Why Simon Francis, head of public sector at Band & Brown, finds Twitter so useful

Simon Francis, head of public sector at PR agency Band & Brown, describes another busy day at the office before he jets off to Italy.

My day
6.30am: Early start considering I only work a 15-minute walk from work. I'll be on the Amalfi coast when this goes live, so plenty to get through today. A mix of Today and FiveLive bring me up to speed on what's happening in the world. My priorities for this week are putting the finishing touches to the launch of the Band & Brown Apprenticeships scheme, a couple of new business tenders, and ensuring all my client accounts are in good shape before I go away.

8am: Emails checked and time to knuckle down to a pitch document. WorldSkills is an Olympics of skills, an event which celebrates some really inspiring young people. It took place in Calgary this year, yet in the UK few people have heard about the successes the UK team achieves. We're working on a bold creative campaign to reinvigorate the 40-year old competition. It's always a difficult balancing act in pitches knowing just how creative we can be. But the team believe in this campaign, so we hope our enthusiasm shines through in our written submission and we make the final cut.

11.00: Time to turn to Band & Brown's corporate structure. I'm working with our HR director on a programme to launch the first PR Apprenticeship and have a few questions for City & Islington College which will be providing our NVQs. PR agencies just close their doors to so many young people because they don't have a degree. Our recent work with Edge (www.edge.co.uk) has shown just how talented young people with vocational qualifications are. I look forward to when the first PR Apprentice makes it to group head level here – then we'll know there are many paths to success.

Lunch: Twitter, Twitter and some more Twitter (don_simon1977). I find it massively useful – mainly as a source of news and opinion from people who matter. My follow list is mainly politicians, government departments and journos – I've yet to be convinced it will be better for me personally as a friends’ network to rival Facebook.

2pm: Client meeting over a frappe latte. It's an interesting stakeholder campaign, which has seen the team engage some potentially tricky partners. It's taken some very careful planning and small steps along the way, but the results have been better than we'd hoped for and show we're making a positive impact.

3pm: A COI PSQ (pre-selection questionnaire) pops up. It's always a difficult decision to turn these down – on this occasion we don't have to. One of our home-working mums and a B2B guru has some excellent insight and experience in this area so takes on the writing of the document (and managing the word count – why is it so tricky for PRs to write in under 200 words?).

5pm: Catch up with the Edge team on plans for the 'revolution' campaign. We're also starting to think about our next quarterly review. We're tracking at an 80 per cent increase in coverage year-on-year, so trying to explore a few ways to hit the magic phrase 'doubling coverage' before the end of the year – with the party conferences coming up, perhaps it's time to look again at gaining PR mileage from Edge's debates.

7pm: Off home, via the gym, to plan some more of my Italy trip. Any suggestions for what to do on Ischia gratefully received on Twitter!