Having worked in several different sectors of PR I think I'm justified in saying I've paid my dues. From dancing with a rapping cow all day in a field, to nights in the office late enough to justify ordering breakfast… I've been there; written the pitch. But working on more taxing campaigns just makes it all the sweeter when such great projects comes along. Cue Cisco's BIG Awards.

When we began work on the British Innovation Gateway (BIG) campaign - Cisco's legacy piece as the Official Network Infrastructure Supporter of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games - we were clear on one point: we wanted to use Cisco's position as an industry leader to inspire, discover and nurture tech talent in the UK.

We live in a time of extraordinary technological advancement and outstanding innovation. But there have been grumbles about how few of the big ticket ideas come from the UK compared to our American pals across the pond. We're a clever bunch, and Britain's technology legacy is rich - the phone, the television, the WORLD WIDE WEB - but there seems to be a limit sometimes to the level we push ourselves to achieve. Tweetdeck, yes; Twitter, no. So what do we do to bridge this gap?

We set out to find the unsung heroes of the UK tech scene by launching a five year awards programme which tied into the wider BIG campaign. The Cisco team was clear on one point when we began planning the Cisco BIG Awards: a cash prize alone was not enough. Feedback from SMEs over the years indicated that money is all well and good, but without expert advice, mentoring and resources it will only carry you so far. So Cisco lined up some tremendous partners to help make the Cisco BIG Awards as beneficial to the winner as possible - Bird & Bird, DNX and even us here at Octopus will join Cisco to deliver legal, PR, digital and industry mentoring, in addition to the cash prize.

The level of entry - as clichéd as it may sound - was exceptional. This was compounded by Dragons' Den style presentations by the six finalists last night at Cisco House. There were some real 'oh I wish I'd thought of that' moments and the judging panel - which included our very own Octopus MD, Jon Lonsdale - had a hard task it must be said, but in the end three really stood out.

The winner in particular is AMAZING. Snap Fashion allows users to search for clothing items via a visual search engine - simply take a photograph of something you've seen or an item you own and the app will scan more than 110 UK fashion retailers to find a match. Impressive stuff.  Runners up included Digital Shadows, a clever cyber protection tool, and Six3, a very slick video messaging service.

It's been a pleasure to work on this campaign and to meet all the entrants - and we're excited to start working with Snap Fashion very soon! With more projects like this, with more corporate buy in and support, I'm sure the UK will be back on top of the tech map in no time.

By @KeBeveridge

It's that time of the year again where we sit in awe of all the beautiful celebrities as they make their way down the red carpet wearing the dresses we'll never have; it's the month of guilty pleasures, it's award season.

In the space of two weeks, the biggest award ceremonies on earth happen; The Grammys, The BRIT Awards (ok, that one's maybe not the biggest on earth, but definitely in the UK) and The Oscars. The Grammys have been and gone and the Oscars are happening at the end of the week, which leaves us with The BRITS taking place tonight. I particularly enjoy The BRIT Awards because the UK has some incredible talent and the winners are voted for by the public, not a set of judges.

There has been a huge amount of hype on Twitter and other social media platforms on who should win a BRIT Award, so it was only right to use our client's social media monitoring tool, Meltwater Buzz, to look at which artists dominated online conversations and generated the most "buzz".

We looked at the following four categories to analyse online conversations across Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums and other social media sites to see how much talk each artist had created since the nominees were announced at the beginning of January; Best British Group, British Breakthrough Artist, British Female Solo Artist and British Male Solo Artist.

In relation to Best British Group, Coldplay was a clear winner generating 43% of the online buzz in relation to the BRIT Awards, unlike Chase & Status who only accumulated 7%. I quite like Chase & Status and was surprised at the lack of chatter around them, what with them being a band with a considerable fan base. It just goes to show that with awards like this, where it's up to the public to decide the winners, your vote really does count.

