The charity at the centre of the Downing Street bullying scandal reopens today after raising serious questions over the Prime Minister’s suitability to lead the country.

Bullying in any capacity is vile but it has to be asked that in the work place, especially one as high pressure as Downing Street, is there a fine line between bullying and being an irate boss?

Gordon Brown is accused of shouting at his staff and shoving them aside, and while nobody can condone this, what exactly did these so called victims of Mr Brown expect when accepting jobs in Downing Street? Is it conceivable that they went into the role without having considered the high pressure environment that would naturally exist in such a place?

Now, I don’t want to seem callous, I have been the victim of the aforementioned shouting and shoving and I know that it can be thoroughly upsetting (I should point out now this was while waitressing in a restaurant a VERY long time ago and not in the lovely WEPR offices). However, if restaurant bosses and head chefs can get so worked up about an overdone steak what would they be like facing economic meltdown and bomb threats?

Surely if you work in an environment such as Downing Street you must expect that the atmosphere will occasionally lead to angry outbursts. Why is Gordon Brown facing this media scrutiny when another famous Gordon, Chef Ramsey, can say what he likes to his staff without a national bullying charity singling him out for criticism?

The problem is that Gordon Brown is an easy target. Despite shedding the occasional tear to Piers Morgan and having a very popular, media-savvy wife, he can seem cold and aloof and claims like this just stick too easily.

You can’t imagine someone making similar allegations about the silky smooth Blair, but I would hazard a guess that around 9/11 or 7/7 he wasn’t above the odd outburst. Personally, I wouldn’t have relished the thought of having worked in Downing Street in the Thatcher era either. The nickname the ‘Iron Lady’ hardly conjures up images of a boss to confide in, does it?

On a serious note, it must be awful to feel like a victim in your own workplace and if people do feel that they are they are being treated unfairly they should contact organisations like the National Bullying Helpline. However, it might be worth changing your boss’s name, just in case...

Katherine Williams-Davies, account manager

We are currently in the throes of London Fashion Week (19th – 23rd February 2010). What has struck me so far about this year’s event is not the continuation of the big shoulder trend (its here to stay ladies), nor the emergence of leather socks (thanks very much, Paul Costello) – but it seems that this year, social media is the big trend that’s emerging.

‘LFW’ was once viewed as the fashion event of the elite – attended by glossy magazine editors, industry insiders and skinny models only. Now the runway information is instantly available to everyone who wants it, thanks to bloggers, Twitter posts (follow #LFW for all updates) and even London Fashion Week’s own website.

This year, the official site is offering online streaming videos of the runway shows and a newly launched blog portal listing the bloggers who are following LFW. These include Times Fashion and Liberty London Girl – bloggers who are sure to be tweeting and posting updates, photos, videos and gossip - directly from the front row.

The fashion world’s grasp of social media is not new. Last year, Burberry linked up with Facebook to launch artofthetrench.com – a social networking site enabling fashionistas to upload pictures of their favourite trench coat, creating a community of wearers of the Burberry classic. Fashion-related iphone apps such as Shop Style and Chanel Haute Couture are also growing in popularity.

The female social media market is simply one that cannot be ignored. Facebook says its approx. 350 million users are split evenly between females and males and websites such as Cardiff Geek Girl are springing up across the UK as a way of bringing together female bloggers and social media enthusiasts.

Social media and online networking is the big trend from London Fashion Week 2010 and, unlike leather socks, it’s a trend that a lot of women are going to follow.

- Katie Chappelle, digital media manager

Do you want to donate some money to the people affected by the Haiti earthquake? There’s an app for that. Want to have a baby? There’s an app for that too. Want to stop your partner checking your text messages and emails? You guessed it. There’s an app for that as well.

For only 59 pence, the itrust application takes a screen shot of your iphone and when the phone is locked, mimics that homescreen. It means that the phone looks like it always does, but no one except you is able to access it. When you return to unlock the device, the application uses fingerprint recognition to tell you if someone tried to access your phone while you were gone – and will even playback a video of the buttons they tried to press.

There’s no getting away from the fact that online safety and social networking privacy is a huge issue. The importance of keeping certain details out of the public domain is clear. But keeping them secret from your loved ones is perhaps another matter.

According to the app’s blurb – 67% of women check their boyfriend’s phones regularly. But surely, the very action of downloading this app marks you out as having something to hide and negates the point?

If you do want to keep your texts and messages private, you might be better off using the phones passcode option. This is, after all, completely free. And less glaringly obvious.

- Katie Chappelle, digital media manager

Ever heard of Twixtmas? Apparently, 'Twixtmas' is the five days between Christmas and the New Year holiday and PR consultant Andy Green wants to use it as a period where everyone would ideally do five small things to make our world a better place.

The Twixtmas campaign has been developed by the Flexible Thinking Forum, a not-for-profit organisation promoting flexible and creative thinking skills in business and the community, encouraging people to challenge set ways of thinking.

Andy, who is a member of the Forum, says it's not money making in any way, it's being done because it seems a good thing to do.

Although we live in a 'time-poor' age, during Twixtmas many people will be bored, fed up with sitting in front of the telly or shopping so five small things shouldn't be too strenuous should it?

