#Weeknotes: Chapter 11 — Highs and lows
Another 4 day week. I got lots done, some of it went well, some of it didn’t but it all ended up okay, thanks to donuts in part.
Tuesday
Being I’d been away for 3 days, Tuesday went pretty well. Despite a heavy weekend, I was surprisingly alert and managed to get a bunch of stuff done. Before I signed off last week, I sent my Q&A content to get okayed by people who know more than me¹. Like good colleagues, they’d replied while I was away so I could get stuck right in, which was great as the Q&A was 2 days away.
When I ask people in prosecution or policy or legal for feedback they are always really good at pointing out things that could be misunderstood and need to be made clearer. That’s really helpful, however, they often use business speak or acronyms that are no good for our social media channels and I have to make sure that I make the changes but also that it will make sense to our audience.
It can sometimes take a bit of toing and froing. But there were only a few changes, so it was pretty quick.
Once the Q&A was all finished and sent to the good people at Business Support Helpline, I was on to the next task — publishing our latest animation.
Publishing video always takes a fair bit of time as I upload to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I get the best results if I upload manually to each channel, but it does take longer than just pumping it through SocialSignIn.
I’ve raved about YouTube’s subtitling tool before but it wasn’t working for me this week. It’s still better than most subtitling tools, but it didn’t want to auto-subtitle for me so I had to get hold of the script and upload it manually.
I also made a slightly different edit of the video for LinkedIn. Annoyingly LinkedIn doesn’t let you choose a cover image for your video, it just shows the first frame. Unfortunately, the first frame of our animations is a blank white screen, which isn’t very engaging.
So I made a cut, clipped off the beginning of the video and faded up the music. Now the video looks good even before it starts playing, which is particularly helpful if you want to pin the video to the top of the page — no one is going to click on a blank white box.
We also had a quick meeting with some of the folks from customer services. I can’t say enough good things about them, they know their stuff and they’re on the front line dealing with people who aren’t always courteous. It’s good to meet up with them and see what we can do for them and vice versa. I’ve got some actions from this meeting that I need to not forget.
Wednesday
Wednesday was not great. An eagle-eyed customer services colleague spotted an error in the video² I uploaded on Tuesday. After a quick chat about what was wrong, we decided to pull the video. Not an ideal outcome, but it’s much better than leaving misleading information out there.
It was super frustrating for everyone involved and I’d planned to use the video in Thursday’s Q&A so I was particularly bummed about that.
Then some of our users reported a phishing scam³, it’s not the first time so we’ve got guidance on our site which I can promote, so I did that. But then some other related stuff happened which caused a lot of emails about stuff that shouldn’t have really involved me but did.
I popped out of the office and bought donuts and sweets for everyone and honestly, it did help.
And then, thanks to Jason and the company that created the animation, a quick edit was done and the animation problem was fixed. So I could use it in the Q&A after all.
Thursday
I had time to grab a coffee before my Twitter Q&A started at 10am. It went well, although I missed adding an image to a tweet. It was for decoration only, so no biggie. Next week I’ll do some analytics to see how it went.
The Q&A meant I missed the first half hour of our big comms meeting but there were still biscuits left. Sometimes big meetings are necessary but I think as individuals we need to be more disciplined about staying on topic and not talking over each other. I’ve never worked in a department that has mastered meetings of this size.
The customer services team were short staffed in the afternoon, so I covered all the social replies for the afternoon. Thankfully there weren’t a lot of enquiries as I don’t have the same expertise as our customer services team, so really I’m only good for the simple answers.
Just before I left the office I found time to upload the new version of the animation to YouTube. I should have downloaded the subtitles before I deleted the old version, it would have saved me a job.
Friday
Today I’ve been working from home and a coffee shop, and mostly reading. It’s a bit weird to spend the day reading, it’s really important to keep up to date on stuff and get inspiration from things other people have done — but at the end of the day, you don’t always feel like you’ve got much to show for it.
In other news
Socially, it’s been a fairly quiet week for me. I did 4 nights camping at End of the Road festival at the weekend which was brilliant⁴. I can confirm that I am now too old to deal with 4 nights camping, as my hip hurt all day on Monday. I did stay out dancing til 4am on Saturday night though, which I was pretty impressed with.
On Tuesday night I watched The Fugitive on ITV4⁵. It is a masterpiece that has really stood the test of time. Full disclosure: I saw it twice at the cinema in 1993. I might watch it again this weekend.
Tonight I’m heading to the cinema to see BlacKkKlansman, so expect a review next week.
¹ I was in a rush so obviously I forgot to add the attachment. But thankfully someone pointed it out before I left.
² Soooooo many people saw the video before it was signed off but still a sneaky mistake made it through.
³ These seem to be happening lots at the moment — and some of them are pretty sophisticated.
⁴ If you’re interested in my musical highlights, hit me up on Twitter and I’ll make an effort to remember all the excellent stuff.
⁵ I have it on DVD, I’m not sure why I didn’t put the DVD on and see it without the ads.