Online conversations on the Best British Breakthrough Act showed no clear favourite; Jessie J, The Vaccines and Anna Calvi were all being talked about a lot in relation to winning the BRIT award, with Jessie J just ahead of The Vaccines with 29%. Jessie J again generated a lot of online buzz for the Best British Female Solo Artist nomination, dominating conversations with 35% of the buzz.

Surprisingly Adele, with her recent success in winning six Grammy Awards, generated the least amount of online buzz with only 6% of the public talking about her. Is this due to it being no surprise that she's been nominated or is it just that her talent speaks for itself?

What has surprised me is the lack of buzz around Emeli Sandé... As the winner of the Critics Choice Award and with her album release this week, I thought she would generate a lot more talk being such a fresh talent.

Ed Sheeran is shown to be dominating the online buzz in relation to the Best British Male Solo Artist category, with 35%, followed by James Blake with 29%. Who is James Blake? I'm clearly out of touch.

Although social media gives us insight into the buzz that is generated around each artist, it cannot determine the winner. What it does do is generate a storm of speculation on who will be favourite to win tonight.

Watch this space.

Jen

Last night, the Octopus team proudly joined client Cisco to launch the British Innovation Gateway (BIG) Awards 2012, an open innovation competition to discover and reward the finest examples of the UK's most innovative start-up digital businesses and SMEs.

We were joined by the great and good of the UK's tech, creative and digital industries, as well as Cisco's global CTO, Padmasree Warrior (@Padmasree), who has over 1.4m followers on Twitter. Puts my 204 to shame :(.

The awards, which run from 1 February - September 2012, form the latest stage in Cisco's BIG initiative (www.CiscoBIG.co.uk), a significant five year investment of cash, technology and human resources, which aims to develop Britain's innovation eco-system and create an environment in which start-up digital businesses and their ideas can flourish.

Open to individuals, groups of individuals and legal entities in the UK, applicants can enter their technology concept or prototype into one of five categories, including 'Future Cities' and 'Internet of Things'. The overall winner will receive a total prize package of $200k, made up of cash, mentoring, digital marketing, public relations and legal services.

As a business, we are thrilled to be an official partner of the Awards - alongside JP Morgan, Bird & Bird and DNX - as innovation and technology are at the heart of so much of what we do at Octopus.  Members of our team will sit on the judging panel, and we can't wait to see some of the amazing and creative concepts that the entrants come up with. We're also excited at the opportunity to work with the winners, who will receive extensive PR support and a dedicated PR Programme as part of their prize.

For more information on the BIG Awards, please go to www.theBIGAwards.co.uk.  Entries close on 31 March 2012.

Laura

Ssshhh, you might not know but in September we'll be 10 years old. We stopped being the new kid on the block sometime ago but the hunger, passion and the desire to shake things up a bit is very much there. Well, ok, that's easy for us to say but don't take our word for it, ask the gang at The Holmes Report. They've just announced that Octopus Group's won the golden gong for Tech Consultancy of the Year. Woohooo!!!

After being shortlisted more times than can fit on one hand in as many years it's great to finally get our hands on the big one, the PR equivalent to the Bafta's! A great early birthday pressie and another trophy for the mantelpiece.

Now we can't take all the credit - Octopus Group is more than just us and our sister consultancy, Rocket, deserves the plaudits as well - but these are exciting times at Octopus and the last 12 months have been a whirlwind of activity. Some great brands like Cisco Europe and BMW have joined the fold, as have some stellar people and we're doing some of the best work of our lives. Take a look at Future 5 and you'll see we're at the heart of how PR and comms is changing. The only cloud on the horizon is that we need more Octopedes to join the party - a lot more!

So, 10 years old, some exciting vacancies and a shiny badge - and it's only Feb. Looks like 2011 is shaping up nicely to be another stormer!

Sandy

While we might be bidding a sad and untimely farewell to one of our peers this week, with Paul the Psychic Octopus shuffling (or perhaps floating) off of his mortal coil, we can't find it in ourselves to be too down.