But what sort of thing is being suggested? Each of the five days of Twixtmas is themed to offer a way of making the most of each day where people are invited to celebrate themselves, do something unselfish by celebrating others, and do something for a friend, for the planet, or for their future.

Check out www.twixtmas.com for ideas or partner organisation www.helpfromhome.org which shows you how to carry out home based micro volunteer activities and "change the world in just your pyjamas"!

Is it too late to do anything? It's never too late and as anthropologist Margaret Mead said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Happy Twixtmas to you.

Jackie Sinclair
Account Manager

It was announced this week that lessons in internet safety will be taught in schools from 2011.

Facebook has an age limit of 13 – but with much younger users flouting the rules and cases of teenagers posting their mobile phone numbers online, there have long been calls to make the site’s security measures more robust.

And Facebook itself seems to have woken up to the fact that to reduce bad press for its security measures, it must review those often complicated settings. Which is probably what prompted the recent open letter to members from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

In it, he acknowledges that when Facebook was first developed, it was used primarily by students who wanted to share content with other students in their online university network.

Facebook then grew and began to include networks for companies, regions and even full countries, with users perhaps not realising that anyone in the same network (eg Wales) could see your profile, even if you were not ‘friends’. With almost 50% of Facebook users belonging to a network, the social networking site now acknowledges that “this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy.”

Zuckerberg goes on: “The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.”
Even more exciting is the fact that you’ll now be able to control who will be able to see each piece of content you upload to the site, making it simple to control what goes into the public domain.

So, not everyone has to know about what you got up to at the office Christmas party, and your dignity - and perhaps your safety - could remain intact.

- Katie Chappelle, digital media manager

It’s well documented that Twitter is growing in popularity. Data from Comscore shows that over 58 million people are now using the micro-blogging website – that’s an increase of 949% in just twelve months.

Twitter is perfect for dealing with breaking news, with the most tweeted subjects quickly becoming trending topics. Just try and avoid finding out who’s become the latest X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing casualty on a Saturday night – it’s impossible if you’re on Twitter!

But Twitter has another side too. It’s great for creating a sense of community and with that community comes ease of sharing information. When readers were understandably outraged after reading Jan Moir’s article about the death of Stephen Gately in the Mail, people quickly tweeted about their anger, making the journalist and the newspaper trending topics in their own right. As a result, people who’d never normally have read the article were logging on, to find that they were also upset and angered by what they read and going on to write about the piece on Twitter. Moir claimed she was the victim of an ‘orchestrated campaign’ and while this wasn’t ‘organised’ as such, Twitter quickly became a place for the lynch mob to vent their anger and drum up support. It didn’t take long before tweeters were calling for her resignation and the Press Complaints Commission received a record number of complaints.

Earlier this week AA Gill became the latest Twitter villain after he wrote in an article for the Times that he had shot a baboon, because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone”. The columnist quickly became a Twitter trending topic as people voiced their shock – invariably leading to comparisons with Moir and pledges from tweeters to boycott Gills column in future and calling for his column to be dropped.

There’s no doubt that these articles contained comments which were offensive and upsetting to many. Whether Twitter-notoriety is something that the writers were consciously aiming for remains to be seen, but the lynch mob mentality can leave a bitter taste in the mouths of users. While it is clear to see why these articles are seen as outrageous and may have deserved complaints, surely Twitter is better used for drumming up positive support - as seen in the ‘We love the NHS campaign’ – rather than jumping on the lynch-mob bandwagon....

- Katie Chappelle, Digital Media Manager

The Sun newspaper made its own headlines this week with the announcement to ditch Labour in the run up to the next general election. So should Gordon Brown really be worried?

Many political commentators see this as a massive blow for a Labour party already suffering in the polls believing that The Sun has the power to swing public opinion towards one party or another. But, can the opinion of one newspaper, even if it has the largest circulation in the country, really affect the outcome of a whole general election?

Certainly in 1992 and 1997 The Sun claimed that they had played an important part in first the defeat and then the victory of the Labour party. Famously, in 1992 they showed their colours with the headline, “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain turn the lights out”. In 1997, they announced their about face with the declaration, “The Sun backs Blair” just before the party’s landslide victory in May.

However, can it truly be said that The Sun sets public opinion or would it be more appropriate to say that it is led by it? Surely, a newspaper’s main aim is to sell papers. Therefore, they are unlikely to try and alienate the majority of their readers by going against their political feelings.

A potentially telling sign is the fact that The Sun’s announcement came a day after Ipsos Mori announced that their latest opinion poll had seen Labour drop into third place with 24% of the vote behind the Conservative’s 36% and the Liberal Democrat’s 25%. This would indicate that Labour is already in a pretty weak position.

If history is an indicator, Gordon Brown should perhaps be a little worried. While a newspaper, especially with today’s declining readership figures, may not be capable of swaying the opinion of a nation, The Sun, like rats off a sinking ship, knows when a battle is already lost. In Gordon’s own words, "It is people that decide elections, not newspapers” and it seems The Sun believes the people already have.

- Katherine Williams-Davies, Account Manager