Royal Mail’s comms team has it licked

The medal haul from Team GB is growing hourly and I’ve been watching the tweets from the Royal Mail’s comms and social media team with interest @royalmailnews and @royalmailstamps.

A special stamp is being produced for every Gold medal that is won. Despite their biog stating that the Royal Mail’s comms team only responds to tweets from Mon-Fri 9am-5.30pm, they are clearly scrapping the usual rules and pulling out all the stops to deliver a social media response to reflect what’s happening.

I was impressed with today’s image celebrating 15 Gold medals, but incredibly due to Andy Murray’s win, it only lasted a matter of hours before having to be binned as the number changed. What a fantastic problem to have!

Aside from producing special stamps, Royal Mail is painting mailboxes gold in the hometown of every Team GB (and Paralympics GB) gold medal winners. The UK is believed to be the first country to do this and you can see where they are via the Gold Postboxes website.

This is the first occasion in modern times when Royal Mail has changed the colour of its post boxes. Red has been the standard colour for UK boxes from 1874, with few exceptions.

Comms and caffeine…
I tweeted shortly before midnight yesterday, which is quickly becoming known as Super Saturday due to Team GB’s six Gold medals, saying: “Well done to the comms and social media team @Royalmailstamps. How busy have you been today?! Great to see the Gold medalists immortalised”. I received a reply at 11.51pm: “Won’t lie, it’s been a busy one! Actually, still is!”

The feed from @royalmailstamps is particularly good, with responses to questions about how busy the stamp designers must be and how they’re keeping going, being met with the reply “lots of coffee” and the fact they and the printers are “exhausted but it’s beautiful”.

Congratulations to the comms and social media team at Royal Mail for their hard work in keeping the nation updated. The company has an impressively quick turnaround producing the new stamps – two hours from the end of the winning event to getting the photos via Getty and then having them approved.

The hashtag #goldmedalstamps is being increasingly used and Royal Mail has also filmed a YouTube video showing the process behind producing the Gold medal stamps by focusing on Mo Farah’s one. I applaud the fact they included postie Mick Cumbers talking on behalf of the company as well as Andrew Hammond, MD Royal Mail Stamps and Collectables.

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