The PR Week That Was

Femke and Rob, SIG, in training

So another busy week went by at Waves PR

Early in the week I visited Elegant Cuisine, who have had some changes.  There are some super plans ahead for their Cafe Bar @ Cornerstone, based in the Cornerstone Art Centre in Didcot. It has some lovely engagement going on through its Twitter account @BarCornerstone – making some firm friends along the way, without worrying about the numbers game – and has plans for great things using social media. It’s even holding a Tweetup in December (in Didcot), a brave move for a small bar.

Elegant Cuisine also briefed me on a pretty amazing wedding package on offer – more details on this later – and a website refresh in the offing: more on this later as well.

On Tuesday I worked with SIG – the Software Improvement Group – on some multi-cultural, multi platform media training, which was great fun, and again, it wasn’t just traditional offline media that we discussed. We had been discussing a fun campaign, but off the back of the training changed tack a little, and are developing a campaign based around great software development teams.

Global Integration’s global working video competition has been getting a lot of attention, if no entries yet (although we’ve had some brave attempts from spammers). This has been an amazing learning curve. We knew before we started that we wouldn’t expect thousands of entries, even with a prize as big as $15 thousand. What we perhaps hadn’t anticipated was that the real value has been around the conversations that people have been having and the interest stirred, and if just one of the ideas that people have been discussing materialises, the competition will have been well worth it, and may well run again next year.

The Global Integration new website is also developing behind the scenes, and we may have something to show there soon.

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Wine Masterclasses in Didcot

Post by Claire Thompson, Freelance PR Consultant, Waves PR 

Chateau Pesquie,acknowledged as the top Cote du Ventoux (Southern Rhone) wine estate

A slightly unusual post for this blog, but this one’s just for fun. On November 1, friends at the Café Bar @ Cornerstone are hosting a wine masterclass evening. Third generation owner and winemaker Frederic Chaudiere of Chateau Pesquie, rapidly now being acknowledged as the top Cote du Ventoux (Southern Rhone) wine estate, is coming to Didcot, of all places, to share his knowledge and expertise.

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m somewhat partial to champagne and cava, slightly on the dry side. My grandfather was a wine judge, so I’ve always had a range of wines around, but I can’t pretend to be an expert. To have a fine wine grower over from France in as small a place as Didcot is somewhat surprising, but then, the Cornerstone Arts Centre has always been surprising.

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Royal Wedding Cocktails

The royal wedding cocktail

My colleagues at Oxford catering specialists Elegant Cuisine have come up with a nifty little cocktail for the Royal Wedding – and very nice it is too. (Of course I tried it, before recommending it – what kind of a PR do you think I am!!)

And as it’s highly seasonal – given that the wedding’s on Friday – here’s what they recommend:

Take a tall glass. Add 25ml of Pimm’s No 1. Top up with chilled Champagne or Cava.

Decorate with orange and lemon (unless you can find an English Strawberry!)

So simple, very morish: just the thing for a bank holiday Friday!