Simon Wakeman - marketing, public relations and digital communications
Medway Council Tinderhouse
Enterprise IG
Egg
Open...
Boots plc
Education and
qualifications

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…I was very impressed with the forward thinking and attention to detail Simon displayed…he thinks projects through carefully but quickly and has a good rapport with a wide range of people, from senior politicians and officers through to colleagues and his own staff. Malcolm Triggs, Go4 Marketing and Public Relations

Simon was energetic, focused and displayed a commercial and pragmatic approach at delivering propositions. I found he was able to deliver projects within plan through building great relationships with his team and those in other disciplines or with suppliers. Nick Kusalic, Egg

I would like to endorse Simon’s professional approach when working with us in a freelance position and would not hesitate in recommending him. He has proved his value in picking up concepts and ideas with very little briefing and has always delivered on time - and what we wanted. Nick Bentley, Ether-Ray

Very capable manager with great attention to detail. Great fun to work with too. Damon Reynolds

Marketing and PR Manager - Medway Council

Hello - welcome to my website.

On my blog I write about marketing, public relations and digital communications. To keep up-to-date with my posts you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign-up to receive blog posts by email.

Thanks for visiting and I hope you find my site useful.

September 2004 to November 2007

Medway Council is a unitary local authority in south-east England. It provides all local government services for a quarter of a million people. I joined the council’s Corporate Communications team in September 2004 as Marketing and PR manager.

The council looks after education, environment, social care, housing, planning, business and much more – everything from frontline services such as rubbish collection to work that goes on behind the scenes to ensure that services in Medway run smoothly and cost effectively.

I manage a twelve-strong team and am responsible for the council’s marketing, public relations, graphic design and the council’s website.

I have developed a wide range marketing and PR strategies, and have managed internal teams and external agencies to deliver successful campaigns. I have also developed the small in-house graphic design team into an income-generating design business, trebling the size of the team and winning new client business from other local public sector organisations.

In December 2006 I managed the development of the UK’s first local authority podcast - the Mixit podcast. This is the first time a UK local authority has used podcasting, a new social media tool, to communicate audiences that can’t be reached with more traditional communications tools. More information about the Mixit podcast is available here.

In 2005 also led the relaunch of the council’s newspaper, Medway Matters, as an A4 colour magazine. This is delivered to 113,000 households in Medway bi-monthly and is a key communications channel for the council. Since the relaunch readership and reader response has increased dramatically, and the magazine now generates significantly more advertising revenue.

Simon Wakeman

I've been on the web since 2001 and have been blogging about marketing and public relations since January 2006.

I'm currently Head of Marketing at Medway Council as well as a freelance marketing and PR consultant.

The content and opinions expressed on this website are not endorsed by nor reflect the views of any company or organisation I work with.

Recent blog posts
Ghost writing, social media and ethics »
My thoughts on the ethics of ghost writing in social media.

More interesting stuff on the web »
Social networking, email marketing and some UK usage stats.

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A few interesting research findings and some thoughts on RSS.

How to get a job in public sector PR, marketing or communications »
Some tips for PR, marketing and communications people looking for public sector jobs.

More interesting stuff on the web »
Links to interesting content I've found.