Nearly a year after withdrawing from the UK Public Affairs Council, PRCA director general Francis Ingham has called for the Government to examine lobbying and ministerial meetings.

The UKPAC, which was comprised of the PRCA, CIPR and Association of Professional Political Consultants (APPC), was the chief proponent of establishing a statutory register of lobbyists working with ministers. The PRCA removed itself from the association last December because, according to Ingham, it lacked the credibility to establish an effective register.

Communications recruitment agency Ellwood & Atfield have opened the world’s first communications-centred art gallery, the Ellwood & Atfield Gallery, in Smith Square. The first exhibition focuses on authenticity in communications and public affairs with 60 portraits of individuals on display.

The gallery will explore the increasingly interrelated fields within the communications, public relations and marketing worlds and spark engagement with the future of the communications industry.

The Asian market is booming in terms of social media engagement, with a huge emphasis on the top 25% income group.

GlobalWebIndex surveyed social media activity in 31 countries to determine how consumers engage with social media particularly with branded content. The findings proved heavy brand engagement in Asian countries, particularly china and Indonesia, though Turkey came in at sixth overall. Other highly engaged users emerged in Latin America. The most notable finding was that markets in which online outlets developed with social media integrated social more naturally than in markets such as the UK and US in which the internet was established before the widespread use of social media.

Nearly all of PR professionals surveyed in a recent poll find their social media monitoring capabilities lacking. A recent Kantar Media and Press Index poll was the first survey opinions on media monitoring within the European communications sector. The survey polled 240 PR professionals from 160 PR agencies in the UK, France, Italy and Spain.

The results were determined by the use of social media in the locations studied. In France and Italy, there is less penetration of Twitter use than in Spain and the UK. Accordingly, respondents from Britain and Spain find that they are less equipped to monitor media than their French and Italian correspondents. This is likely due to the difficulty in monitoring social media sites like Twitter, a difficulty that increases with a higher percentage of use as in the UK and Spain.

Communicate magazine is announcing the launch of the fourth annual Transform Awards, Europe’s only celebration of rebranding, repositioning and brand transformation.

The Awards have honoured the best rebrands in various sectors and regions in Europe since 2010 and will culminate in a ceremony and gala in March 2013.

Tourism rebrands are sweeping the nation as English towns attempt to attract more homegrown tourism. The latest of which is a little 800-year-old Cornish cattle market town and the most southerly town in Great Britain – Helston.

The Helston rebrand campaign is a bit different from those of recent news from Lyme Regis, Tavistock or Gravesend. It involves a crowd-sourced poll in which residents and others can vote on their favourite of six identities. Each is designed by Ki Design, a Cornwall-based branding agency, and has its own strapline and iconography based on features of Helston’s character.

The 2012 third quarter edition of the Investis IQ Rankings of corporate websites has accounted for a growth in the use of social media across the banking and finance sectors.

One of the most startling revelations the rankings exposed was a trend among FTSE 100 companies integrating their Twitter feeds onto corporate websites. This accounted for a 22% increase since last year’s survey. Investis sees this trend as an encouraging sign of digital communications integration.

WPP has announced that Grey Group will acquire a majority stake in ArtM Communications Group, an integrated communications agency based in China. This deal is one of many in a recent expansion of the Asian communications industry. Firms with existing locations in Dubai or the Middle East have been clamouring for a piece of the massive Asia-Pacific PR market.

eMarketer has reported Asia-Pacific advertising to be worth nearly £125 billion in 2014, only a fraction less than North America’s £195 billion market. With this number set to increase, agencies have sought footholds in China, Singapore, Hong Kong and other places by either founding their own offices or acquiring local firms.

British charities have spent 2012 reimagining their strategies toward fundraising and awareness programmes. Many have rebranded and rolled out new marketing campaigns as a means of attracting funds and attention. They now have one more tool at their disposal: YouTube.

YouTube launched its ‘Campaigns’ feature this week to assist nonprofits and charities in tracking fiscal contributions and progress in public relations. This may allow charities to move away from telethons as a form of marketing and integrate their digital and fundraising activities.

Joanna Shields has caused a stir by moving from Facebook to Shoreditch to take the helm of London’s Tech City. Former vice-president and managing director of Facebook EMEA, Shields will take up the post of CEO for the Tech City Investment Organisation (TCIO) in January.

Her resume includes the names of tech royalty – AOL, Facebook, Google — and will undoubtedly give the TCIO clout when developing the burgeoning tech sector in East London. The TCIO was established last April by UK Trade and Investment to expand London’s tech presence and the tech presence in London.

