Bank Holidays and business

We are just entering the ‘bank holiday zone’ as I like to call it – we go for almost 4 months of the year with none, and then get a massive hit during May /June. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a day off just like the next man, but again this year we have 3 days off in a month. Last year it was the Royal Wedding and this year it is the Queen’s Jubilee, both events that are worth celebrating if you have even the smallest amount of ‘Britishness’ about you. But did we really need an extra day off?

It was very apparent last year that April was a poor month for the economy from a business point of view, May is quite possibly going to go the same way this year – when we are all trying to push business forwards was it really necessary to have two days off in June?

Why don’t we have a bank holiday in the period between the August bank holiday and Christmas – when a day off would be appreciated! Trafalgar Day would be a celebration of something worthwhile from our history -surely a better idea than the current approach? Let’s move one of the May holidays next year!

 

So how will you follow ‘the Wedding’ today?

You can’t escape it, so you might as well follow it in some way – but how?

This is the first British royal wedding (or large state event) of the Internet age, it is generating one mention every 10 seconds online and will be streamed live to an estimated audience of several hundred million viewers. TV viewing figures are expected to be in the region of 2 Billion world-wide!

Internet users can even sign a virtual book of congratulations for Friday’s marriage and on the websites internet forum alone, there have been almost 113,000 posts on the subject of the wedding.

For the cynics out there internet evidence suggests ”fans” of the wedding outweigh opponents by a ratio of six to one.

I will be watching on TV at my mothers in Wiltshire – it is pure chance that we will be there on the day of the wedding, but my mother will enjoy comparing this wedding to the one in 1973 that she was lucky enough to be invited to. It will be a painful experience for me and my wife!

The biggest difference 30 years on is the Internet – from online news sites to social media – meaning that by comparison, this wedding truly is a very public affair. When Charles and Diana tied the knot in 1981, the Internet was in its infancy, even if Queen Elizabeth II had become the first monarch to send an email five years earlier on a visit to a British military research centre.

However, William and Kate’s engagement was first announced on microblogging site Twitter in November, although it was accompanied by an old-fashioned press release. And palace officials have said the wedding will be streamed live on YouTube, the first such coverage of a royal event. As well as the four hours of Internet coverage on the Royal Channel (www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel) on Friday, there will also be a live multimedia blog put together by royal officials.

Twitter is likely to be the biggest social media site for the wedding – it will be interesting to see if it crashes under the pressure. Also in true twitter tradition there are some spoof sites up -  the Twitter feed @William_HRH, a gentle spoof of the second-in-line to the throne is worth a look!

 

That Wedding!

It won’t have escaped your notice (or if it has where have you been) that there is a wedding this coming Friday!

Personally I don’t have a problem with our Royal family, they are a major part of our way of life and a great marketing tool for the UK – much more than we realise!

This was brought home to me last week in Paris. The French you would think are not big followers of Royal events – how wrong you would be! Their press and magazines are awash with articles about the wedding! Also whenever we got into conversation with any locals – at restaurants or shops, the Royal Wedding came up in conversation. Adverts are everywhere for wedding related programmes and publications.

It is all too easy over here for us to become cynical about events like this, but perhaps this first Royal Wedding in the era of social networking will be the biggest media event ever?

Certainly it is giving UK Ltd a huge amount of positive advertising at a time when it needs it most and that cannot be a bad thing – surely?

So perhaps it’s time to stop being so cynical about this event and realise that this is something we do well – in fact we do it better than anyone else in the World. So enjoy it!