Spotlight On… Rebecca
Meet Rebecca Spargo, our hunter meerkat. Why a hunter? Well, it’s actually nothing to do with work and more because she’s always thinking about where her next meal is coming from! But down to the serious stuff:
As Cosy Meerkat’s writer and content creator Rebecca’s job is to make words sing. Whether it’s writing about the big issues facing internal comms or taking some research and distilling it into easy-to-understand bitesize chunks, Rebecca makes sure the identified audience understands and retains the information clients want them to know. She does do a lot of writing, but there’s thinking and strategy too: working with a client to understand their aims, brainstorming to identify their key messages and, if they don’t already have a house style that’s working, helping them identify the ‘tone of voice’ that will unify their communications.
A typical day for Rebecca always starts with the madness of getting everyone else out the house to school or work. Then she makes herself a big, strong coffee, sits down – and writes. After years of working in noisy newsrooms and offices she loves how much more she can get done in the peace and quiet of an empty house. What she writes very much depends on what is needed. Sometimes you’ll find her wading through reams of data or trying not to fall into the wormhole that is internet research. Other times she’ll be staring out the window, thinking about what angle to take for a blog, or in the flow, bashing out line after line, inspired by a nice quote and a clear brief.
The most common problem she fixes for clients is a lack of meaningful content for their comms channels. Most of the time, clients know they need to produce more and better content but they don’t have the time to do it in-house. Without wishing to compare her to a washing machine or vacuum cleaner, she is the ultimate communications labour-saving device!
Her favourite part of the job is the final read through. Not finished on a piece of work until she feels in her bones that it’s good, Rebecca loves the satisfaction finishing a piece of work brings. The only thing that makes it better is an email from a client saying they love what she’s done too.
Her most interesting job before working with Cosy Meerkat was as a journalist for the BBC. Lucky enough to be witness to many fascinating and, sometimes, historical events, she would be the first to tell you it wasn’t all glamour; try standing in a freezing field for ten hours doing hourly updates on foot and mouth disease statistics, as she once did, and you’d quickly agree. There was one job though that stands out for its glitz: being sent to L.A. as a producer for News 24 to cover Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election as California Governor. He might not have been interested in talking to the foreign media and therefore was only ever a speck in the distance to her, but the sheer grandeur and glamour of that campaign, the five-star hotels, the celebrity endorsers and interviewees, not to mention the fabulous weather and nightlife has, for some unknown reason, left a lasting imprint on Rebecca’s mind.
