,600 homes extension to the west and north of Stevenage.

In the end, the plan was deemed to be ‘unsustainable’ in the light of new powers and North Herts decided to start working on its own plans to meet the new legislation.

The shift from central to local government is quite extreme when you examine the finer detail of the Localism Bill.

Within the Bill, there is a package of measures called The Community Right to Build, proposals that would give local communities the overall power to decide what is built in their area.

It means that developers will have to prove that they have engaged and consulted with the local community at the design stage of all ‘large scale applications’, defined as those covering more than 200 residential units or 10,000 sq metres of floor-space,

The precise form of consultation would be determined by the developer, in conjunction if necessary with communities and local authorities. Ultimately, the test of engagement and consultation will rest with local authorities who will judge whether the developer has merely paid lip service to consult or truly involved the local community in its plans.

Having consulted and engaged the community, developers will also be expected to then reflect those opinions into their plans to prove that they have listened and acted upon them.

At Freshfield, this is something we are familiar with, particularly through our work with the NHS which has been obliged to consult and engage with communities for some years before making any changes to services.

We would advise developers and organisations planning any large scale developments to consider how they will engage and consult with communities earlier rather than later and to think through their communications strategy clearly.

Ultimately, this is about communications and stakeholder engagement. Using online and offline methods to truly gather opinions and views and reflect them succinctly and clearly will be the challenge. The choice of channels, methods and how this meets local community requirements will also test the applicants of any large-scale plan.

The cost of not getting this right, I fear, will become all too evident as this unfolds in the coming months.

Danny has joined the firm as a branding and design executive from PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he occupied an in-house design role in Vancouver, Canada.

Freshfield managing director, Simon Turner, said: “We’ve been working with a lot of organisations in the last two years on brand repositioning and development and this specialist aspect of our business continues to grow.

“Danny has a real grasp of the strategic importance of design and his sector experience is a good fit for us.”

Freshfield’s branding and design department specialises in brand creation and management, lead generation campaigns, marketing literature and digital projects.

It has specialist expertise in the sectors of Built Environment, Business and Professional Services, Public Sector and Education, and Retail and Leisure.

Our work saw over 9,000 students descend on a Preston shopping centre – without a formal invitation in sight.

Word of mouth, text, QR codes, Facebook and the shopping centre’s Twitter feed played their part in attracting the attention of these typically hard to reach ‘freshers’ – who have been bombarded with every brand, event and nightclub since they started their university studies last month.

And while they were storming the shopping malls, we were providing real time updates via Facebook, uploading pictures and video content to encourage their friends to head down too. Overnight, Facebook ‘likes’ quadrupled.

Conversations are crucial. But in retail, it’s conversing with your target audience on their level, in their language, without alienating other shoppers that’s the key.

Here at Freshfield, our retail PR team has taken our social media work one step further on a separate client project, teaming up with a media partner to leverage its 32,000 social media following.

Our ‘Win a Rock with Rock FM’ sees our client offer a £2k engagement ring for the best wedding proposal, solely utilising the station’s Facebook and Twitter outlets.

The power of online conversation is also reaping rewards for another one of our clients, a medieval wedding venue where we have revived its social media presence. Enquiries have tripled, website traffic increased and Facebook ‘Likes’ doubled in less than two weeks as brides are encouraged to post pictures and glowing testimonials from their big day – creating a unique online community.

Understanding consumers’ behaviour online is essential. It is the retailers that successfully engage with consumers that will earn brand loyalty in the end. While there may be no such thing as a ‘shopper for life’ anymore, the right social media strategy ensures that a consumer does so much more than just window shopping.

Freshfield has been recognised for its work to promote the 2011 SPAR Lancashire Youth Games – the largest youth sports programme in the county.

The Games feature 112 district finals and nine county finals, including a special schools’ swimming gala and the high-profile SPAR Lancashire Disability Youth Games, bringing together more than 10,000 primary school pupils from 14 local authority districts.

The media relations campaign is devised to encourage more young people to take part in the Games. As part of a six-month campaign, Freshfield was briefed to help gain £100,000 worth of media coverage and to ensure events from all 14 local and unitary councils across Lancashire were profiled.

Simon Turner, managing director of Freshfield, said: “This was the third year running we have helped to publicise the SPAR Lancashire Youth Games and each year the number of participating schools and pupils has grown significantly. This time we were able to successfully deliver 200 pieces of ‘on message’ coverage.”

The How-Do Public Services Communications Awards feature 18 different categories to celebrate excellence in public service communication.

How-Do serves the media and creative industries in the North West, offering news, opinion and resources for those working in all aspects of media, marketing, PR and advertising in the region.

Following a competitive pitch, Freshfield was handed the brief to help Lancashire-based Super-Click International, which manages the Super-Click brand, build relationships with flooring distributors in the key territories of Asia, Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia.

Super-Click is one of the world’s most versatile LVT (Luxury Vinyl Tile) floating floor systems. It differs from other flooring thanks to a unique locking mechanism, offering superior locking strength combined with ease and speed of installation.

Freshfield is advising Super-Click International on brand development, while a traditional and digital PR campaign will focus on supporting Super-Click’s presence at four key flooring trade exhibitions in Dubai, Hannover, Las Vegas and Shanghai. Freshfield will attend the exhibitions overseeing media relations activity.

Simon Turner, managing director of Freshfield, said: “There are huge global opportunities for the Super-Click brand and we are looking forward to working in partnership to bring them to fruition. The international aspect of the brief provides exciting opportunities for Freshfield too allowing us to demonstrate our cross-border expertise and integrated approach.”

Stewart Procter, chief executive of UK-based Super-Click International, said: “We were very impressed with Freshfield’s strategic integrated thinking and its understanding of our requirements. Freshfield’s work is already driving a positive response from our target international markets.”

In July 2011, Super-Click entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with Beauflor, a member of the BIG Group, one of Europe’s largest floorcovering manufacturing Group. Under the agreement, Beauflor will market the LVT product as Dream Click in North America, Western and Eastern Europe market, while Super-Click International will market the Super-Click brand in southern hemisphere territories.