Ian Williams’ day as communications director at moneysupermarket.com

Ian Williams, director of communications at moneysupermarket.com, is a morning person who keeps fit cycling, which is lucky as his day starts early and the pace never lets up …

My Day

5.59am: Such is my hatred of the alarm that I wake up a minute before it bleeps to switch it off. This has the added benefit of letting my wife, Nicola, sleep on. Unlike me, she’s not a morning person. Breakfast is always porridge with the Today Programme on.

6.45am: On to my bike for the cycle to work. My old ride in London was 17 miles and had about 50 sets of traffic lights. From Chester to moneysupermarket.com’s offices in Ewloe, Flintshire is only around eight miles and has just three sets of lights. It’s a much nicer route through the countryside too, although muck spreaders are always a risk.

Most weeks I spend at least a day in London for meetings with our agencies, product providers or journalists. The routine is the 6.26am from Chester to Euston, which gets in around 8.30am. This means I can do a decent day of meetings and, if I catch the 5.10pm back to Chester, still make it home in time to see the kids. Now that Virgin Trains have wifi I can plough through the inbox en route too.

7.30am: After a hot shower, the first job of the day is to read moneysupermarket.com’s cuttings, a quick flit round social media sites to see what’s been said about us online, and then a flick through a newspaper or two. Clare Francis, our site editor, is even more of a coffee addict than me and she tends to keep my mug topped up.

8.00am: Trying to wean myself off Twitter and failing … we probably find it more useful for media relations and customer service than anything else.

8.30am: By now, most of the team has arrived. We like to think we’re ahead of the game in that we are a fully integrated communications team. We produce “content packages” that we distribute to a variety of audiences by a range of different means. What this means in practice is that when we generate a story we’ll write content for our site, produce videos, podcasts, web chats and press releases. We’ll then distribute this content direct to customers (by publishing it on our site), to our partners’ sites, to the media, via social media, email and so on. Obviously, we engage directly with customers – particularly in our own forums which our Graeme (UGC manager) looks after.

9.00am: Checking in with Paul Lawler, who heads up our money PR, Emma Morris who looks after travel and shopping and Clare, on the day’s activity. Each week we have a number of pre-planned activities, often integrated with other marketing activity, that get the full “content” treatment. On top of that every day we’ll do tactical stuff reacting to the news agenda. In a typical week we’ll do 10 to 15 stories for the media, about 10 on-site in various formats. Most of our stories come from our own site – either from what we see customers doing, or product trends.

10.30am: Coffee truck! Rural location = no Starbucks. Fortunately, a man in a van visits our car park twice a day for those who need a double skinny.

11.00am: Off to a product showcase for home insurance. We develop software in two-week iterations, working with customers and providers, so every fortnight there is a new version ready to try. Our new home insurance channel is on iteration 10 which means it goes live this week, in beta at least. Typically we do two software releases a week so we are always launching new stuff into live that we hope customers will love.

12.00 noon: I sit down with our dot Community team to run through requests for charitable funding. The team, who are staff volunteers from across the business, generally support two or three charities a month that meet our funding criteria – all within a few miles of our offices.

1.00pm: Tuesday is trading meeting day. Being an online business we have data and insight on every aspect of the business. At trading, the exec team reviews the performance of the business the previous week and agrees the actions to improve performance for the following week.

3.00pm: Week ahead meeting. Once a week we sit down as a team for our planning session. We’ll review the previous week’s data – which of our stories worked well in the media, and which did customers love the most on the site. Then we’ll run through the plan for the next couple of weeks – covering off the political and regulatory agenda, developments on our site, developments from our product providers, what we expect the news agenda to be and so on. As a team we use MBTI to help us work better together, so there will be calls for a group hug at the end of the meeting.

4.00pm: Grab an hour or so to return calls from journalists, or to speak to some of our key product provider partners.

6.30pm: I usually try to head home about now. There’s no point in getting home before the Archers end as I won’t be allowed to speak, to Nicola anyway. The evening usually brings a few calls and emails too, often from customers as my mobile number is quite easy to find in the media centre on the site.

Ian is speaking at PRmoment's PR in a Digital World Conference on 22 April.