Because against the backdrop of Paul taking his incredible clairvoyant skills to the great Octopus's Garden in the Sky, we've been busy turning nine years young. That's right, it's Octopus' ninth birthday this week and, as we always do at this time of the year, we took the opportunity to let our hair down, have a few "relaxing liquid beverages" and generally dress up like a bunch of weirdos at our Halloween themed birthday party.

There was a pretty special range of costumes on show this year, though highlights have to include a self-referential Wonder Woman, an intensely bloody zombie and our esteemed MD showing resource and guile by bringing last year's Harry Potter cape into play in this season's Dracula ensemble.  Best of all, the party was hosted in our fantastically rejuvenated "West Wing", now converted into a huge creative area for our teams to thrash out their best ideas. Huge props to our ops team for pulling off an incredible Changing Rooms style makeover. It looks ace.

Strange dress choices aside, it's been a heck of a year for Octopus. It's been a great 12 months for growth, we've got some fantastic new people and clients on board, we've been shortlisted for more awards than ever, and we've added more and more services to our portfolio. Huge thanks to everyone who has helped us get to where we are now!

2011's shaping up nicely too, and there'll be more on that soon. In the meantime, why not check out our Flickr feed for a few gruesome insights into last night?

Chris

Tonight team Octopus is taking the short journey down the M4 to London's glamorous Mayfair, where we shall be in attendance at this year's PR Week Awards.

Having walked away with the Best Marketing Communications Business trophy for our Customer Kings campaign for Cisco at last year's awards, we're keeping all our fingers crossed this year as we're up for Best Technology Campaign for Customer Kings yet again! Marking another successful year in which we've helped Cisco to really set the SME agenda in the UK through the Customer Kings programme, tonight's festivities will certainly make for a memorable evening. Here's hoping for a few less sore heads than last year however.

If you're going to be there tonight then please Tweet the team @OctopusComms and let us know, as we'd love to meet some new faces and catch-up with some old ones for a quick drink or two. You can also keep up with the evening's winners and riders by following the #PRWAwards10 hashtag.

Good luck to everyone tonight from Octopus Communications!

Louie

While a career in PR isn't likely to leave you with as many good tales to tell the grandchildren as a job in something like international espionage might, it does have its fair share of moments where you can sit back and think "that was pretty cool". Of course, public relations does tend to involve a lot less being shot at as well (particularly bad review meetings aside), and you don't have to ask the grandkids to sign the Official Secrets Act either, both of which are integral parts of the Octopus benefits package.

A few of the Octopus gang were privy to one of those "Ain't It Cool" moments just recently, as we brought together the judging panel for Cisco's Customer Kings campaign - a partnership with Real Business magazine to find the UK's best customer focused small firms, and one that Octopus and Cisco picked up a PR Week award for in 2009, thankyouverymuch.

Joining Cisco's head of SME and Commercial , David Critchley, the judging panel included MoneySupermarket genius and small business supremo Simon Nixon (now running the fabulous travel guide SimonSeeks), The Daily Mirror's resident careers, finance and small business expert Tricia Phillips, and Real Business' Charles "I've written about more brilliant SMEs than you've had dinners, hot or otherwise" Orton-Jones.

With our four judges assembled, it was a bit like having a small business version of the A-Team in the room; the SMB-Team, if you like. And a good thing it was too, because we needed every iota of their entrepreneurial and small business expertise to pick the winners from the many, many fantastic entries to the competition. Yes, this day was cool for two reasons - not just for being slightly star-struck at our judging panel, but also for being able to see the raw brilliance and passion on display from our entrants.

Quite literally just like the judging day...

From those that have come up with a smart, unique idea and just run with it to those who have spent years crafting their business into a well drilled, slick and yet - dare we say it - lovable company, Customer Kings is a wonderful reaffirmation of the breadth of talent and drive that exists amongst the UK's small businesses. When times are tough, these businesses continue to put the customer first, and that's what has made each and every single one of our winners not only a Customer King, but also a roaring success of a small business in their own right.

Stay tuned for the announcement of the winners when the March 8^th edition of Real Business hits the streets. We love it when a plan comes together.