What happens when the world’s favourite search engine and one of the world’s most trusted brands gets it wrong? Very wrong.

Billions are lost. Stocks freefall. Crisis management teams leap into action. The name that the entire world knows and relies on is in the news; only now it’s for the $22 billion missing from its market value.

Google’s inadvertent release of an earnings report early outlining a 20 per cent decline in profits erased nine per cent of the company’s market value in a frantic two hour period before trading was suspended.

The company has come under criticism for the lack of a quote from CEO Larry Page which would have better prepared Google’s investors for the shock of the announcement. However, Andrew Harvey a media and crisis management expert and co-founder of HarveyLeach says that Page’s crisis management has been effective in the aftermath.

In an increasingly connected world, global business issues are becoming more complex. The Imperial College London’s Business School hopes its Insights Series will demystify some of the challenges facing business students and leaders in the industry.

The Imperial Business Insights Series launched yesterday, 18 October with a discussion on entrepreneurship. The series will run through June 2013 and will feature discussions from leaders in international business, academics and research.

The British military is changing. Regiments have been cut, funds have been redirected, troop numbers are down. The next step is a complete overhaul of the Territorial Army’s branding.

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond announced on Monday that the TA will be rebranded as the Army Reserve in light of the recent defence review. Hammond promises that the Army Reserve will come into being once the military has the opportunity to support new legislation.

The PRCA announced today that its the new 2012-13 chairman of the PR Council is Martin Bostock of the Nelson Bostock Group. Bostock succeeds Elisabeth Lewis-Jones of Liquid from his current position as vice-chairman of the Council.

Bostock’s role as vice-chair involved developing the PRCA’s Partnership Charter. The client consultancy guide is offers 10 points to assist in client/agency relations. The Charter was launched on 11 October at a PRCA event during the Communication Directors’ Forum. The document is intended to assure that consultancies deliver services as promised and clients see a return as promised.

The third annual Digital Impact Awards recognised the best in digital stakeholder communications last night. The gala dinner celebrated award winners in five categories including social media, deliverables, evaluation, digital and sector.

Science humourist and self-professed nerd Steve Mould hosted the evening’s awards and introduced a room full of fellow digital nerds to a brief history of technology. The evening was held in a dazzling room at the Brewery with nearly 500 people in attendance. Mould led the festivities and some of the industry's top personalities distributed awards in each sector, including, among others editor of Communicate Molly Pierce and the director general of the PRCA, Frances Ingham.

It has been an interesting month for seemingly normal concepts gaining an official seal of approval. Brand consultants Blue Marlin have designed a trademark and brand identity for ‘Bore Off!’, a popular catchphrase. Last week, Cadbury won a legal battle against competitor Nestle for sole use of the colour purple, which is now trademarked.

Bore Off began life as a hashtag and quickly gained traction in the media and in popular culture. Blue Marlin’s design reimagines the classic smiley faced emoticon and will feature on t-shirts and other merchandise available on the new boreoff.com.

Blue Rubicon’s fresh consumer-facing subdivision, Surname & Surname, has been launched with a tongue-in-cheek identity courtesy of NB Studio.

NB Studio aimed to provide fun, humourous branding for the ‘anti-ego’ PR agency. The result was a classic design with room for personality.

The British Airports Authority empire is to be broken up into its constituent brands as a reflection of the direction the company has taken in recent years. BAA, which owns Heathrow, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Southampton airports, will devolve its operations to allow each airport to function independently of the BAA brand.

BAA also owns Stansted, which is to be sold off in early 2013 following sales of Budapest and Naples airports. Heathrow Airport will now operate under its own brand, as will the BAA’s other constituent airports.

The Love Boat extended its magical powers to a joint envoy from the PRCA and the CIPR. Sally Sykes, the president of the CIPR and Martin Bostock, chairman-elect of the PRCA, took a brief respite from the Communication Directors’ Forum (CDF) to attend the official opening of PR consultancy Liquid’s new offices in Guernsey.

The detente was organised by chair of the PRCA Council and chief executive of communications at Liquid, Lis Lewis-Jones. Liquid hosted the event to promote its continued expansion into the channel islands from its existing offices in London, Jersey and Birmingham.

The London Olympics boosted sales for sponsors, it saw a sky-rocketing use of social media, it promoted sport across the country and the world and it increased client budgets for PR spending.

The Olympic effect is promising in the short-term, but the industry will rely on an improving economy as a whole for continued expansion. The PRCA found that 30 per cent of surveyed PR consultancies believed that this would be the case in the coming years.